Killer Lies: Chasing a True Crime Con Man (2024) s01e03 Episode Script

1
[Stéphane Bourgoin]
Meeting with serial killers 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 killer,
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 killers,
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 War,
cheating about this age.
And then during
Second World War,
he was a long-time resistant.
My mother was a double agent
during the Nazi 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 murdered
by a serial killer,
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 murder 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 murdered.
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 killed
by a serial killer,
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 murdered by a serial killer,
I didn't want people to
think that I gave her money
because she was a prostitute.
-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 murdered by a serial killer.
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 murder 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 murdered
by a serial killer,
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 shoot 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
murdered 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 killer stemmed from
the murder 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 raped 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 murdered.
-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 killed, raped,
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 murderer.
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 killers
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,
killing 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.
Captioned by
Cotter Media Group.