The parents of Joanna Parrish, the British student who was murdered by the French serial killer Michel Fourniret 33 years ago, have said their daughter and other victims could have been saved if police in France had done their job properly.
Roger Parrish and Pauline Murrell believe chances were missed to get to Fourniret before he beat, raped and killed their daughter and threw her body in a river in 1990.
Murrell said: “If the gendarmes had done their jobs correctly in the first place, a lot of girls would have been saved. The investigation was completely botched.”
This week Fourniret’s ex-wife, Monique Olivier, 75, was found guilty of complicity in the murder of Joanna and two French victims.
Parrish said: “If the authorities had been more efficient and acted together, it’s quite likely that Fourniret and Olivier would have been caught long before and lives would have been saved.”
Joanna, 20, from Newnham-on-Severn in Gloucestershire, was working as a teaching assistant at a school in Auxerre in France when she was targeted by Fourniret and Olivier.
Parrish said: “There were suggestions Fourniret had been seen around the lycée where she worked and suggestions he made phone calls to the lycée and those calls were reported to the police.
“Going back before that, one of the victims had grandparents living in the same small community where he lived. He already had a record by then. For goodness sake, why wasn’t he questioned or at least his movements tracked?
“Had he been caught at that time, Jo and the other victims would still be with us. We do still feel anger. It’s maybe a useless emotion but we can only hope that lessons are learned from this and that other innocent victims will be saved.”
Fourniret, known as the “Ogre of the Ardennes”, was jailed for life in 2008 for the murder of seven other girls and young women. It was another decade before he admitted killing Parrish and two more victims whose bodies have never been found: 19-year-old Marie-Angèle Domèce, who disappeared in 1988, and nine-year-old Estelle Mouzin, who vanished in 2003. Fourniret died in 2021, aged 79, before he could be brought to trial for these murders.
This week after a three-week trial, Oliver was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 20 years. She is already serving life in prison for her role in the almost two-decade campaign of kidnaps and killings that traumatised France.
Speaking at Gloucestershire police headquarters, Parrish said: “We are satisfied that the court has recognised Olivier’s part in the murder of our daughter. There’s never been any doubt in our minds that her presence was a major part in gaining Jo’s confidence, and her active participation in her murder has been proved beyond any doubt.”
Joanna’s parents have campaigned for 33 years for justice for their daughter, often travelling to France to try to keep the case in the public eye.
Parrish said: “We’d have kept going no matter what. Thirty-three years is a long time, of course it is. We never thought we’d have to do it for that long. But even if had gone on longer, we wouldn’t have stopped. We owed that to Jo.”
During the trial, Parrish described Fourniret as a “narcissistic psychopath” and said the impact on her family had been “never-ending devastation”.
Looking back at the court process, he said: “There were one or two occasions that were more difficult than others. There are no details spared during a trial. We tried to avoid the more difficult of these but it was impossible to avoid some of them. We heard things that no mum and dad or brother should ever hear.”
The pair hope Olivier will spend the rest of her life behind bars. Murrell said: “I’d bring back hanging; hopefully she’ll stay in prison for the rest of her life.”
They will stay in touch with families of other victims, including relatives of Estelle Mouzin. Murrell said: “I don’t know how they cope without a body – we at least have Jo.”
And they will spend time with their grandchildren. Parrish said: “They have grown up knowing what we’ve been doing. Their lives are ahead of them. We will do all we can to help them.”
They paid tribute to Joanna. Parrish said: “She was kind, helpful, hard-working, really very conscientious. She had a sense of humour.”
“And the most beautiful smile,” Murrell added. “Everyone remembers her smile.”
