Michel Fournier tried to make his wife’s killing look like a disappearance in the Mount Hood area, prosecutors say.
WELCHES, Ore. — The killing of Susan Lane-Fournier unfolded in public first as a search for a missing woman and her dogs, then as a murder prosecution in which the state said her estranged husband shot her after she moved to end their marriage and protect the home they shared.
By the time Michel Fournier was convicted and sentenced in March 2026, prosecutors had tied the case to a sequence of records and physical evidence that began with divorce filings and ended with surveillance video, a submerged cellphone and a body hidden within a short distance of the couple’s Brightwood residence. The case mattered beyond one household because it turned a widely followed search effort into a blunt example of how domestic violence can hide inside a story that first appears to be an outdoor emergency. The key issue was whether jurors believed the disappearance had been staged.
Lane-Fournier, 61, filed for divorce on Oct. 31, 2024, and court records reflected trouble serving the paperwork early that month. Prosecutors later said she succeeded in having Fournier served on Nov. 20. They told jurors she had become increasingly fearful and had started taking steps to protect important papers and her dogs. After she failed to report to work on Nov. 22, concern spread quickly in the mountain communities east of Portland. Her pickup was found near a trailhead south of Welches, and with two dogs also missing, the early theory was that she had gone into the woods and never returned. That explanation set off a broad search and shaped public understanding of the case for days, even as relatives said it made little sense given her experience outdoors and her habits.
Search teams, volunteers, drones and trained dogs spent four days looking for Lane-Fournier before the sheriff’s office suspended active operations after more than 800 hours of work. But the people closest to her kept pressing. Her son said she knew backcountry safety well because of her earlier search-and-rescue work. Friends said she was dependable and hard to imagine simply disappearing. On Nov. 29, one of those friends, James Evans, helped find the body in the Welches area near East Highway 26 and East Miller Road. He later described lifting a tarp and seeing boots. Investigators soon confirmed that the case was no longer a rescue effort but a homicide investigation. Prosecutors said Lane-Fournier had been shot in the head, neck and chest at the Brightwood home, then moved and concealed nearby.
From there, the state’s case turned heavily on follow-up evidence. County officials said Fournier did not initially report his wife missing and instead called 911 on Nov. 24 after detectives had tried to reach him. During that call, officials said, he remarked that he had just been served with divorce papers. He later told deputies he had hitchhiked to Portland for a vehicle part and returned to find Lane-Fournier gone along with her truck and dogs. Investigators then found video they said undercut that account. Surveillance from an auto parts store showed Fournier driving Lane-Fournier’s truck with the dogs inside, according to county officials. The truck was also captured near Northeast Marine Drive by the Columbia River, where investigators later recovered Lane-Fournier’s cellphone damaged and underwater. Prosecutors used those details to argue that Fournier had built a false trail to support the missing-hiker narrative.
The case also carried an emotional and symbolic center: the house. Michael Lane, the victim’s brother, told reporters that Fournier’s name was not on the lease and said his sister had to be killed for the divorce to be silenced and the property kept. Prosecutors adopted the same broad motive theory. At sentencing, county officials said Fournier feared losing the shared home, which was in Susan Lane’s name. They also said he killed her two dogs, Elrond and Elros, by strangling them, then disposed of their bodies in Multnomah County to reinforce the false impression that she had vanished with them. In court, a recording was played in which Fournier admitted killing the animals. Prosecutors also cited jail calls in which he apologized to Lane-Fournier’s adult son and said, “I lost it,” words the state used to help connect him directly to the killing.
Lane-Fournier was remembered publicly by family and friends as an artist and healer who had deep ties in the community. Those descriptions stood in sharp contrast to the prosecution’s picture of her final days, which centered on fear, divorce planning and an effort to leave safely. Fournier, who was 71 at the time of his arrest and 72 at trial and sentencing, was charged with second-degree murder shortly after the body was found. He later faced an added unlawful weapon count and separate aggravated animal abuse allegations. He pleaded not guilty and chose a jury trial that began Feb. 24, 2026. After eight days, jurors found him guilty on March 5. He was sentenced on March 6 to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 25 years, closing the main criminal case while leaving the dog-death charges still pending.
The story remains fixed in local memory because of how sharply it changed shape. Residents first saw search flyers, reports about a truck at a trailhead and appeals for help in the forest. What emerged later was a domestic killing prosecutors said had been hidden inside that public search from the beginning. That shift, from possible rescue to confirmed homicide, gave the case its force in court and in the community. It also left behind a record in which ordinary legal steps in a divorce became the starting point for a chain of violence, concealment and a trial that ended with a life sentence.
With the murder conviction entered and the life sentence imposed, the remaining unresolved courtroom issue is the separate animal abuse case tied to the deaths of Lane-Fournier’s dogs.
Author note: Last updated March 23, 2026.