Investigators have begun searching for the remains of Estelle Mouzin, a nine-year-old girl who disappeared in 2003 and who French serial killer Michel Fourniret, who allegedly murdered British student Joanna Parrish, admitted to having raped and killed.

This ultimate effort to find the young girl’s remains is set to take place over the course of a week in the Ardennes woods where Fourniret, who died in May this year in prison at the age of 79 after he lapsed into a coma, might have buried her body, after judge Sabine Kheris ordered part of the woods to be deforested in preparation of the search.

Fourniret, dubbed the Ogre of the Ardennes by the press, had previously admitted to the kidnapping, rape and murder of nine young girls and women over a period of 14 years starting in 1987. He had been serving a life sentence without possibility of parole and had only been convicted of eight of the killings when he died.

He is believed to have murdered as many as 30 young women and girls in total, but it is unclear if all the remains will ever be found now that he is dead.

His victims allegedly included Joanna Parrish, a 20-year-old British student from Leeds University who was brutally murdered in the eastern French region of Burgundy in May 1990. But he died before he could stand trial for her murder.

And now the authorities are trying to find the location of young Estelle’s body, in a bid to solve the case and bring some closure to her father Eric.

Experts dispatched from the nearby city of Dijon are going to dig in an area of just over two hectares, near the house of Fourniret’s deceased sister, in the commune of Ville-sur-Lumes.

It is in this building that the serial killer admitted that he had kidnapped, raped and killed the nine-year-old girl after having grabbed her in broad daylight as she was walking home from school, on 9th January 2003 in the commune of Guermantes, in the Seine-et-Marne department on the outskirts of the French capital Paris.

Monique Olivier, the widow and jailed accomplice of the serial killer, is also going to be taken out of the Fleury-Merogis prison where she is currently serving her sentence, to assist with the search. She admitted her role in the Estelle Mouzin case the first time on 1st April this year.

After Fourniret died, Olivier’s lawyer, Richard Delgene, said: “Michel Fourniret is taking his secrets with him.”

He added that she “will remain the only one in the defendant’s box to be held accountable.”

She is currently serving a life sentence without parole for 28 years for her role in the kidnappings and brutal killings. She met the serial killer while working in a prison when he was serving time for rape some 35 years ago.

The exchanged hundreds of letters while he was serving that sentence and she even asked him to murder her own husband and in exchange she agreed to help him kidnap “virgins to rape”, according to French news outlet RFI.

While he did not murder her husband, the pair married while he was still in prison. He finished serving that sentence and was released in 1987, which is when the murders started.

She reportedly watched young Estelle for a few hours before dropping Fourniret off when he went to get rid of her body, according to French newspaper Le Parisien, but she has also claimed that she never knew exactly where her serial killer husband left it.

It is still unclear if he left Estelle’s body in the woods or if he buried her.