01x03 - The Reckoning

[bunniefuu]

[Stéphane Bourgoin]

Meeting with serial K*llers is

something that you can't forget.

It, it's always within you.

I'm there to have them talk,

to understand their psychology.

Before meeting

with a serial k*ller,

I don't sleep at night.

I'm very nervous

because I'm afraid.

But once I go into the jail

it's no problem for me anymore.

You don't mind if

I call you Tommy?

-I prefer Tommy.

-You can call me Stéphane.

I will watch if he

avoids looking at me.

If they cross their

arms like this.

If they're open with their arms.

They always test me, you know.

-What kind of

books do you write?

-Crime fiction and I've written

also a lot of non-fiction books.

Because they are psychopaths,

they are manipulators.

What were those fantasies?

They're very surprised that

I'm interested in their youth,

in their background.

So that creates a

more intimate feeling.

Although it's

manipulation on my behalf.

-It's good on any kind of meat.

[Stéphane Bourgoin]

Yeah. On any kind, yes.

I let them have the

feeling that they are

in control of this interview,

although I am in control

but they don't know it.

[theme music playing]

[Lauren Collins] Every time

Bourgoin interviewed one

of the serial K*llers,

he was getting a

masterclass in manipulation.

He was learning how to

manipulate the audience.

He was learning how to

elicit sympathy from people,

even if you've done

things that most people

would consider appalling.

And that could be part

of why nobody had managed

to pin him down.

I mean so far he kind of

successfully slipped out of the

grasp of anybody who had

tried to hold him accountable.

He's just kind of, you know,

learned from the worst.

-Yeah. I know about it.

Their goal was to

totally destroy me.

-Yeah.

Elora, Gwenadu, Saturne,

Maat, Sven, Valak.

It's not real names.

-It's not very courageous.

[Valak] Mr. Bourgoin,

finally, we hope,

certainly as much as you,

to have reached the end of

this game of cat and mouse

that we have been

playing together for

three and a half years now.

Once again,

you'll find yourself

in front of the cameras,

thanks to, or because

of someone else's work.

This project probably

offers you, for the last time,

the opportunity to tell the

truth and not your truth.

So you have important

decisions to make.

It's up to you to make the

right choice and then maybe

the 4th Eye will close for good.

-How do?

-Inside? Because of the letter?

Nothing.

They were right

to come after me.

I lied, and I lied on purpose.

-On those aspects, yes.

[Stéphane Bourgoin]

That I had been in Quantico.

-Which is totally untrue.

I just made interviews

which took a day.

That's all.

[Stéphane Bourgoin] I

just met him once in jail.

I didn't talk to him.

-No, that was a

lie on my behalf.

I admit that.

[Stéphane Bourgoin] No.

-This was not a lie,

it was a joke I made.

[Stéphane Bourgoin] I had

asked that they should hide

the real identity,

but they didn't listen

to what I told them and

she got mad at me.

And she, in a way,

was totally right.

But I'm not responsible.

-I don't owe an

apology to Dahina because

I explained what happened.

[audio rewinding]

[Stéphane Bourgoin] Sometimes

I said some things happened

to me on the crime scenes

that really happened

to Micki Pistorius.

Yes, I admit it.

[Micki Pistorius] You

can see page, after page,

after page is just a

direct copy of my book.

-Oh, no, never in any book.

But when I'm with other

people I might have sometimes

exaggerated things to have

them look more romantic,

like I'm a fiction

character in a movie.

Yes, I admit to that.

But in a 40-year career,

I lied maybe ten, 20 times.

I should have

stuck to what I did.

It was enough, I think.

-Yeah, on some lies

that I did, yes.

But also, a lot of writers

lie about their own biography.

It's something that is,

I don't know,

quite often done.

[Lauren Collins] Bourgoin

admitted to some of his lies.

But on others he continued

to deflect and manipulate,

saying that things were

just a joke, not his fault,

or in the case of

plagiarizing Micki Pistorius,

outright denying culpability.

The further I got

into the story,

there wasn't a lot about motive.

I mean, it was all

kind of the, you know,

the where and the

when, and the how,

but not a lot of the psychology

and the why of it all.

So just out of pure

human curiosity, um,

I immediately

thought well, like,

what would compel

somebody to do this?

[Soledad O'Brien] Getting

into the mind of con artists,

of liars, is just fascinating

for an audience because we love

to really either

speculate or understand,

about, you know,

people's motivations.

[Sarah Weinman] There

are a number of different

underlying motives.

