Summary The Unravelling of an Expert on Serial Killers | The New Yorker www.newyorker.com
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Renowned serial killer expert's credibility questioned and investigated by true-crime enthusiasts, uncovering fabrications in his personal and professional life.
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Slide Presentation (6 slides)
Key Points
- Stéphane Bourgoin, a well-known expert on serial killers, became famous for his jailhouse interviews with murderers.
- Bourgoin's career was built on books and public appearances, establishing him as an expert on serial killers in France.
- A group of true-crime fans uncovered inconsistencies in Bourgoin's stories, leading to the unraveling of his career.
- Bourgoin's life story contained grandiose elements that were later questioned and found to be fabricated.
- The investigation by skeptics revealed that Bourgoin had exaggerated his achievements and experiences.
- Bourgoin's lies ranged from small fictions to elaborate fabrications, ultimately shaping his career as a serial-killer expert.
- Bourgoin's personal history and professional credentials were called into question by the investigative group.
- Bourgoin's erratic behavior and conflicting accounts of events led to further scrutiny and doubts about his credibility.
Summaries
19 word summary
Renowned serial killer expert's inconsistencies exposed by true-crime enthusiasts, leading to investigation revealing fabrications in his life and career.
62 word summary
Stephane Bourgoin, a renowned expert on serial killers, was inspired by his girlfriend's murder in the 1970s. Despite a successful career, inconsistencies in his stories were exposed by true-crime enthusiasts, leading to an investigation that revealed he had exaggerated his experiences. Bourgoin admitted to fabricating aspects of his life and career, but continued to insist on the truth of his girlfriend's murder.
135 word summary
Renowned serial killer expert Stephane Bourgoin's interest in the subject was sparked by the murder of his girlfriend in the 1970s. His career in B movies led to popular books and media appearances, establishing him as a leading expert in France. However, inconsistencies in his stories were uncovered by a group of true-crime fans, leading to an investigation that unraveled his career. Bourgoin claimed to have conducted over seventy-seven jailhouse interviews with murderers, but evidence showed he had only interviewed eight or nine. He admitted to fabricating aspects of his life and career in an interview with Paris Match. Despite the unraveling of his career, Bourgoin continued to sow confusion by insisting that he really had a girlfriend who was murdered by a serial killer, possibly due to childhood experiences and a desire for love.
461 word summary
Stephane Bourgoin, a renowned expert on serial killers, gained notoriety for conducting jailhouse interviews with murderers. His interest in studying serial killers stemmed from a form of catharsis after the murder of his girlfriend, Eileen, in the 1970s. Bourgoin's career in B movies led to writing popular books, establishing him as a leading expert on serial killers in France. He cultivated a flamboyantly geeky look and frequently appeared in the press and on television, giving talks at prestigious institutions and building a devoted following within the true crime subculture.
Bourgoin claimed to have conducted over seventy-seven jailhouse interviews with murderers over more than forty years, but inconsistencies in his stories led a group of true-crime fans to launch an investigation that unraveled his career. Despite this, some grandiose elements of Bourgoin's life story were true, such as his father's historical significance and his mother's mysterious and daring nature.
In 1991, Bourgoin's career as a writer on a cable documentary about porn led to his first filmed meeting with a murderer. He began writing books on serial killers and collaborated with a publishing house on a branded series of graphic novels. However, some considered him a hack who presented himself as a globe-trotting criminologist when he was merely a jobbing presenter. His association with family members of victims of killers led them to see him as a kindred survivor, but some interactions with victims were controversial.
In 2019, a group of true-crime fans launched an investigation into Bourgoin's stories, uncovering inconsistencies that unraveled his career. The skeptics formed a chat group to discuss their doubts about Bourgoin, eventually splintering into a smaller cohort called the 4me il Corporation. They combed through Bourgoin's books and found instances of plagiarism and inconsistencies in his stories.
The group expanded the scope of their investigation by contacting Bourgoin's purported former colleagues, sending letters to prisons across the U.S., and interviewing a representative of the clerk of court in St. Lucie County, Florida. In January 2020, they began posting damning videos on YouTube, revealing that Bourgoin had fabricated numerous aspects of his life and career.
Bourgoin's lies ranged from pointless fictions to brazen fabrications, including claims of interviewing seventy-seven serial killers when evidence showed he had only interviewed eight or nine. In February 2020, he announced the closure of his public Facebook page and migration to a private group. Three months later, he admitted to fabricating aspects of his life and career in an interview with Paris Match. Despite the unraveling of his career, Bourgoin continued to sow confusion by admitting to fabricating aspects of his life while insisting that he really had a girlfriend who was murdered by a serial killer. His childhood experiences and desire for love may have contributed to his fabrication of stories.
