THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022 47
heard of Bourgoin, that Whalen had
never travelled outside North Amer-
ica, and that Whalen was, to the end,
a strong believer in the American ju-
dicial system and “very proud of de-
fending Donald Harvey.”
The 4ème Œil even composed a
psychological sketch similar to the
serial-killer profiles with which Bour-
goin had titillated the public: “The
typical mythomaniac is fragile, sub-
ject to a strong dependence on oth-
ers, and his faculties of imagination
are increased tenfold. Whatever his
profile, he is often the first victim of
his imaginary stories, which he strug-
gles to distinguish from reality.” The
collective described Bourgoin as a “vo-
leur de vie”—a stealer of life. “We’re
by no means accusing Stéphane Bour-
goin of being an assassin,” the group
wrote. “By voleur de vie we mean that
he helps himself to pieces of other
people’s lives.”
Most cons become harder to keep
up the longer they go on, but Bour-
goin’s was cleverly self-sustaining. His
lies enabled him to gain the very ex-
perience that he lacked, and every jail-
house interview doubled as a master
class in manipulation. Blagging his
way into prisons and police acade-
mies, Bourgoin, in pretending to be
a serial-killer expert, at some point
actually became one.
T
he 4ème Œil has extended the
right of reply to Bourgoin on sev-
eral occasions, but he has never re-
sponded to the group directly. The
closest he came was when he hired a
legal adviser who, citing copyright
and privacy violations, got the group’s
videos removed from YouTube. In
February of 2020, Bourgoin announced
that he was closing his public Face-
book page and migrating to a private
group. (It has nearly three thousand
members, but its administrators
blocked me as I was reporting this
story.) He was going to be less active
on social media, he said, but only be-
cause he needed to save all his time
and energy for “the most important
project of my life,” whose parameters
he didn’t specify. Almost airily, he
mentioned that he had been the vic-
tim of a “campaign of cyberbullying
and hate on social media” and was
being targeted by “bitter and jealous”
individuals. Their acts, he declared,
were akin to those of people who
snitched on their neighbors during
the collaborationist regime of Mar-
shal Pétain.
Three months later, with pressure
on Bourgoin mounting in the French
press, he spoke to Émilie Lanez,
of Paris Match. “STéPHANE BOUR-
GOIN, SERIAL LIAR?” the headline read.
“HE CONFESSES IN MATCH.” The
article was empathetic, attesting to
Bourgoin’s “phenomenal knowledge”
and the respect that he commanded
in the law-enforcement community,
and presenting his lies as an unfortu-
nate sideshow to a largely legitimate
career. Bourgoin seemed erratic, tog-
gling between tears and off handed-
ness, lamenting the weight of his lies
but then dismissing them as “bullshit”
or “jokes.”
Even as he unburdened himself,
Bourgoin was sowing fresh confusion.
The article explained, for instance,
that Eileen was actually Susan Bick-
rest, who was murdered by a serial
killer near Daytona Beach in 1975.
The article described Bickrest as a
barmaid and an aspiring cosmetolo-
gist who supplemented her income
with sex work. Before her death, she
and Bourgoin had seen each other
“four or five times,” and he had trans-
formed her into his wife because he
“didn’t want people to know that he’dbeen helping her out financially.” The
dates of Bickrest’s murder and her
killer’s arrest didn’t align with the Ei-
leen story, however, and even a cur-
sory glance at photographs of the two
women revealed that, except for both
having blond hair, they didn’t look
much alike.
“Day after day, we patiently untan-
gled the threads, trying to distinguish
true from false in the jumble of his
statements,” Lanez wrote. Engagingwith Bourgoin’s lies, I found, could
have a strange generative power, in-
spiring in those who tried to decipher
them the same kind of slippery spec-
ulation that they were attempting to
resist. Étienne Jallieu, people pointed
out, was nearly an anagram for “J’ai
tué Eileen”—“I killed Eileen,” in
French. (A more likely derivation is
the town of Bourgoin-Jallieu, near
Lyon.) A bio of Bourgoin at the end
of an old, undated interview claimed
that he had sometimes used the alias
John Walsh in his adult-film days.
John Walsh is a common enough
name, but it also happens to be the
name of the man who hosted “Amer-
ica’s Most Wanted” for many years.
Walsh’s six-year-old son was mur-
dered in Florida in 1981, and in 2008
Ottis Toole, the Florida drifter with
whom Bourgoin joked about barbe-
cue sauce, was posthumously recog-
nized as the child’s murderer. Might
Bourgoin have refashioned himself as
the family member of a victim in im-
itation of Walsh? Or was his desire
for proximity to mass killing born of
his work on the films of John Holmes,
who was later tried for and acquitted
of the so-called Wonderland murders
of 1981?
Just when I thought I was gaining
some traction on Bourgoin’s story, a
tiny crack would open up, sending me
down a new rabbit hole. The Paris
Match article, for instance, made the
unusually specific claim that Bourgoin,
in the seventies, lived on the eleventh
f loor of an apartment building on
155th Street in New York. I remem-
bered that Bourgoin had once given
a similar address in a Facebook post,
claiming that he’d “lived in New York
at the moment of the Son of Sam’s
crimes.” That address turned out to
be slightly different: 155 East Fifty-
fifth Street. Curious, I typed it into
a database. One of the first hits was
a Times article from 1976—the year
of Son of Sam—describing an apart-
ment at the address as a “midtown
house of prostitution.”
Xaviera Hollander, a former sex
worker who now runs a bed-and-
breakfast in Amsterdam, confirmed
that 155 East Fifty-fifth Street was
“the famous, or should I say infamous,
apartment building where I started