THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022 45
Necek, who co-directed documenta-
ries featuring Bourgoin, told me. Some
of Bourgoin’s peers considered him a
hack who presented himself as a globe-
trotting criminologist when he was
merely a jobbing presenter. “Neither
I nor any of our mutual friends at the
time had heard the story of his mur-
dered girlfriend, nor of his so-called
F.B.I. training,” a colleague and friend
of Bourgoin’s from the eighties told
me. “It triggered rounds of knowing
laughter among us, because we all
knew it was absolutely bogus.”
But elsewhere Bourgoin was taken
seriously. As his career progressed, he
came into contact with family mem-
bers of the victims of killers. They
saw him as a kindred survivor, some-
one who could be trusted to treat them
with integrity, because of his personal
experience. Conversely, proximity to
them was valuable to Bourgoin as a
form of reputational currency. “Each
month, two or three people contact
me,” he boasted, of his relationship
with victims’ families, in 2012. Through
his association with a victims-advocacy
group called Victimes en Série, Bour-
goin got to know Dahina Sy. She had
been kidnapped and raped at the age
of fourteen by Michel Fourniret, who
later murdered seven young women.
One evening, Sy went to a dinner
at Bourgoin’s house. The atmosphere
there was peculiar—a “museum of hor-
rors,” according to a journalist who
once visited, filled with slasher-film
posters, F.B.I. memorabilia, porcelain
cherubs in satin masks, and case files
of uncertain provenance. Sy told me,
“He said, ‘Come here, I want to show
you something.’” Bourgoin began pull-
ing crime-scene photographs out of a
folder. “Puddles of blood,” Sy said. “It
was absolutely abject.” Sy had suffered
from post-traumatic stress for years
after her abduction. One of its man-
ifestations was extreme arachnopho-
bia. At the dinner table, Bourgoin put
a plastic spider on her shoulder. “I was
paralyzed, and he was laughing,” Sy
recalled. “I think it gave him pleasure
to mess with my mind.”
In 2018, Bourgoin began collabo-
rating with the publishing house
Glénat on a branded series of graphic
novels (“Stéphane Bourgoin Presents
the Serial Killers”). The second in-
stallment, about Fourniret, came out
in March of 2020. Alerted by an ac-
quaintance to the book’s existence, Sy
was shocked to encounter her ado-
lescent image rendered “f lesh and
bone” in a cartoon strip, with Fourni-
ret threatening her (“I will be forced
to disfigure you if you don’t do ex-
actly as I say”), his words suspended
in dialogue bubbles. Sy says that nei-
ther Bourgoin nor the publisher had
notified her about the book, or about
the fact that it reprinted the entirety
of an interview that she’d given in
a different context years earlier. She
hired a lawyer to send a letter of com-
plaint to the book’s publisher, which
withdrew it from the market. “It was
like being defiled a second time,” she
told me.
Bourgoin never interrogated Fourni-
ret, but, oddly, the book’s writer in-
serted a character inspired by Bour-
goin throughout the text, a revered
criminologist who goes by Bourgoin’s
old pseudonym Étienne Jallieu.
“I admit that I’m having trouble
understanding the dynamics of your
relationship with your wife,” Jallieu
tells Fourniret, facing him across a
table in an alfresco interrogation room
set up on a prison basketball court.
“Probably because none of you tell the
exact truth.”
“What is the truth for you, Mon-
sieur Jallieu?” Fourniret asks.
“What you’ve spent your entire life
trying to hide, Monsieur Fourniret,”
Jallieu replies.I
n 2019, a man who goes by the
pseudonym Valak—inspired by
a demon in the film “The Conjur-
ing 2”—picked up a Bourgoin book
that happened to be at hand. Valak,
who is forty-five, lives in a port city
in the South of France and works in
a field unrelated to serial killers. When
we spoke one day, over Zoom, he sat
in a small room in front of a red vel-
vet curtain. He wore a black baseball
cap, a black polo, and a black mask,
an outfit that was intended to protect
his identity but also gave off a whiff
of stagecraft. Valak told me that he
had always been interested in human
psychology, particularly at its extremes.
He had enjoyed Bourgoin’s work as
a teen-ager, but, revisiting it as anadult, he was struck by its sloppiness.
“There were things that didn’t seem
coherent,” Valak told me. “I told my-
self, ‘O.K., it must be me that’s par-
anoid, that’s looking for a nit to pick.’
And then I discovered Facebook.”
One day, in a large Facebook group
of true-crime enthusiasts, someone
posted a link to an article about Bour-
goin. Valak commented, expressing
his unease about the work. He re-
called, “There were a bunch of peo-
ple who responded after that, saying,
‘Bah, oui, I agree.’”
The skeptics—about thirty of
them—formed a chat group to dis-
cuss their doubts about Bourgoin.
That group eventually splintered into
a smaller cohort, composed of Valak
and seven others, living in France,
Belgium, and Canada. (One member
left the group after a falling out.) They
called themselves the 4ème Œil Cor-
poration (the Fourth Eye Corpora-
tion)—a play on Au Troisième Œil
(At the Third Eye), the name of the
bookstore that Bourgoin once ran.
At first, the group members saw
their task as largely literary. They set
to work combing through Bourgoin’s
dozens of books, expecting to find in-
stances of plagiarism. Bourgoin had,
in fact, lifted passages from English-
language works that hadn’t been trans-
lated into French. In some cases, he
had even pilfered other people’s life
experiences. He claimed, for instance,
that, while visiting a crime scene in
South Africa with the profiler Micki
Pistorius, he was splattered by mag-
gots and decomposing body parts that
had been churned up by police heli-
copters. (Pistorius did experience a
similar incident, but Bourgoin was
not there.)
The members of the collective
weren’t professional researchers, but
they were assiduous. “As soon as we
started looking,” Valak recalled, “we
found more and more inconsistencies.”
They decided to expand the scope of
their investigation. Soon, they were
devoting as much time to Bourgoin
as they were to their day jobs. They
contacted Bourgoin’s purported for-
mer colleagues, sent letters to prisons
across the U.S., and scoured YouTube
for clips of obscure speaking engage-
ments and television appearances, like