Stéphane Bourgoin


Stéphane Bourgoin is a French true crime writer. He presented himself as an expert on serial killers for many years, until 2020 when he admitted that he had lied about many of his claimed experiences. Bourgoin had written 75 books and produced dozens of documentaries, with his books selling thousands of copies in France. He was regarded as France's best known serial killer expert. He occasionally lectured police on the subject, and critiqued media depictions of serial killers.

Biography

Stéphane Bourgoin was born in Paris on 14 March 1953, the only child of, a military engineer. He was expelled three times from high school and does not hold any diploma.
Bourgoin has 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 has said that the event led him to try to understand what goes on in the mind of serial killers. 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 the serial killer Gerald Stano in 1975.