What lies beneath: the secrets of France’s top serial killer expert
What lies beneath: the secrets of France’s top serial killer expert
One night in the early 1990s, at a dinner party at his home in Paris, Stéphane Bourgoin, an author and bookseller then of no particular renown, began to hold forth on the matter of serial killing. The topic was, at the time, quite novel. As a cultural trope, the string of mysterious homicides had of course been a fixture around the world since at least the time of Jack the Ripper, and the French more specifically had been acquainted with the idea since as early as the 15th century, when the nobleman Gilles de Rais was found to have kidnapped, tortured and ritualistically murdered nearly 150 young children. But these people had not been understood as “serial killers”. That phrase, and the notion that such criminals were a breed apart, impelled by a special, sexualised depravity, really entered into the popular imagination only in the 1970s, and then mostly in the US, where the FBI had established a unit of so-called “profilers” to catch them. The serial killer was not yet a cultural vogue in France, much less the cliche it was already becoming elsewhere. Bourgoin’s guests were barely familiar with the concept at all. They listened, as millions of other French-speakers would listen in the decades to come, horrified, nauseated and rapt.Bourgoin told his invitees of the FBI programme, of the traits of the typical killer, and of some of the more awful American specimens. “We were utterly captivated,” Carol Kehringer, who was among Bourgoin’s guests that night, recalled recently. Kehringer was then in her 20s, starting out as a television producer. “I started asking him all sorts of questions,” she said, “and the more he spoke, the more I thought to myself: ‘We’ve got to do a film!’”Bourgoin was a friend of Kehringer’s parents, and Kehringer had known him since she was a child. She was fond of him, but also found him to be “a bit out of sync”, she said, “always in his own little world”. Bourgoin ran Au Troisième Oeil – “The Third Eye” – a tiny secondhand bookshop specialising in mysteries and crime. He fit the part. His frame was slight and boyish, but he had grown rather doughy by his late 30s, with a pot belly and a pallid complexion that suggested, along with his spectacles, a sedentary life in the half-light of the margins. Before the bookshop, he had been an assistant on the sets of a few minor pornographic movies. He spoke in a small, satiny voice; there was something vaguely spectral about him. Yet he tended to grow quite animated – blue eyes shimmering, his speech breathy and fervent, a mischievous smile spreading over his lips – when discussing his pet interests. These skewed sharply toward the bizarre and, increasingly, the gruesome.Bourgoin was a lover of cinema, and the walls of his apartment were lined with an immense collection of VHS cassettes. Among these was a hand-labelled series of recorded newscasts, showing all manner of accidents and natural disasters. He kept a trove of photographs of cadavers in various states of mutilation, which he liked to show around, and also delighted in telling the story of his mother’s first husband, a German who had been decapitated by the Nazis. “He was a charming young man,” a friend from that period told me, “who had an extreme attraction to the macabre.”Yet Kehringer also knew him to be what she called a “walking library”, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of his preferred subjects, and that evening, for every question she asked about serial killers, Bourgoin offered an extensive response. Before leaving the dinner, she asked him to write up a pitch for a documentary, and soon enough they were at work together on a film. In the fall of 1991, Bourgoin, Kehringer and a small production team flew to the US for the shoot.They began in Quantico, Virginia, with the FBI’s serial crime unit. The head of the unit was a renowned psychological profiler named John Douglas. Douglas was a consultant on the Hollywood adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs – the story’s protagonist, Clarice Starling, is a profiling trainee – and the film had been released earlier in the year to great acclaim. The chance to speak to a minor French film crew did not seem to fill Douglas with awe. “The impression I got was that we were more or less wasting his time,” Olivier Raffet, the cameraman, told me.Get the Guardian’s award-winning long reads sent direct to you every Saturday morningWhile Raffet set up his equipment in Douglas’s office, however, Bourgoin began chatting with the profiler about a case from decades earlier. Douglas said something to the effect of, “The suspect was arrested in October of ’48, in such-and-such city,” Raffet recalled. “And Stéphane said: ‘Yes, but I believe it was November, not October, and it wasn’t that city but the little town next door called so-and-so.’ And the guy was completely blown away. And he said: ‘Yes, I believe you’re right.’ And from that moment on, his attitude toward us changed completely.” The FBI shoot went exceptionally well. Thirty years later, it remains an all-time favourite for Kehringer.The crew traveled to Florida, where arrangements had been made to interview two convicted killers, Gerard Schaefer and Ottis Toole. Kehringer was wary of the risk of sensationalism, and did not want the men to simply narrate their crimes. “We wanted to know if, over time, these killers had come to understand the harm they’d done,” Kehringer said. “If they’d questioned themselves.” She and Bourgoin composed the questions together, but she was too spooked to attend the interviews herself, and the next day Bourgoin and Raffet drove to the prison without her.Schaefer, a former sheriff’s deputy with a distressing smirk, was believed to have killed at least 34 women. Toole had once claimed participation in more than 100 murders, some cannibalistic. In subsequent years, Bourgoin would often describe the paralysing horror he’d experienced in the presence of these men. By Kehringer’s recollection, however, he emerged from the prison euphoric. “He was extremely excited, literally jubilant,” she told me. She reviewed the tapes, and very quickly realised he had not conducted the interviews according to plan.Bourgoin had Toole describe his murders in detail. “Whoever cut the person’s throat would fuck the person, and then let an animal fuck them, too,” Toole explained. “And they would have a big feast – they would cook the person and cook the animal.” For the meeting with Schaefer, Bourgoin brought along several copies of Killer Fiction, a book of semi-autobiographical murder tales the killer had written, for him to sign. Afterward, he and Schaefer posed together for a photograph, each with his arm around the other’s shoulder, beaming.Kehringer was appalled, and angry. But Bourgoin apologised, and assured her that he would keep to the prearranged questions with the third and final killer. The crew flew to California, to meet Edmund Kemper.Kemper, who stood nearly seven feet tall, had killed his paternal grandparents as a young man and later murdered eight women, including his mother. He once remarked that, when he saw an attractive woman, “One side of me says, ‘Wow, what an attractive chick. I’d like to talk to her, date her. The other side says, ‘I wonder how her head would look on a stick.’” (Bret Easton Ellis quoted the line in his novel American Psycho.) Yet Kemper was thought to have grown exceptionally introspective and regretful. He could provide the analysis Kehringer wanted.After the interview, Kehringer reviewed the tape. Bourgoin had asked Kemper about various violent incidents from his childhood, about the details of his killings, about the particulars of his monstrous fantasy life. “What were those fantasies?” Bourgoin inquired. “What were they?” Kemper replied, almost taken aback. “Possessing the severed heads of women.”The documentary went forward, but Kehringer stopped speaking to Bourgoin. “I saw Stéphane change,” she told me. His interest in serial murder was evidently more compulsive than mere curiosity. “When he had the killers in front of him, it was as if he was sitting across from his idols.” Bourgoin, she concluded, was in fact a fan.Serial killers seem to exert a special pull on the modern imagination. The sex and gore have much to do with it, of course, as does the prospect that the normal-looking lives of normal-looking people might conceal a monstrousness beyond comprehension. The serial killer plays upon our nervous instinct that, beneath the surface of everyday life, society is rapidly unravelling.By the late 1960s, amid a vast and mysterious explosion in violence, this unravelling seemed to have accelerated beyond the point of control. Between 1960 and 1980, annual killings in the US climbed from about 9,000 to more than 23,000. For a time, many believed that serial killers might be to blame, stalking the new interstate highways, preying upon a new class of independent, unprotected young women. By the 1980s, with the encouragement of the FBI, the American news media had begun to speak of an “epidemic” of serial murder, one that claimed thousands of lives each year. After pushing this theory for several years, however, the bureau quietly withdrew its claims: serial killers are now thought to account for less than 1% of homicides. (The actual causes of the late-century rise in killing remain a matter of debate.) But the figure of the serial killer – “natural born celebrities”, as the scholar David Schmid has put it – had by then established itself as a conduit for the anxieties of the era. A culture – articles, books, films, innumerable television reports – had sprung up around it.Stéphane Bourgoin at his home in the west of France, April 2020. Photograph: Eric Hadj/Paris Match/Getty ImagesBourgoin’s documentary translated this culture into French, importing it for an audience with similar preoccupations about modernity and a longstanding mix of fascination, revulsion and envy – not unlike what most people feel toward serial killers – toward the US. It was among the first major French reports on serial murder, and Bourgoin parlayed it into a new career. He worked with remarkable speed. Within about a year of the film’s initial TV broadcast in 1992, he had published books on the American murderers Albert DeSalvo (the “Boston Strangler”) and Jeffrey Dahmer, a monograph on Jack the Ripper, and Serial Killers, an encyclopaedic treatment that established him as the uncontested French authority on the phenomenon. (The title was in English, and it is a lasting reminder of the provenance of the concept that the French are, even now, just as likely to refer to “serial killers” by their English-language name as by the French translation, tueurs en série.) In Le Monde, a reviewer remarked that Bourgoin had approached his subject – “these new ‘stars’ of crime” – with “the precision of the entomologist”, which may have been a generous way of saying that Serial Killers was a dense anthology of names, dates and grisly details, with no narration or analysis to speak of, the work of a hoarder of murder trivia. And yet it was a hit. Since 1993, through numerous editions, the book is said to have sold over a million copies.Bourgoin was prolific, if, after a time, repetitive. He wrote The Black Book of Serial Killers, 100 Years of Serial Killers and The Serial Killers are Among Us. In Who Killed the Black Dahlia? he claimed to