The New Yorker - USA (2022-04-11)

46 THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022

music lovers searching for concert
bootlegs. They were completists, even
interviewing a representative of the
clerk of court in St. Lucie County,
Florida, about Bourgoin’s claim that
he possessed most of the case evidence
related to Gerard Schaefer, who was
sentenced there in 1973. (Bourgoin had
neither the evidence nor the remains
that he had bragged about.) This was
the inverse of fandom: a passionate
connection driven by disappointment
rather than by admiration. One man
became so consumed by the work that
his relationship nearly ended.
In January of 2020, after months
of research, the collective began post-
ing a series of damning videos on You-
Tube. They contended that Bourgoin,
a “serial mythomaniac,” had fabricated
numerous aspects of his life and
career. Eileen, for example, was not
Bourgoin’s first wife, as he sometimes
claimed (alternatively, he called her
his “partner,” “girlfriend,” or “very close
friend”): French public records ob-
tained by the group established that
his first wife was a Frenchwoman, and
that they divorced in 1995. The col-
lective showed that Bourgoin had also
given wildly conflicting accounts of
the timing, the place, and even the
manner of Eileen’s death. Her sup-
posed killer, furthermore, was nowhere
to be found. The 4ème Œil had gone
through a list of prisoners awaiting
execution in California, and there
wasn’t a single one who had killed the
correct number of people in the time
period that Bourgoin had laid out.
Nor did they find evidence of a vic-
tim who fit the description that Bour-
goin had given of Eileen.
Bourgoin’s professional résumé was
as dubious as his personal history. By
the collective’s reckoning, he had not
interviewed seventy-seven serial kill-
ers but, rather, more likely only eight
or nine. An interview with Charles
Manson? Nobody in Manson’s camp
had ever heard of it. In setting out his
credentials, Bourgoin often claimed
that the F.B.I. had invited him to com-
plete two six-month training courses
at Quantico with Douglas’s team of
profilers. The 4ème Œil contacted
Douglas, who, according to the group,
replied, “Bourgoin is delusional and
an imposter.”

Bourgoin’s lies ran the spectrum

from pointless little fictions to brazen

fabulation. In some cases, he tried to

make himself sound more important

than he was—he really did give talks

at the Centre National de Formation

à la Police Judiciaire, even if he had

nothing to do with creating the law-

enforcement body’s profiling unit. He

really did know the writer James Ell-

roy, but a picture of the two of them

that he had tweeted wasn’t taken “on

vacation”; it was from a crime-fiction

and film festival. Bourgoin also often

took risks that didn’t comport with

their potential payoff, as when he

claimed that he had played profes-

sional soccer for seven years with the

Red Star Football Club before mov-

ing to America. Bourgoin was born

in 1953, and by 1976, the year in which

Eileen was allegedly murdered, he was

supposed to have been living in the

U.S. “If his career had lasted for 7

years,” the 4ème Œil deduced, “he

would have been pro at 16.” (Red Star:

“No trace of him.”)

Bourgoin’s story wasn’t so much a

house of cards as a total teardown.

Some of his lies hardly made sense

except in fulfilling his seemingly ir-

resistible desire to become a charac-

ter in dramas that didn’t concern him.

At a talk that he gave to high-school

students in 2015, he showed a clip of

the interview he had done with the

killer Donald Harvey, who was ac-

companied by his longtime attorney,

William Whalen. Bourgoin called

Whalen “a very close friend of mine.”

He told the students, “Whenever he

came to Europe, he stayed at my place

in Paris. Unfortunately, last year he

committed suicide, and in his suicide

note he said that he was ultimately

never able to live with the fact that

he’d defended a killer like Donald

Harvey.” Whalen, Bourgoin concluded,

was a “new victim” of Harvey’s. Wha-

len’s family told me that they had never

SEPARATING

At twenty-nine I drink strawberry cider with an ex in the mist

outside a pizza restaurant. He painted off a ladder this summer.

Asks if I’ve smelled the difference between fear and regular sweat.

Down the road, there’s a church with a tall wooden door where we

once kissed

so fast the earrings fell off my head. Today he lives with a beautiful artist.

I often think of him holding my thighs beside a river after we finished

a bottle of Malbec.

Mosquitos pulling little blankets above the grass. I know if I sit here

long enough

he will say the thing he forgets he always says: You’re a planet. I never want

you to leave. I know I am not the only woman he keeps

wrapped in the same story. Because I’ve been hurt, I order another drink.

Wait for him to say what men say before getting married: Loving you

is its own time. A place that always exists but cannot in this life.

—Taneum Bambrick