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Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Scamfluencers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or Apple Podcasts. This is the finale to our two-part series, The Serial Killer Grifter. If you haven't listened to the first episode in the series, what are you doing? I highly recommend you go back and do so.
Sachi, you and I have both been the subject of various internet pylons over the years, correct? I have no idea what you're talking about. I have no memory of that personally. Okay, well, I do. And I will say that we have mostly been innocent.
But isn't it so juicy when someone who you know is shitty finally gets caught? It is. It's the most delicious thing in the world when someone gets their just desserts. Yeah, and the end of Stefan's story is the ultimate gotcha. Because the people who finally brought him down were the same ones he depended on for his livelihood. Extremely online true crime fans.
In 2019, a true crime fan named Charles is scrolling Facebook. One particular post grabs his attention. It's a link to a TV interview with France's top serial killer expert, Stéphane Bourgoin.
Stefan's telling the story of his murdered American girlfriend. Charles has been a fan and observer of Stefan's for years. And Charles isn't his real name, by the way. It's a pseudonym The Guardian uses because Charles works for the French military. Back in the early 90s, when Charles was a teenager, he read Stefan's book on the cannibal killer Jeffrey Dahmer and got hooked on serial killers. Charles has followed Stefan's work ever since. But...
Over time, he started to notice certain discrepancies in his stories. Like, Stefan goes from telling interviewers that he didn't have much time with the serial killer Ed Kemper to saying he talked to Kemper for 300 hours. And then there's the issue of Hélène, who Stefan says was brutally murdered. Well, sometimes Stefan says Hélène was his girlfriend, then his fiancée, and then other times his wife.
And the number of serial killers he says he's interviewed keeps changing.
I don't know why people don't think about the fact that they can get caught in these lies. Like, these are easy lies to get caught in. Yeah, it's kind of sloppy. But Charles is truly fascinated by serial killers, so he reads a ton about them. And over time, he picks up on fishy similarities between Stefan's writing and the work of other experts, ones without Stefan's gift for self-promotion. Charles tries to ignore it, at least until the day he comes across this Facebook post
Because the other people commenting on this post agree with him. Charles scrolls through the comments from former fans of Stefan, all sharing their concerns about his work. Many of them, like Charles, got into true crime because of Stefan's work. And now they have questions. Yeah, for years, they've been tracking Stefan's career. They thought his books would help them understand the minds of serial killers. But instead, they're about to start profiling a new suspect, Stefan himself.
From Wondery, I'm Sarah Hagee. And I'm Sachi Cole. And this is Scamfluencers.
In our last episode, we followed Stéphane Bourgoin as he turned being a weird guy who reads a lot about murder into somehow becoming an expert on serial killers. He even got to interview some of the objects of his intrigue. And soon, French law enforcement was treating him like an actual authority. Ah, well, you know what they say. You gotta love your work. Yes, and if there's anything we know, it's that you have to fake it till you make it. Well, we're going to talk about that.
Stefan rode the global wave of true crime fascination to a life of fame, fortune, and respect. But the worldwide audience he taught to look for clues is about to turn their magnifying glasses back on the expert himself. Never piss off a fandom, Sarah. Never piss off a fandom. This is Serial Killer Grifter Part 2.
The initial Facebook thread that caught Charles' attention gets longer and longer. More and more people are sharing their frustration with Stefan, and eventually, like pretty much any group of people online, it splinters into smaller groups of people who find increasingly petty reasons to dislike each other. First, Charles is a part of a smaller group, but he immediately gets kicked out for insulting an admin. A few people leave with him, and they form a smaller group of seven or eight.
Charles' group names itself the Fourth Eye Corporation, a rift on the Third Eye, the bookstore that Stefan used to run. They even have a logo, and Sachi, I need you to look at this.
God, this is like a lemony snicket Illuminati portrait. It's the outline of an eye and then in the pupil is a shadowy figure wearing a trench coat and a hat on a laptop. Well, like Charles, the other members are all former fans of Stefan who paid close enough attention to his work to notice all the inconsistencies. And they feel betrayed.