have solved one of the most infamous American murders of the 20th century. (It was his second full-length book on the case.) By 2015 – the year of the second edition of 999 Years of Serial Killers and at least four other titles – he had met with no fewer than 77 serial killers, he said, and had furnished the FBI with thousands of hours of film from those interviews. By way of thanks, the bureau had trained him as an independent investigator, he said, and he had obtained confessions from murderers around the world. “I have a certain gift for getting them to talk,” he once told Libération. In France, he was invited to lecture for magistrates, the judicial police and the Gendarmerie Nationale.He had become a celebrity in his own right, “the world’s top serial killer expert”, in the estimation of one French TV host. He was a fixture of the evening talk shows, and on the radio; after murders, attacks and other violent crimes, the newspapers invited him to expound the culprit’s motivations. He made dozens of TV specials. Bourgoin never developed a comprehensive theory of the serial killer, but an enigma that remains unsolved is an enigma that keeps its fascination, and no one seemed to hold his equivocations against him. His talks and conferences sold out across France; at book signings, fans queued for hours.Bourgoin was an unusually glamourless sort of star, and seemed to go most places wearing the same ironic murder-themed T-shirts favoured by his fans. One typical model featured the face of Dahmer, a cannibal who murdered at least 17 people, along with the slogan “So many people, so many recipes.” Bourgoin signed his books “With my bloodiest regards.”His monomania for serial killing did not meet everyone’s definition of good taste, and from the start of his career, Bourgoin was often asked to explain his fixation. Typically, he would tell the story of his wife. When the documentary maker Frédéric Tonolli first met Bourgoin in the late 1990s, he told him rather bluntly that he thought he was a morbid voyeur. “Yes, but Frédo,” Bourgoin said, Tonolli recalled recently, “my wife was murdered. That’s why I started: I had to know why.” Tonolli was stunned. “It was still morbid,” he told me. “But there was love in it, and that’s something else.” He went on to direct one of Bourgoin’s early films.Around the turn of the century, Bourgoin began speaking publicly of his wife’s death, and it quickly became the tragedy by which he was known. While living in the US in the 1970s, he would explain, he had married a woman named Eileen. In the summer of 1976, he returned to their Los Angeles apartment to find she had been raped, her throat slit, her body dismembered. Two years later, the police informed him that Eileen’s killer had been apprehended, and that the man had confessed to numerous other murders. Until then, Bourgoin had never encountered the term “serial killer”. No one was able to convincingly explain to him how a human being could be capable of such horrors. He combed libraries in the US and in France, but found nothing, and realised that if he was to make sense of the evil that had claimed his wife, he would need to do it on his own.In 1991, when he was 15 years old, a man I will call Charles read an article in his mother’s Paris Match magazine about Jeffrey Dahmer. Dahmer, a mixer in a chocolate factory, had been arrested a few weeks earlier. In his apartment, police had found seven human skulls, four severed heads, three torsos dissolving in a vat of acid, and another torso in the freezer. Charles was captivated. The following year, in a supermarket, he came upon Bourgoin’s book on the case. “Like everyone who’s interested in the serial killer milieu,” Charles told me, “we all started with Bourgoin.”Charles followed Bourgoin closely, and with admiration. In his 20s, on a whim, he wrote to the author to ask his opinion of a book on the killer Ted Bundy. Bourgoin responded with his phone number, and an offer to talk whenever Charles liked. “I was over the moon,” he recalled. “But I never called him. I didn’t want to act like just some fan.”Bourgoin was generally known for being friendly and accessible, but he treated some of his admirers with a disdain that is not unusual in the realm of offbeat fandoms. He seemed to wish to make clear that their obsession with serial murder, unlike his own, was inauthentic, overblown, illicit – that he was, in essence, the real fan. In an updated edition of Serial Killers, he lamented the world’s “infatuation” with serial killers. “I’ve lost count of the crazies – in their overwhelming majority, young women – who call or write to me,” Bourgoin wrote, “with appalling requests.” On Facebook, where he maintained a following of many tens of thousands, he was known for sparring with anyone who appeared to question his expertise.Charles, who works for the French military and has asked to remain anonymous, does not think of himself as a serial murder aficionado, or at least not an obsessive. “Sometimes, on the online groups, I see things that are shocking,” he told me. “When you say, ‘My favourite serial killer is,’ for instance, ‘Richard Ramirez’” – the “Night Stalker” – “ – how can you say you have a ‘favourite’ serial killer?” His own interest is in the psychology of serial killing, he said. In 30 years of study he confessed that he has made no sense of it at all, but he continues to pore over the finer points of various killings in search of some sort of epiphany.About 10 years ago, absorbed in these details, Charles began to notice what he thought were discrepancies in some of Bourgoin’s pronouncements. His work tended to cover the same crimes over and over again, but the specifics, especially as they related to his own interactions with the killers, had