42 THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022
now awaiting execution on death row.
When an interviewer asked for
an image of Eileen, Bourgoin would
produce a black-and-white photo-
graph of the young couple. It was
beautifully composed, almost profes-
sional-looking. In it, the two of them
are pictured in closeup, facing each
other. Eileen has feathered hair and
rainbow-shaped brows. Bourgoin’s
hair is long, and he appears to be wear-
ing a leather jacket with a big shear-
ling collar. He is turned toward her
in a protective stance. She looks up
at him with a snaggletoothed smile.
They’re so close that their noses are
almost touching.
“Eileen was his hook,” Hervé Weill,
who co-runs a crime-fiction festival
at which Bourgoin often appeared,
told me. The story of her death stirred
the public’s emotions, adding a sheen
of moral righteousness to Bourgoin’s
vocation. “I knew of Stéphane Bour-
goin well before this program having
seen almost all his interviews with
prisoners, but I’m only here learning
that he was the partner of a victim,”
a YouTube user wrote, after watching
one of Bourgoin’s television appear-
ances. “Incredible man.”
In his public appearances, Bour-
goin delivered even the most grue-
some anecdotes with weary didacticism,
as if he had seen it all and emerged
omniscient, emotion transmogrified
into expertise. He spoke in data points:
seventeen crimes, seventy-seven se-
rial killers, “hundreds of thousands”
of case files that he claimed to have
stored in his cellar. “For nearly fifteen
years, I accumulated files that I syn-
thesized into more than five thousand
tables, four of which are reproduced
in the book,” he said at one point, an-
nouncing that he had, in all likeli-
hood, solved the long-standing mys-
tery of the murder of Elizabeth Short,
known as the Black Dahlia.
Bourgoin could seem a little off at
times, more like an admirer than a
dispassionate observer of the killers
he studied. But it was easy enough to
interpret this macabre streak as a con-
sequence of his trauma. His social-
media feeds featured an uncomfort-
able mixture of cat pictures (he named
a cat Bundy), promotional brags (“once
again a packed house, for the seven-
teenth time in a row”), morbid memes
(“BEING CREMATED IS MY LAST
HOPE FOR A SMOKING HOT BODY”),
and crime-related kitsch (barri-
cade-tape toilet paper; gloves and a
jacket designed to look as if they were
made from human skin). He spoke of
his opposition, on moral grounds, to
the death penalty, but he’d pose for aphotograph in a fake electric chair,
captioning it “Today, I’m lacking a
little juice.” What might normally
have seemed in bad taste could feel
like defiance coming from a bereaved
partner. He showed up for interviews
in a Jeffrey Dahmer T-shirt and signed
books “With My Bloodiest Regards.”
In 1991, Bourgoin travelled to the
Florida State Prison to meet Ottis
Toole, sometimes called the Jackson-
ville Cannibal, for a French-television
documentary. Toole claimed to have
eaten some of his victims and allegedly
issued a recipe for barbecue sauce call-
ing for, among other ingredients, two
cloves of garlic and a cup of blood.
Bourgoin opened the interview
brightly, saying that someone had sent
him the recipe for the sauce. “And I
must tell you that I tried it,” he said.
“Was it any good?” Toole asked.
“Yeah, it was very good,” Bourgoin
answered, his voice quickening. “Al-
though I didn’t try it on the same kind
of meat that you did!”
Despite Bourgoin’s inclination to-
ward facts and figures, his own mem-
ories could be indistinct. Sometimes
he said that he’d been introduced to
serial killers, in the late seventies, by
a police officer he got to know from
Eileen’s case; at other times, he said
that he’d met some sympathetic cops
at meals hosted by Robert Bloch, the
author of “Psycho.” Bourgoin refused
to identify Eileen’s killer, or to give
her last name, saying that he was pre-
serving her anonymity out of respect
for her parents. Whether because of
decency, laziness, or esteem for his
reputation, Bourgoin’s interlocutors
tended not to press him very hard. “I
seem to have been prepared to put
down his evasions to professional
caution or eccentric obsession,” Tony
Allen-Mills, a British journalist who
interviewed Bourgoin in 2000, told
me. “He was accepted as an expert,
and that’s how I treated him.”
Bourgoin knew the power of fan-
dom, having spent decades stoking
the public’s emotional investment in
true crime. But he underestimated the
intelligence of the audience. After
years of watching TV specials, attend-
ing talks, reading books, and replay-
ing DVD boxed sets about necrophilia,
satanism, bestiality, torture, infanti-“Let the war of succession begin!”