Each of them had a different breaking point. One of them is disgusted by a 2015 Facebook post where Stefan claims to possess the remains of serial killer Gerard Schaefer, who was murdered in his prison cell a decade earlier. Not only that, but he offers to send pieces of the body to anyone who's interested. Oh, I don't even know what to say. If you're one of those people who's like, I bought...
some hair that belonged to a murderer or to someone that was murdered. Like, there's something wrong with you. There's something wrong with you. But some of Stefan's claims aren't disgusting. They're just annoying and weird. At one point, he claimed he used to be neighbors with Stephen King. And at another point, he claimed he played professional soccer for seven years. These are the lamest lies I've ever heard in my life. Like, what a waste. If you're going to lie, like, think of something interesting to lie about. Right.
Well, also, it's kind of like, Stefan, we see you. We know you're not a soccer player. We can tell. Well, now that they've found each other, the members of the Fourth Eye decide to do something it seems no one has ever done. Fact check, Stefan.
They review nearly all of Stefan's TV interviews, or at least all the ones they can find. They rewatch his documentaries, they reread his books, and they reach out to everyone, including several former FBI profilers, family members of serial killers, and even the killers themselves.
But as their research intensifies, the inconsistencies pile up. The Fourth Eye members are convinced that all their time and effort is worth it. Because if Stefan's willing to fudge the specifics of some of his stories, then what else is he capable of lying about?
For the rest of 2019, Charles and the other members of the Fourth Eye Corporation revisit huge swaths of Stefan's work, sniffing out gaps and discrepancies. And it's actually shockingly easy to uncover huge lies and contradictions. It's not that Stefan was doing a good job of hiding a scam. It's just that no one thought to look before. Like, remember when we talked about Mickey Pistorius'
the famous criminal profiler from South Africa? Yeah, the one who gave Stefan her memoir and then he ripped it off for his own book about her. Yeah. Well, members of the Fourth Eye Corporation discovered that words aren't the only things Stefan stole from Mickey.
They find a radio interview where Stéphane tells a disgusting story about his time with Mickey. He says they were working together on an investigation when they discovered a serial killer's store of bodies. Stéphane calls it a private cemetery. When crime scene investigators arrive in helicopters, they land too close to the bodies
And the wind blows maggots and chunks of dead bodies all over Stéphane and Mickey. Come on. Okay, it sounds crazy, but it really happened to Mickey Pistorius. Stéphane wasn't there. He just read about it in her book. Ha ha ha!
Wow, what a dumb thing to steal. Mickey Pistorius is still alive. She's in South Africa, and now she's retired after years of solving crimes with her cryptesthesia. Please never forget, that means she has psychic serial killer powers. How could you ever think I would forget any of those details for the rest of my life? Cryptesthesia, a thing that exists. Anyway, Charles and the other members of the Fourth Eye contact Mickey, and they discover that...
Not only was she alone during the maggots flying through the air incident, but Stéphane was never with her for any of her investigations. And Mickey's not the only cop Stéphane has pretended to be friends with. He claimed he trained with the FBI and provided them with hours of interview footage. So in one of their takedown videos uploaded to YouTube, the fourth eye reveals who they reached out to to verify Stéphane's claims. We're not going to make the suspense last any longer.
They email John Douglas, the FBI profiler. And this quote in his response is just so brutal. Sachi, you have to read it. Okay.
Bourgoin is delusional and an imposter. Ooh, right to the point. Yeah, and in his email to Charles, Douglas also says that he's never even heard of Stefan, even though they did meet back in 1991. That interview was crucial to launching Stefan's career and gave him a template for being a camera-ready expert on serial killers. But Douglas is all, I'm not going to do that.
I don't know him. Either he's too embarrassed of his initial encounter with Stefan or their interview left no impression on him at all. Oh God, is it worse to be embarrassing or to leave no impact whatsoever? I don't know what's worse. If someone lied about me and said like, I don't know her or like literally who the hell is she? Yeah, it's all bad.
Well, Douglas tells Charles that he hopes Stéphane is not testifying as an expert in criminal trials in France. But remember, Stéphane was a lecturer at the National Police Academy for at least 10 years, and he still has ties to French law enforcement. Jacques Deleste, the prosecutor who brought him in to lecture at the School for French Judges, tweeted a selfie of him and Stéphane as recently as 2017. So Stéphane,
Stefan obviously still has some sway with cops and judges, but meanwhile, his own fans aren't quite so charmed, and they're about to take a pretty drastic measure to uncover his fraud.
