fiction.wikisort.org - Writer

Stéphane Bourgoin (born 14 March 1953)[1] is a French true crime writer. He presented himself as an expert on serial killers for many years, until he admitted in 2020 that he had lied about many of his claimed experiences.[2][3]

Stéphane Bourgoin
Bourgoin in 2011
Occupation	Author film producer criminologist
Language	French
Nationality	French
Genre	True crime
Subject	Serial killers

Life

Stéphane Bourgoin was born in Paris on 14 March 1953,[1] one of four children of Jean Bourgoin [fr], a military engineer. He was expelled from high school three times and does not hold any diploma.[4]

Bourgoin claimed to have moved to the United States in the early 1970s, where he allegedly found his then-girlfriend murdered, raped and mutilated by a serial killer in 1976 in Los Angeles. He said that the event led him to try to understand what goes on in the mind of serial killers.[5] In 2020, however, Bourgoin confessed that the story was in fact an invention drawn from the case of Susan Bickrest, murdered at age 24 by serial killer Gerald Stano in 1975.[6][7]

Works

Bourgoin has written 75 books and produced dozens of documentaries,[2] with his books selling thousands of copies in France.[7][8] He was regarded as France's best known serial killer expert. He occasionally lectured police on the subject,[6][9] and critiqued media depictions of serial killers.[10]

Some of his thousands of Facebook followers formed a group to more thoroughly investigate Bourgoin's stories, and found that many appeared to have been invented or plagiarized.[5] They published their findings in 2019, and after French media covered the issue Bourgoin confessed; in 2021 he told a Guardian reporter that he had in fact met only 30 rather than 77 serial killers. In response to the scandal, Bourgoin was dropped by his publishers and producers.[3]

References

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