01x01 - m*rder He Wrote

[bunniefuu]

[sirens]

[sirens]

-Something terrible

happened to somebody

close to me.

While I was in United States.

I had a girlfriend.

She got k*lled.

Violently.

Very violently.

-What are you accused of?

-k*lling 34 women.

- Stéphane Bourgoin.

- Stéphane Bourgoin.

- Stéphane Bourgoin.

- Stéphane Bourgoin.

[Lauren Collins]

Stéphane Bourgoin had become

one of the foremost experts

on serial K*llers in France.

[Stéphane Bourgoin] What were

those morbid games that you

played with your sister?

-He was this titan of

the true crime industry.

[Stéphane Bourgoin] I don't

think there is anybody in the

world who has seen as many

serial K*llers as I did.

[Lauren Collins] But

nothing was what it seemed.

-With Stéphane, there is a

fascination for violence.

-People had this slew

of theories about

what could have happened.

[Aja Raden] They told themselves

they were perusing justice.

-Lies have a funny way

of becoming real.

[Maât] I didn't trust him,

for some reason.

I thought I was the only one.

-This whole charade

blew up in his face.

-This is a very strange con

story that took place over

the course of decades.

And the longer I've gone on

the more questions it's raised.

[Valak] We had a

target in mind.

And we were all

consumed by it.

-Is he dangerous?

Why all this

attention for serial k*lling?

[Lauren Collins] He took a

masterclass from these guys.

-People's going to

believe what they

want to believe anyhow.

-Really there was only

one person who could

speak to the why.

And that was

Stéphane Bourgoin.

[Stéphane Bourgoin] I would do

it again and again and again.

[in French] Silence, please.

[speaking French]

-Take one.

[slate tap]

-The story begins in 2019.

-Stéphane Bourgoin is at the

height of his public notoriety.

[Lauren Collins] He's

this master of true crime.

[Lauren Collins] Bourgoin had

power, access, and influence.

And the thing that got

him attention were these

extraordinary stories

that he retailed.

-For me, he was the man that

gave me my first informations

about who are serial K*llers

and what makes them tick.

-This time of the history of

criminology in France

he was the one and only.

Whatever happened

in the crime field.

He was there.

[Lauren Collins] That brought

him into contact with real

law enforcement, real

criminal profilers.

[Lauren Collins] He actually

even claimed that he had

solved some crimes himself.

[Alain Bauer] He's

hypnotized by criminals.

Which mean going

on the dark side.

[Lauren Collins]

He's a little creepy.

He's gory, he's a little

inappropriate,

he's pushing the limits.

And within a year, he was

going to abruptly lose it all.

[Lauren Collins] But to really

understand what happened,

we have to go back

to the beginning of his

true crime career.

[director] Carol Kehringer ITV.

Take one.

[director] Rolling, rolling.

[g*nshots]

[John Douglas] A serial k*ller,

uh, uh, has a very good chance

of getting away with his crimes.

[g*nshots]

[Stéphane Bourgoin]

And I got some tips from

John Douglas also

-Oh, did you?

[Stéphane Bourgoin]

to interview Kemper.

[FBI agent] John has talked

to Kemper I think three times.

[Stéphane Bourgoin] Yes.

[Olivier Raffet] Before leaving

we went to the FBI gift shop.

Stéphane was very interested

in buying all kind of

things from that store.

[in French] Yes.

-Then we go to Florida.

To Stark Prison.

And this is where we would meet

the two first serial K*llers.

Stéphane was of course

very excited to be there.

[Olivier Raffet] For me, it is

a bit scary this fascination

for true crime

and serial K*llers.

[Sarah Weinman]

Serial K*llers are not a

uniquely American phenomenon.

[reporter] Parts of bodies

leading them to believe

[reporter] The m*rder trial

of John Gacy did indeed

get underway today.

[reporter] Los Angeles police

today arrested the man they

believe is the

so-called Night Stalker.

[Sarah Weinman] What is unique

in America is the frequency

of serial K*llers.

It's understood that the term

serial k*ller was coined by

Robert Ressler and John Douglas,

who was an FBI profiler

and the founder of

the Behavioral Science Unit.

[John Douglas] What I did was,

for the first time,

was to go into

penitentiaries and interview

serial K*llers and rapists.

Uh, murderers of all types.