a tendency to drift. Sometimes, Bourgoin said he had interviewed Edmund Kemper only briefly; elsewhere, he claimed to have spent hundreds of hours with him. Bourgoin spoke of meeting 77 killers, but Charles could find video recordings only of the interviews with Kemper, Schaefer, Toole and four or five others. The language of some of Bourgoin’s books struck him as markedly similar to the works of various more obscure English-language writers. But plenty of media figures self-aggrandise, he reasoned, and some play a bit loose with the facts, and plagiarism is not, to many French people, an especially troubling offence. Charles was disappointed, but kept his observations to himself.In 2019, however, he was browsing one of the various murder-related Facebook groups to which he belonged, and came upon a post about Bourgoin. It was a link to a recent television interview, in which Bourgoin recounted the usual episodes: his “300 hours” with Kemper, the murder of Eileen. He wore his Dahmer T-shirt. To Charles’s surprise, sceptical comments began appearing beneath the post, and the page’s administrator soon created a new, smaller group to discuss the doubts that had been raised.Everyone came with their particular misgivings. One member, a middle-aged bookshop employee named Anne-Sophie Bec, was troubled by Bourgoin’s online behaviour. In one Facebook post, Bourgoin claimed to have once lived next door to Stephen King, the American author; in another, he claimed to have been given Gerard Schaefer’s mortal remains – Schaefer was murdered by a fellow prisoner in 1995 – and offered to give away bits of the body to any interested fans. “There were things where you’d say to yourself, ‘Wait, is he joking?’” Bec said. “But he didn’t seem like he was joking.” Another member of the group, a thirtysomething Belgian named Sven Coquelin, had questions about the story of Eileen. “He says that, in order to spare her family, and out of respect, he doesn’t want to give her last name,” Coquelin, who works in logistics at a company that manufactures heat-resistant concrete for crematoria, told me. “And at the same time, he recounts these horrible details.”There was some jockeying over who would lead this new group of doubters. At one point, Charles insulted the administrator and was ejected from the group. Bec, Coquelin and five others chose to follow him out, and together they formed a new group, which, in winking reference to Bourgoin’s old bookshop, they called “4ème Oeil Corporation”.The members of 4ème Oeil did not know one another personally, and were spread around the globe – some in France and Belgium, Bec near Montreal, another member in South America – but they began to coordinate a joint investigation of Bourgoin. Initially, their ambitions were modest. “The thing is,” Charles told me, “when we really got going and started to look around, every time we went looking for something, we’d find something.” They began to feel betrayed. “The more we dug, the more new problems we found,” said Coquelin, “and the more new lies.”The 4ème Oeil group began with the story of Eileen. Over the years, they found, Bourgoin had variously described her as a companion, a fiancee, or his wife, but was more consistent in his description of her murder. It had occurred in Los Angeles, in 1976; the culprit, who had also killed a dozen other women, was apprehended in California in 1978. In 2019, Bourgoin told an interviewer that the killer was still awaiting execution.The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation maintains a public list of the hundreds of prisoners on death row, as does the Los Angeles Times; none of these inmates had murdered a woman under the circumstances Bourgoin described. The group tried a different approach. In a TV appearance, Bourgoin had once shown an old photograph of himself and Eileen, an attractive young blonde woman with an upturned nose and distinctively square front teeth. The group began looking for any victims of known California serial killers who resembled her. Once again, they found no one.They widened the scope of their investigation, and enlisted the help of some of America’s most notorious killers. Charles wrote to about 30 murderers Bourgoin claimed to have met, asking if they had any recollection of the Frenchman. Those who said they did came exclusively from the small handful of killers whose meetings had been recorded on film. No one else who replied remembered Bourgoin at all. (Dennis Rader, the BTK killer – for “bind-torture-kill”– sent his “no” response on paper that seemed to have been perfumed. “I wrote back just to be polite,” Charles said.)Bourgoin claimed to have interviewed David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam”, who had said at his trial that his killings had been mandated by the demon inhabiting a neighbour’s dog. Bourgoin said that he’d confronted Berkowitz about the story of the dog, and that Berkowitz admitted to him that he’d made it up so as to appear insane. Berkowitz, who has been imprisoned since 1977, said through an intermediary that he did not recall Bourgoin. Nor was there any trace of the interview Bourgoin claimed to have had with the cult leader Charles Manson. In an interview with Le Parisien in 2017, after Manson’s death, Bourgoin said he had met him “in the early 80s” in prison, where Manson “climbed up and sat on the back of a chair, in order to dominate me physically”. The administrator of Manson’s official website, a disciple known as Gray Wolf, told 4ème Oeil he could find no evidence of such an encounter.The Berkowitz and Manson anecdotes, the group realised, both strongly resembled experiences recounted by John Douglas – the FBI profiler Bourgoin had interviewed 30 years earlier – in his 1995 