The father of a British student murdered by a French serial killer has told a court how the “narcissistic psychopath” devastated his “perfect” family. Roger Parrish, 80, whose daughter Joanna was beaten, raped and strangled by Michel Fourniret in 1990, said: “Never-ending devastation doesn’t even come close to describing the effect Joanna’s murder has had on our family.” Fourniret was convicted in 2008 of killing seven women and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died before he could be tried for killing three others including Joanna. Parrish, a retired civil servant from Gloucestershire, was speaking at the trial of Monique Olivier, 75, Fourniet’s ex-wife. Olivier is serving a life sentence for her role in four of Fourniret’s killings. She is appearing in court on charges of complicity in the murder of Joanna in May 1990, as well as that of Marie-Angèle Domèce, 19, who vanished in 1988, and of nine-year-old Estelle Mouzin, who disappeared in 2003. The bodies of Domèce and Estelle, who are French, have never been found. Fourniret was charged with the three murders in 2018 but died before he could be brought to trial. Parrish told the Paris court: “Joanna’s story ended in May 1990. Our bright, beautiful, intelligent 20-year-old with the world at her feet was never able to have the life she wanted or deserved. “Her life was truly ended by a narcissistic psychopath and his female partner who was an active participant in all of his crimes … Many years have passed but the pain has never gone away, has never subsided. Joanna’s life was taken away along with the happy future of a perfect family.” On 16 May 1990, Joanna, a Leeds University language student who was spending eight months as a teaching assistant in the city of Auxerre, told her flatmate that she was meeting a man to talk about giving his son English lessons. She was saving money to visit her boyfriend, Patrick Proctor, a fellow Leeds student who was studying Russian in what was then Czechoslovakia, and had placed a small ad in the local newspaper offering language teaching and babysitting. She did not return to her lodgings that evening. The next day her naked and bound body was found floating in the Yonne River. Although Fourniret, who had a criminal record for sexual assault and rape and had served time in prison, was living with Olivier near Auxerre at the time, he was never interviewed by police. Olivier admitted being involved in the killing of Joanna and Domèce when questioned between 2004 and 2008 but subsequently retracted her statement. On the second day of the trial last week, a Belgian prosecutor who questioned Olivier in 2004 said she described then how she and Fourniret had picked up Joanna near the station at Auxerre. On Monday, part of her statement to police was read to the court. In it, she told detectives that Joanna agreed to get in the back of the couple’s Citroën C5 van “even though it wasn’t very comfortable because there were no seats, only a few cushions”. Olivier said the original plan was to keep the young woman at their home for a few days, rape her and kill her, but after she had driven a few miles Fourniret “changed his mind and decided to rape her immediately”. They stopped the vehicle at an isolated spot. “He asked her if she was a virgin and if she had a boyfriend,” Olivier told police. “He told her to get undressed but she refused so he hit her until she didn’t speak any more. He then undressed her and tied her arms and legs. After he had raped the young girl, he strangled her. I don’t know how long all that took. Then he took her in his arms and he threw her into the river.” She said she “heard everything that happened” in the back of the vehicle and “did not dare to look around”. Proctor, now 55, told the court how he and Joanna met at Leeds University and that they had discussed marriage. He said that even after more than three decades, her death still affected him. “It is barely believable that a human being can do that to someone else,” he said. Throughout the family’s emotional statements, Olivier remained impassive in the dock. Jean-Pierre Lauzier, the doctor who carried out the autopsy, said Joanna’s body showed signs that she had been gagged and her legs and arms tied before she was subjected to a sexual attack. She had injuries to her head and bruises to her body suggesting she had received “several blows from an object” some time before her death. His expert view was that she had then been strangled with a ligature between 10pm on the evening she was abducted and 2am the following day and her body then moved and thrown into the river at about 6am. Parrish, who has waited 33 years to see justice for his daughter, has previously been deeply critical of the French police and legal investigation. On Monday his lawyer, Didier Seban, said the justice system “failed from the beginning to the end”. Parrish was accompanied in court by Joanna’s mother and his ex-wife, Pauline Murrell, the couple’s son Barnaby, and Parrish’s sister Pauline Harris, 77, a retired teacher from Derby, who said she felt “rage, anger and despair” when the family finally learned what had happened to Joanna. “Our world was shattered on 17 May 1990 when I learned my lovely niece was dead and, worse, probably murdered. Life changed irrevocably in so many ways for ever. It felt as if my heart had broken into a million pieces,” Harris said. “She would never have gone with a lone male stranger, but a man, a wife and a baby were able to trick her with their lies. We knew this 16 years ago – why were charges not brought sooner?” The president of the court, Didier Safar, praised the tenacity of Joanna’s parents in continuing to seek “the truth of what happened to Joanna”. For many years after their daughter’s death, while Fourniret remained at large, the couple travelled to Auxerre to hand out her picture and seek witnesses and information. “It merits our respect and it’s thanks to Mr Parrish that this process is happening today,” Safar said. French police believe Fourniret may have been responsible for up to 35 murders between 1987 and 2003, many of them unresolved. The trial continues.