essay on expert detectives

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The Making of an Expert Detective. Thinking and Deciding in Criminal Investigations

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The making of an expert detective : Thinking and deciding in criminal investigations

• Published 11 November 2016
• Psychology, Law

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The making of an expert detective : Thinking and deciding in criminal investigations

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Improving Efficiency and Understanding of Criminal Investigations: Toward an Evidence-Based Approach

• Published: 23 November 2021
• Volume 36 , pages 635–638, ( 2021 )

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• Nadine Deslauriers-Varin 1 , 3 &
• Francis Fortin 2 , 3  

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Various investigative techniques and methods available to investigators following the commission of a crime can have a great impact on the ability of police forces to adequately respond to such a crime. This impact can take many forms, ranging from the identification, arrest, and charge of the perpetrators to their conviction. Every case where the alleged perpetrator is not tried for lack of evidence poses a risk to community safety. Similarly, when an individual is wrongly convicted of a crime, it undermines the community’s confidence in the police forces responsible for protecting it, as well as its faith in the criminal justice system.

Nowadays, the realities of investigative work have profoundly changed: investigators are confronted with emerging phenomena and increasingly sophisticated crimes that present multiple (and new) challenges (e.g., economic crime, cybercrime, dark web, terrorism, online sexual exploitation). The type and nature of evidence required to take these cases through the criminal justice chain, and the way in which this evidence can be gathered, have also become more complex. Various legal, ethical, and practical issues have also contributed to the technicalization and greater systematization of crime scene analysis, intelligence, and everything related to evidence and information gathering. As a result, investigative work is becoming increasingly specialized (e.g., Maguire  2003 ; Police Executive Research Forum  2018 ).

As such, it is important to conduct research aimed at improving the effectiveness of evidence collection, identification, and prioritization of potential suspects, investigative interviews, and, ultimately, the charging and conviction of perpetrators. It has been noted, decades ago, that the criminal investigation is however one of the least examined areas of police studies (Skogan and Frydl  2003 ). Unfortunately, this has not necessarily changed much since then. In fact, knowledge about police investigation generally comes from “how to” books (sometimes of a more scholarly nature) or books which present the state of knowledge on specific aspects of investigations or techniques rather than presenting empirical and innovative results. Moreover, most books or collective work place a particular emphasis on its forensic aspect, as well as on the analysis and contribution of physical evidence. However, in case of limited physical evidence, other methods must also be used by police forces but there are few researchers working to scientifically measure and improve the efficiency of these techniques and methods. A careful review of the scientific literature shows that research having a genuine and valuable impact on police practices are in fact relatively infrequent. Applied research that moves police practices beyond common sense, tradition, experience, and flair to evidence-based practices remains a challenge (Mitchell and Huey  2019 ).

In recent years, we are, however, witnessing a growth of empirical studies that aim at providing support to police forces and specialized investigation units, and improving the efficiency of their practices using a proactive and evidence-based approach. This particularly true for sexual crimes and homicides (e.g., Beauregard and Martineau  2013 ; Chopin et al.  2020 ; Fortin et al.  2018 ; Woodhams et al. 2021 ). In the last decade, partnerships between academia and police agencies have emerged and detailed information on offender behaviors has been analyzed to facilitate police investigations as well as suspect prioritization and identification efforts. Despite this, evidence-based research in the field of criminal investigation is still lacking. Good and emerging research is being conducted and published on this topic, but there are only but a few collective works showcasing such research at the international level.

Several examples support the relevance of a vision that would for example use investigative and forensic science not only to study a single situation in depth, as usually done with cases presented in court, but to apply it to the entire criminal phenomenon or modus operandi. These new ways of approaching criminal phenomena offer an innovative way of appropriating criminological knowledge. As an example, in a study on “forensic drug intelligence” by Esseiva et al. ( 2007 ), the authors applied the chemical profiling technique to drug seizures made by the police. For each of these seizures, experts performed a chemical analysis to determine the nature of the substance, its level of purity, and its chemical properties. By collating this information and keeping an “organized memory” of all seizures, a certain amount of information can be uncovered: this technique can provide clues as to the path taken by the drug, from production to distribution on the street. In addition, this study demonstrated, among other things, the potential of this intersection between forensics and intelligence (Esseiva et al.  2007 ).

This special issue was proposed to the Editorial Board of the Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology with a main objective in mind: to bring together, in a single issue, innovative research on a relatively unknown and underdeveloped field of research usually looked at in a fragmented way. In other words, to create the synergy that is needed to comprehensively move forward investigative practices and techniques towards a more “scientific,” evidence-based police. The current issue includes 11 articles that represent the diversity of research on the topic and that fit well with the objectives and focus of this special issue. These 11 articles can be regrouped under three main topics related to police investigations: (1) the understanding of the processes involved in an investigation, the challenges related to it, and ways to improve investigative decision-making; (2) investigative techniques and the pivotal role of the spatiotemporal patterns of offenses for suspect prioritization and identification; and (3) investigative interviewing and new techniques and approaches to improve information and evidence gathering.

Understanding and Prioritizing Investigations

This first three articles of this special issue pertain to the understanding and prioritizing investigations (Rossmo; Jurek et al.; Henning et al.). Recalling the lack of scholarly literature on investigation noted earlier, Rossmo first proposes to outline the anatomy of a criminal investigation: the underlying structure of an investigation, its main purposes and objectives, and, by the same token, why it can fail (e.g., failure to solve the crime; miscarriage of justice). Using the example of the Canadian investigation into the murder of Gail Miller that led to the wrongful conviction of David Milgaard, Rossmo highlights the systemic problems in the investigation that lead to these failures, and emphasizes the unconditional importance of the relevance, reliability, and robustness of the evidence. In doing so, Rossmo’s article highlights areas for improvement in order to maximize the likelihood of success of an investigation, while minimizing its risks of failure.

In the second article, Jurek et al. aim at measuring and describing key activities police investigators take when working sexual assault cases and identifying factors influencing investigative actions. To date, relatively little is known about the specific actions that police investigators take after a sexual assault report is made that could potentially explain the high attrition rate for sexual offenses. Using a sample of sexual assault case files from a larger project on unsubmitted sexual assault kits, their study highlights factors that shape the way the investigation unfolds and provides insights into factors related to case attrition and progression in the criminal justice system.

The last article of this section addresses the prioritization of intimate partner violence investigations. In their study, Henning et al. seek to assess whether domestic violence recidivism can be reliably predicted using data that most law enforcement agencies already have access to in their standard police report. Their findings support the use of currently available records for the automation of risk triage tools that could be done at the earliest stage of the criminal justice process (i.e., police response). The 10-item scale put forth in their study pave the way for further improvements in the identification and predictive accuracy of high-risk intimate partner violence, investigative decision-making efficiency, and allocation of police resources.

