Serial Killers, True Crime, and the Con Man

Source: Art by K. Ramsland

Stéphane Bourgoin, a self-described French expert on serial killers, lived in a world of make-believe. While making low-grade films, he learned what hooked an audience: shock, sex, and gore. In the true-crime world, he discovered that playing a victim attracted advocates, financial support, and fans. So, he told a story (with multiple variations) about finding his friend/girlfriend/wife murdered/beheaded/dismembered in Los Angeles—whatever scenario worked. With one hand, he mesmerized with his “poor-me” account, and with the other, he convinced cops, the FBI, and some documentary makers that he was a legit expert on society’s most extreme offenders. He validated his tales with fake credentials, building a lucrative decades-long career via plagiarism and fraud.

It’s not that he lied about everything. That was the key. He did interview a few serial killers (we see some clips of him with Gerard Schaefer and Ottis Toole), and he grabbed what he could from publications by actual experts. He also interviewed FBI profiler John Douglas. It wasn’t hard to stretch the truth about his expertise: His eight interviews turned into 30, then 70-plus. Nobody checked if any of this was true or if the interviews had any clinical value. This went on for years, as Bourgoin was touted as France’s leading authority on serial killers. He’d gone from filmmaker to criminologist. He claimed to have been credentialed by the FBI Behavioral Science Unit. What an irony that his own friend/girlfriend/wife had been slaughtered by a serial killer. It was this incident that had moved him to study these monsters, he claimed, producing dozens of books. Yet, “out of respect,” he wouldn’t name the victim or the killer. That was his mistake.

In early 2020, a group of fans spotted the inconsistencies. They discovered that the girlfriend story was a lie and that some of Bourgoin’s work was fabricated or plagiarized. They formed a group, the 4ème Oeil Corporation (Fourth Eye), to hold him accountable for duping them. For three years, they hounded him to come clean, apologize, and explain himself. He’d made a grand living on plagiarism, fabulism, and false claims. He’d exploited actual victims, hurting them for his own profit. He’d stolen others’ ideas, even their experiences. Lauren Collins documented all this in The New Yorker. Now Nat Geo has made a three-part series about her investigation of Bourgoin’s career, his downfall, his background, and his refusal to let go of the lie at the very foundation of his career. He confessed to some of the deception, including that he’d interviewed Charles Manson. He apologized. But he continued to publish.

The most interesting part of the documentary, available on Nat Geo and Hulu, is when Collins digs into Bourgoin’s motive. She refuses to accept a seemingly obvious reason: that he’d been trying to live up to his larger-than-life parents with their impressive accomplishments. Instead, she finds a darker side to the family that makes more sense of an insecure kid immersed in make-believe.

Still, the various investigators seem to miss a key point. Showing that a person has lied about his life does not necessarily dismantle him as a subject-matter expert. You have to look deeper. We do see that he plagiarized John Douglas and Micki Pistorius (a South African profiler) and that he exploited Dahira Sy, but what about his supposed acquaintance with the minds of serial killers? Did anyone check his criminology credentials? Apparently not. But that’s the serious stuff. It needs attention. He did interview some serial killers. But was he a serious researcher or just a dabbler? What, exactly, did he contribute to our body of criminological knowledge?

I have some second-hand sense of the guy. I watched a documentary about Bourgoin’s interview with Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr. Since I’ve interviewed Henley extensively to learn how he became an accomplice to serial killer Dean Corll during the 1970s, I was able to spot how Bourgoin fudged the facts. First, he’s filmed reading a Time-Life account, which is superficial at best. Then he claims to have spent two days talking to Henley while Henley says it was an hour. Bourgoin acts surprised that Henley won’t discuss the murders, but Henley had placed these conditions on their interview before Bourgoin arrived. What Bourgoin says about Henley is lifted from other authors, none of whom ever spoke to Henley. In the end, Bourgoin had to get the “gore” from a star-struck detective who showed him the crime scene photos. Bourgoin went into the interview with little idea of what he was doing and produced an inaccurate story that added nothing to our understanding of accomplices. I see no source for academic credentials and no professional interviewing skills.

Still, he hooked a documentary maker.

He’s not a criminologist. He’s just a serial liar who exploited the gullibility of an audience primed by his fake victim story and his scattering of amateur interviews. There’s little at stake with outing this con artist, but the series is still fascinating as it tracks those who want to unmask him and those who want to expose the reason for Bourgoin’s fraud. There’s more to explore in true crime culture about such naïve tolerance, but that’s for a different kind of documentary.