Moneteau is an enchantingly timeless village in rural Burgundy. There is a 13th-century church, an imposing town hall, and an iron bridge designed in a style pioneered by the architectural genius who created the Eiffel Tower.
The café-tabac sells vapes these days, and the once wild banks of the River Yonne have been neatly landscaped — but otherwise it looks just as it did on the awful day that unfolded here, 33 years ago this week.
Around 9am, on the morning of May 17, 1990, a local fisherman, Monsieur Bardot, was casting for trout when he saw something disquieting floating in the dark waters.
He soon realised he was looking at the body of a young woman, naked but for her wristwatch and jewellery.
Though the subsequent investigation was appallingly mishandled (‘Clouseau-esque’ was her mother’s damning summation) police were at least quick to establish that this was Joanna Parrish, a 20-year-old French language student at Leeds University, who had spent her gap year teaching English at a school in nearby Auxerre.
The unsolved murder of Joanna Parrish (pictured) has become a stain on France’s national conscience
Mr Parrish (pictured) was a 20-year-old French language student at Leeds University, who had spent her gap year teaching English at a school in nearby Auxerre
Having arranged to meet someone who had answered her newspaper advert offering her services as a private English tutor and babysitter, she had been spirited into a van. She was then bound and brutally raped before being strangled and flung into the river.
So began a case that would come to stain France’s national conscience and continues to do so, more than three decades later.
It is a case that has highlighted many flaws in the country’s Napoleonic justice system and the ineptitude of its top prosecutors and detectives, while exacerbating the agony of Joanna’s Gloucestershire-based parents, Roger Parrish and Pauline Murrell, by denying them the consolation of seeing anyone brought to account.
In recent days, however, they have been given renewed hope of finding closure.
Shamed into re-examining Joanna’s murder more rigorously, a new cold-case unit in Paris claims to have identified a convincing suspect and amassed sufficient new evidence to bring charges.
Investigating magistrate Sabine Kheris tells me she is now examining their file and will decide next month whether there are sufficient grounds for a trial.
If, as expected, she gives the go-ahead, the case could begin this autumn.
And into the dock will step one of the least likely-looking sexual murderesses imaginable — a stooped, frumpy, white-haired woman who more resembles a retired school teacher.
Now 74, Monique Olivier is already serving a life sentence, with a minimum term of 28 years, for assisting her husband, Michel Fourniret, to rape and murder a string of girls and women.
Notorious as the ‘Ogre of the Ardennes’, after the scenic swathe of forests and mountains on the French-Belgian border that served as his prime stalking ground, Fourniret is France’s most prolific modern-day serial killer.
Now 74, Monique Olivier (pictured) is already serving a life sentence, with a minimum term of 28 years, for assisting her husband, Michel Fourniret, to rape and murder a string of girls and women
He was the Gallic equivalent of Fred West — or perhaps Ian Brady, given his risible pretentions to a superior intellect and meticulously planned expeditions to hunt down vulnerable young victims in his white Citroen van.
Much in the manner of Myra Hindley or Rose West, Olivier was — at the very least — his dispassionate and dutiful foil.
However, a former warden at Rennes women’s prison who guarded her for eight years and penetrated her implacable facade tells me she is every bit as culpable as her husband.
Some prosecutors and psychologists who spent hours interviewing her agree.
Down the years, Olivier has admitted helping Fourniret to procure the girls, guarding them, and even holding them down while he violated them, unmoved by their screams.
Breathtakingly, she even used a dummy to demonstrate how she physically examined the helpless girls to find out whether they were virgins before her husband set about them — for the Ogre was possessed by a macabre compulsion to defile their chastity.
In 2008, Fourniret was given a whole life sentence for at least seven murders. Olivier was convicted of assisting him in several of them.
Though Joanna was not among the victims named at the trial, Olivier has twice confessed that they killed her — statements she now claims to have been made under duress.
In 2008, Fourniret was given a whole life sentence for at least seven murders. Olivier was convicted of assisting him in several of them
In 2018, Fourniret also admitted to murdering Joanna, an understated English rose who dressed conservatively and wore little make-up, thereby conforming to his lust for demure young women.
This small, bearded, bespectacled psychopath described the virgins he hunted down as ‘membranes on legs’. After raping them, he would make them thank him, before eliminating them with ever-more inventive sadism.
Indeed, it may be significant that two pinpricks were found inside one of Joanna’s elbows during her post-mortem examination, for he is known to have injected air into the bloodstream of some of the victims to inflict a protractedly slow, painful death.
Had the rickety wheels of French justice turned faster, Mr Parrish and Mrs Murrell, who separated soon after Joanna’s murder and are now in their late 70s, might have heard this vile character reveal precisely how their daughter was taken from them.
Following his 2018 confession, he was expected to be tried for Joanna’s murder. But nothing happened for three years, and in 2021, Fourniret died of respiratory failure at the age of 79 (in the same Parisian hospital where Princess Diana was taken after her fatal car crash).