Investigative Techniques and the Spatiotemporal Patterns of Offenses

So far, empirical studies in the field of police investigation have been primarily conducted to improve understanding and knowledge of criminal behaviors and to support techniques and methods that facilitate case resolution – particularly by supporting investigators in identifying and prioritizing suspects. In the absence of confessions, eyewitnesses, or forensic evidence to quickly identify the perpetrator, other methods must be used to assist investigators in identifying and prioritizing potential suspects. The following five articles of this special issue (Salfati and Sorochinski; Bennell et al.; Woodhams et al.; Chopin et al.; Hewitt) aim at improving suspect prioritization and identification techniques and showcase the pivotal role of the spatiotemporal patterns of (sexual) offenses. In the first study, Salfati and Sorochinski aim at having an applied utility for the investigative process of offender profiling. Based on a sample of sexual homicide crime series (i.e., all sex worker victims, mixed victims, all non-sex worker victims), key differences in the types of offenders who commit different types of homicide series were identified. Their findings provide a classification model for future research on offender profiling, as well as an example of how research on offender profiling may help support investigative practice by narrowing the pool of potential suspects based on crime scene actions.

In the second study, Bennell et al. set out to improve investigative crime linkage of serial crimes. Using a sample of serial offenders having committed stranger sexual assaults, their study uses domains of crime scene behaviors to distinguish between crime pairs committed by the same or by different offenders, and tests four different statistical approaches to predict linkage status. Their findings add to the scant literature aimed at determining the most suitable statistical method to link crimes and provide methodological improvements on how practitioners link serial crimes using the statistical approaches. Their study therefore represents a first step towards an empirically informed decision-making approach to link crimes.

Along the same lines, in the third study, Woodhams et al. aim to fill a significant gap in the literature by investigating the temporal and geographical proximity of crimes committed by serial stranger sex offenders in the UK. Their findings provide an empirical update regarding the periods of time and space over which serial sex offenders commit their offenses. They also offer insights relevant to analysts, decision-making, and search strategies for interrogating databases (such as ViCLAS) that could enhance the detection and apprehension of sex offenders.

In the fourth study of this section, Chopin et al. innovatively examine the geographic mobility patterns involved in what they call “Motiveless” homicides — homicides with no apparent motive. Despite the obvious challenges this type of homicide poses to law enforcement, motiveless homicides have rarely been studied with the aim of facilitating their investigation. Using a sample of solved cases of motiveless homicide from France and based on the criminal mobility triangle approach, their findings suggest that these crimes present distinct patterns compared to “motivated” homicides. Their study also provides easily observable information that could help investigators to prioritize their search for a potential suspect or to recover useful evidence in cases where no clear motive is discernable.

Finally, Hewitt’s study reaffirms the fact that sex crimes reported to the police are spatially concentrated on a very small number of street segments. Unlike past studies on the topic that use aggregated or crime-specific data, this study allows to further knowledge on this topic by using a substantial sample of sex offenses that occurred in Austin, Texas, broken down by victim age and type of sexual acts perpetrated by street segment. By disaggregating offenses this way, differences in the degree of spatial concentration are revealed and specific (micro)locations for certain subtypes of sexual offenses are highlighted.

Investigative Interviewing

Police interviews can influence the criminal investigation process, including the ultimate outcome of a case. Effective interviewing of suspects, victims, and witnesses allows investigators to gather a greater volume of information related to the crime and the probable suspect and can increase the credibility of the evidence being collected. The last three articles of this special issue focus on this vital part of criminal investigations (Izotovas et al.; Otgaar et al.; Van Beek et al.). In the first study, Izotovas et al. step away from the much common laboratory-based research to examine a sample of real-life police interrogations with suspected sex offenders. Aiming to standardize the language used across investigative interviewing settings, their study examines these interrogations using Kelly et al.’s ( 2013 ) taxonomy of interrogation techniques to assess whether the six domains of techniques could be applied to interviews carried out by PEACE-trained investigators from the UK. Their study provides a better understanding of the dynamics of interviews with suspects and supports the need to examine interviews more holistically.

In the second study, Otgaar et al. experimentally assessed whether empirically based interviewing — the National Institute for Child Health and Development (NICHD) Protocol — would affect the reporting of misinformation in children. In many countries, children with an alleged experience of abuse are often interviewed by many different organizations and practitioners. Their findings suggest that when children are interviewed about possible traumatic experiences, the first interview should ideally and immediately be conducted using empirically based guidelines, such as the NICHD Protocol.

Along the same line, the study of Van Beek et al. which closes this special issue, further investigates the impact of misinformation and inaccurate information presented by investigators during interviews, this time conducted with suspects. Using an experimental design, they seek to examine the responses that police interviewers provide to suspects when such suspects claim that information or evidence presented to them is incorrect. Their findings highlight the need for police interviewers to be aware that some of the evidence/information they present to suspects may be incorrect due to a variety of reasons that are inherently part of the criminal investigation process. Their findings also put forward that expertise may perhaps be more important in this regard than experience and support the importance of evidence-gathering training before conducting this complex cognitive task of interviewing suspects.

This special issue brings together 11 original articles, all of which, in their own way, make an important contribution to the field of police investigation and investigative techniques. It regroups empirical studies conducted by researchers from various countries (Canada, Netherlands, Switzerland, UK, and the USA), mostly carried out in partnership with police organizations, covering a variety of themes related to criminal investigations, and highlighting the efforts and expertise of emerging and established researchers. In this regard, this is, to our knowledge, one of the first special issues of its kind. We hope that this issue will be of interest to researchers, students, and practitioners in this field, that it will pave the way for other special issues and collective works, and that it will stimulate research in this understudied area.

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Deslauriers-Varin, N., Fortin, F. Improving Efficiency and Understanding of Criminal Investigations: Toward an Evidence-Based Approach. J Police Crim Psych 36 , 635–638 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-021-09491-6

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-021-09491-6

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Detectives Role in Investigation Essay

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Introduction

Crime exists everywhere around the world. In the US, the effective work of local police departments caused an impressive decrease in crime rates in the 1990s and kept it on that level throughout the 2000s (Dempsey & Forst, 2016). In no small part, such progress was achieved due to the reformation of the investigation department. Nowadays, detectives and patrol officers work in tandem, rather than separately, to ensure that cases and crimes are investigated as swiftly and efficiently as possible. The detective plays an important role in the process of investigation. This paper is dedicated to studying the specifics of detective work.

The Detective Mystique

The position of a detective is, perhaps, the most advertised and known one. The image of the detective has been widely popularized by movies and literature. A detective is often portrayed as a sort of an independent anti-hero that works with the system but outside of the system. The rogue attitude, impressive intelligence, a troubled past, and dedication to justice despite the dangers and personal hardships is what makes this role so attractive.

As it often happens, the reality is much more prosaic. A detective spends most of his or her time interviewing the victims, witnesses, and filling out reports. They are often thrown at the cases that could not be solved through a primary investigation. Those cases typically remain unsolved due to a lack of witnesses, evidence, or suspects (Dempsey & Forst, 2016). In short, the work of a detective is not as exciting and glamorous as it is portrayed to be, and certainly not as effective as it is showed in the movies.