[Sarah Weinman] Thomas Harris,

a reporter for the

Associated Press,

decided to embed with

these profilers, and from that,

he created a character

named Hannibal Lecter.

And that cemented the serial

k*ller as a fictional archetype.

Media properties elevated serial

K*llers to supervillains.

[Hannibal Lecter] Morning.

-I think for

someone like Bourgoin,

that can be very exciting.

[Olivier Raffet] We had seen

that movie Silence of the Lambs,

so we didn't know

whether there would

be glass in between us.

-Hell, I can do that in here

[suspenseful music playing]

[Oliver Raffet]

But the guard left us

without anybody watching.

Ottis Toole was known the

Jacksonville Cannibal because

he claimed to eat his victims.

Authorities think the number

of people he m*rder*d could

be over a hundred.

[Stéphane Bourgoin] Your

recipe for the barbecue sauce.

I must tell you

that I tried it.

-Was it any good?

[Stéphane Bourgoin]

Yeah, it was very good.

Although I didn't try it on the

same kind of meat that you did.

[laughs]

-It's good

on any kind of meat.

[Stéphane Bourgoin] Yeah?

On any kind, yes.

[Olivier Raffet] So after

the interview with Toole,

the guard came back

with Gerald Schaefer.

Gerald Schaefer was

a sheriff's deputy,

was convicted of

k*lling two teenagers.

He was suspected of being

involved in the deaths of

more than two dozen

other victims.

He told us that he

wrote books about killings.

[Gerald Schaefer] No I said,

"I ought to put these into

a book format,

into an anthology.

And fictionalize them.

And maybe I can get across the

horror of what serial m*rder

is all about."

-After the

interview was done,

Stéphane asked Gerald Schaefer

to autograph books

he had brought.

[Stéphane Bourgoin] Well

you know I'm a writer also?

[Gerald Schaefer]

Are you really?

[Stéphane Bourgoin] We

write the same books, yes.

-I have written

this documentary.

-How did you like this?

Did you enjoy this?

-Yes, I liked it very much.

[Hannibal Lecter] May I

see your credentials?

That expires in one week.

You're not real FBI, are you?

[Lauren Collins]

Silence of the Lambs

set up this idea

that there were more dimensions

to serial K*llers.

That there was more to

be probed and discovered.

Whatever his motivation was,

Bourgoin was clearly fascinated.

[Clarice Starling] I'm

here to learn from you.

[Lauren Collins] But, the way

he conducted these interviews

took that fascination

to a whole new level.

[Olivier Raffet] After Florida

we went to California to the

jail where Ed Kemper

was imprisoned.

[dramatic music playing]

[prison buzzer]

Edmund Kemper was

known as the "Co-ed k*ller."

He was convicted of

k*lling eight people,

including his mother.

-Hi.

[Oliver Raffet] He was known

also for raping corpses

of his victims.

[Edmund Kemper] The decapitation

fantasies were even there.

They were in place

by then already.

[Stéphane Bourgoin] What

where those fantasies?

-What were they?

[Stéphane Bourgoin] Oh, yes.

-Um possessing the

severed heads of women.

That got caught up in

my morbid fascination.

[Stéphane Bourgoin] And

did you take Polaroids also?

-At first, I did, yeah.

But that stopped.

[Stéphane Bourgoin]

Why did you do that?

-At first, I was

hoping I could get off,

I could get a vicarious thrill

in seeing those pictures and

say, well, this will

be satisfying enough.

One

two people die, that's it,

doesn't have to go past that.

And I'll see why I

don't wanna do it again.

[theme music playing]

[Olivier Raffet] At the time

we shot this film I did not

realize what we got to

film was exceptional.

-Those tapes

kicked off his career.

They opened doors,

they launched his brand.

[Lauren Collins] He

had the documentary.

Then he had a book.

[Lauren Collins] Once you

have a book, you get on TV.

[Lauren Collins]

Once you're on TV

[Lauren Collins] you're the

expert.

Stéphane Bourgoin is very

conscious of this zeitgeist.

He knew that he could

repackage this thing as like

a hot new trend in France.

[Lauren Collins]

And by the 2000s,

Bourgoin had legions of fans,

who hung on his every

word on social media and who

turned out in droves for

his book conferences.

