a handwritten note, made at a later
date by a nephew of Alice’s:
Stéphane subsequently came to the USA
and visited ASB, at her expense, when she
handed over the rings. He never wrote to ex-
press any appreciation and was not heard from
again before she died.
A
s a young man, Bourgoin resem-
bled a character out of a potboiler.
In the late seventies, he began work-
ing at Au Troisième Œil, a second-
hand crime bookstore in Paris’s Ninth
Arrondissement, which he later took
over. Customers could find him there,
presiding “like a spider in his web,” ac-
cording to a longtime client. The shop
was a narrow room bursting with first
editions, forgotten genre novels, and
rare crime fanzines, stacked double on
shelves that ran from floor to ceiling.
“It was a lair stuffed with literary trea-
sures, and you could spend ages there
talking about le roman noir,” the writer
Didier Daeninckx recalled.
The cultivated seediness of the place
and its proprietor was irresistible to
the writers who frequented the shop.
Daeninckx put Bourgoin into one of
his books, as a bookstore manager
who deduces that a key character has
cribbed his tale of suicide by piano
from the plot of an obscure novel.
Bourgoin also seems to have inspired
the character of Étienne Jallieu, a “self-
taught erudite shopkeeper” who out-
wits professional sleuths, in Jean-
Hugues Oppel’s thriller “Six-Pack.”
Bourgoin spun the myth out further,
co-writing several especially grisly
true-crime books (one focussed on in-
fanticides) under the pseudonym Éti-
enne Jallieu.
Bourgoin got an early taste of pub-
lic attention in 1991, as a writer on “100
Years of X,” a cable documentary about
porn. This was also the year of Bour-
goin’s first filmed meeting with a mur-
derer. Serial killers were having a cul-
tural moment, following the success
of Thomas Harris’s novel “The Silence
of the Lambs.” On the eve of the book’s
publication in French, Bourgoin wrote
an article for a small crime-literature
review about “a new type of criminal:
the serial killer.” He seems to have
sensed that a phenomenon was in the
air, one that would only gain momen-
tum with the release of a film version
of “The Silence of the Lambs,” star-
ring Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Fos-
ter. One night in Paris, Bourgoin re-galed guests at a dinner party with
tales of these new American murder-
ers and the profilers who spent their
days tracking them. “We were utterly
captivated,” Carol Kehringer, a docu-
mentary producer who attended the
dinner, told Scott Sayare, writing in
the Guardian. “I started asking him all
sorts of questions,” she added. “The
more he spoke, the more I thought to
myself, We’ve got to do a film!”
Kehringer and Bourgoin were ac-
quaintances and had worked together
before, so she asked him to conduct
the interviews for the documentary.
In the fall of 1991, Bourgoin and a
crew flew to the United States to shoot
the film for the French television
channel FR3. At Quantico, they met
with John Douglas, the pioneering
F.B.I. criminal profiler who would
later gain fame through his book
“Mindhunter.” They travelled to Flor-
ida and California for meetings with
murderers, arranged by the produc-
tion crew.
The film, sold as “An Investigation
Into Deviance,” was Bourgoin’s first
public foray into the world of serial
killers, but, by the time it was finished,
Bourgoin and Kehringer were no lon-
ger speaking. “When he had the kill-
ers in front of him, it was as if he was
sitting across from his idols,” she told
the Guardian. Still, other producers
continued working with him, and he
soon published his first book on serial
killers, a study of Jack the Ripper. He
followed it with a flurry of spinoff vol-
umes and, in 1993, with the first edi-
tion of his masterwork, the “Serial
Killers” almanac.
Eileen doesn’t figure in Bourgoin’s
work from this time. He seems to
have introduced her into his profes-
sional repertoire sometime around
2000, even though, according to his
sister, he had been telling the story
privately for decades. “I had doubts
when he said his girlfriend had been
murdered, simply because I had known
him for years and he had never spo-
ken about it before,” François Guérif,
a well-known French crime-fiction
editor and Bourgoin’s former boss at
the bookshop, recalled. Bourgoin was
clearly conscious of a need to add
emotional punch to his work. “He
“Don’t be sad, Bud. These decisions are so political.” could cry on command,” Barbara