Original subtitles

[sirens]

[sirens]

-Something terrible happened to somebody

close to me.

While I was in United States.

I had a girlfriend.

She got killed.

Violently.

Very violently.

Use the free code JOINNOW at www.playships.eu

-What are you accused of?

-Killing 34 women.

- Stéphane Bourgoin. - Stéphane Bourgoin.

- Stéphane Bourgoin. - Stéphane Bourgoin.

[Lauren Collins] Stéphane Bourgoin had become

one of the foremost experts on serial killers 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 killers 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 killing?

[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 killers 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.

[gunshots]

[John Douglas] A serial killer, uh, uh, has a very good chance

of getting away with his crimes.

[gunshots]

[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 killers.

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 killers.

[Sarah Weinman] Serial killers are not a

uniquely American phenomenon.

[reporter] Parts of bodies leading them to believe...

[reporter] The murder 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 killers.

It's understood that the term serial killer 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 killers 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 killer as a fictional archetype.

Media properties elevated serial killers 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 murdered 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 killing 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 murder

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 killers.

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 Killer."

He was convicted of killing 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 killers 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 killers,

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 murdered 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 killer

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 terrorist, lone blackmailer,

solo nut, now able to make his own bomb?

[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 killer 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

murder 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 killed 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 killer.

[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 killers 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 killers.

[Valak] John Douglas is the FBI's leading special agent,

an expert criminal profiler and in his lifetime only ever

interviewed 36 serial killers.

[Valak] We saw that Bourgoin interviewed eight serial killers

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 killers 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 killers, 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 killers.

[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 war 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 killers.

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 killer, which was in Durban,

and the last one was the Saloon serial killer

which was in Piet Retief.

All the serial killers 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 Killer.

He'd written many books about serial killers,

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 killer.

[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 shooting of the documentary.

-His girlfriend was killed by a serial killer.

[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 murdered.

And that the crime was attributed to a serial killer.

[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 killers.

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.

Captioned by Cotter Media Group.

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