Joanna Parrish murder: Justice for parents 33 years after daughter's death

Joanna Parrish was killed by serial killer Michel Fourniret

For 33 years, the parents of Joanna Parrish have faced countless twists and turns in their fight for justice for their murdered daughter. Roger Parrish and Pauline Murrell have watched numerous French investigations, police blunders over DNA, and a serial killer deny any involvement in her death, only to then confess and die in prison before he could be brought to trial.

Over the past few weeks, they have sat in a courtroom watching the killer's accomplice, who appeared to hold the key to the truth of what happened to their 20-year-old daughter.

It was a moment they said they had been "waiting a lifetime" for.

Monique Olivier, 75, the former wife of one of France's most prolific serial killers, Michel Fourniret, has been jailed for life after a trial in Paris. The court heard she helped Fourniret lure Miss Parish to her death in 1990.

"We didn't think for one minute it was going to take this long, but we were so determined that we would find who was responsible - that we just kept on going, however long it took," said Mr Parrish.

"Jo was a very kind person who achieved a lot in her life, so for someone to take that away there was no way we were going to just leave it to the authorities - no way at all."

Olivier was also found to be complicit in the killing of another woman and the disappearance of a nine-year-old girl.

Roger Parrish said it was a "bombshell" for the parents to think it could be Fourniret

Fourniret, who was dubbed by French media as the "Ogre of the Ardennes", was convicted of murdering eight girls and young women between 1987 and 2001.

He repeatedly denied killing Miss Parrish, but finally confessed to investigators in 2018. He died three years later, aged 79, before he could be put on trial and face justice.

His former wife, Olivier, has been serving a life sentence since 2008 for complicity in her husband's kidnappings, rapes and murders, but was charged earlier this year in relation to Miss Parrish's death.

Olivier was also found to have been complicit in the murders of 18-year-old Marie-Angèle Domèce and nine-year-old Estelle Mouzin, whose bodies have never been found.

Miss Parrish, from Newnham-on-Severn in Gloucestershire, had been working as a teaching assistant at a school in Auxerre in France when in May 1990, just a fortnight before she was due to finish, she placed an advert in a local paper offering English lessons.

A man, now known to be Fourniret, answered the advert and they arranged to meet.

Miss Parrish's body was found the next morning in the River Yonne, at Moneteau, not far from Auxerre.

The French authorities began an investigation, but mistakes were made early on and the crime scene was not protected.

Bernie Kinsella, a retired Det Ch Supt with Gloucestershire Constabulary, worked with Miss Parrish's family for many years.

"Even in 1990 you would secure and ensure any crime scene like this was kept completely sterile," she said.

"But that wasn't the case there, where a number of people were allowed to walk over the scene at the time, which could obviously, potentially, destroy or contaminate any evidence that was there."

With the prospect of finding who had killed Miss Parrish fading, her parents kept up pressure on the authorities and visited Auxerre regularly.

Pauline Murrell, Joanna's mother, regularly went out to France to keep pressure on the investigation

"We distributed as many leaflets as we could," said Ms Murrell.

"We were showing the picture to people and they were saying 'Is this what she looked like? We didn't know. We'd heard that somebody had been missing and then in the river'.

"They hadn't put a picture out of her or anything."

But over the years, the case ground to a halt. Suspects were investigated but the leads came to nothing and the case was dogged by further problems.

Ms Kinsella even travelled to France with a DNA scientist but found that crucial DNA evidence had been lost.

Michel Fourniret died in 2021, aged 79

Fourniret and Olivier hit the headlines in France in 2004 when they were arrested over a string of horrific murders of young women and teenagers aged between 12 and 22.

In 2008, Fourniret was found guilty of killing seven young women. He was also found guilty in 2018 of killing the wife of someone he was in prison with.

Crucially for Miss Parrish's case, it was revealed ahead of his first conviction that Fourniret had lived close to Auxerre at the time she was murdered.

"It was like a bolt of lightning," said Mr Parrish.

