cover of episode Serial Killer Grifter | Part I

Serial Killer Grifter | Part I

Publish Date: 2022/9/26
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Sachi, did you ever go through like a real true crime phase? And I mean like murder story true crime. When I was 15, I found all of the Annie serial killer documentaries on YouTube and I watched them several times over and over again. Okay, well, around the same age, I read Helter Skelter for the first time. Yeah.

It's like a rite of passage for women who are like have a higher likelihood of being murdered. Yeah. Everyone does love a good trashy true crime story.

I guess the question I have is like, who gets to tell those stories and how were those stories told before podcasts? Which I guess Helter Skelter and A&E on YouTube. Yeah, and cops. I mean, cops and prosecutors got to control the stories. Okay. I have a story about the prototype for all true crime podcasts. A weird nerd with questionable qualifications who turned his morbid obsession into a shockingly successful career.

Is it me? Hey, it does sound like us. It's 1991 and Carol Keringer is far from home.

She's a young, ambitious French TV producer, and she's in Florida working on a documentary about serial killers. It's a perfect time for it. The Silence of the Lambs has just come out, and it's a huge global hit. Why do you think he removes their skins, agents, darling? Throw me with your acumen. Serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, who was caught just a few months earlier, have been terrorizing the country. People are both horrified and fascinated.

They're desperate for insight into the twisted minds of people who kill again and again. We all think we're going to be able to make sense of it somehow. Well, Carol sits down to review some sensitive footage that one of her collaborators, Stéphane Bourgon, shot at a nearby prison.

Stéphane's a stocky, pale French guy in his 30s, and he's an expert on serial killers. He's read everything and has an encyclopedic memory for the details of every case. Carol and Stéphane have known each other for a long time, and Carol thinks that they share the same approach. They've agreed that their documentary will give insight into the psychology of these murders, not sensationalize the details of the crimes themselves.

But when Carol hits play on the tape, she is shocked by what she sees. Stefan sits across from a serial killer named Gerard Schaefer at Florida State Prison. He's a former sheriff's deputy convicted of murdering two women and suspected of killing dozens more.

With his round face, thick 70s glasses, and vacant smirk, he's a perfectly unsettling subject for Carroll's documentary. He also kind of looks like a malicious mirror image of Stefan. The interview is a big deal. Carroll sees it as an opportunity to delve into Schaefer's psyche and understand a serial killer.

But that's not exactly what happens. Instead, Stefan has Schaefer describe the murder in lurid detail. Schaefer tells him about his time with Ted Bundy, swapping stories about their horrific crimes. Schaefer recounts taunting Bundy about which one of them had killed more people. Listen to this from their interview. He told me that he had followed my case and that he had killed two girls in Washington.

as a copycat crime, so to speak. I discerned that he was concerned about the number, and it was my own way of needling him back by saying, I'm the best, Ted. You're going to fry, and I'm going to be here, and I'll be the best.

God, it's messed up, eh? I'm stressed. So Stefan asks question after question about killer fiction, Schaefer's book of supposedly fictional descriptions of murders. And he listens with excitement as Schaefer describes all the fan mail he got, so much that he decided to write a second book beyond killer fiction. People were writing and saying, wow, this is so terrible. This is so disgusting. Can I get some more?

After the interview, the two men pose together for a photo. They're grinning, arms around each other. And Carol has a sinking realization that Stefan, her supposed guide to the world of serial killers, isn't an expert at all. He's a fanboy.

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This is a story about our collective fascination with violent graphic murder. All the books, TV shows, movies, and podcasts that have ballooned into the massive and very lucrative true crime industry. They all capitalize on humanity's need to look.

And I'm not excluding us from that category. Sarah, you know how much I love a car crash. I know. We're rubberneckers. Today, I'm going to tell you the story of a guy who managed to build a decades-long career out of a morbid fascination. He got in on the true crime wave at exactly the right moment. He convinced people that he can make sense of serial killers and never shied away from any of the very gory details.

This is The Serial Killer Grifter, Part One. All right, Saatchi, let's leave Florida behind and take a trip to Paris in the 1960s. Charles de Gaulle is the president. French new wave cinema is influencing artists all over the world. And Stéphane is a teenager on his way home from school, the prestigious Lise Carnot. He's walking home alone because he doesn't have many friends.

