France, May 2020
Stephane Bourgoin is France’s most famous expert on serial killers, the author of more than 75 books and dozens of TV programmes. He was so highly regarded that he acted as a guest lecturer at the national Police Academy.
But now he has confessed that his work was based on many lies, after an anonymous internet collective 4e Oeil (Fourth Eye) reported that many of his books had been plagiarised from books published in English, and that there are inconsistencies between facts in his various books.
“It is true that when I was in the public eye I sometimes happened to embellish, to extrapolate, to exaggerate my importance because I always had the deep feeling of not really ‘being loved.” He told Le Parisien.
One of the worst examples of his lies what that he claimed a woman murdered in Los Angeles in 1976 was his wife, when in fact she was just someone he had met a few times. Bourgoin also falsely claimed he had met Charles Manson.