40 THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022
DEPT.OFCRIMINOLOGY
MURDER, HE WROTE
Stéphane Bourgoin was a celebrated expert on serial killers. Then his own story came under investigation.BY LAURENCOLLINS
A
brother and a sister are stand-
ing on the balcony of a sixth-
f loor apartment in Monte
Carlo. It’s the nineteen-seventies, in
May, the afternoon of the Grand Prix.
The sun is glinting off the dinghies
in the turquoise shallows of the har-
bor. The trees are so lush they’re al-
most black.
The brother, Stéphane Bourgoin,
is in his twenties. He’s come from
Paris to visit his sister Claude-Marie
Dugué. Race cars circle the city, ca-
reening onto the straightaway on Bou-
levard Albert 1er, which Dugué’s
apartment overlooks. Over the thrum,
Bourgoin leans in and tells her some-
thing shocking: in America, where
he’d recently been living, he had a
girlfriend who was murdered and “cut
up into pieces.” Her name was Hélène.
Bourgoin’s revelation was one of
those moments when you “remember
exactly what you were doing that day
at that precise moment, the news is
so striking and indelible,” Dugué re-
called recently. “It was stupefaction
and shudders, amid the revving en-
gines of Formula 1.” Dugué and Bour-
goin shared a father but had differ-
ent mothers. They had got to know
each other not long before, and Dugué
didn’t feel that she could probe for
details about a girlfriend she hadn’t
met, or even heard of until that day.
“I found the whole situation disturb-
ing,” she said. She simply told Bour-
goin how sorry she was.
At the time, Bourgoin had a career
in the realm of B movies, reviewing
fantasy and horror films for fanzines
and dabbling in adult film. Later, he
started writing his own books, which
became hugely popular and helped es-
tablish him as a prominent expert on
serial killers in France. His best-known
work, “Serial Killers,” a thousand-page
compendium of depravity, was released
in five editions by the prestigious pub-
lisher Grasset. Travelling around the
country to book festivals, Bourgoin
built up a particularly devoted follow-
ing within the already zealous sub-
culture of true crime. One fan, Bour-
goin said, sent him annotated copies
of his own books, with items such as
scissors, razors, and pubic hairs glued
to the pages, corresponding to words
in the text.
Bourgoin also had admirers in law
and law enforcement. “He was one of
the first people in France to say that
serial killers weren’t only in America,”
Jacques Dallest, the general prosecu-
tor of the Grenoble appeals court, told
me. Dallest was so impressed with
Bourgoin that he invited him to speak
at the École Nationale de la Magis-
trature, France’s national academy for
judges and prosecutors. Bourgoin also
gave talks at the Centre National de
Formation à la Police Judiciaire, a train-
ing center for one of France’s main
law-enforcement bodies, for which he
claimed to have created the country’s
first unit of serial-killer profilers.
An energetic self-promoter, Bour-
goin appeared frequently in the press
and on television. “I counted, I did
eighty-four TV shows in one month,”
he once said. “I get up at 4:45 A.M. to
be on the morning shows and go home
at midnight to have a bite to eat.” He
cultivated a flamboyantly geeky look,
with equal shades of Sherlock Holmes
(ascot, horn-rimmed glasses) and Ace
Ventura (cerulean blazer, silky skull-
print shirt). A quirky-shoes enthusi-
ast, he sometimes wore a pair of white
brogues made to look as though
they were spattered with blood. On
Facebook, he claimed to possess
the remains of Gerard Schaefer, a se-
rial killer from Florida. “To each per-
son who buys my book, I will offer a
small bag containing a little piece of
Schaefer—fingernails, hair, ear, knee-
cap, skin, bones, etc.,” he wrote, in- Female fans, he added, would be
given priority.
Bourgoin was most famous for his
jailhouse interviews with murderers.
In the course of more than forty years,
he had conducted seventy-seven of
them, he said, “in the four corners
of the planet.” He riveted audiences
with tales of his encounters with the
“Son of Sam” killer David Berkowitz
(“David, I come here, you agreed to
meet me, but I hope you’re not going
to tell me the same bullshit that you
told at your trial”), with the homicidal
hospital orderly Donald Harvey (“He
confesses seventeen additional crimes
to me that he hadn’t even been sus-
pected of ”), with the “Killer Clown”
John Wayne Gacy (who, Bourgoin
said, grabbed his buttocks during the
encounter). “Confronting these indi-
viduals can be dangerous from a men-
tal point of view,” Bourgoin wrote, in
“Mes Conversations avec les Tueurs”
(“My Conversations with Killers”), a
2012 book. “To make them talk, you
have to let down your guard, open
yourself completely to a psychopath,
who manipulates, lies, and is devoid
of any scruple.”
If you dedicate your life to serial
killers, the first question anyone asks
is “Why?” Bourgoin’s answer was that
Hélène’s death made him want to con-
front the worst that humanity had to
offer, as “a form of catharsis” or even
as “a personal exorcism.” At some point,
he started pronouncing her name “Ei-
leen,” the American way. He said that
he’d met her in the mid-seventies, when
he was living in Los Angeles, work-
ing on B movies; that, in 1976, he went
on a trip out of town; that when he
returned to the home they shared he
discovered her dead body, “mutilated,
raped, and practically decapitated.”
The killer was apprehended two years
later, and eventually confessed to al-
most a dozen other murders. He was