Mickey and John Douglas have been helpful sources for the Fourth Eye, but some of the biggest revelations come from the serial killers themselves. So remember how Stefan offered to send fans pieces of Gerard Schaefer's body? Uh, yeah, literally, how could I ever forget? Well, members of the Fourth Eye Corporation reach out to a member of Gerard Schaefer's family.
This family member confirms that Schaefer was cremated and says that Stefan most definitely does not own the serial killer's remains and that Schaefer's family is shocked by what Stefan has been claiming.
The Fourth Eye also calls a representative for the Circuit Court of St. Lucie County, Florida, to verify whether or not Stefan actually owns the evidence in Schaefer's case. As far as you know, if Mr. Bourgoin claims to have, for instance, the tree, the bark, the piece of wood that the victim was tied to, it's a lie. He does not have the tree limbs that were entered into evidence.
But Sachi, if you can believe it, it gets weirder. Okay, hold on. Let me put on like a full roller coaster seatbelt. Yeah, I'm ready. Okay. Stefan claims to have interviewed a number of famous serial killers, including Charles Manson and Dennis Rader, the BTK strangler. So Fourth Eye members email an even more online serial killer weirdo, the administrator of a website dedicated to Charles Manson.
He goes by the name Gray Wolf. And a side note, Sachi, he reportedly stole Charles Manson's fiance. And I need to show you this article about the drama because there are these paparazzi photos of him with Star, who was with Charles Manson. They look like celebrities.
Charles Manson gave Graywolf his name and he stole his girl. Sarah, who would have thought somebody obsessed with a serial killer would not have a great moral compass? I just thought, you know, some things are sacred. Okay, well, you are an innocent. Well, honestly, I think we need a whole other podcast to dissect the Manson-Thropple drama, but I do need to tell you what happens next with The Fourth Eye. Okay. They reach out to Graywolf and guess what?
Graywolf says he has no record whatsoever of Manson ever meeting with Stefan. Embrace yourself.
Another member of the Fourth Eye writes a letter to Rader, who's in prison in a small town in Kansas. They ask him to confirm that he spoke with Stefan, and he writes back saying, nope, he has no memory of ever meeting Stefan. Nobody wants to fuck with this guy. They're like, literally, who are you? The BTK killer is like sitting in prison being like, I murdered and raped several women, but this guy, I don't know.
I do not want to be associated. Well, inspired by all the cracks they're finding in Stefan's stories, Charles and the other members keep pushing. Their little community has a single driving purpose and it starts to consume them.
Charles becomes so invested in the Fourth Eye's work that his wife gets really pissed. They end up making up, but not all the members are so lucky. One of them is fully dumped over their obsession with Stefan. They know they're on the right track and they're ready to expose Stefan to the world. They start to compile their findings into YouTube videos, and now they turn to Stefan's biggest claim of all: his origin story.
Sven Coquelin is a Belgian member of the Fourth Eye Facebook group. He has short, cropped brown hair that he hides under a gray newsboy hat. He works in logistics for a company that manufactures heat-resistant concrete, including for crematoriums. Sven can't stop thinking about Stefan's origin story. Stefan spent years using the story of his girlfriend's murder as a way to burnish his credentials and gain a following. Sven wonders, what's respectful about that?
So Sven, Charles, and the other members look into the Aileen story. And they discover that Stefan's told a lot of different versions over the years, which is strange for an event you'd think someone would remember pretty well. Stefan claims that he had married Aileen, but there's no record of that anywhere. And there's no serial killer on death row in California who's murdered any victims even close to resembling Aileen. Okay, wait, is Aileen alive?
Well, they compile their findings into the longest Fourth Eye YouTube video yet, a 15-minute exposé. In it, they reveal a bombshell.
There's no evidence whatsoever that Eileen ever existed. In their video, the fourth eye is forced to conclude that Eileen is totally made up. The story is a lie and they won't stop until the world knows it. Oh, fuck off. Fuck off.
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At first, Stéphane doesn't comment on the videos. After all, he's Stéphane Bourgoin, international expert. And these accusers are just randos on the internet. But by the end of 2019, the videos start to catch on in the French true crime community. Stéphane realizes that allegations against him aren't going away. So he decides to take action.