Feeling inadequate about

one's actual life is a big one.

What was actually going on?

[Maxime Chattam]

That's why we're here today,

because we never

had any explanation,

so we don't understand clearly

who he is and why he did this.

Because he hurt people, he

owes these people explanations,

even if it's about

his private life.

This is the only way

to close the door.

Explain us why you've

been doing this.

That means going back to

his childhood, to his family.

-Mm, he's ugly.

While I was a child,

I didn't communicate so

much with my parents, no.

When I was born my mother

was close to 50 years old and

my father was 56.

He was a true life hero,

my father.

He had first fought in the

trenches in First World w*r,

cheating about this age.

And then during

Second World w*r,

he was a long-time resistant.

My mother was a double agent

during the n*zi occupation.

She was responsible for

saving the city of St. Malo.

Recently there have been

a book published about her

activity for the

French resistance.

[Lauren Collins] At this point

I knew that Bourgoin had woven

this elaborate tapestry of

lies and fictions over his life.

I was able to get his

father's military file.

And it's all there.

His mother's story was

well documented too.

Almost everything he said

about his parents was, you know,

not only true but verifiable.

[Stéphane Bourgoin]

I know I disappointed

very much my parents.

That what I did was [bleep].

My parents, who had

succeeded so much in life,

who had done so many things,

extraordinary things,

and I was scared,

really deeply scared

that I wouldn't achieve,

you know, just a little bit

of what they had done in

their own life.

[Lauren Collins] You get

the sense that the worst thing

you could do would be

to lead a banal life.

But as I researched the

family story further,

I discovered something

pretty shocking,

something concrete that

went beyond the boilerplate,

dime-store psychology

of a boy not living up to

his parents' dreams.

[distant bells ringing]

-Yes.

There were

secrets in the family.

I was totally astonished.

[Stéphane Bourgoin] When I

learned that my father had

an affair with a woman

and he had two girls,

Françoise and Claude-Marie,

and he would

still see the children,

I-I felt, uh, quite betrayed.

[Lauren Collins] Stéphane

had a really unhappy childhood,

so he begins to

seek material, kind of,

on the margins of society.

I mean he started traveling

in worlds that were very

unfamiliar to his parents.

[Stéphane Bourgoin]

When I was 15, 16,

I would sneak out on my

Mobylette to go to the showings

of the French Cinematheque.

This was something very

kind of magic for me.

[suspenseful music playing]

[terror scream]

[Stéphane Bourgoin] The

days I wouldn't have classes,

I would watch five,

six movies a day.

-You could think

of it as escapism.

I mean, going and sitting

in a theater for, you know,

12 hours a day.

But he wasn't really

running away from something,

so much as I think he was

running towards something.

[Stéphane Bourgoin] I see

movies as an outsider,

but I also lived the movies.

Sometimes I make

movies in my head.

[Sarah Weinman] Making

stuff up about your life,

creating false credentials

about your work, I don't know,

inventing imaginary

significant others and spouses,

those are all

examples of fabulism.

The fabulist is someone who

embellishes details and

creates an entire world,

a narrative,

that is significantly

altered from the world that they

actually live in.

[dramatic music playing]

[Lauren Collins]

Stéphane Bourgoin, I mean,

he's been a student from a

very early age, of narrative,

of how to hook an audience.

And so, you know, from his

kind of earliest decision to

say that he knew somebody

who had been m*rder*d

by a serial k*ller,

I think he wanted

to be the protagonist.

I think he wanted the

story to be about him.

You have more righteousness.

You have more reason,

you have more of a

justification to participate

when you have a

personal story.

The Eileen story, to me,

it was a big question mark

that was still looming.

Is he living in reality

or is he living in a film?

You know, a film

of his own making.

I started to wonder who

else Bourgoin had told this

story to and how far

back he had told it.

I interviewed

Stéphane Bourgoin's

half-sister,

Claude-Marie Dugué.

I said, "Well, do you

remember the first time

Stéphane talked about Eileen?"

And she said,

"Like it was yesterday."

[engines revving]

[crowd cheering]

[engines revving]

[tires squealing]

[engines revving]

[Lauren Collins] Claude-Marie

didn't provide any more clarity

about who Eileen was,

but she was saying,

"Well, all the way back

to the 1970s he was

telling me this."

It really complicated things,

'cause it didn't fit with

everything that I knew before,

both in terms of timeline

and also his intended audience

for this story.

Was this a test run?

Was he trying the

story out on her?

Or could this mean that some

version of Stéphane's story

about Eileen was true?