He's a pretty dweeby kid. He's shy, wears glasses, and he's a little intense, and he mostly keeps to himself. Stéphane makes it back to his family's apartment in a posh part of Paris' 17th arrondissement. He enters a building and is approached by a stranger. She's almost a decade older than Stéphane, and she tells him she's been waiting for him. It's all very mysterious and noir.

Her name is Claude-Marie Duguay, and she drops a bomb on Stéphane. She says she's his half-sister, and that for years, Stéphane's father, Jean, has kept a secret family with the mistress on the other side of Paris. In the same city? Same city, baby.

Stefan's taken aback, but maybe not as shocked as you'd think. Because though this kind of deception should be earth shattering, having a secret family might actually be the least shocking thing about his dad's extraordinary life. Get this. Jean was a hero of the French resistance in World War II and served in the French government in exile. Later, he was an engineer who helped UNESCO literally pick up and move Egyptian temples away from the Nile to avoid flooding.

He's well-known and very fancy, which is why Stefan grows up with live-in servants. But his globe-trotting job also means he's away from his family all the time. There's even a rumor that he was a high-level intelligence officer after the war. Okay, so he's a spy? Maybe. But honestly, Jean might not even be the most impressive member of the family. Stefan's mother, Franziska, also resisted the Nazis. Probably. Probably.

Probably? You need to be sure. This is not a probably situation. Well, okay. Francisco was a high-powered interpreter at the German military base on the French port of St. Malo. German forces suspected her of acting as an informant, and she actually was tried for treason, but she was acquitted.

A newspaper called her the Mata Hari of St. Malo. Okay, normal stuff, normal family, normal shit. Just like our families. Okay, go on. Yeah, I mean, his parents are so accomplished and it hasn't always been easy for Stefan to live up to their expectations. He confides in Claude Marie about his insecurity and they stay in touch. They write letters and meet up every once in a while.

Stéphane wants to find his passion, so he sets out to pursue the first major love of his life, movies. He's determined to make his mark on that world, no matter who he has to cross along the way. Fast forward a decade to 1975. This is when, according to The Guardian, a young film enthusiast named Alain Schlokhoff is building a niche empire.

His magazine, L'Ecran Fantastique, has been around for six years. And the film festival he founded, the Paris International Fantastic Film and Science Fiction Festival, is gaining traction in its third year. Sachi, I couldn't find a picture of Alain from that time, but here's what he looks like today.

I mean, this is exactly what I would picture for a film festival guy. Oh, he's wearing a fedora. Yeah, this is the kind of guy you see at any Q&A at the end of like a screening. Yeah, he doesn't have a question, but he does have a comment. Yeah. And Alain has a new assistant, a recent high school dropout named Stéphane Bourgoin.

Stefan's made a name for himself in this subculture by writing for Alain's magazine. The magazine and the film festival focus on fantastique, a blend of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Stefan is decidedly on the horror end, and like any good nerd, he has several odd collections to prove it.

He keeps photos of mutilated dead bodies and collects news footage of disasters. And he tells anyone who will listen that his mother's first husband, a German man, was decapitated by the Nazis. Okay, cool. So textbook weirdo shit. Yeah, it's like normal small talk, you know? And he has an encyclopedic knowledge of movies and a trick he uses to see them for free.

He takes a razor blade and glue and painstakingly repairs old tickets so he can scam his way back into the theater. It's clever, but unnecessary. Stefan's family is super rich. He can probably afford as many movie tickets as he wants.

This is like the thing that we always find in these scammer stories where it's like just telling the truth is actually less labor than the scam itself. I know it's actually so stupid, but Alain's focused on setting up this year's film festival. He's in London having a meeting with a director and the director mentions he's planning to send over the film reel Alain requested. But Alain hasn't requested that film. He actually hasn't asked for any movie.

The director's confused. He runs off to his office and brings back a letter. It's a request for the film written on Alain's letterhead, but signed by Stéphane. Oh my God, see, it's so much work. It's so much work. So when Alain returns to Paris, he finds out that Stéphane has been trying to organize a competing film festival behind his back. Needless to say, Alain distances himself from Stéphane, and Stéphane's festival is a failure. ♪

But, Stéphane is determined to find his way into the movie business however he can. So, he pivots to a new subculture. For a while, he works in the adult film industry as an on-set assistant and a writer for movies like Extreme Close-Up and Johnny Does Paris. Those sound like great films. They sound like classic films. Yeah, Oscar-winning pictures. And,

And he's about to find himself thrust into something darker, bloodier, and even more provocative than the most out there fantastique.