"Pauline and I had discussed the kind of person that could gain Jo's confidence and we thought about several types of profiles.

"But we never in a million years thought about a man with a woman accomplice."

Monique Olivier is in prison for helping her husband commit terrible crimes

He said it was a "bombshell" and he was "immediately convinced" the pair were responsible for Miss Parrish's murder.

Mr Parrish and Ms Murrell went to France for Fourniret and Olivier's trial in 2008.

Although Miss Parrish's case was not part of it, they wanted to see the couple suspected of killing their daughter.

Ms Murrell said she "shivers" thinking back to that time.

"To look at them back then, it makes me shiver thinking about it," she said.

"She [Olivier] seemed to think she was beyond anything. He was doing the same thing.

"One of the fathers stood up and shouted at him.

"He [Fourniret] said something, the way they translated it, was that he said 'She asked for it'."

Joanna Parrish pictured with her dad Roger Parrish and mum Pauline Murrell

Mr Parrish said: "Fourniret, as we know now, was very clearly a psychopath.

"Not just a violent thug, a narcissistic psychopath who appeared to believe he was on a different level of intelligence to other people.

"This is something we'd never seen or heard of before at all."

Fourniret was given two life sentences in 2008 after a trial. Olivier, who was divorced from him in 2010, was sentenced to at least 28 years for her role in the crimes.

Joanna Parrish was on a gap year in France when she was murdered

Despite confessing to other crimes, Fourniret repeatedly denied any involvement in Miss Parrish's death until a new investigator, Sabine Kheris, interrogated him at length in 2018.

Didier Seban, the Parrish family lawyer in Paris, said Ms Kheris, the examining magistrate, took a fresh approach to the case.

Mr Seban said: "She decided to start the inquiry from the very beginning, starting with what we'd been asking for - the criminal history of Michel Fourniret and Monique Olivier."

He explained how Ms Kheris got the judge to ask Fourniret about his passion for Dostoevsky, convincing him to start to open up.

"Little by little she started to convince them it was in their interests to tell the truth," Mr Seban continued.

"And so Monique Olivier and Michel Fourniret would admit the killing of Joanna Parrish."

Jo Parrish was described as a "devoted" student

Mr Parrish said the confession was welcome, but Fourniret still played games with the prosecutors in the way he spoke.

He said: "He had a very unusual way of speaking. The way he put it was something like, 'If these women had not come across my path, they would still be alive today'."

The authorities took Fourniret back to Auxerre and the river where Miss Parrish's body was found. Her parents felt they were - at last - close to seeing someone convicted for her murder.

But they were left cheated when the serial killer died in 2021 before he could be put on trial.

"We would have wanted to face him in court but we both had to accept that he wasn't there," said Mr Parrish.

"The world was a better place without him, and there's nothing much we could do about it."

'She deserved to live'

But Olivier was still around to stand in the dock, and she was finally convicted for helping lure Miss Parrish into Fourniret's van so that he could take her life.

During the trial, she told the jury that Fourniret had planned to imprison Miss Parrish for several days before killing her, but that changed on the night she was kidnapped.

She said that Miss Parrish fought back but was overpowered in the back of Fourniret's van.

Questioned by Didier Seban during the trial, Olivier spoke of her regret over the death.

She said: "She was beautiful, she deserved to live. I regret it. She didn't deserve that. I am sorry."

Ms Murrell said despite the trial, nothing would make them feel better about losing their precious daughter.

She said: "It's a lifetime isn't it?

"It's such a waste, a terrible waste. Yes, we've got a trial, but it's not going to bring Jo back."

Mr Parrish said: "I can't deny that there were times in the late 1990s before Fourniret and Olivier had been identified, even to myself, I thought is this ever going to end? Are we ever going to find who is responsible?

"But it didn't make us give up by any means - it just made us even more determined."

Big Cases: The Student Who Never Came Home

If you want to find out more about what happened to Joanna Parrish watch 'Big Cases: The Student Who Never Came Home' now on BBC iPlayer.