The couple resembled ordinary French pensioners, he with his arms folded in a professorial pose, she sucking in her cheeks like a watchful grandmother. Behind the façade, however, lay a cold-blooded sexual predator who raped and killed victims with the help of his wife and accomplice, a court was told yesterday.

As Michel Fourniret and Monique Olivier sat in a glass-fronted dock on the opening day of their trial, jurors were told chilling details of the grey-haired couple alleged to be among the most horrific criminals in the history of France. Using an image of happily-married respectability, Olivier would gain the confidence of the girls and women they had identified as prey.

After they had been bound, gagged and sometimes drugged by her husband, she would examine them to check they were the virgins he desired.

She would then hand them over to Fourniret “in the sole aim of allowing him to fulfil his fantasies”, according to a report read out in the court in Charleville-Mézières, in the Franco-Belgian border region where they once lived. He would assault his victims — “beautiful little subjects” was how he referred to them — before shooting or strangling them, the report by investigating magistrates said.

One, a “serious, prudent and intelligent” 20-year-old student, had air injected into her veins to provoke a heart attack, the magistrates said.

Fourniret, 65, is on trial charged with the murder of seven girls and women aged between 12 and 21 in France and Belgium between 1987 and 2001. He has confessed to the crimes.

Olivier, 59, who is charged with one count of murder and complicity in four other killings, has admitted helping her husband but has sought to minimise her role with a claim that she was in his psychological grip.

The couple are suspected of a series of other crimes likely to be the subject of a subsequent hearing. These include the murder of Joanna Parrish, a 20-year-old British student found dead in Burgundy in 1990.

Yesterday Fourniret fuelled his reputation as a manipulator as he sought to dominate proceedings with a bizarre performance. He claimed his right to privacy under French law to prevent media from taking his photograph, a customary practice in high-profile trials in France. He listened impassively to a list of crimes with which he is charged.

Asked to confirm his identity, he held up a note written in capital letters that said: “Lips sealed if not in closed session.” His request for the press and public to be excluded along with photographers was dismissed by Judge Gilles Lapatie.

Fourniret responded by handing the judge a second handwritten note, this one rolled up and bound like a medieval scroll. “This is the account of my acts which I intended to read,” the defendant said, breaking the vow of silence that he had made minutes earlier. “But I cannot talk if the court is not in camera. I ask for your permission for you to read it out yourself.”

A lawyer at the court said later that in the note Fourniret described himself as “a bad being and devoid of all human sentiment” and that his wife was “an object that my lack of morals constantly manipulated through a perverse game”. Olivier was more co-operative, confirming her identity before her childhood stammer reappeared as she tried to remember the names of her lawyers.

Her lawyers say that she is hoping for a lenient sentence, unlike her husband, who is resigned to life imprisonment, according to legal sources.

But the report of the investigating magistrates said that when Fourniret set in motion their first crime in 1987, asking her to “get him a virgin”, she knew the end could only be fatal. The remains of the victim, Isabelle Laville, 17, were found almost two decades later in a gravel-filled well.

The court was also told how the couple were caught in 2003 when a 13-year-old Belgian girl bit through the rope with which they had tied her wrists and jumped out of their van.

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