Responsibilities of the Detective. The Difference between a Detective and a Patrol Officer

Before the Rand Study conducted in 1975, the detectives were the ones who did most of the work solving crimes. The patrol officers had very little to do – their only task was to file the report and wait for the detective to pick up the case. As a result, precious time was being wasted. The Rand Study reflected on that and concluded that 93% of the work done by the detective department is done pointlessly and does not directly contribute to the result (Dempsey & Forst, 2016).

The patrol officer shares some of the duties that detectives used to have in the past. They are the ones to perform the primary investigation, which is conducted upon arriving at the scene of the crime. They have many tasks to perform. Among them is looking for possible suspects on the run, assessing the situation and requesting reinforcements if necessary, identifying and locating all the involved parties, securing the crime scene, and making sure nothing is disturbed, moved, or touched without permission. The actions of the officers are also recorded in the incident report (Dempsey & Forst, 2016). Statistics show that the majority of crimes are solved due to the efforts of the patrol officers during the preliminary investigations.

The detective division is charged with solving of the reported crimes. More often than not, those are crimes that could not be cleared based on the contents of the preliminary investigation conducted by the patrol officer. Detectives conduct a follow-up investigation, based on the incident report provided after the preliminary investigation is concluded. They often have to re-interview the victims and the witnesses, search the scene of the crime for any evidence that was overlooked, find and interview possible culprits, perform arrests, and give the required testimony in the court (Dempsey & Forst, 2016).

Investigative Tactics

The investigative tactics used by the detectives are separated into two groups – the retroactive and proactive tactics. The retroactive tactics have the purpose of solving the crime after it had been committed. It includes the primary and follow-up investigations, crime analysis, profiling, interviewing, and others. Often there is not enough evidence to identify a culprit, which is why the crime-clearing rate for serious offenses is less than 50%, and less than 20% for felonies (Dempsey & Forst, 2016). However, the best way to solve a crime is to prevent it from happening or actively stopping it. That is where proactive tactics come in.

Decoy operations involve operatives dressed up as civilians to blend into the surrounding environment while keeping a watchful eye out for the crime. They operate in crime-saturated areas and often pose as victims to attract a potential perpetrator and lure them out. This approach has proven to be very effective. The criminals do not expect an elderly man, a saloonkeeper or a prostitute to be an operative in disguise.

Stakeout operations are often employed when the police know an approximate location where the crime is going to be perpetrated. It involves breaking into the homes of the suspect, ambushes, and decoys with a follow-up crew to intercept the criminal. It involves hidden surveillance of a person. However, these operations are expensive in terms of material and human resources.

Sting operations involve operatives undercover pose as criminals, to lure out other criminals. This is a potentially dangerous operation because it involves a personal risk, in case the operative’s identity is compromised. Because of that, these operations are often implemented to catch thieves and robbers trying to get rid of the stolen goods (Dempsey & Forst, 2016).

Internet Article Summary

For this paper, I am going to summarize a case involving the murder of Bella Bond – a two-year-old child that was found dead by a random passerby, almost three months after her disappearance. The police launched a massive media campaign to identify the girl. Eventually, they succeeded, although it took them several months until somebody recognized the child.

The parents – Michael McCarthy and Rachel Bond, accused each other of the deed. The article does not provide a conclusion as to who is guilty of the crime and provides background information about both parents. Bond had a history of prostitution and drug-related offenses. However, she seemed like a doting mother, according to the pictures on her Facebook page. McCarthy was treated in a Boston hospital with a condition not related to the crime (Lavoye, 2015).

The method of investigation for this crime is clearly retroactive. The investigator had to implement the use of mass media and information technology just to identify the victim. The evidence seems lacking, and there are no witnesses to the crime. However, there are two possible suspects – the mother and the father of the girl. However, the fact that the article has no conclusion as to who is guilty means that investigation is still underway.

Despite the role of the detective is not as glamorous and flashy as it is represented in the books or movies, it is still an important part of the investigative effort that takes place after every crime.

Dempsey, J. S., & Forst, L. (2016). An Introduction to Policing, 8th Edition . MA, Boston: Cengage Learning.

Lavoye, D. (2015 ). Officials seek motive, cause of death in ‘Baby Doe’ case . Web.

• The Historical Investigation - Robert Salmon's Crime
• Police Officers' White Lie in Criminal Investigation
• Paul Rand and His Role in Modern Graphic Design Theory
• Anthem by Ayn Rand: Discrimination Theme
• Theme Comparison in "The Road" by McCarthy and "Anthem" by Rand
• The Act of Mass Murder by Gregory Johnson
• Problem Situations Identification: Ima Goodenough' Case
• The Debate Over Recent Recorded Crime in Turkey
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The Unravelling of an Expert on Serial Killers

In August, 2024, National Geographic and The New Yorker Studios released “ Killer Lies ,” a TV docuseries adapted from this article. To enjoy more reporting, news, and other writing from the magazine, sign up for our daily newsletter .

A brother and a sister are standing on the balcony of a sixth-floor apartment in Monte Carlo. It’s the nineteen-seventies, in May, the afternoon of the Grand Prix. The sun is glinting off the dinghies in the turquoise shallows of the harbor. The trees are so lush they’re almost black.

The brother, Stéphane Bourgoin, is in his twenties. He’s come from Paris to visit his sister Claude-Marie Dugué. Race cars circle the city, careening onto the straightaway on Boulevard Albert 1er, which Dugué’s apartment overlooks. Over the thrum, Bourgoin leans in and tells her something shocking: in America, where he’d recently been living, he had a girlfriend who was murdered and “cut up into pieces.” Her name was Hélène.

Bourgoin’s revelation was one of those moments when you “remember exactly what you were doing that day at that precise moment, the news is so striking and indelible,” Dugué recalled recently. “It was stupefaction and shudders, amid the revving engines of Formula 1.” Dugué and Bourgoin shared a father but had different mothers. They had got to know each other not long before, and Dugué didn’t feel that she could probe for details about a girlfriend she hadn’t met, or even heard of until that day. “I found the whole situation disturbing,” she said. She simply told Bourgoin how sorry she was.

At the time, Bourgoin had a career in the realm of B movies, reviewing fantasy and horror films for fanzines and dabbling in adult film. Later, he started writing his own books, which became hugely popular and helped establish him as a prominent expert on serial killers in France. His best-known work, “Serial Killers,” a thousand-page compendium of depravity, was released in five editions by the prestigious publisher Grasset. Travelling around the country to book festivals, Bourgoin built up a particularly devoted following within the already zealous subculture of true crime. One fan, Bourgoin said, sent him annotated copies of his own books, with items such as scissors, razors, and pubic hairs glued to the pages, corresponding to words in the text.

Bourgoin also had admirers in law and law enforcement. “He was one of the first people in France to say that serial killers weren’t only in America,” Jacques Dallest, the general prosecutor of the Grenoble appeals court, told me. Dallest was so impressed with Bourgoin that he invited him to speak at the École Nationale de la Magistrature, France’s national academy for judges and prosecutors. Bourgoin also gave talks at the Centre National de Formation à la Police Judiciaire, a training center for one of France’s main law-enforcement bodies, for which he claimed to have created the country’s first unit of serial-killer profilers.