Joanna’s parents had seen justice denied once again.
Mr Parrish is now so disillusioned with the process that, as he recently told Le Parisien newspaper, if Olivier is tried, he will not deign to attend the court hearing.
On this 33rd anniversary week of Joanna’s murder, described by a friend as ‘a particularly difficult time for him’, he was unavailable for comment as was Mrs Murrell.
Yet they have long suspected that Olivier played a crucial part in the abduction. At one time, Joanna’s mother wrote to her in prison, urging her to ‘re-examine her conscience’ and tell her what happened. She received no reply.
Mr Parrish says their daughter was a sensible, safety-conscious young woman and would not have got into a van with a strange man had he been alone.
But the presence of Fourniret’s wife — and perhaps, also their baby son, who was sometimes used as ‘bait’ on their virgin-hunting expeditions, when they would tell the young women they stalked that he was ill and needed a doctor — would have reassured her.
Mr Parrish is now so disillusioned with the process that, as he recently told Le Parisien newspaper, if Olivier (pictured) is tried, he will not deign to attend the court hearing.
‘There has always been a puzzle about how somebody could have gained Jo’s confidence,’ Mr Parrish has said. ‘But the fact that he was with a woman could explain everything.
‘Jo found herself in a dark world which was so alien to her own. For a moment, good and evil collided, and there was only ever going to be one outcome, because that evil was so powerful.’
Joanna Parrish was, indeed, a fine young woman. That much became clear this week when I spoke to her former flatmate in Auxerre, who was teaching German at the same grammar school.
Thrown together far from home in a quiet, provincial town, the two young women forged a close bond. Joanna’s friend, now a 53-year-old mother, asked not to be identified but said:
‘Jo loved France and was very interested in its culture and history. We would go on many excursions, exploring Burgundy and taking the train to Paris. We also went running and cooked together.
‘She introduced me to PG Tips tea and Cadbury’s chocolate, I introduced her to pumpkin seed oil, which we put on salads. We always spoke in English. It’s because I met Jo that I am now an English teacher.
‘I feel so sad when I think how we’d have stayed friends, and how our families would have visited each other. Jo was a little bit reserved but great company. It is such a waste of a wonderful person and a wonderful life.’
The friend confirms Joanna was cautious, organised, structured — certainly not the type to take chances.
She had placed the newspaper ad to make some extra money, intending to visit her boyfriend, also a student, in Czechoslovakia where he was also on his gap year. She then hoped to go travelling with him before pursuing a teaching career.
Picture taken in 1990 of Joanna Parrish (L) and her brother Barney in Paris before her body was found in the River Yonne
Meanwhile, Joanna’s parents were planning to drive to Auxerre to collect her belongings — duvet, clothes, the teddy bear that went everywhere with her — and return with them to Newnham-on-Severn, the Gloucestershire village where they and her 17-year-old brother Barnaby lived.
Mr Parrish, then 46, was working at the Land Registry in Gloucester when he was told Jo’s body had been found in the river. It took several seconds before the word ‘body’ registered and he realised she wasn’t coming home.
Three weeks passed before she could be flown home and buried in the village cemetery.
Her grave is inscribed with a poignant tribute written in French. Perhaps sent by the students she taught in Auxerre, who had come to adore her, it says simply: ‘A look. A smile. Her pupils.’
What sort of woman could have helped her husband commit such depraved crimes? If we believe Olivier, she was subjugated by Fourniret after a lifetime of abuse.
Raised by an alcoholic mother and a remote father, and mocked for her childhood stammer, she failed her final school exams and found work as a typist before marrying a driving instructor and would-be artist, Andre Michaut.
At her trial, she claimed he was controlling and violent, accusing her of affairs, and once tried to drown her in the bath. She also claims he pimped her to other men.
Michaut strenuously denied her allegations and we might think it significant that, when they divorced, he was granted custody of their two sons.
Psychologists who assessed her also ranked her IQ in the top 2 per cent of the French population.
Friends confirm Joanna (pictured) was cautious, organised, structured — certainly not the type to take chances
She was in her late 30s when, as she would have it, she fell under the Ogre’s spell. While serving a prison sentence for serious sexual assaults, he placed a magazine ad for pen pals and Olivier answered.
If the authorities had monitored the dozens of letters they exchanged, their perverse partnership might have been curtailed and many lives spared.
Adopting the roles of a rampant brute and his obedient disciple, Fourniret and Olivier struck up a spine-chilling pact, to be carried out after his release: she would help him hunt down and satisfy his craving for virgins and in return he would help her kill her ex-husband.
In some letters, she addressed him as ‘Mr Dear Shere Khan’, after the tiger in ‘Jungle Book’. In others, she called him ‘My Beast’. When he emerged through the prison gates, in October 1987, she was waiting to pick him up in her green Peugeot.