memoir Mindhunter. (The book was all but unknown in France until being adapted as a Netflix series; both anecdotes appeared in it.) Charles wrote to Douglas, who, to the great thrill of 4ème Oeil, responded. “Stephane Bourgogne [sic] is delusional and an imposter,” Douglas wrote. “It looks like Bourgoin became an ‘expert’ by reading books … mine in particulars [sic].”A still from the Netflix adaptation of John Douglas’s memoir Mindhunter. Photograph: NetflixThe group began rewatching Bourgoin’s old TV appearances, listening to his interviews, rereading his books. The investigation took months, and nearly all their free time. “I’d get home from work, take a shower, and go straight online,” Charles said. “My wife was pissed.” Coquelin’s partner nearly left him in exasperation; another group member’s did. But they seemed unable to stop. During one conversation with Coquelin, I said I presumed that 4ème Oeil’s investigation had been propelled, at least in part, by a love of the search. “Not especially,” he said. “We really did it out of disgust.”They found borrowings and misrepresentations everywhere. Bourgoin’s early monograph on Dahmer appeared to be heavily plagiarised, as did a 1998 book on Kemper. Who Killed the Black Dahlia?, in which Bourgoin claimed to identify the murderer, was essentially a rehashing of an American book from 1994. (The FBI still lists the case as unsolved.)In 1999, Bourgoin had travelled to South Africa to film a documentary on Micki Pistorius, a profiler of some renown. During the shoot, Pistorius gave Bourgoin a copy of the manuscript of her soon-to-be-published autobiography, Catch Me a Killer. After Bourgoin returned to France, he and Pistorius spoke occasionally by phone, and at the conclusion of one call, just before hanging up, Bourgoin said, “By the way, I wrote a book about you.” “I was shocked,” Pistorius told me by email. At the time, Bourgoin insisted that the book was based solely on his experiences with her in South Africa, and Pistorius, whose French was too rudimentary to read the book herself, took him at his word. In reality, 4ème Oeil discovered, significant portions were lifted wholesale from Catch Me a Killer.The group alerted Pistorius to claims Bourgoin had been making. In one radio interview, Bourgoin had told the story of discovering, alongside Pistorius, a serial killer’s “private cemetery”, full of exposed corpses. “The police helicopters arrived,” he recounted, “but they landed too close to the bodies. And the draft from the rotor blades sent bits of decomposing body and maggots flying everywhere. And I, her, and another cop were covered in it.” In another interview, Bourgoin claimed to have obtained the confession of the killer Stewart Wilken, whose case Pistorius had worked on. “I chose a room that was quite small, claustrophobic, without windows,” he said. “I asked the investigators for photos of their young children, and I covered the walls with the photos, which he looked at constantly. And I could feel that he was beginning to crack.” Wilken eventually confessed to the murders of numerous children.Bourgoin’s claims were preposterous, Pistorius said. The helicopter incident was real, but she had experienced it alone; Wilken’s confession had been obtained – under conditions much like those Bourgoin described, but a full two years before Bourgoin had visited South Africa – by a South African detective. “Under no circumstances whatsoever would the South African Police Service require the ‘help’ of an author who has no training in investigation and has never been a member of a police force to interrogate a suspect,” Pistorius wrote to me.Bourgoin’s inventions seemed to have grown more extravagant over the years. “What he would do in general was to add himself to a story after the fact,” Bec said. It was perhaps predictable that it should be his own fans who first noticed this tendency. “Without his work, we never would have got interested in serial killers in the first place,” Coquelin said. “It’s ironic. In a way it’s thanks to his own work that we ended up catching him. When we learned the real stories, we realised the stories he’d been telling were made up.”In the autumn of 2019, 4ème Oeil began contacting French media outlets and presenters. “They didn’t take us seriously,” Charles recalled. “Because after all, this was Stéphane Bourgoin.” After a few months of unsuccessful efforts, 4ème Oeil decided to publish their findings on their own, in a series of long, detailed and notably angry video compilations, under the title Serial Mytho. (“Mytho” is short, in French, for “mythomaniac”.) No one in the group had any video-making experience to speak of; they posted them to YouTube without fanfare. “We’re not going to kid ourselves, the videos were pretty awful,” Charles said. “We don’t even know how people found them.”Within the community of francophone crime aficionados, the videos took off. “A lot of people were pissed off,” Charles recalled. Bourgoin fans sent insults, and occasional threats of legal action. Some seemed to be under the impression that their hero had merely plagiarised a passage here and there, which seemed forgivable; some reproached the debunkers for going after a man whose own wife had been murdered. Other viewers, more willing to accept the content of the videos, treated 4ème Oeil as folk heroes. And others still, more conspiracy-minded, concluded that Bourgoin was not merely a fabulist but a serial killer. Etienne Jallieu, a pseudonym Bourgoin sometimes used, was a near-anagram of the words “J’ai tué Eileen”: “I killed Eileen.” (“Complete garbage,” Coquelin said. “He didn’t kill Eileen, given that Eileen didn’t exist.”)After a period of near-silence, in February 2020 Bourgoin announced on Facebook that, in