In February 2020, a few months after The Fourth Eye uploads her findings, Stefan engages in one of the most time-honored traditions of our time, a social media post about why he's leaving social media. I really appreciate that even someone as detached from reality like Stefan is going to write like a notes app message on Twitter being like, I need to leave. This is too toxic. Yeah.
While in a long update on Facebook, Stéphane complains about being the victim of an extended harassment campaign. He reiterates his many, many accomplishments and basically says that these online haters are just jealous of his success. He also compares the current climate on social media to Vichy France, the same tense, paranoid, violent environment his parents survived.
Right, right. Because people being mad at you for spending decades lying about your career is the exact same thing as having to evade the Nazis. Same diff. Yeah, it's honestly so wild that he felt emboldened enough to say that in this statement of why he's quitting social media. He said it with his whole chest. And those two fans complaining about the fourth eye videos, he doesn't say that they're the reason he's going offline.
He just has a lot of work to do. In fact, he says he's working on, quote, the most important project of his life. But he doesn't say what the project is. Is it a murder? I mean, you'd think that's kind of the next natural step for him, right? He feels like it's a murder, Sarah. Well, in a win for Stefan, his lawyer is able to briefly explain
get the Fourth Eye videos taken down from YouTube. So, Stéphane has won this battle against his former fans for now, but the cat's out of the bag. And he's about to face his own legal challenge from one of the subjects of his own books.
In 2020, as suspicions are rising against Stéphane, Dahina Leguanon becomes aware of a book she's never heard of. Dahina's in a rare group of people, living survivors of serial killers. In 1982, at the age of 14, she was raped by a French serial killer who was later convicted of killing eight people. And this book capitalizes on her experience. It's part of a series of graphic novels called Stéphane Bergouin Presents the Serial Killers,
which focuses on her rapist, Michelle Fournure. And it features Dahina as a part of the story. Flipping through the book, Dahina is horrified to see an illustrated version of her own kidnapping and rape. So much of the story feels like an indictment of the production of true crime content. Like an illustration. This isn't even the first creepy things Tufan has done to Dahina.
Several years earlier, she met him through an advocacy group that works with survivors of serial killers. Stefan was popular with the group specifically because of his claim to have been married to a victim. And once, he invited Tahina over to dinner at his house. His house is covered in memorabilia, graphic posters, crime scene photography, and even weird dolls.
At one point during dinner, Stefan pranks Dahina by putting a plastic spider on her shoulder. It's super messed up because Dahina developed severe arachnophobia after the trauma of being raped and held captive. And that trauma is very activated by this. She gets the distinct impression that Stefan enjoys setting her off. So when she sees the book, Dahina is shocked and disgusted.
She hires a lawyer to go after the publisher and they have it pulled from the market. Someone has finally started to hurt Stefan's bottom line and it's about to get a lot worse. For someone who normally loves attention, Stefan's been pretty tight-lipped about the specifics of the allegations against him.
But roughly two months after Dahina discovers herself in Stéphane's book, Émilie Lénez, a journalist working for popular French magazine Paris Match, decides to try to interview Stéphane about it anyway.
Emily reaches out and mentions that they're both published by Hachette. So they have something in common. And surprisingly, he agrees to an interview. This man is a glutton for punishment. Like the arrogance knows no bounds. He is. He keeps going. He just can't get the fuck out of his own way.
So they start talking. And they keep talking. They're on the phone with each other for several hours a day, every day for a week. And Emily basically spends a whole time trying to navigate Stefan's web of lies, which seems to get more complicated the further in she gets. Over the course of their long phone calls, Stefan does come clean about some of the basic allegations. For example, he admits that he, quote,
borrowed the story with the helicopters from Mickey Pistorius and inserted himself into it. But he also tells new stories every day, which she then has to go fact check every night before asking him about the new lies the next day. Oh my God, this sounds exhausting. Well, each day, Emily confronts Stefan, saying she's been able to confirm that what he told her the previous day was completely made up. And each day he apologizes to her just before telling her more lies.
