Not just any young women.

To satisfy Fourniret’s depraved fantasies, the young women had to be virgins.

Apart from helping Fourniret entrap and capture girls, it was Olivier’s job to check that some victims fit her husband’s sick requirement.

She did this by physically confirming their virginity was still intact.

Fourniret, regarded as one of France’s worst serial killers, sexually abused his victims before murdering them.

In May 2008, a French judge handed life sentences to Fourniret, dubbed the “Ogre of the Ardennes”, and his wife Olivier who, during their trial, was described as his “bloody muse” and a “devil with two faces”.

Fourniret wears a blindfold and bulletproof vest after being questioned. Picture: AFP

The court case was described as one of the worst serial murder cases in recent French history.

The jury found Fourniret, 66, guilty of killing and raping, or attempting to rape, seven women and girls aged between 12 and 22.

His horrible crimes were committed between 1987 and 2003.

Olivier, aged 59, was convicted of complicity in four murders and one rape.

She was sentenced to a minimum 28-year jail term.

Monique Olivier — also protected by a bullet proof vest — outside a police headquarters in 2004. Picture: AFP

Fourniret, who had admitted his crimes and said he would not appeal, operated mostly in the heavily wooded northern region of France, and in Belgium.

His wife was accused of helping him select some of his victims, capture them and act complicity in his crimes.

The victims were either strangled, shot or stabbed with a screwdriver to feed what prosecutors called Fourniret’s obsession for virgins.

Fourniret’s offending began in 1966 when, at age 24, he groped a minor.

After being arrested for the attempted kidnapping of a young woman, he was jailed after admitting to 15 previous sexual assaults in the Paris region.

During his incarceration, he placed penpal ads in a Roman Catholic magazine.

Olivier, a former nurse, saw one of his ads and wrote to him.

They began a relationship via correspondence.

In letters, Fourniret, a former tradesman and school supervisor, claimed he was traumatised by an incestuous relationship with his mother.

He also wrote of his want for virgins.

Victim Natacha Danais

Jeanne-Marie Desramault

Fabienne Leroy

Olivier called him her “beast” and “Shere Khan”: a reference to the tiger character in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book story.

After his release in 1987, Fourniret and Olivier lived together in a village in Burgundy, France, before moving to an 18th century chateau in a wooded area near the Ardennes, near the French/Belgian border.

Not long after his release, the couple started hunting female virgins.

Five of the murders for which Fourniret was convicted occurred in the first three years after his release from jail.

The couple had a convincing modus operandi — Olivier was said to coax potential victims into the couple’s vehicle; at times while pregnant with their son and later while he was a toddler.

Fourniret claimed to have acted alone for his last two murders, in 2000 and 2001.

Their first victim was Isabelle Laville, 17, in the central French region of Burgundy.

Elisabeth Brichet

Isabelle Laville.

After Isabelle was lured into their car, according to court documents, Fourniret “grabbed her by the hair and asked her was she a virgin, and she replied in the affirmative’’.

A string of murders followed.

In June 2003, Belgian police detained Fourniret after he bungled an attempt to kidnap a 13-year-old Belgian girl.

She was walking along a road in her hometown of Ciney when a Citroen van pulled up and its driver, Fourniret, asked her for directions.

Under heavy police guard and wearing a bulletproof vest, Michel Fourniret leads investigators to two bodies in July 2004. AFP photo

He insisted she get in to show him the way.

When she did, Fourniret pushed her into the back of the truck and tied her hands and ankles.

“I felt like I was in a film,’’ the girl would say in evidence during the couple’s trial.

“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.’”

Fourniret also said he was “far better’’ than Marc Dutroux, a Belgian paedophile and serial killer active around the same time.

According to the girl, Fourniret’s threat to kill her came after she screamed and tried to resist when he touched her breasts.

She managed to free herself from her bonds and jump out when the van stopped.

A passing car picked her up and drove her to a police station, where the driver gave police Fourniret’s car numberplate.

Investigators found some of the girl’s hair inside the van, and soon after Olivier made a police statement against her husband.

Olivier’s statement included details such as after one killing, Fourniret arrived home and said: “I went hunting today, and I obtained satisfaction.”

Sensing the game was up, Fourniret cooperated with police and led them to some of the bodies of his victims buried near his property.

Prosecutor Yves Charpenel likened Fourniret to a plotting chess player, a trait Mr Charpenel said became evident during the recovery search.

“There were 200 people around him and a helicopter overhead, and we felt he was in his element,’’ Mr Charpenel said at the time in July 2004.

The ‘virgin hunter’ in handcuffs and in custody in 2004. AP photo

DURING the 2008 trial, the victims’ parents and others in court heard how the couple made a pact to hunt for virgins.

Fourniret and Olivier sat in the dock behind bulletproof glass as court officials read out a litany of horrific crimes.

Letters seized by investigators showed that, while serving his 1980s jail term for sexual assault, Fourniret made a pact “that in exchange for the murder of Olivier’s first husband, she would find him a virgin to fulfil his fantasies’’.

Fourniret never fulfilled his promise to kill Olivier’s first husband.

But Olivier fulfilled hers.

Elisabeth Brichet’s father, Francis Brichet, holds a photo of her outside court. Picture: Reuters

Olivier, who admitted to helping her husband in some of the sex murders, sought to minimise her role by claiming Fourniret trapped her in his psychological grip.

She claimed theirs was a master-slave relationship, adding she was the terrorised wife of a domineering and violent husband.

But a prosecutor described her as a willing accomplice; a complicit women who responded to the screams of some of her husband’s victims with a “deafening silence’’.

Olivier testified that she and Fourniret would reproduce scenes from their crimes sex.

The grey-haired bespectacled Fourniret provided horrific details while admitting he had a sexual obsession with virgins, who he coveted to satisfy a 16-year “bloodlust”.

He said he was in an “altered state’’ when he killed his victims.

“I remain an extremely dangerous individual,’’ he reportedly acknowledged.

State prosecutor Francis Nachbar described Fourniret as a “necrophiliac monster”.

Psychologists found that Fourniret, a self-obsessed and controlling man, took sadistic pleasure in rape and murder.

A coroner provided evidence suggesting Fourniret interfered with one of his teen victims after stabbing her to death.

Fourniret and Olivier showed no emotion during the trial.

As the verdict and sentences were announced, the victims’ relatives sobbed and hugged.

“I can breathe again,’’ Isabelle Laville’s mother, Marie-Jeanne Laville, said afterwards.

“We will now try to return to a nearly normal life,’’ added Jean-Pierre Leroy, whose daughter Fabienne, 20, was taken from a supermarket car park in 1988 and shot dead.

Investigators said Fourniret’s calm appearance belied a manipulative inner demon.

Police fear he preyed on other girls across Europe.