National Center for Missing and Exploited ChildrenNicholas Barclay was 13 years old when he vanished in San Antonio, Texas.
In 1994, 13-year-old Nicholas Barclay went missing while walking home in San Antonio, Texas. Three years later, he appeared to reemerge in Europe — but the story only got stranger from there.
Though Nicholas was seemingly returned his family, something was off. He seemed much older. His eye color had changed. He spoke with a French accent. Though he accounted for these changes by claiming that he had been held captive by a sex trafficking ring, something was not adding up.
Finally, the truth came out: the person who returned to Texas was not Nicholas Barclay, but a 23-year-old Frenchman named Frédéric Bourdin.
Nicholas Barclay Disappears
On June 13, 1994, 13-year-old Nicholas Barclay disappeared while walking home from playing basketball with some friends. At first, his family wasn’t unduly alarmed. As KSAT reports, Nicholas had recently gotten into trouble for threatening a teacher, stealing a pair of shoes, and breaking into a convenience store. He had a court hearing scheduled for June 14, and his family initially assumed that Nicholas had run away to avoid it.
Before long, however, it became clear that Nicholas had vanished.
YouTubeNicholas Barclay in an undated photograph.
The next few years brought few updates. At one point, Nicholas’ brother claimed he had seen Nicholas trying to break into the family garage, but the police doubted his story. In any case, there was no sign of Nicholas at the house, and no further clues about the missing boy’s whereabouts emerged.
Until 1997. Then, the police received a surprising phone call from a man in Europe. The man told them that Nicholas Barclay had been found. He claimed that the boy had been rescued from a child sex trafficking ring, and that he was currently at a shelter in Linares, Spain.
Nicholas Barclay’s sister flew to Spain to see him, confirmed that it was him, and brought him home to his family in Texas.
But then the story took a strange twist.
Nicholas Barclay Returns — Or Does He?
Three years after he vanished, Nicholas Barclay was welcomed back home by his family. Though he seemed older than 16, spoke with a French accent, and had brown eyes (Nicholas had blue eyes), his family didn’t seem to question these changes. Nicholas said he was kidnapped by a child sex trafficking ring, who had changed his appearance.
His family accepted that surviving such an ordeal could change someone. And the boy who appeared in their home did have Nicholas’ tattoos, though other parts of him were different. However, a local private investigator named Charlie Parker was suspicious from the start.
As he told The Independent, he went to the Barclay family home alongside a television news crew after the story of his reappearance broke. But the boy who claimed to be Nicholas struck him as odd.
YouTubeFrédéric Bourdin, the man who impersonated Nicholas Barclay for months.
“He was creepy,” Parker recalled. “He was. But I just sat in the chair, and… I was fortunate enough that there was a picture on the right there of the real Nicholas Barclay. And he had blueish gray eyes, and… it didn’t gel.”
Parker knew that people could lie, but that their ears would tell the truth. And by comparing the ears of Nicholas Barclay and the person who claimed to be him, he became further convinced that the Nicholas Barclay who had returned to Texas was an impostor.
Five months later, Parker got the impostor to confess. In March 1998, at a diner in Texas, he admitted that his real name was Frédéric Bourdin. He was 23 years old, from France, and wanted by Interpol.
Frédéric Bourdin, The French ‘Chameleon’
Born in 1974, in Paris, France, Frédéric Bourdin had an unhappy, lonely childhood. He began to invent aliases for himself at a young age, thrilled with both the con and the grand reveal of the truth. Before long, however, he had gotten in trouble with the law, and Interpol had his information on file.
By 1997, Bourdin was in trouble. As The Guardian reports, he was staying in a youth home in Linares, Spain, but had only 24 hours to prove to a child-welfare judge that he was a teenager (he wasn’t). Bourdin needed to escape. So he called the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Masquerading as the head of the Linares shelter, Bourdin said that a frightened boy with an American accent had appeared. He gave a description of himself, and the organization suggested that it could be Nicholas Barclay.
Bourdin then claimed that the lost child was, in fact, Nicholas. And he transformed himself into the missing Texas teeanger by dying his hair blond and asking a friend to give him makeshift versions of Nicholas’ tattoos.
YouTubeThe real Nicholas Barclay posing by a Christmas tree.
At first, he was eagerly welcomed by Nicholas’ family. But as Parker began to press him about his identity, Bourdin also struggled to keep up the charade. The weight of being someone else — instead of one of his inventions — had started to get him. Meanwhile, he had begun to wonder if Nicholas’ family knew more about his disappearance than they were letting on.
“I know that God punished me by sending you to me,” Nicholas’ mother purportedly screamed at him at one point.
The pressure became too much, even for the conman. Frédéric Bourdin admitted his true identity to Parker, and was subsequently arrested.
But what happened to the real-life Nicholas Barclay?
The Mystery Of Nicholas Barclay’s Fate
To date, no one knows what happened to Nicholas Barclay. But, after his arrest, Frédéric Bourdin suggested that Nicholas’ mother, Beverly, and his older brother, Jason, might have been involved in his disappearance. Bourdin suggested that they had known from the beginning that he was an impostor, but had accepted him to conceal their guilt.
Indeed, Beverly later failed a polygraph test about Nicholas’ disappearance, and Jason died from an overdose of cocaine after Bourdin’s arrest, which some have taken as a sign of his guilt. But no one in the family has ever been charged with Nicholas Barclay’s disappearance. And Beverly, speaking to The Guardian, said that they accepted Bourdin into their home because they had convinced themselves that he could be Nicholas.
“We just kept making excuses – that he’s different because of all this ugly stuff that had happened,” Beverly said. “[But he] just didn’t act like my son.”
Picturehouse EntertainmentFrédéric Bourdin in the 2012 documentary The Imposter about his impersonation of Nicholas Barclay.
As for Frédéric Bourdin? In September 1998, he plead guilty to obtaining and possessing false documents, and perjury, and was sentenced to six years in prison. But even after he was released, he continued to create false identities for himself. Though he’s married today, with a family of his own, he has never disavowed his shifty past.
Meanwhile, Nicholas Barclay — the real Nicholas Barclay — is still missing. He has not been seen since June 1994, and his fate remains unknown.
After reading about the disappearance of Nicholas Barclay and his impostor Frédéric Bourdin, read about the case of Bobby Dunbar, another baffling disappearance. Then, check out some of history’s most mysterious disappearances.
The post The Bizarre Story Of The Missing 13-Year-Old In Texas Who Came Back As A French Conman appeared first on All That’s Interesting.
