Description
Frédéric Pierre Bourdin is a French serial impostor the press has nicknamed "The Chameleon". He began his impersonations as a child and claims to have assumed at least 500 false identities, three of which have been of actual teenage missing people.
Nicholas Barclay was a 13-year-old boy from Texas who went missing in 1994 after a basketball game with his friends at the neighborhood park. Frederic Bourdin was a 23-year-old man from France who had grown up in a home without love or affection and had taken to a life crime to keep himself afloat.
When Nicholas Barclay first went missing, his family didn’t immediately raise the alarm. Nicholas was a troubled kid and had a court hearing scheduled for the day after his disappearance that would determine if he would be sent to a home for juvenile delinquents. His family simply assumed he had run away to avoid the consequences of the hearing.
Soon, however, it became clear that he was missing. He had only been carrying $5 and as far as anyone knew hadn’t packed any clothing. If he had been planning to run away, his family theorized, he would likely have taken personal items with him. As it was, he had left everything behind.
Police opened a missing person investigation but there were virtually no leads on where Nicholas could have gone. As he had only $5 to his name, the likelihood of him having secured a ticket on public transportation was low as was the possibility of him finding room and board somewhere. It seemed the only explanation was that he’d hitchhiked out of town and if he had, there was even less hope of finding him.
Then, three months later, police received a phone call from Jason Barclay, Nicholas’ uncle. He claimed that he’d seen Nicholas trying to break into their garage, but when police arrived, Jason told them he’d fled. It was the only lead in the case so far though it eventually panned out to a dead end.
The Nicholas Barclay who went missing in 1994 was a blond-haired blue-eyed boy of 13 with a violent temper and an unruly attitude problem. The Nicholas Barclay who was found in Spain in 1997 was a dark-haired brown-eyed boy of 16 who was eerily calm and made those around him uneasy. Despite the fact that he neither looked nor acted like their son, the Barclay family insisted, without a doubt, that the boy was their son Nicholas Barclay.