554 word summary
Stephane Bourgoin, a prominent expert on serial killers, gained fame for conducting jailhouse interviews with murderers. He attributed his interest in studying serial killers to a form of catharsis after the murder of his girlfriend, Eileen, in the 1970s. Bourgoin's career in B movies led to writing popular books, establishing him as a leading expert on serial killers in France. He cultivated a flamboyantly geeky look and frequently appeared in the press and on television, giving talks at prestigious institutions and building a devoted following within the true crime subculture.
Bourgoin claimed to have conducted over seventy-seven jailhouse interviews with murderers over more than forty years. However, inconsistencies in his stories led a group of true-crime fans to launch an investigation that unraveled his career. Despite this, some grandiose elements of Bourgoin's life story were true, such as his father's historical significance and his mother's mysterious and daring nature.
Bourgoin's career as a writer on a cable documentary about porn led to his first filmed meeting with a murderer in 1991. He began writing books on serial killers and collaborated with a publishing house on a branded series of graphic novels. However, some considered him a hack who presented himself as a globe-trotting criminologist when he was merely a jobbing presenter. His association with family members of victims of killers led them to see him as a kindred survivor, but some interactions with victims were controversial.
In 2019, a group of true-crime fans launched an investigation into Bourgoin's stories, uncovering inconsistencies that unraveled his career. The skeptics formed a chat group to discuss their doubts about Bourgoin, eventually splintering into a smaller cohort called the 4me il Corporation. They combed through Bourgoin's books and found instances of plagiarism and inconsistencies in his stories.
The group expanded the scope of their investigation by contacting Bourgoin's purported former colleagues, sending letters to prisons across the U.S., and interviewing a representative of the clerk of court in St. Lucie County, Florida. In January 2020, they began posting damning videos on YouTube, revealing that Bourgoin had fabricated numerous aspects of his life and career.
Bourgoin's lies ran the spectrum from pointless little fictions to brazen fabrications. He claimed to have interviewed seventy-seven serial killers, but the group found evidence that he had only interviewed eight or nine. His claims of training courses at Quantico with the F.B.I.'s team of profilers were debunked by Douglas himself. Bourgoin also made false claims about his personal and professional connections.
In February 2020, Bourgoin announced that he was closing his public Facebook page and migrating to a private group. Three months later, he spoke to milie Lanez of Paris Match, admitting to fabricating aspects of his life and career. He claimed that Eileen was actually Susan Bickrest, who was murdered by a serial killer near Daytona Beach in 1975.
Bourgoin's admission raised doubts about the authenticity of his claims and personal history. His lies enabled him to gain experience that he lacked, and every jailhouse interview doubled as a master class in manipulation.
Despite the unraveling of his career, Bourgoin continued to sow confusion by admitting to fabricating aspects of his life while insisting that he really had a girlfriend who was murdered by a serial killer. His childhood experiences and desire for love may have contributed to his fabrication of stories.
1416 word summary
Stéphane Bourgoin, a well-known expert on serial killers, became famous for his jailhouse interviews with murderers. He claimed that studying serial killers provided a form of catharsis or personal exorcism after the murder of his girlfriend, Eileen, in the 1970s. Bourgoin's career in the realm of B movies led to writing books that became popular, establishing him as a prominent expert on serial killers in France. He cultivated a flamboyantly geeky look and appeared frequently in the press and on television, giving talks at prestigious institutions and building a devoted following within the true crime subculture.
Bourgoin was most famous for his jailhouse interviews with murderers, claiming to have conducted over seventy-seven of them over more than forty years. He also made public appearances, delivering gruesome anecdotes with weary didacticism and speaking in data points. Despite his expertise, some inconsistencies in Bourgoin's stories led a group of true-crime fans to launch their own investigation, unraveling his career.
One seemingly grandiose element of Bourgoin's life story is true: his father, Lucien Joseph Jean Bourgoin, was a great man of history, with a dossier in the National Archives of France chronicling countless missions, decorations, and special services. Bourgoin's mother, Franziska Glückner, was also mysterious and daring, with a newspaper article later dubbing her the Mata Hari of Saint-Malo. Bourgoin himself was an awkward child who left high school without a diploma and became obsessed with cinema, eventually working in adult film.
Bourgoin's career as a writer on a cable documentary about porn led to his first filmed meeting with a murderer in 1991. He began writing books on serial killers and collaborated with a publishing house on a branded series of graphic novels. However, some of Bourgoin's peers considered him a hack who presented himself as a globe-trotting criminologist when he was merely a jobbing presenter. His association with family members of victims of killers led them to see him as a kindred survivor, but some interactions with victims were controversial.
In 2019, a man who goes by the pseudonym Valak picked up a Bourgoin book and was struck by its sloppiness. This led to a group of true-crime fans launching their own investigation into Bourgoin's stories, uncovering inconsistencies that unraveled his career. The investigation revealed that some seemingly grandiose elements of Bourgoin's life story were true, but other aspects were called into question.