It's the late 1970s. The year is a little hazy, but I guess it's probably a year or two after Stéphane's falling out with Alain. Stéphane has just gotten back from living abroad in America, and now he's in Monaco hanging out with his half-sister, Claude Marie. She lives there now, and her balcony looks over the street where Formula One race cars speed along in the Monaco Grand Prix.

Claude Marie and Stéphane catch up. And Stéphane says that during his trip to America, he had a whirlwind romance with a woman named Hélène, like Helen in English. But this romance ended suddenly and tragically. He tells Claude Marie that Hélène was brutally murdered and dismembered. Oh, boy. Claude Marie is obviously shocked, and she tells Stéphane that she's sorry. But...

What else can she say? She doesn't probe any further and Stefan doesn't offer any more details. But he's plagued with this horrific tragedy because Hélène wasn't murdered by just anyone. She was the victim of a serial killer. Stefan hadn't realized that serial killers even existed. But after this, he sets out to learn everything about them.

And he's not alone. The concept of serial killers is still fairly new, and the world sees it as a very American phenomenon. Around this time, the son of Sam is plastered across newspaper headlines, and Ted Bundy is awaiting trial and plotting his infamous escape from a Colorado courthouse. God, the 70s were lousy with serial killers. It's amazing anybody made it out of that decade alive. It was a true moment in time. It's a

Stéphane's tragic loss turns into a driving obsession. And this fixation will set Stéphane on the course of coming face to face with the real deal, convicted serial killers. After his trip to Monaco, Stéphane is back in Paris. It's the late 1970s and he's hired to manage a used bookstore called Au Troisième Oeil.

That translates to the third eye. It's exactly what you picture when you think of a tiny used bookstore in Paris. A narrow space packed to the ceiling with first editions, pulp novels, rare fanzines. How romantic. It's not romantic, actually, because the third eye focuses on crime.

So nonfiction accounts of crime and crime fiction with a dash of mystery and science fiction. And it's the hub of true crime obsessives in Paris. Readers and writers too. In other words, it's the perfect place for Stefan. All right. Well, a lot of people like consuming this stuff, but do his coworkers know about his real life experiences with serial killers? No.

It doesn't seem like he talks much about Hélène during this period of his life. The woman he casually mentioned was dismembered? Yeah, Hélène, his lover in America who was killed and dismembered by a serial killer. Got it. Yeah.

It's kind of like he's finally found his place and he spends the next decade making the bookstore his world. He continues writing and in an article for a small crime literature publication, he identifies serial killers as a new kind of cultural phenomenon and uses all the knowledge he's gained to fashion himself into a self-taught expert.

We're familiar with this kind of bookish true crime nerd now, but Stefan was one of the first to ever actually do it. And over the years, he's become an almost mythic character at the third eye. Inside the cramped store, he's impossible to miss. One client later compares his presence at the bookstore to a spider sitting at the center of its web.

I picture him as basically living in his own sitcom, chatting up France's crime writers and other superfans. And for the next decade, Stéphane becomes the center of the French true crime scene. And he's even immortalized on the page. A few French crime writers actually add characters to their books who are clearly based on him. "Sachi, you're an author. Why haven't you put me in a book yet?"

Oh, you simply are an uncompelling character. Okay, that's fair. Yeah. Maybe just put me in an acknowledgement. I would, but I just can never remember your name. Okay, okay, whatever. Well, one of these characters is a bookstore owner with an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure books, which he uses to expose another character's lies. Another is an amateur detective who's more competent than the pros.

Years later, Stéphane adopts his character's name, Etienne Jallure. It becomes a pseudonym when he writes about grisly subject matter, like infanticide. Is he often writing about infanticide? I don't know about often, but it seems like there's nothing gross he won't touch. Right. So Stéphane is dedicating his whole life to the gory and grisly, and he's turned into something of an expert. But he's about to step out from behind a bookshelf...

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for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash Scampod for free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince dot com slash Scampod. Okay, Sachi, it's 1991. Huge year, because that's when we were born. And Stefan is hosting a dinner party at his home in Paris. He holds court going off on his favorite subject, serial killers.