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An energetic self-promoter, Bourgoin appeared frequently in the press and on television. “I counted, I did eighty-four TV shows in one month,” he once said. “I get up at 4:45 A.M. to be on the morning shows and go home at midnight to have a bite to eat.” He cultivated a flamboyantly geeky look, with equal shades of Sherlock Holmes (ascot, horn-rimmed glasses) and Ace Ventura (cerulean blazer, silky skull-print shirt). A quirky-shoes enthusiast, he sometimes wore a pair of white brogues made to look as though they were spattered with blood. On Facebook, he claimed to possess the remains of Gerard Schaefer, a serial killer from Florida. “To each person who buys my book, I will offer a small bag containing a little piece of Schaefer—fingernails, hair, ear, kneecap, skin, bones, etc.,” he wrote, in 2015. Female fans, he added, would be given priority.

Bourgoin was most famous for his jailhouse interviews with murderers. In the course of more than forty years, he had conducted seventy-seven of them, he said, “in the four corners of the planet.” He riveted audiences with tales of his encounters with the “Son of Sam” killer David Berkowitz (“David, I come here, you agreed to meet me, but I hope you’re not going to tell me the same bullshit that you told at your trial”), with the homicidal hospital orderly Donald Harvey (“He confesses seventeen additional crimes to me that he hadn’t even been suspected of”), with the “Killer Clown” John Wayne Gacy (who, Bourgoin said, grabbed his buttocks during the encounter). “Confronting these individuals can be dangerous from a mental point of view,” Bourgoin wrote, in “Mes Conversations avec les Tueurs” (“My Conversations with Killers”), a 2012 book. “To make them talk, you have to let down your guard, open yourself completely to a psychopath, who manipulates, lies, and is devoid of any scruple.”

If you dedicate your life to serial killers, the first question anyone asks is “Why?” Bourgoin’s answer was that Hélène’s death made him want to confront the worst that humanity had to offer, as “a form of catharsis” or even as “a personal exorcism.” At some point, he started pronouncing her name “Eileen,” the American way. He said that he’d met her in the mid-seventies, when he was living in Los Angeles, working on B movies; that, in 1976, he went on a trip out of town; that when he returned to the home they shared he discovered her dead body, “mutilated, raped, and practically decapitated.” The killer was apprehended two years later, and eventually confessed to almost a dozen other murders. He was now awaiting execution on death row.

When an interviewer asked for an image of Eileen, Bourgoin would produce a black-and-white photograph of the young couple. It was beautifully composed, almost professional-looking. In it, the two of them are pictured in closeup, facing each other. Eileen has feathered hair and rainbow-shaped brows. Bourgoin’s hair is long, and he appears to be wearing a leather jacket with a big shearling collar. He is turned toward her in a protective stance. She looks up at him with a snaggletoothed smile. They’re so close that their noses are almost touching.

“Eileen was his hook,” Hervé Weill, who co-runs a crime-fiction festival at which Bourgoin often appeared, told me. The story of her death stirred the public’s emotions, adding a sheen of moral righteousness to Bourgoin’s vocation. “I knew of Stéphane Bourgoin well before this program having seen almost all his interviews with prisoners, but I’m only here learning that he was the partner of a victim,” a YouTube user wrote, after watching one of Bourgoin’s television appearances. “Incredible man.”

In his public appearances, Bourgoin delivered even the most gruesome anecdotes with weary didacticism, as if he had seen it all and emerged omniscient, emotion transmogrified into expertise. He spoke in data points: seventeen crimes, seventy-seven serial killers, “hundreds of thousands” of case files that he claimed to have stored in his cellar. “For nearly fifteen years, I accumulated files that I synthesized into more than five thousand tables, four of which are reproduced in the book,” he said at one point, announcing that he had, in all likelihood, solved the long-standing mystery of the murder of Elizabeth Short, known as the Black Dahlia.

Bourgoin could seem a little off at times, more like an admirer than a dispassionate observer of the killers he studied. But it was easy enough to interpret this macabre streak as a consequence of his trauma. His social-media feeds featured an uncomfortable mixture of cat pictures (he named a cat Bundy), promotional brags (“once again a packed house, for the seventeenth time in a row”), morbid memes (“ BEING CREMATED IS MY LAST HOPE FOR A SMOKING HOT BODY ”), and crime-related kitsch (barricade-tape toilet paper; gloves and a jacket designed to look as if they were made from human skin). He spoke of his opposition, on moral grounds, to the death penalty, but he’d pose for a photograph in a fake electric chair, captioning it “Today, I’m lacking a little juice.” What might normally have seemed in bad taste could feel like defiance coming from a bereaved partner. He showed up for interviews in a Jeffrey Dahmer T-shirt and signed books “With My Bloodiest Regards.”

In 1991, Bourgoin travelled to the Florida State Prison to meet Ottis Toole, sometimes called the Jacksonville Cannibal, for a French-television documentary. Toole claimed to have eaten some of his victims and allegedly issued a recipe for barbecue sauce calling for, among other ingredients, two cloves of garlic and a cup of blood.

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Bourgoin opened the interview brightly, saying that someone had sent him the recipe for the sauce. “And I must tell you that I tried it,” he said.

“Was it any good?” Toole asked.

“Yeah, it was very good,” Bourgoin answered, his voice quickening. “Although I didn’t try it on the same kind of meat that you did!”

Despite Bourgoin’s inclination toward facts and figures, his own memories could be indistinct. Sometimes he said that he’d been introduced to serial killers, in the late seventies, by a police officer he got to know from Eileen’s case; at other times, he said that he’d met some sympathetic cops at meals hosted by Robert Bloch, the author of “Psycho.” Bourgoin refused to identify Eileen’s killer, or to give her last name, saying that he was preserving her anonymity out of respect for her parents. Whether because of decency, laziness, or esteem for his reputation, Bourgoin’s interlocutors tended not to press him very hard. “I seem to have been prepared to put down his evasions to professional caution or eccentric obsession,” Tony Allen-Mills, a British journalist who interviewed Bourgoin in 2000, told me. “He was accepted as an expert, and that’s how I treated him.”

Bourgoin knew the power of fandom, having spent decades stoking the public’s emotional investment in true crime. But he underestimated the intelligence of the audience. After years of watching TV specials, attending talks, reading books, and replaying DVD boxed sets about necrophilia, satanism, bestiality, torture, infanticide, matricide, patricide, and the like, followers of the genre had learned not to count on anybody’s better angels, or to underestimate humankind’s capacity for deceit. They were connoisseurs of the self-valorizing lie, having been trained by authors like the “master of noir” himself.

One group of true-crime fans, disturbed by inconsistencies in Bourgoin’s stories, launched their own investigation, which would unravel his career. “Can you imagine yourself in a long hallway?” a member of the group told me. “Each time you open a door, behind it there’s another door. That’s how many lies there were.”

One seemingly grandiose element of Bourgoin’s life story is true: his father, Lucien Joseph Jean Bourgoin, was a great man of history. Jean, as he was known, was born in 1897, in Papeete, Tahiti. He joined the French military at the age of seventeen, fighting with distinction in the First World War before studying at the élite engineering school École Polytechnique. During the Second World War, he made a bold escape from French-colonial Indochina after being put under surveillance for his support of the Free French, and was personally summoned by Charles de Gaulle to join the government-in-exile in London.

