INTERVIEW | Lauren Collins Discusses “Killer Lies”: Unveiling the World’s Biggest True Crime Fraud By Stéphane Bourgoin

There’s no doubt that True Crime has become really popular in recent years because of streaming platforms delving deeper into some of the extraordinary cases. However, true crime always had a dedicated fan base and its popularity kept on increasing as time progressed. True crime films and documentaries tell the story of terrifying serial killers or events that shocked the world. With the rise of true crime as a genre, we have seen a lot of True Crime experts gaining prominence in pop culture. They give viewers a good idea about how serial killers behave and why they commit such gruesome crimes. But what happens when a True Crime expert starts behaving like a criminal? This is what Nat Geo’s upcoming documentary series, ‘Killer Lies: Chasing a True Crime Con Man,’ tries to find out by delving deeper into the story of French true crime expert Stéphane Bourgoin.

Bourgoin made a life by talking to serial killers and becoming the biggest True Crime expert in France, and one of the biggest in the world. For decades, he met criminals and told a story that made him into a household name. However, everything came crashing down when online sleuths started unraveling his lies. Although several media outlets covered the story, a New Yorker article from Lauren Collins nabbed the attention of the global audience and people started talking about Bourgoin’s lies across the globe. Now, Collins has teamed up with a team of brilliant makers to tell the story of the world’s most notorious true crime expert. I sat down (virtually) with renowned journalist and author Lauren Collins to talk about the documentary series and how Bourgoin spun his web of lies without getting caught for so many years.

The New Yorker staff writer Lauren Collins and author and renowned serial-killer expert Stéphane Bourgoin pose for a portrait during the production of “Killer Lies: Chasing a True Crime Con Man,” a documentary series about obsession and deception, following the unraveling of Stephane Bourgoin’s career as a best-selling author and serial killer expert. (National Geographic/Ben Selkow)

Aayush Sharma: From writing about Macron and the Gas Tax in France to Jessica Simpson and Celine Dion, now it must be easier for you to have different perspectives about different things. But, how difficult it is for a journalist to write different stories and tackle different beats?

Lauren Collins: I feel so lucky that every time I launch myself into a new story, I mean, given that I’m not an expert on any narrow, specific subject, I get to learn something new basically every time I write. For me, that is a great pleasure and privilege of the job. That said, I would like to think that there are some kind of unifying curiosities maybe, or interests in my body of work. I think one of them is definitely about the kind of underpinnings of human behavior, especially extreme human behavior. So that’s something that really drew me to this story about Stéphane Bourgoin. Some of the anonymous collective of fans called the Fourth Eye had already done this incredible job. You know, they were the first ones to unmask him and to say, this story he’s been telling all these years, this foundational story of his career, is actually a lie. So they had established some of the kind of, like, whens and whos and wheres of the story, and I wanted to look into some of the hows and the whys.

Aayush: What initially drew you to the story of Stéphane Bourgoin, and how did you approach the task of investigating such a complex figure?

Lauren Collins: I knew that there were certain questions, like, you know, when I start a piece, I want to be able to move the ball forward somehow. I hope that I can bring something to the table and add something that isn’t there already. I knew that there were a lot of questions that still needed more digging, and that were still unanswered. One of them was, you know, every time Bourgoin told this story about his wife Eileen, who was supposedly mutilated and raped and, murdered by a serial killer, he would hold up this one photograph. I was very, very interested in this photograph because I thought, even now that we know, if Eileen didn’t exist, who is that woman in the photograph? I spent months and months trying to track her down. I mean, as I wrote in the piece, I went to great lengths to get a hold of all these obscure b movies from the seventies, and I was, like, watching them all. I think I had them on DVD. But you know, watching these obscure movies, just like watching them all with my nose pressed up to the screen, trying to see and pausing to look at the people’s teeth to see if I could find the woman in that picture. I spent months on that. I mean, I was working by myself. I went as far as I could, and at a certain point, I just had to write the piece and publish it, and I did that feeling a little bit frustrated that I hadn’t been able, even after all these phone calls and after all these DVD’s and whatever, to ascertain the identity of the person, of the woman in that picture. So when we started on the documentary, the amazing team I was working with, Ben, our showrunner and director, and the producers, they all said, are there questions that remain unanswered for you? Are there things that you were hoping to find out that you didn’t like? Where do you want to take it from here? And my immediate answer was that I wanted to keep looking into that picture and try to figure out who that woman was. As you know, because you’ve now seen it, were able to do that in the documentary, although the result wasn’t what I ever would have guessed going into it.

Aayush: What challenges did you face when trying to corroborate or debunk Bourgoin’s claims, particularly given the global nature of his reputation?

Lauren Collins: Yeah, it was really slippery and really hard. I mean, I tried all kinds of. I mean, just on a prosaic level, all kinds of timelines, and, I mean,  the pieces were moving, and they were kind of, like, in so many dimensions. You know, this is not a horizontal story. You can’t do the timeline. It doesn’t work. You end up building this kind of upside-down staircase or something that you can’t even make sense of. It’s a great question. I mean, it was really challenging just to keep the facts of the story straight. But then you had the real facts, you had the contested facts, and even just keeping track of the lies was really challenging. So, that did become a lot easier when I got some colleagues and support and people to bounce things off of. It was really exciting. You know, after spending months living and breathing this story in solitude, it was really, really exciting and kind of relieving for me to be able to work on this as a team.