[Lauren Collins] In trying

to make sense of Bourgoin's

Eileen story, and

the timeline of events,

we know that he told his sister

about the m*rder in the 1970s,

after his return from the US.

He was also supposedly

working on erotic film sets

in the mid-1970s,

around the same time that

he said Eileen was m*rder*d.

One of the big outstanding

questions for me that

had never been addressed,

was the picture of the woman

that Bourgoin said was Eileen.

It doesn't make sense that

we have this image of Eileen,

and nobody knows

who it actually is.

When you go back and look,

it didn't suggest

that they had just kinda

rolled out of bed and, like,

snapped a Polaroid,

because of the way

it was composed,

even what they were wearing.

My hunch was that it

was taken on a film set.

There were three adult

film productions that I knew

he had worked on.

The three John Holmes films.

These weren't that easy

to get a hold of.

[laughs]

I found myself scouring

erotic video stores of Paris.

I was spending my days

watching erotic films

from the 1970s and

pressing pause every time

a woman opened her mouth,

to see if there was the

little snaggle tooth that

I had seen in the

picture of the woman.

I called a lot of people

who had worked in adult film

in the '70s.

I also thought if I could talk

to enough people who might have

crossed paths with him

at that era in his life,

that somebody would be

able to identify Eileen.

[moan]

I had this vision,

if I watched enough

erotic films from the 1970s,

that Eileen would

magically appear.

-I'm gonna come, I'm gonna come.

[laughs]

-That did not happen.

I was at an impasse

with the photograph.

I wasn't sure I would

ever be able to find her.

Which was

incredibly frustrating,

given how crucial she

was to Bourgoin's story.

[clap]

-Oof.

-Well, the initial event

that focused me on true crime,

it really happened to me,

but she wasn't a

wife or a companion.

While I was in

United States, in 1974,

I was going all over the

country preparing for my books.

I had a girlfriend over there.

We met in a bar.

She noticed my

accent and she said,

"Are you European?"

We started talking

and I buyed her drinks.

She was nice-looking,

very open-minded

American girl, you know?

I only met her three times.

We had intimate relations

those three times.

And when I got back to

France I wanted to get

in touch again with her,

but she had been k*lled

by a serial k*ller,

I learned afterwards.

-Yes.

-Oh yeah. Totally.

-Oh that, that is

totally true. Yes.

-YesBut I won't say it.

[director] What?

-I won't say it.

Because I lended her money,

we had three times

intimate relationships,

and when I learned that she

got m*rder*d by a serial k*ller,

I didn't want people to

think that I gave her money

because she was a prost*tute.

-No.

-I can't remember.

[Stéphane Bourgoin]

She was a Spanish actress.

-No.

-That I had nice hair.

[peaceful music playing]

[Lauren Collins] For decades

Bourgoin has been brandishing

this person's face, saying she

was m*rder*d by a serial k*ller.

When that's not the truth.

I would be outraged if

someone did that to me and

therefore I'm a little

outraged on her behalf.

I think she deserves to know.

[Lauren Collins] No. It's not.

I mean, I just think that's

-I think it's a

[bleep] thing to do.

Isn't that enough?

You know, that is one of

the currents in true crime

that we are talking about.

It's something that

Bourgoin felt some level of

pressure to produce, right?

I really don't have one.

I am just as a member of

the public, impersonally,

yet strongly offended by um,

by the idea that, you know,

you would just take

somebody's face and

turn them into a m*rder victim.

I think that's horrible.

But, I mean, it

remains to see like,

what she thinks of it,

which is really what matters.

I definitely, like, absolutely

want to try to find her and ask.

In all of these months

of showing the picture,

of asking for a name,

a production, I had nothing.

So given that there's

technology that can go from

face to name,

rather than name to face,

that seemed like it

would be really helpful.

Okay, we know

that she's Spanish.

Let me see if I

can upload a photo.

Creepy facial recognition

search engine.

And so now I have a

bunch of photographs that

have come back to me.

Some of them do look a lot

like the woman in the photo.

Oh my God.

Could it be this?

It looks just like her.

You know I spent all that

time pausing like porn movies

looking for a snaggle tooth,

but it's really something in

her eyes that looks so familiar.

To me that's her.

So now I'm just trying to

learn everything I can.

She's an actress who's

appeared in erotic films around

the same time Bourgoin

was working in that world.

I mean, she seems to

have gone on to like a

long and fruitful career.

Contact.

She doesn't seem to be

on Facebook or Instagram.

Hm. Okay.