As a civilian, Jean travelled the world building roads, tunnels, railroads, irrigation systems, and electrical networks. Later, he became a Commander of the Legion of Honor, and took part in UNESCO ’s effort to relocate the ancient Egyptian temples of Abu Simbel. His twenty-two-page dossier in the National Archives of France chronicles countless missions, decorations, and “special services rendered to Colonization” in roughly twenty countries. “I’ve heard that there was much more to the story, that he was also a high-level intelligence officer,” Julien Cuny, his grandson, told me.

Bourgoin’s mother, Franziska Glöckner, was as mysterious and daring as her husband. Born in Germany in 1910, she moved to France in the thirties after marrying her second husband, a French diplomat. In 1940, with her husband at war, she took a job as an interpreter with the German command at Saint-Malo, on the coast of Brittany. “Intelligent, courtesan-like, and calculating,” according to one writer, she spent the war years facilitating fishing permits, attending cocktail parties, and consorting with the Grand Duke of the Romanovs, who was living in exile at a nearby villa. A French official recalled that she eventually acquired “such an influence that she was known to all as ‘Commandante du Port.’ ” A newspaper article later dubbed her the “Mata Hari of Saint-Malo.”

Toward the end of the war, Franziska was arrested on charges of treason and was accused of acting as an informant. At her trial, ten local witnesses, including the former mayor of Saint-Malo, testified in her defense. “It was thanks to her exceptional situation with the high German command that the docks of Saint-Malo, where ninety-six mineshafts had been set, were not exploded,” a newspaper article reported. She was ultimately acquitted.

Jean and Franziska married in Saigon in 1951. He was fifty-three and she was forty. Two years later, their only child, Stéphane, was born in Paris. The family lived in a Haussman-style apartment in the Seventeenth Arrondissement, not far from the Arc de Triomphe. Stéphane spoke French, German, and English, and attended the venerable Lycée Carnot. He seems to have been an awkward child. “The second the bell rang, three minutes later I was outside with twenty people, but he was rather isolated,” Jean-Louis Repelski, a classmate, recalled.

An unremarkable student, Bourgoin left high school without a diploma. He was obsessed with cinema, sometimes seeing five movies in a day. “He was a walking dictionary,” Claude-Marie Dugué told me. “He knew all the directors and films by heart, and inundated me with references and anecdotes.” At some point, Bourgoin parlayed this interest into a series of jobs in adult film. He is credited as the screenwriter of “Extreme Close-Up,” “La Bête et la Belle,” and “Johnny Does Paris,” a series of late-seventies and early-eighties productions starring John Holmes, the prolific American porn actor.

Bourgoin has said that his career in movies got started in the U.S., but, despite featuring some American actors, the three films were shot in France. Bourgoin did go to America at least once in his youth, as I learned from the papers of his father’s former wife, Alice Gilbert Smith Bourgoin. Alice was a New England patrician, with a degree from Smith College, who appears to have had an ardent but melancholic relationship with Jean, exacerbated by the turbulence of their era. Toward the end of her life, she wrote an affectionate letter to Jean offering to return “two handsome and valuable rings you gave me—a solitaire diamond and a beautiful dark blue sapphire.”

Alice’s letter arrived in Paris on June 7, 1977, but Stéphane was the one to receive it. Jean had died, of a heart attack, three days earlier, at a ceremony hosted by his alma mater. Jean’s death must have been a shock, but Stéphane replied to Alice, in a letter dated the same day. “You do not know me, but I am Jean’s son, Stéphane, born in 1953, and, by the way, the only child of his last mariage [ sic ],” he wrote, in English. “Perhaps you want to know a little bit more about me.”

He told her that he had recently spent almost a year in America, but the letter made no mention of a murdered lover, or of a serial killer. “I love very much the USA and the kindness of the Americans,” he wrote. He added that he was engaged to an American girl who was living in France, a love story just like Alice and his father’s. “Right now, I am keeping aside every penny I earn to be able to make another trip to the States.” He concluded by giving Alice his telephone number and his address.

In the bottom left-hand corner of the second page of the letter, there is 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 express any appreciation and was not heard from again before she died.

As a young man, Bourgoin resembled a character out of a potboiler. In the late seventies, he began working at Au Troisième Œil, a secondhand crime bookstore in Paris’s Ninth Arrondissement, which he later took over. Customers could find him there, presiding “like a spider in his web,” according 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 treasures, 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 outwits 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 infanticides) under the pseudonym Étienne Jallieu.

Bourgoin got an early taste of public attention in 1991, as a writer on “100 Years of X,” a cable documentary about porn. This was also the year of Bourgoin’s first filmed meeting with a murderer. Serial killers were having a cultural 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 momentum with the release of a film version of “The Silence of the Lambs,” starring Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster. One night in Paris, Bourgoin regaled guests at a dinner party with tales of these new American murderers and the profilers who spent their days tracking them. “We were utterly captivated,” Carol Kehringer, a documentary 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 acquaintances 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 Florida and California for meetings with murderers, arranged by the production 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 longer speaking. “When he had the killers 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 volumes and, in 1993, with the first edition 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 professional 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 spoken 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 could cry on command,” Barbara Necek, who co-directed documentaries 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 murdered 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 members of the victims of killers. They saw him as a kindred survivor, someone 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, Bourgoin 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 horrors,” 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 pulling 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 manifestations was extreme arachnophobia. 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 collaborating with the publishing house Glénat on a branded series of graphic novels (“Stéphane Bourgoin Presents the Serial Killers”). The second installment, about Fourniret, came out in March of 2020. Alerted by an acquaintance to the book’s existence, Sy was shocked to encounter her adolescent image rendered “flesh and bone” in a cartoon strip, with Fourniret threatening her (“I will be forced ​​to disfigure you if you don’t do exactly as I say”), his words suspended in dialogue bubbles. Sy says that neither 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 complaint 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 Fourniret, but, oddly, the book’s writer inserted a character inspired by Bourgoin 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, Monsieur Jallieu?” Fourniret asks.

“What you’ve spent your entire life trying to hide, Monsieur Fourniret,” Jallieu replies.

In 2019, a man who goes by the pseudonym Valak—inspired by a demon in the film “The Conjuring 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 velvet 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 an adult, he was struck by its sloppiness.

