A French man considered a top expert on serial killers has been exposed for repeatedly lying throughout his decades-long career — including falsely claiming that his own wife was murdered, according to a report.
Stéphane Bourgoin, who has penned more than 40 books on serial killers, admitted Tuesday to fabricating a number of bald-faced claims on his resume after internet sleuths from anonymous forum 4ème Oeil Corporation questioned his past, the Guardian reported.
The 67-year-old confessed that he never trained with the FBI, interviewed Charles Manson or was a professional soccer player for the Parisian team Red Star, the report said.
“I have reached the moment of coming clean. My lies have weighed me down,” he told Paris Match magazine. “Sometimes I make films in my head.”
And in an even more stunning admission, Bourgoin acknowledged that a story he’d given of his own “wife” being murdered — a tale he used to propel his career — was fake.
He said he based the account off the case of a young woman named Susan Bickrest, whom he briefly knew before serial killer Gerald Stano murdered her in Florida in 1975, according to reports.
“It was bull—t that I took on,” Bourgoin told newspaper Le Parisien. “I didn’t want people to know the real identity of someone who was not my partner, but someone who I had met five or six times in Daytona Beach, and who I liked.”
Over the course of his career, Bourgoin had claimed to have interviewed more than 70 serial killers, but he acknowledges now that he sought out far fewer, according to the reports.
He claimed he was driven by a need for others to like him and believes he needs psychological help to work out his issues.
“I am profoundly and sincerely sorry. I am ashamed of what I did, it’s absolutely ridiculous,” he told Le Parisien.