April 01, 2008	Tuesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 23, 1429

CHARLEVILLE-MEZIERES (France): The wife of self-confessed French serial killer Michel Fourniret on Tuesday denied in court that she had entered into a pact to help him lure women to rape and murder.

“A pact was never signed between us, there was no agreement,” Monique Olivier told the judge on the third day of Fourniret’s trial for the kidnap, rape and murder of seven young women.

Olivier, 59, has been charged with one count of murder and complicity in several others during a killing spree that prosecutors said began in 1987 and ended in 2003 when a girl managed to flee from Fourniret’s vehicle.

Investigators seized letters that Olivier wrote to Fourniret while he was in prison on sexual assault convictions that suggest she had agreed to help him entrap his victims if he, in turn, killed her abusive husband.

“It was only words!” Olivier told the court in Charleville-Mezieres, a town near the Belgian border. “There is a difference between words and actions.” Olivier had told Belgian police in June 2004 that a deal had been reached between them, but she recanted during testimony on Monday.

Fourniret is being tried for the rape and murder of six young women or teenage girls in France and one in Belgium, who were aged between 12 and 21 and who were either strangled, stabbed with a screwdriver or shot.

A Belgian teenager took the stand earlier and testified that her escape from the clutches of Fourniret was like “being in a film.” “He said to me: ‘shut up or I’ll kill you... you must give me pleasure, if you don’t give me pleasure you won’t be going home’,” she said as Fourniret sat in the dock and listened to her testimony.

The girl, identified in court only as Marie because at 17 years old she is still a minor, said that in June 2003 she was walking along a road in her Belgian hometown of Ciney when a Citroen van pulled up and its driver, Fourniret, asked her for directions.

He insisted she get in to show him the way, she said. When she did, Fourniret pushed her into the back of the truck and tied up her hands and feet. “I felt like I was in a film,” Marie told the court.

Marie said that Fourniret’s threat to kill her came after she started screaming and tried to resist when he began touching her breasts.

She managed to free her limbs and jump out of the van when it stopped at a junction. A passing car picked her up and drove her to a police station, where the car’s driver gave police Fourniret’s car number plate. That led to Fourniret’s arrest. Fourniret, 65, listened impassively as Marie testified.—AFP