[cheering and applause]

[Maât] I must have found one

of his books, you know,

in one of the

libraries I went to.

I thought finally somebody

who's writing about

true crime in French.

Finally, it's about time.

And I read one of his books,

then two of his books,

then three.

[Valak] The first book I read

about serial K*llers was

The Cannibal of Milwaukee

by Stéphane Bourgoin.

In three or four days

the book was finished.

[Maât] He was everywhere on TV

at some point, and I noticed

that he was always rehashing

the same things, all over again.

[Maât] Always the same words.

[Maât] Always,

almost in the same way.

[Maât] In the same order.

[Maât] I had a weird tingling

on the back of my neck going,

like, something's wrong.

That's probably what raised

the first real red flag.

It's almost a circus act.

I mean it's rehearsed.

[mysterious music playing]

[Valak] I reread some

books by Stéphane Bourgoin.

That's when I realized

there were anomalies.

I thought it was just a

mistake around dates.

[notification alerts]

[notification alert]

[notification alerts]

[mouse click]

[various keystrokes]

[Maât] When this whole started

to get really serious,

we decided to find a name for

our little group, and then we

thought about the name of

Bourgoin's bookstore in Paris,

which was The Third Eye.

[Maãt] The third eye is

the eye that sees everything.

It's the all-known,

all-seeing eye.

So we became The Fourth Eye.

We are here to

correct his view.

[Valak] We were

watching Bourgoin,

but he didn't know it yet.

There's something

wrong with this man

and we had nothing to lose.

[mysterious music playing]

[Aja Raden] True crime

about murders,

particularly serial K*llers,

has a sort of

epic component to it.

- He went from

victim to victim.

[Aja Raden] That's as evil,

as grotesque as crime gets.

Stéphane Bourgoin, he had a

particular kink for people

being m*rder*d in grotesque

ways, and he was performing

for a giant audience,

who said "We love it.

More, more, more."

[Soledad O'Brien] Stéphane

checked all the boxes.

Most people had not

interviewed a serial k*ller

and he could talk about,

you know,

these things that were riveting.

-Working on TV news,

you could see very easily that

true crime

got a lot of traction.

- And what if

the threat came down to

one individual, a single

t*rror1st, lone blackmailer,

solo nut, now able

to make his own b*mb?

[Soledad O'Brien] ABC's 20/20

was among the very first.

They really, in the '70s, set

the stage for creating content

by following these

stories of crime.

After that, there was

48 Hours of course.

So now there is

a ticking clock.

[John Walsh] The portrait of

a serial k*ller is always

a chilling one.

[Soledad O'Brien]

American's Most Wanted

with John Walsh brought

true crime kind of a bit of

a different direction

with that personal element of

a dad who had lost his son.

- There's only one

hope for justice.

You.

-And an audience

wanting to participate,

wanting to take part.

- If you can help, call.

Because the next victim

might be someone you love.

[Soledad O'Brien] Then on

cable news, suddenly it is

unfolding live in front of us.

[reporter] The intersection

of the five and the 91 freeway.

[Soledad O'Brien]

And because it's cable,

we have the capacity,

we don't have to

break away to commercial.

[reporter] An inside look at

one of the most sensational

m*rder trials in years.

[Soledad O'Brien] We're talking

about the Menendez brothers.

[reporter] The body

of JonBenét Ramsey,

strangled and beaten.

-JonBenét Ramsey.

We're talkin'

about OJ Simpson.

[reporter] He k*lled her.

[Soledad O'Brien] If you layer

in celebrity, suddenly your

eyeballs are just massive.

- Tonight, the clock is ticking.

[Soledad O'Brien] There

are channels then, right,

that if you love true crime

it is the place to go.

Technology made

participation so much easier.

[reporter] Do you have

any new clues or theories?

- Follow us on our

Facebook page.

[Soledad O'Brien] Social

media really tapped into that.

[reporter] The next

question is from Kiru.

[Soledad O'Brien] It's much

more interesting if you're

actually part of a story.

If you're part of moving it

along and seeing where

that story goes.

[Lauren Collins] Bourgoin was

very conscious of the power of

fandom, and he did everything

that he could to stoke that.

The Fourth Eye is effectively

people who met on Facebook.

He taught all these fans

how to investigate,

how to understand

the mind of a liar,

how to penetrate myth

and mania and deception.

