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[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.

-Yes...But 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.

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