Over a span of more than 15 years, a series of killings of women and young girls haunted parts of France and Belgium, but perhaps none more than the murder of nine-year-old Estelle Mouzin – France’s Madeline McCann.
Between 1987 and 2003, at least 11 people disappeared across the region, with several of the cases seeming – at least at first – to be unconnected.
The first woman disappeared in Auxerre, in December 1987. The second vanished 90 miles away in Vitry-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, in 1988.
Another woman went missing in Auxerre that same year, but then more vanished further north in Châlons-en-Champagne (1988) and Charleville-Mézières (1989. Then one in Saint-Servais in Belgium, then another in Rezé, over in the West of France.
After a flurry of eight disappearances from 1987 to 1990, there was a ten-year pause, but they restarted in 2000, in Charleville-Mézières again, then another in Sedan in 2001, and one more in Guermantes in 2003.
Of the places where the women went missing, only two appeared on the list more than once: Auxerre (three women) and Charleville-Mézières (two). When plotted on a map, the locations are spread across a vast area of 21,500 square miles.
It is easy to see, therefore, why authorities struggled to connect them to the culprit: dreaded serial killer Michel Fourniret, known as ‘the Beast of Ardennes’.
Finally arrested in 2003 in Belgium, Fourniret was convicted to life in prison in 2008 for the murder and rape or attempted rape of seven teenagers and young women, after he admitted to killing several women and girls.
Fourniret would go on to be convicted again after confessing to more killings, and he confessed to three more he was never convicted of – including 20-year-old British tutor Joanna Parrish, who was killed in Auxerre in 1990.
But of all of Fourniret’s horrific killings, one stood out in particular: That of nine-year-old Estelle, who went missing in 2003. The whereabouts of her body remain a mystery to this day, and is a secret that Fourniret took to his grave.
The youngest of Fourniret’s victims, Estelle’s disappearance has been likened to that of Madeleine McCann‘s, the three-year-old British girl who went missing in 2007.
As with McCann, who vanished in Portugal, Estelle disappeared without a trace, leaving investigators stumped while capturing the attention of the public and media.
The girl had been returning from school on January 9, 2003 in the commune of Guermantes, some 15 miles east from the centre of Paris.
The nine-year-old was last seen that winter’s day in front of a bakery, en route to the house belonging to her mother, Suzanne Mouzin.
Suzanne, who was in the middle of a divorce from Estelle’s father Eric, raised the alarm with the local police station at around 7pm that evening.
Little did she know, in going to the police she had lit the touch paper on an investigation that would span seventeen years, spark huge media coverage in France, and yet would never truly discover what had happened to her little girl.
Hellbound and Down 