This is a page for

Spanish women actors.

They all have their headshots

and here's her email.

[distant siren]

The woman in the photo

declined to participate

in this documentary,

which I totally understand.

I mean that was

maybe the ultimate way to

reclaim the story.

Just to say nothing at all.

And I thought that was

a really fitting rebuke.

After what Bourgoin did to her,

I wouldn't want anything

to do with him either.

Here he's projecting this

hideous fantasy of violence

onto someone who doesn't

even know that he's been

going around using her

face as a prop in his

Stéphane Bourgoin production.

-I mean, no, I don't

think he's telling the truth.

And if he made up

this origin story,

that seems really wrong to me.

That was the shortcut to trust

with victims and their families.

By being able to hold

up this picture and say,

well here's the person

I lost, he was saying,

I'm one of you and

you can trust me.

You can trust me with

your stories, which he then,

in this ill-gotten way,

went on to exploit and use.

As long as he can claim

some adjacency to victimhood

as he continues to do, um,

by insisting that he did have

a girlfriend who was m*rder*d

by a serial k*ller,

he doesn't have to admit

that there was something

morally wrong about

the lies that the told.

Now that I know who the

woman in the photograph is,

maybe I can go back to

Bourgoin and see if he's willing

to let this lie go.

-Um, no, I have no idea

how it's gonna go.

But, I mean, I think,

you know, at this point,

I'm pretty well equipped

knowing how he might try to

exploit certain facets of it.

Bourgoin's never gonna stop

trying to manipulate people

and the 4th Eye is never

gonna stop calling him out.

The 4th Eye sent me a

screenshot of some, like,

selfie he posted being like,

I'm back in Paris for my

first sh**t since I moved.

When I saw that, I mean,

it was kind of like

a slightly disturbing

confirmation that he's, like,

not out of the game.

At least in his own head.

On Facebook, it's as

though it never happened.

The con continues.

Which, yeah, is like,

exasperating.

It's just a never-ending cycle.

Did you ever say to him, like,

"Why should we believe you?"

-Yeah, I don't think

we should, but.

[Lauren Collins] Well,

because the lies can be as

informative as the truth.

[Lauren Collins] Knowing

the truth behind the woman

in the photo and how

Bourgoin had not only

used her but so

many people's stories,

many of them women,

I felt like I needed to go in

and try one last time to see if

he would finally acknowledge

that he'd used these women's

stories to get sympathy.

And maybe also explain why.

Hi Stéphane.

-Hi.

-How are you?

-Okay.

-Nice to see you.

Okay, let's get into it.

Um, we know that

you have told lies.

The photograph of Eileen,

for example,

you held that up and you

said this was a woman who was

m*rder*d and decapitated

and cut up into pieces.

Like, what entitled you

to project that onto the

real person who was

in that photograph?

-Well, at first I never

thought that that picture

would be published.

-But you were on television.

You held it up on television.

-Yes, I know.

But I didn't think it would

last more than the moment

it was shown.

I admit that it was cruel,

that it was stupid.

But it's true that my interest

in serial k*ller stemmed from

the m*rder of this girlfriend.

-Well then why didn't

you just tell the real story

if that's true?

-Because it's part of my life.

There are some aspects of my

life I don't want to be known.

-You see, it's a little

hard to believe that though,

because you've never

had a problem talking,

you like to talk.

You like to be in the spotlight.

-No, I don't like

to be in the spot.

-You just accidentally

had a career that put you

in front of the camera?

[TV host] Stéphane Bourgoin.

[Stéphane Bourgoin] That

was part of doing publicity

for my books.

-Do you think this series,

this show,

will help you sell your books?

-No.

Because I think this series

will be very unfavorable to me.

A scandal, a plane crash,

everything that is bad sells

much better than the

good things in life.

-One question that remains for

me is why did you feel entitled

to take other

people's pain and

use it for your own benefit?

-I didn't use any,

anybody else's pain.

-See, it's surprising

to me that you maintain,

I mean I can't make you

accept that as a proposition

if you don't think so,

but Dahina Sy for instance.

You took her story of being

kidnapped and r*ped when she

was a teenager.

She trusted you because

she thought that you were a

bereaved loved one.

And then to find out

that that wasn't true.

I mean that's yet

another blow to absorb.

-Yes.

But it's based on something

that really happened to me.

-Mm-hmm.

So when you were lying, did

you know that you were lying?

-Of course, I did.

Mostly I lied when I was

in front of the public eye.

-We're in the

public eye right now,

does that mean that

we're in a setting where

you're susceptible to lying?

