In October 1997, a boy telephoned a children's shelter in Linares, Spain, saying he had escaped from a group that had abused him. He was frightened, spoke little, and would not give his name. Eventually he was persuaded to try telephoning the United States, and a call was placed to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
He was identified as Nicholas Barclay, a thirteen-year-old from San Antonio, Texas, who had disappeared in June 1994.
Nicholas Barclay had blue eyes and blond hair. The person on the telephone was Frédéric Bourdin, a twenty-three-year-old Frenchman with brown eyes and dark hair, who spoke English with a French accent.
Barclay's sister Carey flew to Spain and identified him. The United States issued a passport. He returned to San Antonio and lived with the family for five months, attended high school, and was interviewed by the FBI.
Bourdin's account of how he did it is instructive because so much of it is not technique.
He learned everything available about the missing boy from the shelter's own inquiries — the staff, trying to help, told him what they were finding out. He dyed his hair. He explained his eye color by saying his captors had injected chemicals into his eyes. He explained his accent by saying that he had been held by a military abuse ring and had been beaten for speaking English. He explained the missing tattoos by describing what had been done to remove them.
Every anomaly received a story, and each story was worse than the last.
That is the mechanism, and it is chapter 13's dissonance reduction running in the family rather than in the impostor. Confronting a discrepancy — this person's eyes are the wrong color — requires the family to entertain the possibility that the boy is not their son, which is a return to a grief they have just been released from. The trauma narrative offers a resolution that costs nothing and explains everything. Bowlby's attachment framework predicts the direction: reunion cues are powerful and discrepancy detection is suppressed by the motivation to complete the reunion.
Institutional actors then deferred to the family. The passport was issued because the sister identified him. The FBI's early involvement treated the identification as established. Each party assumed a check had been performed by another.
It unravelled because of a private investigator named Charlie Parker, hired by a television program, who noticed that the ears in a photograph of Nicholas Barclay did not match the ears of the man in San Antonio. Ear morphology is highly individual and does not change. Then an FBI agent, Nancy Fisher, pursued it and obtained a fingerprint match to Bourdin's record in France.
He served six years. He has impersonated missing children at least a dozen times since, and has been convicted more than once.