Monique Olivier: Accessory to Evil Review 2023 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
Through interviews with law enforcement and victims’ families, along with archival news footage and reenactments, directors Christophe Astruc, Michelle Fines discuss how the disappearance of young women in France’s Ardennes region in 2000 and 2001 led authorities to an unassuming forest ranger, Michel Fourniret, who was accused of assault when one of his potential victims escaped and identified him.
Because the two teenage girls — 18-year old Céline Saison and 13-year-old Mananya Thumpong — were found in the same wooded region in Belgium, not far from where Fourniret lived, he came under suspicion for both. But even after many hours of interrogation, he didn’t give law enforcement any info that would link him to those deaths.
So the authorities turned their attention to Olivier, Fourniret’s wife since 1989. She seemed like an old-fashioned, very submissive woman who seemed to have knowledge of her husband’s sexual assaults and murders. When she gave enough information to have Fourniret arrested, the killer tried to distance his wife from the assaults and killings, saying she was a frightened wife forced to participate under his overwhelming control. But some investigators had a feeling she had more to say, notions that were confirmed when Olivier admitted that she was an active participant in the abduction of Isabelle Laville.
Most of the first episode of Monique Olivier: Accessory To Evil goes over the Laville, Saison and Thumpong cases, and discusses just how tough it was to get Fourniret to admit to anything that he was suspected of doing. Astruc and FInes do a good job of giving viewers a bit of misdirection in the first episode, painting Olivier as this submissive wife who didn’t marry Fourniret for love or romance. The detectives even describe her as “a woman without any notable physical features.”
But the history of the case tells us otherwise; she was a prison pen-pal for Fourniret when he was in prison for sexual assault in 1966, and she voluntarily participated in his crimes once he got out of prison in 1987 — shortly before the disappearance of Laville. The other four parts are going to peel back the layers of the onion of just how complicit Olivier was in her husbands’ heinous crimes, and just how unfeeling she was towards the families of the victims, despite having a son herself.
The final part will also have her participating in a cold case in more recent times, which should be interesting. But the middle three parts of this docuseries will really reveal just how evil Olivier was, even in light of what her husband did.
