Stéphane Bourgoin

Stéphane Bourgoin was born in Paris on 14 March 1953,[1] one of four children of Jean Bourgoin, a military engineer. He was expelled from high school three times and does not hold any diploma.[4]

According to The Guardian, "around the turn of the century, Bourgoin began speaking publicly of his wife’s death, and it quickly became the tragedy by which he was known". Bourgoin claimed that his wife, Eileen, had been brutally murdered by a serial killer, and that this tragedy motivated him to become an expert on serial killers.[3]

Bourgoin has written 75 books and produced dozens of documentaries,[2] with his books selling thousands of copies in France.[5][6] He was regarded as France's best known serial killer expert. He occasionally lectured police on the subject,[7][8] and critiqued media depictions of serial killers.[9] Bourgoin claimed to have provided the FBI with hours of film from his interviews with serial killers; he claimed that the FBI--grateful for his assistance--had trained him as an independent investigator.[3]

Some of Bourgoin's thousands of Facebook followers formed a group to more thoroughly investigate his stories. They found that many appeared to have been invented or plagiarized.[10] They published their findings in 2019, and after French media covered the issue, Bourgoin confessed. In 2020, he informed a Paris Match reporter that his oft-repeated claim that a serial killer had murdered his wife was fabricated; he apologized to his readers for the deception. In 2021, he told a Guardian reporter that he had in fact met only 30 rather than 77 serial killers and that he had never been trained by the FBI. In response to the scandal, Bourgoin was dropped by his publishers and producers.[3]

Bourgoin claimed to have moved to the United States in the early 1970s, where he allegedly found his then-girlfriend murdered, raped and mutilated by a serial killer in 1976 in Los Angeles. He said that the event led him to try to understand what goes on in the mind of serial killers.[10] In 2020, however, Bourgoin confessed that the story was in fact an invention drawn from the case of Susan Bickrest, murdered at age 24 by serial killer Gerald Stano in 1975.[7][5]