Estelle Mouzin case: why did Michel Fourniret’s alibi last so long?

At the start of the track that leads to Michel Fourniret in the investigation into the disappearance of Estelle Mouzin in 2003, there is a motive. Already convicted of sexual assault and rape, Michel Fourniret was again arrested at the time, for having attempted to kidnap a very young girl in Belgium. In the eyes of the local police, he undoubtedly has a serious predator profile. But when the French investigators in turn studied what is called Michel Fourniret’s “telephony”, that is to say all the phone calls he made on January 9, 2003, he was excluded from the list of potential suspects. Indeed, at the estimated time of Estelle’s disappearance, he is supposed to have made a phone call to his son to wish him a happy birthday from his home, located in Sart-Custinne in Belgium…

For justice, this call, which however does not last more than a minute and without anyone answering it, is a sufficient element to irremediably rule out the Fourniret track. But in 2019, this alibi collapses when Monique Olivier, the ex-wife of the serial killer, confesses… In the podcast “L’Ombre”, produced by Spotify and Europe 1 Studio, Me Herrmann, l lawyer for Estelle Mouzin’s father, told journalist Chloé Triomphe about this reversal of the situation: that day, faced with the last investigating judge in charge of the case, “Monique Olivier explains that the telephone call of 9 January 2003, it was she who passed it. Above all, she did it at the request of Michel Fourniret”. The whole investigation was then relaunched. But Eric Mouzin’s lawyer explains that we could have realize well before the subterfuge.

Me Herrmann, who works in duo with her colleague Me Seban, reveals that she herself created an “Excel table” from the very first file provided by the Belgian investigators to list, study and track down all the telephone numbers used by Michel Fourniret, without exception. “I pulled out about 14-18 phone traces, which are cases, IMEI numbers, phone brands, prepaid card phones.” But “when we exploit these elements well, it goes beyond what I thought, that is to say to question” Michel Fourniret and Monique Olivier. By studying the calls and messages of the criminal couple, ” we see that they exchange. We see that they structure, that they are organized in their movements. It sheds light on their modus operandi, on their way of acting around Estelle, their way of having become real crime pros.

Me Corinne Herrmann, specialist in “cold cases”, confides having transmitted her Excel table to the various investigating judges in charge of the Estelle Mouzin file, but without any result. “We shouted into the void, we were right from the start,” she regrets. With hindsight, Eric Mouzin’s lawyer believes today that she has come up against the public image of Michel Fourniret, that of a boorish man, of an already advanced age and therefore not very good with technology. Even less to foment a false alibi by using the telephone for that. “It was very difficult to combat the image we had of Michel Fourniret, who was this forester who went to the Ardennes, who did not use the motorways, or did not know how to use a telephone. This image that we had of him, it was already false.” According to the lawyer, all the elements that would have made it possible to definitively implicate Michel Fourniret in the kidnapping of Estelle Mouzin were however there from the first months of the investigation.

To find out the rest of this story and discover other unpublished elements on the Mouzin affair thanks to the journalistic counter-investigation carried out by Chloé Triomphe, go to the Spotify platform to listen for free and exclusively to the Original podcast “L’ Shadow”, a Spotify and Europe 1 Studio production.