Stephane Bourgoin (Photo Credit: Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

Aayush: One of the most intriguing dialogues in the documentary comes from, I think John Douglas says that “Serial Killers can get away with their crimes easily.” Do you think that as well? And if yes, why do you think it’s easy for serial killers to vanish?

Lauren Collins: I don’t know if serial killers can get away with their crimes very easily, but I know that Bourgoin positioning himself as an expert on serial killers got away with that deception very easily, and I think I do know why. I have ideas about that. He kind of constructed this perfect story, perfect in the sense that it was designed and built so that nobody would question it from a few angles. I mean, first, there’s just a kind of human decency. If somebody tells you that their wife died, not many people will ask things. If somebody tells you that their wife was murdered in a gruesome way, particularly not many people are going to ask for receipts, right? I mean, it just seems cruel. So there was that kind of protection built in. There was also the protection that he was telling the story largely to French audiences about something that supposedly happened in America a long time ago. I mean, that’s pretty hard to fact-check. If you’re just an average television viewer in France, are you going to get police records from Los Angeles in 1976? He thought not, although he underestimated the intelligence of his audience because that’s exactly what they did.

Aayush: Did you find any psychological parallels between Bourgoin’s behavior and the criminal minds he claimed to study?

Lauren Collins: Well, one thing that has long fascinated me about this story is the success of the con and how this was a very unique case and a very extraordinarily successful fraud case for one reason: it was really unusual. The longer the con went on, the better he was able to sustain it, which is really unusual. Usually, the longer the con goes on, the more likely it is to fall apart because you’ve just told so many lies, that you can’t keep them straight anymore. But Stéphane Bourgoin, in pretending that he was an expert on serial killers, actually became one. And then he gets entries, you know, not to interview the 77 serial killers that he claimed, but he starts meeting these guys, he just makes his way into it. And then he’s sitting face to face with these people who have committed these crimes and deceptions, and he’s getting a masterclass in how to lie and how to manipulate your audience. So my idea is that as he was building up his credentials with these jailhouse interviews. He was also taking notes on how to tell your story, how to manipulate the person who’s listening to it, and ultimately how to sustain these lies over many decades.

In this behind-the-scenes photo, The New Yorker staff writer Lauren Collins prepares for an interview for “Killer Lies: Chasing a True Crime Con Man,” a documentary series about obsession and deception, following the unraveling of Stephane Bourgoin’s career as a best-selling author and serial killer expert. (National Geographic/William Rouse)

Aayush: So, why do we have this fascination with serial killers? Why, most of the content we see about them make people feel empathy about them?

Lauren Collins: Well, Sarah Weinman, who appears as a commentator in the documentary, has this great anthology. I’m just looking for the title of it, about true crime. It’s called Evidence of Things Seen: True Crime in an Era of Reckoning. I really like and subscribe to some of her ideas in that book. Like, she argues that you didn’t say this, but a lot of people do, that it’s a false premise, that true crime is like a new obsession, that it’s like a contemporary phenomenon. I mean, she points to the Bible, she points to Shakespeare. She points to the Victorian notoriety of criminals like Jack the Ripper. Anyway, her point, which I take, is that people have always been interested in this. Also, she defends true crime in a way that I think is persuasive. By saying that true crime media has made us more knowledgeable about police brutality, about crappy forensic science, about institutional racism, about manipulated confessions, all these things so that’s kind of a start off. But I don’t think people’s interest in true crime is so different from their interest in other stories of extreme human behavior. Whether those are optimistic, encouraging ones, like people climbing Mount Everest, or whether they’re scary and unusual ones like someone getting bit by a shark. To me, the interest in these sorts of phenomena has something in common, which is just that people are curious about other people, particularly in how they behave, how they react, and kind of how they hold up in the most extreme situations that we can imagine.

Aayush: Are you a True Crime aficionado as well? Does your Netflix watchlist and library consist of true crime titles?

Lauren Collins: Not so much my Netflix watch list, but, yeah, I like True Crime. So, the answer is yes. We made this documentary series with total respect for the true crime audience, of which, like, many of the people who are involved in this are a part. I love to read non-fiction, and I gravitate a lot to books about crime. There’s a book by an Irish writer called Mark O’Connell called ‘A Thread of Violence’ that I just finished, which was about a notorious murder in Ireland, I believe, in the 1970s, which ended up bringing down the government. That was really interesting because it took a really kind of macro view of what this crime had meant in so many different terms. But, yes, the answer is yes. I was thrilled to be able to work on something like this. Yeah, I think I’m definitely a fan of the genre. That was part of the reason that we made the choice in the series to consciously talk about the genre, to interrogate it, to challenge it while embracing it. I think that’s what is unique about this series and that we’re really proud of is its kind of head-on engagement with true crime as a medium and as a phenomenon.

Killer Lies: Chasing A True Crime Con Man premieres on National Geographic on August 28 and on Hulu on August 29.

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