[keystrokes]

[Maât] We thought that it would

be good to start investigating.

[ominous music playing]

[Maât] In 1995 Gerard Schaefer

was stabbed by another inmate

and cremated afterwards.

[Maât] Why on earth

would anybody send him

the remains of Schaefer?

Why?

That makes no sense.

So, of course, we contacted

the family of Schaefer.

[whimsical music playing]

[notification alert]

[Maât] So we were thinking what

else could he be lying about?

Why, why?

It's a big question mark.

We looked in books and

magazines, newspapers,

and the more we digged,

the more we found,

and the more we found,

the more it got deeper

and deeper, and deeper.

[melodic music playing]

-In the 2000s,

Stéphane Bourgoin is everywhere.

Not only is he still writing

books and making documentaries,

but he starts

fielding invitations

from police academies.

[Lauren Collins] And so we see

him cross this line from media

talking head, to somebody

who could actually train law

enforcement on how to

think like a serial k*ller.

[Lauren Collins] I think

he wanted to be the famed

FBI profiler John Douglas.

But as The Fourth Eye started

to look critically at the life

of Stéphane Bourgoin, they

began to question whether he'd

really interviewed dozens

of serial K*llers at all.

[Maât] You can be addicted

to your own fame and then

you tend to be more

and more, and more.

[Maât] It's like his

ego inflated, literally.

[Maât] He was constantly saying

that he met 77 serial K*llers.

[Valak] John Douglas is the

FBI's leading special agent,

an expert criminal profiler

and in his lifetime only ever

interviewed 36 serial K*llers.

[Valak] We saw that Bourgoin

interviewed eight serial K*llers

in front of cameras.

Only eight.

He said he was not

allowed to show the others.

That seemed strange to us.

I started to write to other

serial K*llers that he could

have possibly met with.

Among those who responded

to me, there was BTK.

I asked him if

he knew Bourgoin.

No.

Robert Yates?

No.

William Suff?

He didn't know him either.

Phillip Jablonski?

He didn't know him either.

I sent three or four

almost every weekend.

The majority said

they didn't know him.

[Lauren Collins] And yet,

when Bourgoin talked about

interrogating K*llers,

he'd give incredibly detailed

accounts of meeting

them face-to-face.

That included an encounter

he said he'd had with

Charles Manson, one of the

most notorious cult figures

in the world.

[Maât] And I'm like, wait a

minute, I read that somewhere.

So I looked.

And it was exactly

like in Mindhunter,

a book from John Douglas.

[John Douglas] He

was extremely small.

As I did the interview, he

sat up on top of the chair to

dominate us during the

interview and interrogation.

[Maât] Bourgoin said the

exact same sentence in French.

And I'm like, what?

[laughs]

[Lauren Collins] He was creating

a persona for himself

that essentially

authorized him to

interrogate and investigate

serial K*llers.

[Lauren Collins] And

no one questioned it,

because Bourgoin claimed

he'd been trained by the FBI.

[Valak] Bourgoin made

people believe that he had

worked with the FBI.

[Valak] We had some doubts,

so we went to the source.

[notification alert]

[Maât] And he was kind enough

to answer to our questions.

He told us that Bourgoin was

never a trainee at the FBI.

[Valak] He responds and says

it's a visitor badge with a

t-shirt that was sold at

the FBI souvenir shop.

[Maât] It was an endless

pit of discrepancies and

lies upon lies, upon lies.

It's a lasagna of lying

if I can say it like this.

[Lauren Collins] The Fourth Eye

was uncovering an

elaborate ruse that was so

much bigger than any single

lie or exaggeration.

It was a pattern that gave

Bourgoin the bona fides he

needed to propel his career,

and the lies were alarmingly

bold and even dangerous.

[camera shutters clicking]

[Lauren Collins] Bourgoin

had positioned himself as a

psychological

w*r correspondent.

As a guy who would go to

the scariest, you know,

darkest places on earth with a

sense of mission and purpose.

He wants in on the action.

[Valak] So we decided to

contact the people who knew

Stéphane Bourgoin and we

started by sending an email

to Micki Pistorius.

She was a profiler on

the Stewart Wilken case.

She's one of the best

profilers in the world and the

subject of that Bourgoin book.

[Micki Pistorius] I was a

profiler in the South African

police from 1994 to 2000.

