Variety

Nat Geo Doc ‘Killer Lies: Chasing a True Crime Con Man’ Examines How a Serial Killer Expert Was Unmasked as a Serial Liar

By Addie Morfoot,

5 days ago

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For over 30 years Stéphane Bourgoin was known in France as the leading expert on serial killers. During his tenure he interviewed 77 murderers, including Charles Manson. He trained at the FBI’s base in Quantico, Virginia and wrote over 40 best-selling books about various violent deaths. He was a regular on French television shows and true crime documentaries. Bourgoin’s fascination with homicide was personal. His wife was murdered in 1976.

But in reality, Bourgoin was lying about practically everything. While he wasn’t a serial killer, Bourgoin was a serial liar. He never really spoke to Charles Manson and he didn’t interview more than 70 serial killers; more like 30. He also never trained with the FBI and his wife, Eileen, wasn’t murdered. She didn’t even exist. Eileen, it turns out, was Susan Bickrest, a woman Bourgoin had met before she was murdered in 1975 by a serial killer.

In National Geographic’s “Killer Lies: Chasing a True Crime Con Man” director Ben Selkow explores Bourgoin’s web of lies and how he got away with telling them.

The three-part series is based on Lauren Collins’s 2022 New Yorker article “The Unraveling of an Expert on Serial Killers.” In addition to Bourgoin, the series chronicles the group of online sleuths (the 4th Eye) responsible for Bourgoin’s downfall while also examining the explosive growth of the lucrative true crime industry. Featuring forensically reexamined archival footage and interviews with Collins, members of the 4th Eye and Bourgoin himself, the docuseries is an exploration of human nature and cultural psychology.

Variety spoke with Selkow about “Killer Lies: Chasing a True Crime Con Man,” which began airing Thursday on Nat Geo and streaming on Hulu on Friday.

Bourgoin said that he was attracted to serial killers due to his wife’s murder, but since that was all made up, what was it that drew him to homicide cases?

Selkow: It’s hard to say, but my armchair psychology take is that he grew up in an established, rigid, higher-class France post-World War II with parents who were intimately involved in the war in various capacities and who had enormous amounts of trauma of their own. Bourgoin was left to raise himself, and I think he found solace in the cinema and his imagination. Then he eventually gained attention for his books and that gave him some kind of self-worth as an expert in that space.

Bourgoin lied about interviewing Manson and having the remains of serial killer Gerard John Schaefer Jr. stashed away in his home. He got away with his lies for close to 40 years. Why did it take internet sleuths to figure out that he was lying? Where was the French media?

It’s this very curious case where he crafted his own reputation that was unassailed and then was not critiqued. The way it has been explained to me is that a crime breaks and you bring on Stéphane to kind of feed the blood lust of the audience. Nobody vetted him because he had been on other shows and had written multiple books so therefore, he must be an expert. So, it’s a failure in that way, but I wouldn’t hang it just on the French media. I would say that this is a universal thing. You see this kind of thing happen in the States as well.

Did it take a lot of convincing to get Bourgoin to participate in this series?

My producer and I talked to him for an hour and a half, and he came around quite quickly. I think it speaks to his desire for attention. It was also his attempt to correct the story in the public’s mind, but having an American documentary crew show up to his house was feeding another need as well. So, we were very conscious of not platforming someone who told all of these lies.

Was it a difficult interview, since Bourgoin is a pathological liar?

I knew how to check him or push him when he made a claim that I thought was suspicious in the sense that me or someone on the crew would say, “Stéphane, I’ve heard that and I have counter evidence. You are going to have to verify that in a different way.” So we did not let him speak unchecked. But it was difficult because you know you are being manipulated. We make the point in the series that every time he interviewed a serial killer, he was getting a master class in manipulation.

If you were to classify this docuseries, would you say it’s a true crime doc, a con doc, a sleuthing doc? Or is it all three?

It’s all three plus it has a cultural critique within it. It certainly plays with all the tropes of traditional true crime, that’s the audience for this, but it’s a con and a scam (doc) that, like in “Don’t F**k with Cats,” heroizes the sleuths. Also, Bourgoin’s rise parallels this modern rise of true crime and crime fiction starting with the 1991 release of “Silence of the Lambs.” That was followed by different growths and spikes of the genre. Bourgoin’s own fame and celebrity is riding along those waves as well so, we had this super unique opportunity to map the modern true crime movement.