-No.

I want the truth to come out.

-You want the

truth to come out,

except, except you don't

want the truth to come out

about who Eileen actually was,

if indeed you had a

companion who was m*rder*d.

-Well, I don't like that,

because it's, uh,

for me, it's an insult because

she has really existed.

-I don't know.

I'm more than 70 years old,

so my life is behind me.

-Yeah, but I don't think

Ben is asking you about the

end of your story,

like your life.

He's asking you about

this story of truth and lies.

The 4th Eye hasn't stopped.

They don't want to stop.

You don't want to

give the name of Eileen.

-I admitted my lies.

I don't see what

I could do more.

-What you could do is,

so that we could have some

trust in what you're saying now,

is that you could

give us the name,

we could verify the story,

and then we could say

Mr. Bourgoin told us the

name of the person,

we checked it, we verified.

We're not going to use

her name, but she existed.

-No.

I don't want to do that.

-Why?

-Because I've been sometimes

trustful with previous.

-Oh, so you're saying

you don't trust us?

-Yeah. And I admit

I lied about this Eileen,

and I admit that I

would do it again,

and again, and again.

-So according to you,

this was all in service of

an honorable goal.

-For me. Yes.

[train bell ringing]

[Lauren Collins] When I

sat down with Bourgoin,

it was absolutely

infuriating to feel like

he was lying

right to my face.

You always hope that

you're gonna be the

one person who's gonna,

you know, get the guy

in the room and ask that,

you know, incredibly

penetrating question that makes

him break down and

just confess everything.

[Maxime Chattam] If he doesn't

want to go back in the shadows,

he won't tell you the truth

probably because he can get

attention with it.

And it's the only

thing he gets now.

[Stéphane Bourgoin] Ow!

[Stéphane Bourgoin]

Well, next is moving out of

this house, unfortunately.

Maybe I made the

wrong decisions.

I thought it would totally

destroy my writing career.

It's the worst thing for me.

The punishment didn't

fit the crime, in my eyes.

I live in a world like

many other people,

which is not

just black and white,

it's also in-between,

you know?

I'm not a criminal.

I've been a liar, but

I never k*lled, r*ped,

or robbed anybody.

People shouldn't forget and

put things in perspective.

[Lauren Collins] But what's

pretty messed up is people

almost want him

to be a m*rder*r.

They want a body.

It's not enough to have

made up a dead wife and

to have become one

of the world's biggest

experts on serial K*llers

on the back of that lie.

You get the sense that in

this desire for yet another

wild and crazy twist,

sometimes the living victims

of his lies get overlooked.

[Maât] I don't want anything

more than to be able to close

the 4th Eye page and say,

"Okay, our job here is done."

I have been now

battling cancer for 12 years.

I just finished my last

radiotherapy two days ago.

Hopefully, this chapter

of my life can close

because honestly,

I'm a bit tired of it.

[laughs]

[Valak] As long as

Bourgoin tries to stay

in the public eye, the

4th Eye will stay wide open.

[Maxime Chattam] We

are fascinated by what

we don't understand clearly.

The dark side of humanity,

the dark side of ourselves.

But we have a

huge responsibility

because our fascination,

our interest in true crimes

make the society as

it is today.

What does it say about you,

about your society?

We don't care if

it's true or not,

we just want somebody

in front of the camera.

[Aja Raden] You're

responsible for where you're

putting your attention.

You're saying,

"Well, he was a ridiculous

pathological fantasist."

And I'm saying actually,

so were all the people who

were interested in his work.

Bourgoin gave his

audience too much power and

it became a

choose-your-own-adventure.

And they wrote

themselves into the story,

just like he liked to

write himself into stories.

And now you're documenting

the whole thing,

so at some point, we have

to assume someone's gonna

watch this

documentary and say,

"You know, those

people also wrote themselves

into this story."

[Lauren Collins] Because we are

in this meta true crime world,

we've been riveted by

this individual bad guy.

But in addition to focusing

on specific crimes,

I'd like to widen the

lens of true crime.

Let's use these

storytelling skills,

this engagement, this outrage

to hold the larger

systems accountable that allow

all kinds of crimes to flourish.

[reporter] opened fire,

k*lling five people.

-Well, sometimes you don't

solve true crime stories.

There's always

more things to add.

[director] So this is your

last time speaking.

I want to see is there anything

else you wanted to say?

[Stéphane Bourgoin]

To the audience,

don't hate me too much.

Don't forget what I did, also.

And, um

enjoy the shows.