“There were things that didn’t seem coherent,” Valak told me. “I told myself, ‘O.K., it must be me that’s paranoid, 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 Bourgoin. Valak commented, expressing his unease about the work. He recalled, “There were a bunch of people who responded after that, saying, ‘ Bah , oui , I agree.’ ”

The skeptics—about thirty of them—formed a chat group to discuss 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 Corporation (the Fourth Eye Corporation)—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 instances of plagiarism. Bourgoin had, in fact, lifted passages from English-language works that hadn’t been translated 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 maggots and decomposing body parts that had been churned up by police helicopters. (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 former colleagues, sent letters to prisons across the U.S., and scoured YouTube for clips of obscure speaking engagements and television appearances, like 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 posting a series of damning videos on YouTube. 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 obtained by the group established that his first wife was a Frenchwoman, and that they divorced in 1995. The collective showed that Bourgoin had also given wildly conflicting accounts of the timing, the place, and even the manner of Eileen’s death. Her supposed 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 victim who fit the description that Bourgoin 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 killers 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 complete 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 Ellroy, 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 professional soccer for seven years with the Red Star Football Club before moving 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 irresistible desire to become a character 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 accompanied 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. Whalen’s family told me that they had never heard of Bourgoin, that Whalen had never travelled outside North America, and that Whalen was, to the end, a strong believer in the American judicial system and “very proud of defending Donald Harvey.”

The 4ème Œil even composed a psychological sketch similar to the serial-killer profiles with which Bourgoin had titillated the public: “The typical mythomaniac is fragile, subject to a strong dependence on others, and his faculties of imagination are increased tenfold. Whatever his profile, he is often the first victim of his imaginary stories, which he struggles to distinguish from reality.” The collective described Bourgoin as a “ voleur de vie ”—a stealer of life. “We’re by no means accusing Stéphane Bourgoin 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 Bourgoin’s was cleverly self-sustaining. His lies enabled him to gain the very experience that he lacked, and every jailhouse interview doubled as a master class in manipulation. Blagging his way into prisons and police academies, Bourgoin, in pretending to be a serial-killer expert, at some point actually became one.

The 4ème Œil has extended the right of reply to Bourgoin on several occasions, but he has never responded 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 Facebook 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 because 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 victim 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 Marshal Pétain.

Three months later, with pressure on Bourgoin mounting in the French press, he spoke to Émilie Lanez, of Paris Match. “ STéPHANE BOURGOIN, 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 unfortunate sideshow to a largely legitimate career. Bourgoin seemed erratic, toggling between tears and offhandedness, 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 Bickrest, who was murdered by a serial killer near Daytona Beach in 1975. The article described Bickrest as a barmaid and an aspiring cosmetologist who supplemented her income with sex work. Before her death, she and Bourgoin had seen each other “four or five times,” and he had transformed her into his wife because he “didn’t want people to know that he’d been helping her out financially.” The dates of Bickrest’s murder and her killer’s arrest didn’t align with the Eileen story, however, and even a cursory 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 untangled the threads, trying to distinguish true from false in the jumble of his statements,” Lanez wrote. Engaging with Bourgoin’s lies, I found, could have a strange generative power, inspiring in those who tried to decipher them the same kind of slippery speculation 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 “America’s Most Wanted” for many years. Walsh’s six-year-old son was murdered in Florida in 1981, and in 2008 Ottis Toole, the Florida drifter with whom Bourgoin joked about barbecue sauce, was posthumously recognized as the child’s murderer. Might Bourgoin have refashioned himself as the family member of a victim in imitation 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 floor of an apartment building on 155th Street in New York. I remembered 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 apartment 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 off as the happy hooker,” in the early seventies, but she had no memory of Bourgoin. Hollander added that the building used to be called the “horizontal whorehouse,” where “every floor had one or two hookers.” Eventually, I found the owner of apartment 11-H, where Bourgoin supposedly lived, and he told me that a man named Beau Buchanan had rented it in 1976. A director and producer of porn movies, Buchanan died in 2020. He easily could have known Bourgoin—but did Bourgoin take Buchanan’s address and make it his own, or had he really lived there?

It seemed a reasonable guess, given the period fashions and the professional composition, that the photograph of Bourgoin and the woman he had identified as Eileen had been taken on one of the movie sets he worked on in the seventies. The 4ème Œil felt reasonably sure that Eileen was Dominique Saint Claire, a well-known adult-film actress of the era. A porn expert I contacted suggested, independently, that Eileen might be Saint Claire, but, looking at the pictures of Saint Claire that were available online, I wasn’t convinced. (My attempts to contact Saint Claire were unsuccessful.)

I watched a head-spinning selection of films from the era and called a number of former actors—one was a maker of traditional and erotic chocolates—searching for some hint of Eileen. The movies that Bourgoin wrote are almost impossible to get ahold of, but Jill C. Nelson, a biographer of John Holmes, agreed to mail me a DVD of “Extreme Close-Up” from her personal collection. It’s a love-triangle story in which, as the DVD’s jacket copy notes, an American writer “is led into a world of European sexual delights where fantasy merges with reality.” I watched the movie attentively—at one point pausing an open-mouthed-orgasm scene to search for a snaggletooth—but none of the women resembled the one in Bourgoin’s photograph.

In early March, I called Bourgoin from a street corner in a rural village on France’s southwest coast, near where he now lives. I wasn’t expecting him to answer; I had tried to contact him before, without much luck. But, to my surprise, he picked up and quickly furnished his address. Several miles down the road, I found him standing in funky green shoes outside a modest house with an orange tiled roof and voile curtains with teapot appliqués and gingham trim.

Bourgoin invited me inside. I noticed, as he made coffee, that his knife rack was shaped like a human body, stuck through with blades at various points: forehead, heart, groin. Eventually, we sat down at a small table in the sunroom. He seemed unruffled by my unannounced visit, almost as though he’d been waiting for someone to show up.

A person who was once close to Bourgoin told me that he was an “excellent actor” and “extremely convincing, because, when he lies, he believes it very strongly, and so you believe it, too.” At the table, though, Bourgoin was diffident. He didn’t seem to be putting much effort into making me—or, possibly, himself—believe what he said. Or maybe he believed it so deeply that the delivery was no longer relevant. When I asked how many killers he had actually interviewed, he replied, in English, “It depends. Each time I was going to a jail, I asked to meet serial killers other than the ones I was authorized to film or interview. So sometimes at Florida State Prison I met in the courtyard during the promenade—I don’t know, two? five?—other serial killers.” He was just as evasive on other subjects. I asked him about the prank that he played on Dahina Sy. “It was a fake spider,” he said, as though that explained everything. (He later claimed that he was unaware of Sy’s arachnophobia.) When I brought up the rings that Alice, his father’s former wife, had given him, he said that he had called to thank her the next time he was in New York.

His instinct, in tense moments, was to show me his collections: piles of dusty tabloids, stacks of pulp fiction, an attic full of DVDs, desks and dressers and wardrobes containing boxes of old notebooks in which he had dutifully listed and rated, in a prim, upright hand, every film he’d seen. When I asked about the apartment at 155 East Fifty-fifth Street, he produced three large envelopes, postmarked in the early fall of 1975 and sent to “Stéphane Bourgoin, A.R.T. Films” at that address. A.R.T., he said, was a distribution company that had belonged to a friend of his, Beau Buchanan. The envelopes didn’t shed much light on Bourgoin’s doings in seventies New York, but for him such objects seemed almost equivalent to experiences.

