Self-confessed French serial killer Michel Fourniret, who goes on trial this month for seven murders, was charged Tuesday in two other cases, including the 1990 killing of a British teaching assistant, his lawyer said.
   
Fourniret, 65, was accused in the kidnap, rape and murder of Joanna Parrish, 20, as well as the kidnap, murder and attempted rape of Marie-Angele Domece, a 19-year-old disabled Frenchwoman.
   
His wife Monique Olivier, 59, was separately charged with complicity in the kidnappings and murders and both appeared before judges for questioning on Tuesday.
   
Fourniret and Olivier go on trial in the French Ardennes region bordering Belgium on March 27 for seven murders committed in France and Belgium between 1987 and 2001.
   
Fourniret has confessed to carrying out six of the killings.
   
Lawyer Bernard Castaigne said Fourniret would be fully questioned over the two new cases after his upcoming trial. He denies any involvement in either killing.
   
In May 1990, Parrish, a student from Leeds University who was working in a high school in the central French city of Auxerre, was found dead near the city.
   
Domece had gone missing on the road leading to Auxerre station in July 1988.
   
Prosecutors had been seeking for years to link Fourniret, a carpenter, to the two murders.
   
Parrish disappeared after agreeing to meet a man who had answered her newspaper advertisement offering language lessons. Her naked body was later found in the River Yonne near Auxerre.
   
Her family had accused French officials of failing properly to investigate her death.
   
On Tuesday her father welcomed the announcement that Fourniret was now a formal suspect.
   
"Clearly we are pleased Fourniret is to be formally accused but it is only a stage. It doesn't necessarily mean he will stand trial," Roger Parrish said.
   
"Fourniret has certainly come a lot closer than anyone else over the 18 years to matching the profile of the sort of person who might have gained Jo's confidence - particularly as he was working with a woman," he added.
   
Olivier, who is accused of complicity on all counts of kidnapping and murder faced by her husband, was the first to link her husband to the Parrish and Domece murders in 2005, in testimony to police.
   
Arrested in Belgium in 2003 after an attempt to kidnap a 13-year-old girl, Fourniret is accused of murdering six young women in France and one in Belgium, aged between 12 and 22. He is also charged on several counts of rape.
   
Dubbed the "Monster of the Ardennes" by French and Belgian media, Fourniret has already served time behind bars for voyeurism and assault. It was there he met Olivier, a volunteer prison visitor.
   
The murders date from the year of his release from that prison term, when he settled in a village near Auxerre.
   
Olivier's confessions to Belgian investigators in June 2004 led to the charges against Fourniret.
   
Two of the bodies were found buried on a country estate in northern France that he and Olivier had bought.
   
In July 2006 he led investigators to the remains of one of his suspected victims, 17-year-old Isabelle Laville, who was raped and murdered in 1987 and whose body was dumped down a well.
   
Held in a special courtroom in the town of Charleville Mezieres, in the French Ardennes, the trial is set to last two months with all hearings open to the public.