Fourniret never kept his side of the bargain. Just two months later, however, Olivier, began to fulfil hers.
They set up home in a small village near Auxerre (just 12 miles from where Joanna’s body was found three years later) and began combing the streets for girls of a suitably ‘pure’ appearance.
Walking home from school, 17-year-old Isabelle Laville was the first girl to catch their eye. With her willowy frame and long dark hair, she supposedly resembled Olivier in her chaste youth.
In a carbon copy of the ruse Myra Hindley used to deliver Pauline Reade into the clutches of Ian Brady, Olivier drove up beside her and asked for directions, inviting her to climb in and show her the way.
Further along the road, they saw a seemingly stranded motorist standing with an oil can and Olivier kindly pulled over to give him a lift to the garage.
From the back-seat he threw a rope round Isabelle’s neck, drugged her, and they took her to their house.
Serial killer Michel Fourniret (pictured in 2004) died at the age of 79 in May 2021, but his wife is still alive
Olivier later recalled how she gave her husband oral sex to stimulate him before he raped Isabelle, who was then murdered and thrown down a well, where her remains lay undiscovered for 19 years.
By the time they claimed their next victim, in August 1998, Olivier was pregnant with their son, Selim.
Feigning pre-natal sickness, she approached Fabienne Leroy, 20, in a supermarket car park and asked for directions to a doctor’s surgery. The young woman obligingly agreed to take her there.
After she got into the van, Fourniret pushed her into the back and tied her hands and feet. She was driven to a disused military base where Olivier says he instructed her to check the girl’s hymen was intact.
On that occasion, she claims she refused but he raped Fabienne anyway, before shooting her.
At least four more girls were dispatched before they claimed the girl believed to have been their final victim, 13-year old Mananya Thumpong, in May, 2001.
After befriending her at a local library, Fourniret invited her home to play with baby Selim, by then aged two.
There were to be no games. Having violated the adolescent girl, Fourniret strangled her and dumped her body in the countryside to be devoured by wild animals.
When Selim Fourniret grew up and learned how his parents had used him as their dupe, he was deeply traumatised and disowned them. ‘Was I just their rabbit?’ he asked rhetorically in a rare interview.
All this emerged after Fourniret’s arrest, in the Belgian Ardennes, in 2003.
Intending to rape and kill yet again, he had picked up a 13-year-old girl, but she managed to untie herself, escape his van and flag down a passing car whose driver noted his registration plate.
When police swooped on the couple’s hideout, a stone-built cottage in the affluent Belgian village of Sart-Custinne, they found a grisly kidnapping kit: chloroform masks, condoms, guns, knives, rolls of tape and coiled ropes. The killing spree was over.
This week, I found the property derelict. However, neighbours say it has been sold to a local man who plans to turn it into a ‘house of horrors’ guesthouse for ghoulish tourists.
By the time of the arrest, the pair also owned a 19th-century chateau, 35 miles away over the French border. How they acquired this impressive pile, having eked out a living by taking various menial jobs, is another chapter in their story.
In brief, Fourniret persuaded a career criminal he met in prison to tell him the whereabouts of the fortune he had stashed away, promising to take care of it until the man was freed.
The crook’s wife duly led Fourniret and Olivier to the hidden gold, jewels and banknotes, whereupon they murdered her — probably with a bayonet — and stole the cache, using it to buy the chateau.
Fourniret later led police to the bodies of two female victims which he had buried in the grounds.
Perhaps the only remaining question in this protractedly dreadful saga is whether Olivier delivered Joanna into the Ogre’s clutches.
Joanna’s parents, Roger Parrish and Pauline Murrell, have been denied the consolation of seeing anyone brought to account for their daughter’s murder
If the opportunity to gather vital strands of evidence hadn’t been squandered during the initial investigation, we might know the truth.
Police failed to seal off the stretch of river where her body was found, allowing it to be trampled on. Slides containing semen found on Joanna, and scrapings from her fingernails, which could have been tested for DNA, were lost.
As there was no reconstruction of the crime, nor even an appeal for information, no witnesses came forward.
Yet even today, 33 years later, I only need to walk around Moneteau and start asking questions to find possibly useful clues.
One man told me his father felt sure he had seen a white van, resembling the one the couple used, heading along the lane down to the river, just hours before the fisherman spotted Joanna.
So, was it the French Ian Brady who replied to Joanna’s ad, on the pretence of being keen to improve his English?
Was Fourniret the mystery man who met her outside a busy bank in the centre of Auxerre — at the height of rush-hour to avoid suspicion?
And did the kindly looking wife sitting beside him convince this level-headed young Englishwoman to abandon her customary cautiousness and agree to a lift in their van?
To bring Joanna’s ageing parents belated comfort — and restore the reputation of French justice — we must hope, come the autumn, that these crucial questions will finally be answered.
Additional reporting by Rory Mulholland
