Murderpedia has thousands of hours of work behind it. To keep creating
new content, we kindly appreciate any donation you can give to help
the Murderpedia project stay alive. We have many
plans and enthusiasm
to keep expanding and making Murderpedia a better site, but we really
need your help for this. Thank you very much in advance.
Albert FOULCHER
Classification: Murderer
Characteristics:
Revenge
Number of victims: 5
Date of murders: January 19, 1993 / January 8, 2001
Date of birth: 1952
Victims profile: André
Meffray / Pascal Herrero, Maurice Michaud,
and two policemen
Method of murder:
Shooting
Location: L'Aude, France
Status: Committed suicide by shooting himself as police
closed in on a block of flats in Béziers, on January 17,
2001
Gunman commits suicide as gendarmes close in
By John Lichfield in Paris
Independent.co.uk
Thursday, 18 January
2001
The most wanted man in France shot himself dead yesterday
as police closed in on a block of flats in Béziers, on the French
Mediterranean coast.
The most wanted man in France shot himself dead yesterday as police
closed in on a block of flats in Béziers, on the French Mediterranean
coast.
Albert Foulcher, 50, a former insurance agent and gun enthusiast, had
been on the run since murdering two policemen and two other men near
Narbonne more than a week ago. He had already been sentenced to life, in
his absence, for a 1993 murder.
The hunt by hundreds of gendarmes and police, involving two helicopters,
cornered him in the council flat of a girlfriend, 20 miles from Narbonne.
Seventy officers who besieged the block were first beaten back by a
burst of automatic fire through the door as residents were evacuated.
When police finally stormed the flat after eight hours Foulcher was
lying dead under a bed.
His motives for last week's murders remain obscure. Two men murdered by
Foulcher, in separate attacks, were not witnesses at his trial last year,
as police had said earlier. One victim was the husband of a former
mistress; the other was the head of an insurance office, which had taken
business away from Foulcher's own insurance agency, which had failed.
The policemen were shot dead in their car by automatic fire when they
were called to the scene of the first murder.
Foulcher, also a fitness fanatic and self-made business man, had
actually been on the run since January of last year, when he decided not
to attend his trial for the earlier murder.
He had been freed on bail in 1996 after an appeal court ruled that his
long pre-trial detention violated the European Convention on Human
Rights.
Foulcher had always denied responsibility for the 1993 killing of André
Meffray, the man from whom he bought his insurance business. But
forensic scientists matched one of the guns in Foulcher's arsenal to the
bullets in the body of the murdered man.
Convicted
killer on the run after four are shot dead
By John Lichfield in Paris
Independent.co.uk
Tuesday, 9 January
2001
A convicted murderer shot dead two policemen and two men who had given
evidence at his trial before playing a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with
police across the south of France last night.
A convicted murderer shot dead two policemen and two men who had given
evidence at his trial before playing a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with
police across the south of France last night.
Albert Foulcher, 49, a former insurance agent, had been on the run since
he was convicted in April for the murder of a colleague eight years ago.
Police helicopters and hundreds of police were mobilised to track him in
the Montpellier and NĂmes area after he shot and killed two policemen
and committed two suspected revenge murders earlier in the day.
The fugitive was believed to be driving a stolen Mercedes and armed with
at least one semi-automatic weapon. His car was reported to have been
spotted by police on several occasions but he was still managing to
elude his pursuers.
The policemen were killed in Narbonne after being called to what
appeared to be a domestic dispute. Foulcher had turned up at the home of
Pascal Herrero, one of the people who gave evidence at his trial. When
the police arrived, he turned the weapon on them before shooting Mr
Herrero.
One of the police officers died instantly. The other, shot in the head,
died before he reached hospital. Less than an hour later, Foulcher
turned up at a village close to Narbonne and murdered a former colleague,
Maurice Michaud, who had also testified against him last year. The
murderer escaped in Mr Michaud's Mercedes and burst through a police
barricade between Narbonne and Beziers before trying to flee to the east
on the A9 Barcelona to Marseilles motorway.
Shots were exchanged with gendarmes at another barricade before Foulcher
did a U-turn at a toll station near Némes and escaped in the direction
from which he had come. There were several reported sightings of the car
last night in the Némes and Montpellier area.
Foulcher was convicted of the murder in 1993, at Pailhés near
Montpellier, of another insurance agent - the man from whom he had
bought a business in 1984. He was arrested soon after the killing but,
through a judicial error, he was allowed bail in 1998 and failed to turn
up for his trial. He was found guilty in his absence given a life
sentence.
There were fears last night that Foulcher might be planning further
revenge killings. Police said they had provided armed guards for two
lawyers involved in the murderer's trial - his defence lawyer, Jacques
Martin, and an unnamed female lawyer who was the former wife of the
investigating magistrate judge who led the inquiries into the
originalmurder.
The killing of the two policemen in the Narbonne area brings the number
of policemen shot dead in France in the past three weeks to four. One of
these was killed by one of his own colleagues by mistake at a roadblock.