order to devote himself “to the most important project of my life”, he would be closing his page. (He offered no details about this project.) “Furthermore,” he wrote, he had for several weeks been the victim of a “campaign of cyber-harassment and hatred” that put him in mind of the Vichy period, “when informers sent anonymous letters to denounce their neighbours to Pétain’s regime”. He did not address the claims in the videos specifically, but he did make an extensive show of his credentials, in the form of a series of rhetorical questions. “Have all these accusers and informers met even one single serial killer?” he asked. Had they organised “international conferences”, or been invited to appear on “several hundred” television shows? Had they sold out theatres in 26 cities on their 2019 speaking tour? “Of course not,” he said.The media began to take notice. Tony Le Pennec, a journalist for the online outlet Arrêt sur Images, asked Bourgoin about his interview with Charles Manson. Bourgoin said he’d spoken with Manson for only 10 or 15 minutes, and that he “couldn’t help it” if his experience – with Manson perched on the back of a chair – resembled that of Douglas, the profiler. Le Pennec then asked about the confession Bourgoin claimed to have obtained from Stewart Wilken in South Africa. Bourgoin said he and a detective had both questioned Wilken, but that it had been the detective, and not himself, who thought to cover the walls of the interrogation room with photographs of children. Le Pennec asked why Bourgoin had previously claimed otherwise. “All of a sudden,” Le Pennec wrote, in April 2020, “Bourgoin remembered that he had urgent work to finish.” Bourgoin stopped giving interviews, and succeeded, briefly, in having 4ème Oeil’s videos removed from YouTube, for alleged copyright violations. But the media covered the allegations nonetheless: Le Progrès, Le Dauphiné Libéré, France Inter, Le Monde.Bourgoin claimed to have interviewed Charles Manson, but no evidence of it can be found. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty ImagesAround this time, the journalist Emilie Lanez, of Paris Match, contacted Bourgoin to ask for an interview about the controversy. She had published several books, and noted to Bourgoin that they shared a publisher. “It was a bit presumptuous,” Lanez told me. “I would love to have sold as many books as him!” Bourgoin agreed to speak, and for about a week, Lanez called him every morning. They would talk for several hours, and then she would spend the afternoon making calls to confirm what Bourgoin had just told her. Bourgoin was “very sweet”, Lanez said, and when she would confront him each new day with the lies he seemed to have told the day before, he was unfailingly apologetic. “Bourgoin would say to me, ‘Yes, I’ve done a lot of exaggerating in my life – I just wanted to be loved,’” she recalled. “And then he’d get right back on the horse and make up a new story.”Over time, though, Lanez felt she was coming closer to the truth. Bourgoin admitted that he’d “borrowed” the helicopter incident from Pistorius – “I amplify things when I’m in front of an audience,” he said – and that he had never been trained by the FBI. When they came to Eileen, Bourgoin sobbed for a long time.Eileen was an embellishment of a somewhat less sympathetic story, he admitted. While living in the US in the 1970s as a young bachelor, Bourgoin had been a regular visitor to Daytona Beach, a resort town on the Florida coast. On one visit, he met a bartender and aspiring cosmetologist named Susan Bickrest, who, Bourgoin seemed to imply, made a bit of extra money as a prostitute. He’d been with her a handful of times by December 1975, when he returned to Daytona Beach, after an absence, to learn that she had been murdered. A serial killer was suspected.“I started to do some reading, I did some research, it became a passion,” he told Lanez. A few years later, in 1979, he was authorised to interview his first killer, Richard Chase, a paranoid schizophrenic who drank the blood of some of his victims. Bourgoin told Lanez: “It feels good to tell the truth.”Bourgoin seemed to have hoped that the Paris Match story would somehow exonerate him. He had teased it to his fans, telling them to expect it to counter the “malicious and slanderous” claims against him. When the story appeared, he responded angrily. On Instagram, he almost immediately posted a screed about its many “untruths,” and said he had “never met” Lanez. (They spoke by phone.) Still, he acknowledged having embellished and lied, and confirmed that “Eileen” had in fact been Susan Bickrest. “I most sincerely want to apologise for the disappointment that I may have caused my readers,” he wrote.After their initial excitement, however, 4ème Oeil came to believe that Bourgoin’s confession was itself composed mostly of lies. Among other things, it seemed extremely unlikely that Bourgoin had ever met Richard Chase. It was not the first time he had made the claim, but previously he said he was introduced to Chase by the California detective who investigated Eileen’s murder, in Los Angeles. “Now that there’s no more story about his murdered wife, why would anyone have helped him to interview a serial killer in ’79?” Bec said.Both Carol Kehringer and Olivier Raffet, who worked on the 1992 documentary, said they were under the strong impression at the time that, prior to the three interviews they filmed, Bourgoin had never met a serial killer in his life. “We really had no idea how it was going to be,” Raffet said. Ahead of the shoot, Raffet had gone to see The Silence of the Lambs, and came away imagining that, as in the film, the killers they were interviewing would be held behind security glass. But there was no