He admits that when he's talking in front of a crowd, he tends to exaggerate a little bit. He also admits that his serial killer expertise is largely the result of being self-taught and motivated by his personal obsession. Eventually, he tells her that he, quote, just wants to be loved.
I'm sorry, what does that have to do with any of this? Yeah, it's just like, come on, man. Pathetic. And during one of their conversations, they get to the biggest topic of all, Aileen. And the fourth eye video that suggests she never existed. Stefan bursts into tears. Eventually, he pulls it together enough to give Emily a real answer.
He admits to her that the version of the story he had told for decades was made up. But he insists that there was a real Eileen. Her name was Susan Bickrest, and she was a bartender, a sex worker, and an aspiring cosmetologist whom Stefan met during his time living in the States. She lived in Daytona Beach, Florida, and she was murdered by a serial killer. That just makes me have more questions. Like, why Stefan?
Change her name? Why were the details always sort of shifting? Do they know each other at all? Is she real? Sachi, I know you have a lot of questions. Yeah, we will get to them. Okay. But I will say that for now, Stefan is relieved. Finally, he gets to tell the truth. He tells his fans that the upcoming story in Paris match will exonerate him from the malicious and slanderous claims people have been making about him. And surely this will vindicate him, right? Right.
Charles, Sven and the other members of the Fourth Eye are very excited when they see the headline in Paris match. Stéphane Bourgoin, serial liar? He confesses in match. The article comes out on May 17th, 2020, and it lays out some of the biggest lies Stéphane has told. You've been keeping track, right? I mean, I'm trying, but there's so many. Okay, well, let's review.
Stefan claims to have interviewed almost 80 serial killers, but the real number seems to be somewhere between 8 and 30. Okay, that's a really big gap. Big gap. And Emily repeats Stefan's story that Eileen was based on his brief encounters with a bartender in Daytona Beach named Susan Bickrest, who was murdered by a serial killer. And though he's still being wishy-washy with the details of some of his stories...
Stéphane admits to having stolen at least some of them from Mickey Pistorius, and we know he also stole some from John Douglas. But Charles and his internet sleuths aren't satisfied. All things considered, Emily's story is pretty sympathetic to Stéphane. She takes pains to note that French law enforcement respects and admires Stéphane, and that even though he's plagiarized some stories and embellished some details, he swears he does have expertise.
However, Stefan doesn't see it that way. He goes on Instagram and says that the piece is full of untruths. And according to The Guardian, he takes a page from John Douglas. He says he's never even met Emily. And to be fair, I guess they only did talk on the phone, right?
Interesting argument. But you know what? Sometimes good journalism is the kind where nobody's happy. Wow, do you have experience with that? No, I have no idea what you're talking about. Proceed. Well, Stefan puts up a bit of a fight, but eventually he admits that much of Emily's story is true and that much of his own story is not. The jig is basically up and the engine that kept Stefan's career moving slows to a halt.
His publishers drop him. TV producers, I can only assume, stop calling. Plans for a TV show based on his life get scrapped. Stefan was this close to having his own mind hunter. Uh-oh. I know. It's the consequences of my own actions. Remember how...
Remember how last time we talked about Stefan's influence on the media and cops themselves? Yep. Well, it turns out that criminal profiling itself is pretty much bullshit. Oh, surprising. Yeah, studies show that the profiles built by people like John Douglas aren't that much more accurate than a random person's guesses. But we still have plenty of TV shows and movies that show that these people are special geniuses who can understand the criminal mind.
The collapse of Stéphane's influence and the cratering of his reputation doesn't stop there. Some of his fans decided that Stéphane himself is a serial killer, largely because his old pseudonym, Étienne Jallure, named for a character based on him in another author's book, is almost an anagram of "J'ai tué Eileen" or "I killed Eileen." And while that would be a great twist to this episode,
It's probably not true. Something can't almost be an anagram. It either is or it isn't. Everybody in this story needs to go outside and touch some grass. Everyone just needs to take it down like 12 notches.
But, I mean, you can't blame some of the fans for wondering. Stefan's career, and really the entire true crime genre, is based on doing the most. Whether it's the most disgusting method of killing someone, the most psychologically twisted origin for a serial killer, or the most dramatic turn in an investigation, people always want more.