He answers questions and even teases gruesome details. What a great host, huh? Yeah, sounds like a terrific party. Wish I were there. Yeah, just being cornered by this guy who can't stop telling you the most disgusting shit you've ever heard in your life. Hey, did you know that a lady I knew was dismembered? Let me tell you about it. Right? Well, at this point in time, the world's starting to resemble the inside of Stefan's head.

Serial killers like Richard Ramirez, aka the Night Stalker, Ted Bundy, and John Wayne Gacy have become household names. The novel The Silence of the Lambs is a huge hit, so people know of serial killers, and now they want to know more about them. One of the guests who's particularly interested is Carol Carringer. She's a documentary filmmaker, and she is fascinated by Stefan.

She's actually known him since she was a kid because he's over a decade older and he's friends with her parents. She's seen how intense and compelling Stefan can be when he gets going. She's early in her career and eager to make a splash. And she thinks that with Stefan's help, she can make a great documentary about everyone's newest obsession, serial killers, both to advance her career and to tell a deeper, more thoughtful story about killers who've mostly been the subject of gory pulp.

So Carol tells Stefan, we should make a documentary together. But little does she know that she's opening the door to a decades-long scam. Later that same year, Stefan and Carol bring a documentary film crew to Quantico, Virginia, the headquarters of the FBI.

They're here to interview John Douglas, an FBI agent in his late 40s with piercing, deep-set eyes and an impressive comb-over. He's made a name for himself interviewing some of the country's most prolific killers, like Ted Bundy, Edmund Kemper, Charles Manson, and Richard Speck. Ever heard of them?

They're kind of the bad boys of serial killers. All the classics. Yeah, they're big deals. The FBI even uses some of these interviews to create a serial killer database. And then Douglas goes on to create a criminal investigative analysis program, which uses aspects of psychology and forensics to draw conclusions about potential subjects. He basically invented the idea of criminal profiling, which...

I'm sure it's a great thing to have on your conscience as you get older. Yeah, I'm sure he loves that. But that also kind of sounds like he has kind of like helped invent true crime, right? Yeah, that is actually very true. And Douglas has been far more successful than Stefan in making himself into a Hollywood big shot.

Douglas actually consulted on The Silence of the Lambs book and worked closely with the movie's director. And he's a few years away from publishing his own book that will eventually become the Netflix series Mindhunter with its own character based on him. When we know who the criminal is, we can understand what set him off. In a homicide situation, we do the inverse. So...

It's not surprising that as the documentary crew gets ready to film, Douglas is a bit distracted. He's a busy guy and he doesn't have time to waste with these French noobs. So he's showing off, talking about a case from decades earlier when Stefan interrupts and corrects Douglas on some of the basic facts. That stops Douglas in his tracks.

He's been at the FBI for 20 years. And now here's this pale French nerd who knows his stuff better than he does. They're basically two crime fanatics spouting trivia at one another. And Douglas is impressed. Game recognized game, I guess. I mean, you're proud of this? You're proud of this information base? Yeah. And...

After that, the shoot goes really well. Douglas opens up to Stefan and gives an enthusiastic interview about what else, himself and his own work. Carol is thrilled. The documentary is really moving. But this interview is basically a warm-up because once they're done at Quantico, Carol, Stefan, and the rest of the crew head to Florida for the hard part, interviewing actual serial killers.

A few months later in Florida, Carol watches Stefan's overly friendly interview with Gerard Schaefer. But she also has to watch Stefan's interview with Otis Toole. Toole is a drifter who's been convicted of six murders and is likely responsible for many more. Well, Sarah, I don't know if you know this, but Otis Toole is the reason America's Most Wanted exists as a TV program. Are you serious? Yeah. So Otis kidnapped John Walsh's kid and he killed him.

And so then John Walsh started the show because of it, because he wanted like regular people to know who was on this list so that if they saw them, that they could call law enforcement. That's crazy. I knew something happened to his son. I just didn't know it was like a serial killer. That's insane. I know. And you know what? All these men would love to compete with me about the things that like we all know about true crime. But I will win because I am a woman and I have to watch this stuff as a protective measure.

