Killer Lies: Chasing A True-Crime Con Man is the best of both worlds
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
Fraud, although Stéphane Bourgoin's retailing of himself as an expert on serial killers didn't qualify as a chargeable offense.
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The story
NatGeo's Killer Lies: Chasing A True-Crime Con Man has a lot to recommend it. National Geographic's true-crime content tends towards the straightforward and proficient, and Killer Lies is no different. It's directed by Ben Selkow (Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown and Trafficked, among others); it's got access to case figures and knowledgeable commentators, including Bourgoin himself, and our esteemed colleague Sarah Weinman; and it's based on a meta banger of a longread from April of 2022, Lauren Collins's Bourgoin deep dive for The New Yorker, "Murder, He Wrote."
Collins is a talking-head "plus" in Killer Lies, a three-parter that premieres in its entirety on NatGeo's broadcast channel tonight and hits Hulu shortly thereafter, and the docuseries quite faithfully reproduces what I would call the atmosphere of the New Yorker piece and others like it, carefully researched and ethically presented but not above some swears and side-eye. The question is whether you need an AV version when the original mag joint is so good, and Killer Lies isn't essential, but it is worth your time, for a couple reasons.
Let's start with that straightforward proficiency. It's not exactly rare in the genre, but at the same time, the streaming landscape is absolutely lousy with B/B-plus three-parters, serieses that probably should have gotten made as 112-minute features, but use solid enough visuals and don't contain an objectionable amount of filler. The metric, often, is whether it's got enough pace to keep you from jumping out of the boat and into a Wikihole; Killer Lies faces an added degree of difficulty in that the "original" is a known and respected quantity that the entire true-crime commentariat was discussing two years ago -- and can be read in a fraction of the doc's runtime.
I can't speak for "civilians," but for me, Killer Lies was structured well enough that I didn't check back in with Collins's article until I'd finished the doc, which lays out Bourgoin's beginnings in true crime and serial-killer research, his rise to "titan of the true-crime industry," and the work of the online collective 4ème Oeil (Fourth Eye) to confirm their suspicions about Bourgoin and then to unmask him as a plagiarist and credentials charlatan. It works both for those who haven't heard the story, and those who remember it only vaguely.
It works for those who remember it more clearly, too, because it adds to "Murder, He Wrote" by attempting to grapple with the "industry" Bourgoin became a "titan" of. The damage to the credibility of those who consulted with Bourgoin, or wrote up his achievements unquestioningly – and by extension the damage to profiling's already somewhat battered reputation. The way that Bourgoin's (largely unapologetic) assumption of a victim role both revictimized real survivors and their families, but also throws the entire true-crime entertainment complex into question, and asks whether narrative and informational utility outweighs profiting from others' pain.
Even citizen sleuthing, which in Fourth Eye's case had a salutary effect, net, in that it stopped Bourgoin from continuing to position himself as the French John Douglas…but often proved toxic to the sleuths themselves, in a way that put me in mind of I'll Be Gone In The Dark and the price Michelle McNamara paid for solving the Golden State riddle? True crime is an industry, and like any industry, it has costs, known and hidden.
Killer Lies doesn't contend definitively with that idea, which probably should have had its own discrete episode -- or, let's face it, its own 12-parter – but it takes more time with the idea than most docuserieses, which often nod at these conflicts, then despair of getting their arms around them and quickly move on. And I one hundred percent understand that strat, but it is nice to see a doc tie a rope around its figurative waist and jump into that quicksand to see what might be done.
Like I said, it's not an A-plus, because it is too long and it does do a few structurally clichéd things. (Not to scapegoat Killer Lies for shit every doc series does, most of them far more egregiously, but I would reeeeeally like a 12-24-month moratorium on the "interviewee chair, empty, in the foreground; 'gotcha' interviewee moving around in the back of the shot, out of focus" reveal sequence. "What about the one where we come back from the break and the interviewee is obscured by the clapper bo–" Nope, that one's gotta go too.)
But it's also a nearly ideal adaptation of a magazine longread: faithful enough to replicate the experience in a visual medium, while adding more research or commentary on the broader issues. Give it a look this long weekend.