French crime writer Stephane Bourgoin admits he built a career and life telling lies and borrowing other peoples’ stories.

Bourgoin is known as a serial killer expert.

He has over 40 books that have been translated into at least 11 languages and is credited with producing dozens of documentaries.

He’s been hired for speeches and provided training for the French national judiciary police academy.

This is a man who decided what he wanted to be, and then, he literally created a life to make it so.

Stephane Bourgoin’s Lies

If you’re the type who believes what you’re told, you would find plenty to qualify Bourgoin as a serial killer expert.

Somehow, this French man had the connections to get FBI training at Quantico. Not once, but twice.

That looks pretty damn impressive on a resume, even when it’s a lie.

Then, there’s the tragic reason he chose a career covering serial killers: because Eileen– who is sometimes his “wife” and sometimes his “girlfriend,”–was killed by a serial killer in California.

Depending on the version of the story, she was “strangled,” “killed, raped, cut into pieces,” “almost decapitated,” or “eviscerated,” said Paris Match.

Bourgoin created this fantasy relationship from the true story of Susan Bickrest who reportedly was murdered by the serial killer Gerald Stano. But that happened in Florida.

Bourgoin admits he only dealt with the woman four or five times. She was a bartender and also a prostitute.

He said he changed the details of the story because he’d fallen for her and didn’t want anyone to know he was helping her financially.

“It was bullshit that I took on,” Bourgoin told Le Parisien.

But Bourgoin’s outlandish connections didn’t stop there. When he promoted his book Sex Beast about Gerard Schaefer, a police officer convicted of murdering 34 women, he claimed he would give buyers a small piece of the killer, such as his nails, hair or bone.

He claimed that he bought Jeffrey Dahmer’s house in Milwaukee and was planning to open it as a vegetarian restaurant. And his list of phenomenal accomplishments included interviewing the infamous Charles Manson.

All of those were lies.

Bourgoin admits to making up a serial killer who didn’t exist. And, yes, he said he met 77 serial killers, but he was embellishing, by a lot it seems.

Oh, and the Stewart Wilken story he told on radio and during speaking engagements–the one where a helicopter blew debris from decomposed bodies on him– he “borrowed” that experience that from Micki Pistorius, the former South African police officer behind Wilken’s arrest.

Why Stephane Bourgoin Lied?

Bourgoin felt like he was a disappointment to his parents.

He said he exaggerated and lied about his life because he had always felt he was not really loved.

Now that he’s come clean, he claims he feels in need of psychological counseling.

My lies have weighed me down, he said.

Why The Confession?

For decades, Bourgoin got away with the bullshit. But in January, a group called 4e Oeil, or 4th Eye, posted videos on YouTube calling him out.

They suspected he had plagiarized books originally written in English and noticed errors with dates and inconsistencies from across his work.

Given Bourgoin’s popularity in France, the claims gained traction. The media seems to suggest that’s what drove Bourgoin to come with the truth about his lies.

But Bourgoin seems to suggest he was driven by senior’s conscience. He’s now in his 60s, and he said “I have arrived at the balance-sheet time.”

In his interviews, he’s gone through the normal spiel of “I completely admit my faults. I am ashamed to have lied, to have concealed things… I am profoundly and sincerely sorry. I am ashamed of what I did.”

What Now for Stephane Bourgoin?

Bourgoin really has met some serial killers. He’s produced numerous documentaries, and he’s considered a living database, having studied the true crime field in depth.

If Bourgoin hadn’t been a serial liar, he probably would have had the same career, the same success and the same cash flow, said Paris Match.

Bourgoin admits as much, saying “all these lies are absolutely ridiculous because if we objectively take stock of my work, I think it was enough in itself.”

But instead of enjoying a career many would have gladly bragged on, he had a tendency to “amplify.”

Now, IMDb has enhanced his biography, adding the first entry to his trivia section:

Bookseller, author, considered a specialist of serial killers, he admitted in May 2020 that he had lied about many things in his CV.

So, he’s likely to become party entertainment at least once.

And while Bourgoin is no doubt a disgrace to some, there are magistrates and police who say they don’t regret their association with him. They still recognize him for having phenomenal expertise, reported Paris Match.

4th Eye wants him to stop making money off his lies. But, as of earlier this spring, Bourgoin was reportedly waiting for the coronavirus lockdown to end so he could move forward with a new book from Grasset, a comic book collection from Glénat and a paid conference tour across France.

We’ll see what the future holds. Would you buy his work?

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