So I know a lot about Otis, including that he was a cannibal. Yes, he claims to have eaten his victims with like a homemade barbecue sauce he made with human blood. And watching the footage, Carol learns that Stefan has gotten a hold of the recipe. Your recipe for the barbecue sauce. I must tell you that I tried it. Was it any good? Yeah, it was very good. Although I didn't try it on the same kind of meat that you did. Oh.

I'm sorry, whom's blood? You know what? I have really been thinking about that.

Like, did he use his own blood? Because that's the only ethical answer to that question. Even then, I'm going to assume it was his blood. Let's hope for the sake of our sanity. Okay. Carol is very upset. Like, she is beyond upset. So she confronts Stefan and Stefan apologizes and promises that he'll get it together for their next and last interview. He says at this time, he'll only ask the questions they agreed to.

Carol has reason to be cautiously optimistic about this last interview. Not because of Stefan, but because of the serial killer. This killer actually shows remorse.

Kemper is nearly seven feet tall and he's got a mustache. He's responsible for murdering 10 people, including his grandparents and his mother. And while doing time in a maximum security facility years earlier, he actually worked in a psychological testing lab. More importantly, Kemper reportedly regrets his crimes. Surely, Carol thinks, this reformed killer will be able to give them the more serious footage they need.

So they fly to California to visit Kemper at a psychiatric prison called the California Medical Facility. Carol stays behind for the interview, but when she reviews the footage, it's clear to her that Stefan, once again, has gone too far. Listen to this. And what were those morbid games that you played with your sister? Oh, geez. Well, the one I remember someone talking about in a book was

was one that was playing gas chamber or electric chair or something.

The funny thing about this interview is when you listen to it, it almost sounds like Ed Kemper is reluctant to tell the details about what he did in his life, which is kind of a rarity for serial killers. Once they got caught, a lot of them like to talk. Yeah, it is weird to hear like a serial killer be like, OK. Yeah, it's like Stefan is asking too many questions and wants too much detail. Yeah. And in the interview, Stefan doesn't just listen to a killer recount their crimes.

He actively pushes Kemper to go into more detail. He also encourages Kemper to spell out his violent fantasies. He totally throws out the questions Carol's approved of and instead goes for satisfying his own morbid curiosity. What was your fantasies at that time? Morbid fantasies? At what, about age eight or nine? Or later on when you said you were thinking all the time about death?

Carol's had enough. She turns off the tape and stops speaking to Stéphane altogether. But they've already got the footage, so the crew completes a documentary. It's called An Investigation into Deviants, and it's set to air on the French TV channel FR3. When it's broadcast in 1992, the French public can't get enough. They're all like,

Stefan has lost Carol, but he's finally gained a whole new audience. And this audience is about to make him even more influential and a whole lot more reckless. After the documentary, Stefan's career takes off like a rocket. Now, as long as he's talking about serial killers, people will believe pretty much whatever he says.

He starts doing other documentaries, and he's all over French TV. He claims to have once done 84 TV appearances in a single month. Honestly, his work ethic is one of the more sympathetic things about Stéphane. The content grind is...

I mean, is this work ethic or does he just really like attention?

And I'm saying that as someone who really likes attention. And works really hard. For attention. It's a snake eating its own tail. He also starts publishing a truly staggering number of books, including individual books on killers like Jack the Ripper and Jeffrey Dahmer. And in 1993, Stefan publishes his magnum opus, Serial Killers. It exhaustively documents all of the killers in his own mental Wikipedia.

The book blows up. He updates it with several different editions. Some of them are a thousand pages long. Each one contains new information and new killers. It reportedly sells a million copies in France and has been translated in 15 different countries. Wow, it's like a farmer's almanac for murderers. It is exactly that. And at this point, even the French government wants to ask him for advice.

Jacques DeLeste, a French general prosecutor, gets interested in Stéphane after he publicly talks about how serial killers aren't an exclusively American phenomenon. He invites Stéphane to speak at a highly selective prestigious school that trains French judges. All right, so he talked his way into becoming an expert who is now training judges? Yes, it's crazy. And it's not just lawyers who are fighting to talk to Stéphane. One of the

One of France's national police forces actually cites Stéphane and its publications to explain their approach to profiling. Stéphane even lectures at a police training academy for years, molding the young minds of France's next generation of cops.