glass, or wall, or bars, and the men came to the interviews without restraints of any kind. “We were flabbergasted,” Raffet said.Nor, 4ème Oeil concluded, had “Eileen” been Susan Bickrest. Bickrest was indeed a real person, and the victim of a serial killer. But her murderer, Gerald Stano, was not apprehended until 1980, and did not confess to Bickrest’s death until two years later. Nor did Bickrest particularly resemble the woman in Bourgoin’s photograph of “Eileen”. (4ème Oeil believes that woman to be an adult film actress, whom Bourgoin might have known from his brief time in pornography. They and I have contacted her – she now appears to work as a real estate agent – but she has never responded.) Bourgoin seemed to have chosen Stano “simply because Stano isn’t well known in Europe,” Coquelin told me, and Bickrest because she was one of his least-known victims.“‘Eileen’ is just completely made up, from start to finish,” Coquelin said. Bourgoin’s tragic origin story seemed not to be the dramatisation of some actual experience, however banal, but pure imagining: a boyish fantasy of American horror.Fantasy was Bourgoin’s first great love. Early on, he found genre cinema, and devoted himself to the category the French call fantastique, encompassing science fiction, horror and all things uncanny. Alain Schlockoff, who founded the fanzine L’Écran Fantastique in 1969, was close with Bourgoin in the early years of that decade. Bourgoin, who was not yet 20 years old, wrote frequently for the magazine. “He was friendly, he was agreeable to be with, he was intelligent,” Schlockoff told me. “I realised almost immediately that he was a fabulist.”At the time, Bourgoin was living with his parents, in a grand apartment in view of the Arc de Triomphe. Schlockoff was a frequent visitor, and enjoyed speaking with Bourgoin’s mother, a sweet, self-effacing woman who doted on her only child. Bourgoin’s more distant father, a decorated military engineer and veteran of the French Resistance, had made a fortune after the war; there were live-in servants. The young Bourgoin spent his days at the cinema, and amused himself by cheating his way in with old tickets he’d spent hours reconditioning with a razor blade and glue, a friend from that time told me.Every year, Schlockoff organized a major festival of the fantastique, and Bourgoin often worked as one of his assistants. In 1975, ahead of the festival, Schlockoff was in London, meeting with a director. The man said he would send over a copy of the film Schlockoff had asked for; Schlockoff was confused, as he had not requested a film. “He went into his office and showed me a letter, on my festival’s letterhead,” Schlockoff recalled, “signed ‘Stéphane Bourgoin.’” He returned to Paris to discover that, behind his back, Bourgoin had been organising a competing festival, to be held concurrently with his own, and had used his name and letterhead for credibility. He cut ties with Bourgoin immediately. (Bourgoin’s festival took place, but flopped.)Soon after, Bourgoin made a long trip to the US, where he hoped to make connections in the film industry, and to see as many movies as he could. “He had a fascination with the United States,” another former friend told me. “For him, ‘the movies’ meant ‘American movies’ and not much else.” The first friend happened to visit Bourgoin at home a day or two after his return to France. “He was totally exhilarated, stars in his eyes,” the man said. Bourgoin said he’d met innumerable directors, producers and actors; he’d brought back two suitcases full of comic books and souvenirs. “He made absolutely no mention of any sort of fiancee he might have had,” the friend said, “and even less a fiancee who’d been sliced up into pieces by a serial killer.”During his time in the milieu of the fantastique, Bourgoin had befriended a fellow fan named François Guérif. Guérif owned a small Paris bookshop, Au 3ème Oeil, and by the 1980s had become a prominent editor, known for publishing translations of major British and American crime writers. Guérif hired Bourgoin to run the bookshop, and introduced him to his authors. These included the Americans Robert Bloch, whose novel Psycho (adapted for the screen by Alfred Hitchcock) was inspired by the case of the serial killer Ed Gein, and James Ellroy, whose work had similarly drawn upon the theme of serial murder.It was around this time that Bourgoin seems to have developed his own fascination with serial killing. Initially, his friends found it amusing, or at least inoffensive. But it soon grew tiresome, especially after the release of his 1992 documentary. He spoke of nothing else. The first friend told me he suspected Bourgoin had invented the story of Eileen not so much as a ploy for sympathy or notoriety, but merely so that people wouldn’t be put off by his obsessiveness.At a certain point, however, Bourgoin seemed to have lost his bearings, to have lost hold of what was true and what was not. “What’s crazy,” the friend said, “what makes me think he really went off the deep end, is that he could claim this sort of thing one-on-one with people who knew him, without anyone else around. That he could tell me the story of his murdered fiancee!”Bourgoin’s friends withdrew from him, and began to await, with a fair amount of dread, his unmasking. But his star continued to rise. “What astounded me was not so much that he told tall tales, because I knew he was that way, but rather that everyone swallowed them whole,” the other friend said. “It was the unseriousness, not to say the sheer idiocy, of the media.”The indulgence of the publishers, the newspapers, the television stations and even the police might have been more forgivable if Bourgoin’s work had been more insightful, offered more than morbid titillation, the first friend said. “But there was never, ever, ever the slightest beginning of a hint of a shadow of analysis, of reflection,” he said. “And today, people are saying, ‘He’s an impostor! He tricked us!’ Well, folks, you yourselves should be mortified. And you should be thinking, ‘We really were idiots!’ Because he wasn’t actually any good at all.”Quietly, Bourgoin was dropped by his publishers and producers. His new graphic novel, about the French serial killer Michel Fourniret, was taken off the shelves. Plans for a television series based upon his life were cancelled. Still, in the past year Bourgoin has been invited to a handful of small literary festivals, and maintains a core group of fans – he has about 10,000 followers on Instagram – who appear not to have heard the accusations against him, or not to believe them, or not to care. In November, an expanded version of The Ogre of Santa Cruz, his book about Kemper, will be released. It appears to have been self-published. The listed publishing house, Editions Nicaise, has never released another book; its registered address is a Paris coworking and mailbox space.I wrote to Bourgoin last year, asking if he’d be willing to speak. I didn’t expect that he would, and indeed he never responded. After a time, though, I decided to try him on an old number I’d been given, mostly as a pro forma exercise, to be able to say that I’d attempted but failed to interview him. To my surprise, he answered. His voice was kindly and disarming, and, after informing me apologetically that he was no longer speaking with journalists, he immediately proceeded to tell me about his case.“I went too far,” he said. “It’s my fault, after all! I recognise that.” He had not met 77 serial killers, he acknowledged, but rather about 30, and some of them only briefly. Still, 30 struck him as a reasonably impressive total, all things considered. “My accomplishments might have been enough on their own, without my additions,” he reflected. He had had himself psychoanalysed; the trouble was, of course, with his parents. He had also begun a census of all known French serial killers, and was in the midst of expanding his book on Kemper. “I love to write!” he told me.Bourgoin agreed to speak again, sometime in the next few weeks. I called and emailed several times to arrange a date, but he never responded. The reversal was frustrating, but I also found it reasonable of him to be silent, and no doubt wise. And yet, after a time, Bourgoin sent me an email. In English, he wrote that he was in the hospital “for lots of exams and 2 operations (nothing to do with Covid)”, and would be unavailable to speak for several weeks. He made a point of noting that he would not be disclosing his hospitalisation publicly, but also specified that, with the assistance of his “friends & associates”, his social media accounts would continue to publish as usual. He attached a selfie taken standing in front of what appeared to be a hospital bed. The photograph had a realistically hasty look to it; Bourgoin’s pale face, which bore an uncharacteristically solemn expression, filled only the bottom right-hand corner. Yet someone had taken the time to alter the filename to read “HOPITAL SB.jpg”; according to the timestamp, the photograph had in fact been taken a month-and-a-half prior. Just two days before his email to me, on Instagram, Bourgoin had posted a photograph of what appeared to be his computer, inside what appeared to be his home, with a caption that read, “One more week of intense work and I’ll have finished writing a new version of my book on Ed Kemper.”Though it has not traditionally been regarded as a condition unto itself, pathological lying has long been an object of psychiatric inquiry. In the literature, it is known as pseudologia fantastica. One commonly cited definition, from the early 20th century, describes it as “falsification entirely disproportionate to any discernible end in view”. Helene Deutsch, an early psychoanalyst, described pathological lies as “daydreams communicated as reality”. The pathological liar, or “pseudologue”, is not a con artist, in the sense that, whatever the consequences of his lies may be, his intent is not malice. The lying is an end in itself. Scholars disagree as to whether or not the pseudologue can be said to be responsible for his fantastical claims. Crucially, however, he is not delusional. When confronted with his inventions, the pathological liar is able to perceive, if not necessarily admit, their falsity. He knows he is lying, though most of the time he seems able to put this knowledge completely out of mind.Serial killers have been known to be among the most prolific pseudologues, and all serial killers lie about their crimes. Bourgoin was once asked, in a television report, about this propensity for deception. Elsewhere in the segment, he implied that he was in the midst of helping to solve a series of murders, and claimed that he had extracted “confessions” from Schaefer, Toole and Kemper when he interviewed them. He was presented as a “profiler”. Bourgoin was seated behind a large desk in a sombre room, and looked up earnestly at his interviewer, whom he addressed in a regretful tone. “Very often, serial killers are extremely manipulative,” he said. “Most of the time, whatever remorse they claim to have isn’t sincere. It’s part of their habit of lies. These are confirmed liars, since their earliest childhood.” I have watched this moment, and rewound and watched it again, a number of times. Often I think I detect a glimmer of recognition in Bourgoin’s eyes, but it is instantaneously suppressed, or shunted aside, giving way to a blank and slightly quizzical stare. More than anything, he appears to be astonished.