And I was the founder of the

Investigative Psychology Unit

in the South African police.

That is how the people of

the Centre Intenational de

Criminale Penal read about me

and invited me to France to be

one of their keynote speakers.

Stéphane was signing

books in the foyer.

They introduced me to him as

an author on serial K*llers.

And then when I was

back in South Africa,

he suggested that we

make a documentary.

He arrived in South Africa with

the director Fred Tonolli

-Yeah.

[Micki Pistorius] And the three

cases that they selected was

Stewart Wilken,

which was in Port Elizabeth,

the Phoenix serial k*ller,

which was in Durban,

and the last one was

the Saloon serial k*ller

which was in Piet Retief.

All the serial K*llers were

already arrested by then.

It was not

ongoing investigations.

But the detectives would

take Stéphane and the team

to places where crime

scenes were processed before.

Places where the

bodies were left.

It was quite stressful for me

going back to the crime scenes.

[in French] Hello.

[Micki Pistorius] I think it

was clear he wanted to become

a profiler like me.

At some stage, I gave him

a copy of the manuscript to

my book, the autobiography

called Catch Me A k*ller.

He'd written many books

about serial K*llers,

this was my first one,

and he said,

"Do you mind if I take it along

so that I can

finish reading it?"

And I said,

"Well, I suppose so."

And then he took it

along with him to France.

And at some stage, he

called me, and he said,

"By the way, I wrote

a book about you."

And that's when my

instinct told me

there was something wrong.

-I'd always experienced

Stéphane as an odd person.

As far as Stéphane goes, I

didn't have contact with him

for years and years and didn't

follow his career or nothing

until The Fourth Eye Corporation

contacted me.

[notification alert]

[Valak] The first time we

wrote to Micki Pistorius,

we told her we were a small

group of French people

investigating Stéphane Bourgoin.

We translated a part of the book

that Stéphane Bourgoin wrote.

[Micki Pistorius] And they said,

"We think he copied

parts of your book."

My book is my autobiography,

so it covered my life from my

very first day in the police,

and Stéphane's book,

as he said, was just about the

documentary that we filmed.

But it wasn't.

If you look at his book, you

can see page after page,

after page is just a

direct copy of my book.

That is plain,

downright plagiarism.

This is page one of my

book and page two of my book.

This is a direct

translation of what he has.

The next page, that's

page three of my book.

He was completely

impersonating me.

[Valak] And she replies,

"He's stealing from my life.

Moments of my life."

[Micki Pistorius] During the

radio interviews, he would

tell the journalists that he

interrogated Stewart Wilken.

[Derrick Norsworthy] This was

the old clipping after it was

related to the press that

he was a serial k*ller.

[Micki Pistorius] But obviously

that was the detective.

[Stéphane Bourgoin] Have you

ever thought what you would

feel if you hadn't

arrested Wilken?

[Micki Pistorius] I mean,

by the time Stéphane got to

South Africa for

the documentary,

Stewart Wilken had already

been arrested for

more than a year, and he

was already convicted.

And then on the back cover of

the book it just got worse.

It reads, "For several months,

the author, that is Stéphane,

has accompanied Micki Pistorius

in her daily work on

crime scenes in morgues,

police stations, and even in

high-security prisons."

It's just not true.

The blurb at the back of his

book, his selling point,

is a complete lie.

It's a complete lie.

I can't say I'm angry.

I'm deeply disappointed.

I'm astounded, especially

after what he told me during

the sh**ting of

the documentary.

-His girlfriend was k*lled

by a serial k*ller.

[Micki Pistorius] Something

like that stays with you

for the rest of your life.

[speaking in French]

-I remember he

said that he had a girlfriend

who had been found m*rder*d.

And that the crime was

attributed to a serial k*ller.

[Lauren Collins] I think

people thought okay, well,

maybe he's a little off,

but understandably.

[Lauren Collins] There's

actually a beautiful photograph.

You see these two young

gorgeous smitten people

staring into

each other's eyes.

And naturally, you feel a lot of

empathy for the one left behind.

But the irony is that there

are all these traits that

he's taught us to look out

for in serial K*llers.

A lack of empathy, a facility

with lying, a lack of remorse,

that we see in Bourgoin too.

I don't know, there are

people who think that there's

something even more

sinister to be unearthed.