The story is kind of giving me the feeling that nobody knows what they're doing. Like everyone's just in this weird echo chamber of criminal justice and they're all making it up as they go. Yeah. And with the stamp of state legitimacy, Stefan has actually started to influence real investigations. But it's not enough. He doesn't want to settle for being near the John Douglas's of the world. He has to be one of them.

Miki Pistorius is South Africa's first criminal profiler. She's a former journalist with auburn hair and blue eyes, and Miki uses Freudian psychology in her work. When Stefan goes to South Africa in 1999 to make a documentary about her, she talks about her philosophy of avoiding sensationalizing serial killers in the media. Serial killers are very, very normal.

And they have a lot of pain inside them that compel them to do what they do. I am afraid of the answer to this question. Is she related to Oscar Pistorius? She is. Oh my God. I know, right? So Mickey's nephew is Oscar Pistorius, a world champion sprinter famous for being the first double-leg amputee athlete to participate in the Olympics and for murdering his girlfriend. Quite the Wikipedia entry. Well...

Mickey's family issues don't stop there. Her marriage literally fell apart because of the constant pressure from her work as a profiler, which is basically a plot from criminal minds. And Mickey also claims to have cryptesthesia, which basically means that she has psychic powers that allow her to detect serial killers. Stefan can only dream of being this interesting. Okay, well, that is a literal plot from Law & Order SVU.

Man, a lot of inspiration here. While making the documentary, Mickey gives Stefan a manuscript of her autobiography. It's called To Catch a Killer, and it hasn't been published yet. The two keep in touch and they talk on the phone every few months. And on one of these calls, Stefan casually mentions that his latest book is about Mickey.

Mickey is stunned. She had no idea Stefan was writing about her. In English, the book is called Mickey Pistorius, A Woman on the Trail of Serial Killers. But here's the thing. Mickey can't read the book because she doesn't speak French. Oh, okay.

Oh, no. Yeah, it's the kind of thing Stefan could only get away with pre-internet. One Google Translate and Mickey would have figured out that Stefan's book was largely plagiarized from hers. So now Stefan isn't just lying about his own credentials. He's actively stealing other people's work. And he's desperate for the public to pay attention to him, even if it means pulling back the veil on the darkest chapter of his life. ♪

By the early 2000s, Stéphane's an established French expert on serial killers and a prolific author. But people are starting to ask why this socially awkward, intense guy is so interested in serial killers. So he goes public with his origin story. Or at least one version of it. Here he is on France's equivalent of 60 Minutes. A photo of me with my friend Aileen.

He's saying that in 1976, he discovered that his girlfriend had been raped, brutally murdered, and practically decapitated by a serial killer. And I should mention here, Sachi, he's a little inconsistent with how he refers to her. In some interviews, he calls her his wife. In other interviews, he says that they were close friends. He says her name is Aileen, and he shows the camera a photo of himself with a young blonde woman.

Sachi, take a look. I mean, they look like they're in love. They seem happy. They're a young couple gazing at each other. Yeah, it's a photo you'd see in like a documentary or something. Yeah, you can read whatever you'd like to into this photo, I think.

In other interviews, he says that after realizing that there were no books or resources for understanding these criminals, he decided to learn everything he could. And that's how he set off on the path to becoming an expert. It seems sort of fishy that he didn't mention any of this earlier. I mean, the story of Aline comes to define Stéphane in the French media and further propels his rising star.

Once he's able to frame himself as a victim of serial killers, he starts gaining the trust of crime victims and their families. Not just serial killers in law enforcement,

He gets involved with a victim's advocacy group. And these stories bring Stefan even more fame and attention. But while Stefan's story is compelling, it's also packed with details. Details that can be fact-checked. That's important because almost everything we've learned so far is only a version of the truth.

A group of amateur detectives raised on Stefan's work are about to discover that Eileen isn't quite who Stefan claims and that lots of his other work doesn't stand up to real scrutiny. Pretty soon, Stefan is going to get exactly what he wanted. He's about to become the obsessive focus of true crime fans. This is episode one of our two-part series, The Serial Killer Grifter.

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 The Guardian, and The Unraveling of an Expert on Serial Killers, written by Lauren Collins in The New Yorker. Eric Thurm wrote this episode. Additional writing by us, Sachi Cole and Sarah Hagee.

Thank you.

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.

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