The skeptics, about thirty of them, formed a chat group to discuss their doubts about Bourgoin. That group eventually splintered into a smaller cohort, composed of Valak and seven others, living in France, Belgium, and Canada. They called themselves the 4me il Corporation (the Fourth Eye Corporation)—a play on Au Troisime il (At the Third Eye), the name of the bookstore that Bourgoin once ran. At first, the group members saw their task as largely literary. They set to work combing through Bourgoin's dozens of books, expecting to find instances of plagiarism. Bourgoin had lifted passages from English-language works that hadn't been translated into French and even pilfered other people's life experiences. The members of the collective weren't professional researchers, but they were assiduous. As soon as they started looking, they found more and more inconsistencies.
They decided to expand the scope of their investigation. Soon, they were devoting as much time to Bourgoin as they were to their day jobs. They contacted Bourgoin's purported former colleagues, sent letters to prisons across the U.S., and scoured YouTube for clips of obscure speaking engagements and television appearances. They were completists, even interviewing a representative of the clerk of court in St. Lucie County, Florida, about Bourgoin's claim that he possessed most of the case evidence related to Gerard Schaefer, who was sentenced there in 1973. This was the inverse of fandom: a passionate connection driven by disappointment rather than by admiration.
In January of 2020, after months of research, the collective began posting a series of damning videos on YouTube. They contended that Bourgoin, a serial mythomaniac, had fabricated numerous aspects of his life and career. Eileen, for example, was not Bourgoin's first wife, as he sometimes claimed. The collective showed that Bourgoin had also given wildly conflicting accounts of the timing, the place, and even the manner of Eileen's death. Her supposed killer was nowhere to be found. Nor did they find evidence of a victim who fit the description that Bourgoin had given of Eileen.
Bourgoin's professional rsum was as dubious as his personal history. By the collective's reckoning, he had not interviewed seventy-seven serial killers but, rather, more likely only eight or nine. An interview with Charles Manson? Nobody in Manson's camp had ever heard of it. In setting out his credentials, Bourgoin often claimed that the F.B.I. had invited him to complete two six-month training courses at Quantico with Douglas's team of profilers. The 4me il contacted Douglas, who, according to the group, replied, "Bourgoin is delusional and an imposter."
Bourgoin's lies ran the spectrum from pointless little fictions to brazen fabulation. In some cases, he tried to make himself sound more important than he was. He really did give talks at the Centre National de Formation la Police Judiciaire, even if he had nothing to do with creating the law-enforcement body's profiling unit. He really did know the writer James Ellroy, but a picture of the two of them that he had tweeted was from a crime-fiction and film festival.
Bourgoin also often took risks that didn't comport with their potential payoff, as when he claimed that he had played professional soccer for seven years with the Red Star Football Club before moving to America. Some of his lies hardly made sense except in fulfilling his seemingly irresistible desire to become a character in dramas that didn't concern him.
His lies enabled him to gain the very experience that he lacked, and every jailhouse interview doubled as a master class in manipulation. Blagging his way into prisons and police academies, Bourgoin, in pretending to be a serial-killer expert, at some point actually became one.
In February of 2020, Bourgoin announced that he was closing his public Facebook page and migrating to a private group. He was going to be less active on social media, he said, but only because he needed to save all his time and energy for the most important project of my life, whose parameters he didn't specify.
Three months later, with pressure on Bourgoin mounting in the French press, he spoke to milie Lanez, of Paris Match. The article was empathetic, attesting to Bourgoin's phenomenal knowledge and the respect that he commanded in the law-enforcement community and presenting his lies as an unfortunate sideshow to a largely legitimate career.
Bourgoin seemed erratic, toggling between tears and offhandedness, lamenting the weight of his lies but then dismissing them as bullshit or jokes. Even as he unburdened himself, Bourgoin was sowing fresh confusion. The article explained that Eileen was actually Susan Bickrest, who was murdered by a serial killer near Daytona Beach in 1975.
The article described Bickrest as a barmaid and an aspiring cosmetologist who supplemented her income with sex work. Before her death, she and Bourgoin had seen each other four or five times, and he had transformed her into his wife because he didn't want people to know that he'd been helping her out financially.
The Paris Match article made the unusually specific claim that Bourgoin lived on the eleventh floor of an apartment building on 155th Street in New York in the seventies. A Times article from 1976 describing an apartment at the address as a midtown house of prostitution cast doubt on this claim.
Bourgoin admitted that he had invented her name and the location of the murder but insisted that he had really had a girlfriend who was murdered by a serial killer. It was just a young girl that I met three times that I had sex with.
The incident may have been Bourgoin's initiation into the power of secret lives. Back to my childhood I felt I didn't do enough compared to my parents," Bourgoin told me. "So I had always an inferiority complex." Cuny echoed the sentiment. "I decided very early on that having a normal life means boring," he told me.
In My Conversations with Killers, Bourgoin wrote, "The immense majority of serial killers are inveterate liars from a very young age." "Sometimes I make films in my head," Bourgoin said, as though he were performing a voice-over for his own life. "I've always wanted to be loved."