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, reports The Guardian.
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.