Though Sven dismisses the possibility that Stefan could be a killer, other true crime fans have been primed to believe stuff like this. And at least in part, Stefan kind of has himself to blame for that. Yeah, I mean, he is very steadily becoming the victim of his own circumstances.
Well, despite everything, some of his loyal fans still support Stefan. As of this recording, he still has roughly 9,500 followers on Instagram. And the official Stefan Facebook group has 3,000 members. In an updated version of his book, Serial Killers, he writes that, I've lost count of the crazies and their overwhelming majority young women who call or write to me with appalling requests. I mean, I...
doubt he feels overwhelmed by all this female attention. Yeah. But I do believe him. You know, women tend to gravitate towards powerful, monstrous men. It's pretty common. Yeah. You know what's weird, though? This is actually kind of like something Gerard Schaefer said. Do you remember the serial killer who smiled at Stefan while decrying how much people crave these like gory murder stories? Yeah. Here he is in an interview with Bourgoin.
— We had so many favorable responses that I decided to write beyond killer fiction, because people were writing and saying, "Wow, this is so terrible. This is so disgusting. Can I get some more?" — Well, maybe there are more similarities between Stefan and the serial killers he loves more than we'd like to admit. Either way, his career as a widely respected expert is over. But there are still some outstanding questions, and The Fourth Eye won't stop digging until they get answers.
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Stefan has finally started to experience the consequences of his decades of fabrications, but it's still not enough for the fourth eye. They don't just want Stefan to be punished, they want the truth. So Sven and other members start researching again. They learn that Susan Bickrest was murdered, but that it didn't happen when Stefan claims it did. They also learn that the killer wasn't caught until 1980, two years later than Stefan had claimed.
And they're actually able to find photos of Susan Bickrest. She looks nothing like the woman in the photos Stefan claims is the real Eileen. Okay, so who is Eileen? Well, according to The Fourth Eye, they determined that the woman in the photograph is most likely porn actress Dominique St. Clair.
Stefan might have met her during his time working in the adult film industry as a writer and on-set assistant. But then again, who knows? So basically, Stefan didn't just embellish a true story about someone he knew. He totally made her up. Of course he did. And with this knowledge, the Fourth Eye keeps trying to get their message out and correct more of Stefan's lies. The group goes on the record with journalists working on longer stories about Stefan's lies and
In particular, Scott Sayre at The Guardian and Lauren Collins at The New Yorker. Both journalists are attempting to create a timeline of what really happened in Stefan's life to whatever degree that's even possible. The fourth eye watches as Stefan seems to pivot to self-publishing his work. He's going to continue working with his version of the truth and be the main character for whoever is willing to buy his story.
Claude-Marie Duguay, Stéphane's half-sister, learns about her brother's history of lying and plagiarism when Emily's article is published in Paris Match. But instead of feeling betrayed, she seems basically fine with Stéphane's distortions, even the initial lie he told her and Monaco all the way back in the late 70s.
When she speaks to the New Yorkers' Lauren Collins, Claude Marie says that she's unsurprised that Stefan has exaggerated the details of his own life so much. And even after all this, Claude Marie is pretty stoic, even accepting of all the lies. She says she thinks of it as Stefan letting her into his own inner world. And even though Claude Marie seems to have come to terms with Stefan's decades of deception, there are still a lot of people who are frustrated with Stefan's version of the truth.
and they're determined to let the world know. The Fourth Eye has wanted a public reckoning with Stéphane from the beginning. In their latest video called Our Response to Stéphane Bourgoin, they call him out. They're asking for a debate, for the chance to present their case and see if Stéphane has any evidence to contradict them.
But even though he's been publicly shamed, they're not that much closer to getting their real goal, getting Stefan to admit to the full extent of his scam. By this point, Charles, Sven, and the rest of the Fourth Eye seem to understand that he'll never publicly fess up.
They continue to watch as Stefan tries his absolute best to move on and to keep writing because even though Stefan managed to keep a scam going for decades, it doesn't actually feel like he did something impressive. He just happened to be in the right place at the right time, tapping into the collective desire for gory details.
Maybe there's a little Stefan Bourgoin out there right now bullshitting their way through a true crime podcast. Oh, Sarah, I have something I've been meaning to tell you. Yeah, let's not get into that. And I don't know if that impulse is going anywhere, even for Stefan.
