Jailed French serial killer Michel Fourniret, who murdered at least eight girls or young women between 1987 and 2001, has died aged 79, reports BBC News.
Fourniret died in the secure unit of a hospital in Paris, the public prosecutor said on Monday.
Dubbed the "Ogre of the Ardennes", he was serving two life sentences for the kidnappings and killings.
Fourniret's wife, Monique Olivier, was also given a life sentence for complicity.
Fourniret was jailed for life in 2008 after being convicted of the murders of seven girls and young women. In 2018 he was given a second life sentence for the killing of a mobster's companion.
He also confessed to several other murders, including that of British student Joanna Parrish.
Fourniret's victims - most of whom were raped - were aged between 12 and 30. They were shot, strangled or stabbed to death.
Most were killed in the Ardennes region of northern France and in Belgium.
Paris prosecutor Remy Heitz said Fourniret had died at La Pitié Salpêtrière hospital where he had been admitted on 28 April from the nearby Fresnes prison.
Le Parisien newspaper said Fourniret had been suffering from a heart condition and Alzheimer's, and that doctors had placed him in an artificial coma. Mr Heitz said an investigation into his death had been opened.
Fourniret was first convicted of a sexual crime at the age of 25 when he received an eight-month suspended sentence for attacking a girl in his native Ardennes.
In 1984 he was jailed for attacking another young woman and it was during his time in prison that he began a correspondence with Olivier.
According to prosecutors, she agreed to help him find young female victims if, in return, he killed her husband. On his release from prison in 1987 she was waiting outside and they committed their first crime together barely two months later.