In an article called “How I Was Bamboozled by Stéphane Bourgoin,” the Swiss journalist Anna Lietti examined her decision to write a mostly positive article about Bourgoin, despite her discomfort with his “overly smooth” presentation. “I was disappointed by the superficiality of my interlocutor and the lack of depth of his remarks,” Lietti, describing him as a sort of human reference book, wrote. “He lined up facts, dates, details, without offering a perspective, an original key to understanding these monsters to which he devoted his life.” In his countryside house, Bourgoin seemed a sad figure—a collector of trivia and paraphernalia, a man who just as easily could have spent decades amassing esoteric toys or obsessing over cryptocurrency, rather than living off the misfortunes of others. It was as though he thought that gathering enough props would make him a protagonist.

“I’m sorry that I lied and exaggerated things,” Bourgoin told me, at one point. “But I never raped or killed anybody.”

I asked what lies he was apologizing for.

“All the lies,” he said. But, he added, “there was mostly one important lie that I would do again.”

Bourgoin was referring to the Eileen story—the foundational lie upon which he had constructed his career. He admitted that he had invented her name, and the location of the murder. But, he insisted, he had really had a girlfriend who was murdered by a serial killer. “It was just a young girl that I met three times that I had sex with,” he said. Later, he was more explicit: “I invented that story because I was afraid that people would think that . . . I paid for a prostitute.”

Bourgoin didn’t want to give the woman’s name, even if I promised not to publish it. I asked if he could at least give me the identity of the woman in the photograph, but he claimed not to remember. “I think she was Spanish!” he added later.

The only time Bourgoin truly came alive was when he talked about the anonymous collective that had brought him down. We stood in his office, surrounded by fright masks and first editions, and he said that he was “quite happy it came out, but not the way that the 4ème Œil did it.” He asked me if I’d looked into the group’s membership. “You must have done some research on the people who accused me,” he said, suggesting that I get to work on a counter-investigation of his investigators.

Claude-Marie Dugué found out that her brother had been lying to her for half a century when the Paris Match article came out. She had never suspected it, but the news didn’t shock her. “Nothing surprises me in my family,” she said. Nor was she offended, on a personal level, by the breach of trust. “He didn’t really deceive me,” she said. “He let me into his world.”

Dugué’s son, Julien Cuny, told me that one quote from the article jumped out at him. “ Parfois, je me fais des films dans ma tête. J’ai toujours voulu qu’on m’aime ,” it read. “Sometimes I make films in my head. I’ve always wanted to be loved.” Cuny is an accomplished tech executive in Montreal, but he has always been daunted by his family’s distinction. To him, Bourgoin’s words were an almost inevitable response to an overwhelming mythology, “a phantasmagoric picture of distant family members (you almost never meet) who are always on an adventure somewhere.”

The first time Dugué and I exchanged e-mails, she told me something that I wasn’t expecting: she was the product of an extramarital relationship between Jean Bourgoin and her mother, Béatrice Pourchasse, as was her sister, who was born thirteen months before her. The girls lived with their mother in the Fourth Arrondissement. Jean Bourgoin lived with his family—Franziska and Stéphane—across town. Jean organized his parallel lives strictly, keeping them “watertight,” Dugué recalled, but she always felt loved by her father, who “followed and protected his liaison with my mother until the end,” providing money for the family, keeping track of the girls’ studies, and seeing them regularly. Even if he didn’t live with them, Dugué said, she felt immense pride “to be the daughter of such a man.”

One day, Dugué decided that she wanted to meet her younger brother. She was in her early twenties, and had known about him her entire life. He was maybe sixteen, a high schooler, and had no idea that she existed. “I posted myself discreetly inside the building where he lived, waiting for his return from the Lycée Carnot,” Dugué recalled. When he came home, she introduced herself: his secret sister. “He hardly believed me,” Dugué remembered. Nonetheless, they immediately got along. She remembered Bourgoin as a shy and serious boy with round glasses, adrift in a world of extravagantly accomplished adults. “How must Stéphane have perceived himself next to these two exceptional parents, crushed by so much strength and power?” she said. “He was happy to discover all at once that he had two sisters, and we started to communicate amongst ourselves.” They sent long letters between their father’s two households, written in violet ink.

The incident may have been Bourgoin’s initiation into the power of secret lives. “Back to my childhood I felt I didn’t do enough compared to my parents,” Bourgoin told me. “So I had always an inferiority complex.” Cuny echoed the sentiment. “I decided very early on that having a normal life means boring, and that would be the most horrible thing that could happen to me,” he told me. “My bet is Stéphane would prefer this outcome to being a local accountant who never left town.”

In “My Conversations with Killers,” Bourgoin wrote, “The immense majority of serial killers are inveterate liars from a very young age. Isolated, marginalized in their lives, they take refuge in the imaginary to construct a personality, far from the mediocre reality of their existence.” “ Parfois, je me fais des films dans ma tête. J’ai toujours voulu qu’on m’aime ,” Bourgoin said, as though he were performing a voice-over for his own life. “Sometimes I make films in my head. I’ve always wanted to be loved.” ♦

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• Unit 6 Expert Detectives

NCERT Solutions for Class 7 English Unit 6 Expert Detectives

Ncert solutions for class 7 english expert detectives – free pdf download.

NCERT Solutions for Class 7 English Unit 6 Expert Detectives are provided here for your reference, with each and every question of the textbook answered in detail. These NCERT Solutions for Class 7 will be very helpful to students in understanding the pattern in which they have to frame the solutions.

The chapter “Expert Detectives” is about two siblings who are concerned about a person whom they find very strange. The person never has visitors to his home, does not have friends, does not talk to people, is very gaunt and pays nice tips to Ramesh, who brings his food to his room. Thoughts about the strange man grow even messier when the siblings get to know that there is a specific visitor who comes every Sunday during lunchtime to meet the man. Students who are not able to answer the questions in the textbook can use the NCERT Solutions from BYJU’S.

To help students frame authentic answers, the experts have designed the solutions in a comprehensive manner. The solutions are drafted in simple language in order to help students understand the theme of the chapter irrespective of their grasping power. You can download these NCERT Solutions for Class 7 English in PDF format for free by clicking the link provided below.

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EXPERT DETECTIVES

NCERT Solutions Class 7 English – Unit 6

Expert Detectives

Comprehension Check

Answer the following questions:

Question 1. What did Nishad give Mr Nath? Why?

Answer: Nishad gave a bar of chocolate to Mr Nath. He did so because of the lean appearance of Mr Nath, which suggested that he was starving.

Question 2 . What is “strange” about Mr Nath’s Sundays?

Answer: The strange thing about Mr Nath’s Sundays is that there was a particular visitor who used to visit every Sunday, and both of them used to have lunch together.

Question 3: Why did Nishad and Maya get a holiday?

Answer: Nishad and Maya got a holiday because of the bad weather. It was raining heavily, and the streets of the city were flooded with the downpour.

Working with the text

Answer the following questions.

Question 1 . What does Nishad find out about Mr Nath from Ramesh?

Arrange the information as suggested below.

• What he eats

• When he eats

• What he drinks, and when

• How he pays

Answer: Nishad finds out the following about Mr. Nath from Ramesh:

• He is not very particular about what he eats. He eats two chapattis, dal and a vegetable.