If you look at his Instagram, you'll see that he's still posting constantly about crime. In July, he posted a picture of a maximum security American prison in Texas where serial killer Tommy Lynn Sells was held until his execution in 2014 and where killer Elmer Wayne Henley is still held today. Like lots of us, he's still fascinated by murder. Even without a book deal or a documentary, he just can't help himself.
Well, Sachi, this is by far the most gruesome story we've done so far. Yeah, this is a rough one. And it ended with a
A vigilante Facebook group? I need to know what you think. I mean, this has really put a terrible taste in my mouth for all true crime. Like I never want to engage with any true crime ever again now. Here's the thing that really struck me. You know, he did legitimately bring true crime to the masses in France, something he could have easily done without lying. Yeah. But he ended up hurting so many people and
and it had real world consequences. He was able to influence actual law enforcement and deal with lawyers and judges or whatever. I just find that so insane. Like he really was nobody. He had no expertise other than just liking something too much. Yeah, well, as ever, the scam was much more work and much more painful than just doing the thing legitimately. I actually
I don't know if that's true for him because he really just made shit up. It would have been so much harder to create these like gory stories that were his own. But he didn't have to have all of the stuff that he was claiming to have. Like if you did 10 hours of interviews with the serial killer, that's a lot. It doesn't need to be 300. If you only talk to Ed Kemper, that's pretty good. You don't have to have spoken to...
Ed Kemper and Richard Ramirez and, you know, Otis Toole. Like, it's not necessary. We don't understand more about
about the pathology of these guys because he lied about 10 extra dudes. Yeah, that is very true. I just don't know what did he hope to gain outside of proximity to serial killers? Like, what does he want? The whole thing about the Susan slash Eileen lie is like, it wasn't enough to just be interested in this stuff, which you can be, that's fine. But he also had to tie himself into it personally. And
And he had to co-op these stories and make them up. And like, we know that the woman in the photo was a real woman and we know Susan was a real woman. And so he just took from them and decided they were going to be boons to his story and his narrative and his interests and his career.
Sarah, did you enjoy getting this taste of hosting a true crime podcast? I did kind of enjoy it. I did not enjoy it. I don't think I had the stomach for it. The trading in grisly details I find very distasteful. Like, it just doesn't do it for me anymore. I think it did when I was like a kid and I was sort of watching and engaging in true crime as a way to
to test my own limits as a child and like getting a sense of the darkest part of the world as I started to enter it on my own. Exactly. But now that I'm like a grown up and I very much recognize the threats that are around me all the time, I don't need this. I don't want it. It's not for me anymore. Yeah, I agree. And I also went through the same thing as a teen where I like read so many books and watched so many documentaries like before there was even this true crime boom thing.
And it was really me like being like, oh my God, like there's this part of the world I don't even know about. Yeah, it's preparatory. Yeah. Well, what do you think the lesson here is? Touch grass. Yeah.
I really think it's just stay out of other people's business. You know, you also like you don't need to know Charles Manson. No. You know what? It's a good lesson for every single day. You don't need to know anything else about Charlie Manson. Don't worry. Just go outside. This is the Serial Killer Grifter Part 2. I'm going to be talking about
I'm Sarah Hagee. And I'm Sachi Cole. We use many sources in our research. A few that were particularly helpful were What Lies Beneath, The Secrets of France's Top Serial Killer Expert, written by Scott Sayre and published in The Guardian, and The Unraveling of an Expert on Serial Killers, written by Lauren Collins and published in The New Yorker. Eric Thurm wrote this episode. Additional writing by us, Sachi Cole and Sarah Hagee.
Jen Swan is our senior producer. John Reed is our producer. Our associate producers are Charlotte Miller and Tate Busby. Sarah Enney is our story editor. Our senior story editor is Rachel B. Doyle. Research by Chisom Peter Jobe. Fact-checking by Gabrielle Jollet. Our music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Freesound Sync.
Adrian Tapia provided audio assistance. Our sound design is by James Morgan. Our executive producers are Janine Cornelow, Stephanie Jens, and Marshall Louis for Wondery. Wondery.
If you like Scamfluencers, you can listen to every episode early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.
