MURDER, HE WROTE
One night in the early 1990s, during a dinner party at his home in Paris, Stéphane Bourgoin, an author and bookseller then of no particular renown, began to hold forth on the matter of serial killing. Bourgoin’s guests were barely familiar with the concept. They listened, horrified, nauseated and rapt. Bourgoin told them about an FBI unit of so-called profilers trying to help catch such killers, about the traits of the typical killer, and about some of the more awful specimens in the United States.
“We were utterly captivated,” Carol Kehringer, who was among Bourgoin’s guests that night, recalled recently. Kehringer was then in her 20s, starting out as a television producer. “I started asking him all sorts of questions,” she said, “and the more he spoke, the more I thought to myself: ‘We’ve got to do a film!’”
Bourgoin was a friend of Kehringer’s parents, and Kehringer had known him since she was a child. She was fond of him, but also found him to be “a bit out of sync”, she said, “always in his own little world”. Bourgoin ran Au Troisième Oeil – “The Third Eye” – a tiny second hand bookshop specialising in mysteries and crime. He fitted the part. His frame was slight and boyish, but he had grown rather doughy by his late 30s, with a pot belly and a pallid complexion that suggested, along with his spectacles, a sedentary life in the half-light of the margins. Before the bookshop, he had been an assistant on the sets of a few pornographic movies. He spoke in a small, satiny voice; there was something vaguely spectral about him. Yet he tended to grow quite animated – blue eyes shimmering, his speech breathy and fervent, a mischievous smile spreading over his lips – when discussing his pet interests. These skewed sharply toward the bizarre and, increasingly, the gruesome.
Bourgoin was a lover of cinema, and the walls of his apartment were lined with an immense collection of VHS cassettes. Among these was a hand-labelled series of recorded newscasts, showing all manner of accidents and natural disasters. He kept a trove of photographs of cadavers in various states of mutilation, which he liked to show around. “He was a charming young man,” a friend from that period told me, “who had an extreme attraction to the macabre.”
Yet Kehringer also knew him to be a “walking library”, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of his subjects. That evening, for every question she asked about serial killers, Bourgoin offered an extensive response. Before leaving the dinner, she asked him to write up a pitch for a documentary, and soon enough they were at work together on a film. In the fall of 1991, Bourgoin, Kehringer and a small production team flew to the US for the shoot.
They began in Quantico, Virginia, with the FBI’s serial crime unit. The head of the unit was a renowned psychological profiler named John Douglas. He had been a consultant on the Hollywood adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs and the film had been released that year to great acclaim. The chance to speak to a small French film crew did not seem to fill Douglas with awe.