• He eats in the morning and evening.

• He drinks two cups of tea, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.

• He pays in cash and also gives tips to Ramesh.

Question 2. Why does Maya think Mr Nath is a crook? Who does she say the Sunday visitor is?

Answer: Maya thinks that Mr Nath is a crook because he does not have any friends even after spending more than a year at the place. Also, he does not talk to anyone and does not have any visitors at any time except for the visitor who meets him on Sundays.

She says that the Sunday visitor is his partner in crime and visits him on Sundays to give him his share of money.

Question 3. Does Nishad agree with Maya about Mr Nath? How does he feel about him?

Answer: No, Nishad does not agree with Maya about Mr Nath. He thinks that Mr Nath is a lonely and poor person who is starving. He thinks that Mr Nath is a kind person who, despite having less money for himself, gives tips to Ramesh.

Working with language

Question 1. The word ‘tip’ has only three letters but many meanings.

Match the word with its meanings below.

(i) finger tips – be about to say something

(ii) the tip of your nose – make the boat overturn

(iii) tip the water out of the bucket – the ends of one’s fingers

(iv) have something on the tip of your tongue – give a rupee to him, to thank him

(v) tip the boat over – empty a bucket by tilting it

(vi) tip him a rupee – the pointed end of your nose

(vii) the tip of the bat – if you take this advice

(viii) the police were tipped off – the bat lightly touched the ball

(ix) if you take my tip – the end of the bat

(x) the bat tipped the ball – the police were told, or warned

(i) finger tips – the ends of one’s fingers

(ii) the tip of your nose – the pointed end of your nose

(iii) tip the water out of the bucket – empty a bucket by tilting it

(iv) have something on the tip of your tongue – be about to say something

(v) tip the boat over – make the boat overturn

(vi) tip him a rupee – give a rupee to him, to thank him

(vii) the tip of the bat – the end of the bat

(viii) the police were tipped off – the police were told, or warned

(ix) if you take my tip – if you take this advice

(x) the bat tipped the ball – the bat lightly touched the ball

Question 2: The words helper, companion, partner, and accomplice have very similar meanings, but each word is typically used in certain phrases. Can you fill in the blanks below with the most commonly used words? A dictionary may help you.

(i) business ____________

(ii) my ____________ on the journey

(iii) I’m mother’s little ____________.

(iv) a faithful ____________ such as a dog

(v) the thief’s ____________

(vi) find a good ____________

(vii) tennis/ golf / bridge ____________

(viii) his ____________ in his criminal activities

Answer: (i) business partner

(ii) my companion on the journey

(iii) I’m mother’s little helper

(iv) a faithful companion such as a dog

(v) the thief’s accomplice

(vi) find a good helper

(vii) tennis/ golf / bridge partner

(viii) his accomplice in his criminal activities

Question 3: Now let us look at the uses of the word break. Match the word with its meanings below. Try to find at least three other ways in which to use the word.

(i) The storm broke – could not speak; was too sad to speak

(ii) daybreak – this kind of weather ended

(iii) His voice is beginning to break – it began or burst into activity

(iv) Her voice broke and she cried – the beginning of daylight

(v) The heat wave broke – changing as he grows up

(vi) broke the bad news – end it by making the workers submit

(vii) break a strike – gently told someone the bad news

(viii) (Find your own expression – Give its meaning here.)

(i) The storm broke – it began or burst into activity

(ii) daybreak – the beginning of daylight

(iii) His voice is beginning to break – changing as he grows up

(iv) Her voice broke and she cried – could not speak; was too sad to speak

(v) The heat wave broke – this kind of weather ended

(vi) broke the bad news – gently told someone the bad news

(vii) break a strike – end it by making the workers submit

(viii) the machine broke down – the machine underwent a sudden physical damage

Question 1. Play detectives with each other. Find a person in your class (or some other acquaintance) to speak to. Find out the answers to the questions given below. Be careful to ask your questions in a polite and inoffensive way. Do not force the person to answer you. Then allow the person to ask you the same questions.

(ii) What newspapers or magazines does the person read?

(iii) How long has the person lived at the current address?

(iv) What does she/he do during the day, i.e. the daily routine?

(v) What do neighbors and friends say about the person?

(vi) Who are his/her visitors and what are his/her eating habits? (You can ask a few others about this.)

(vii) What do you think about the person?

Answer : Do it yourself.

Question 1. Who do you think Mr Nath is? Write a paragraph or two about him.

Answer : I think Mr Nath is just an ordinary man who is probably not eating well. He might be an introvert which is why he does not have friends and visitors. He might enjoy being alone more than having the company of many others.

He is very lean because he does not take meals properly. He is not even particular about the food he eats. He just needs two chapattis, dal and a vegetable. He consults Nishad’s mother, who is a doctor. This means that he has some ailment. That can be another reason why he prefers to be alone.

He also has scars on his face, making people think he is a crook. But, the scars might be from some accident. The visitor who comes every Sunday might be a family member who ensures that Mr Nath is keeping well.

Question 2. What else do you think Nishad and Maya will find out about him? How? Will they ever be friends? Think about these questions and write a paragraph or two to continue the story.

Answer : I think Nishad and Maya will find out that Mr Nath is a good person and an introvert. They might even get to know that Mr Nath is working from home because he does not keep well. That is the reason he prefers being at home and not having visitors.

They might become friends later, especially Nishad can be a good friend to him because he was in his favour from the beginning. Maya would have regretted to have doubted him to be a criminal.

Question 3. Conducting a Survey

Step I: Study the following questionnaire and discuss the points in small groups.

Step II: Collect information. Contact people in the school/your locality and put these questions to them.

Tick-mark (􀀳) their answers in the relevant column.

Step III: Analyze the results in the group by asking

• How many people think that a home is a place where you feel secure and happy?

• How many people think that a home isn’t a place where you feel secure and happy?

• How many people don’t know about it?

Step IV: Present a brief oral report on the result of your survey. Use phrases such as the following

• Most people think that…

• Few people think that…

• Hardly anyone thinks that…

• No one thinks that…

NCERT Solutions for Class 7 English Unit 6

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Professor Kunal Parker publishes essay on what originalism can teach historians

By Miami Law Staff Report 09-18-2024

Professor Kunal Parker , Miami Law’s associate dean for intellectual life and dean’s distinguished scholar, recently published an essay, “ What Originalism Can Teach Historians: History as Analogy, Means-Ends Tests, and the Problem of History in Bruen ,” in the Notre Dame Law Review . He also co-organized a conference at Oxford University titled "Law as Historicized Critique: Celebrating Chris Tomlins," a conference dedicated to the exploration of themes in the work of Christopher Tomlins, a legal historian at Berkeley.

Parker’s teaching areas and interests include American Legal History, Estates and Trusts, Immigration and Nationality Law, and Property. In addition to his recent book, The Turn to Process , (Cambridge University Press), Parker has published two other books:  Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America  (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), and  Common Law, History, and Democracy in America, 1790 - 1900: Legal Thought Before Modernism  (Cambridge University Press, 2011). 

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