Boy lived with parents for five months before they realised he wasn’t their son

When 13-year-old Nicholas Barclay vanished without a trace his family was left clinging to hope. Three years later, the boy they thought was Nicholas returned home but he wasn’t who he made out to be.

It was a normal summer day when a young boy went missing^[1] after playing basketball in his home town in June 1994 – now more than 30 years later – still no one knows what happened.

Nicholas Barclay didn’t have an easy start in life – born in 1980 he grew up in a family^[2] that had a lot of problems – his dad had a criminal record^[3] and he was known for being a bit rebellious.

A typical teenager, he argued with adults, sometimes skipped school^[4] and didn’t always follow the rules. He was small for his age but had a big, fiery personality and those who knew him said he could be tough to handle but was also very lovable.

On June 13, 1994, Nicholas left home to play basketball with friends. That evening, he called his mother from a payphone, asking for a ride. She was asleep, so he said he’d walk home but he never arrived, according to KSAT. Police and volunteers searched the area but no trace of Nicholas was found.

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Then a few years later in 1997, his family must have thought their prayers had been answered when their long lost son turned home. But all was not what it seemed – 23-year-old Frédéric Bourdin was pretending to be missing Texas boy Nicholas Barclay – he even convinced the family he was their son and lived with them for five months before being exposed.

By his late teens, Frédéric Bourdin discovered he could convince authorities he was a missing teenager and over the years, he assumed dozens of false identities. Police even nicknamed him “The Chameleon” because of his ability to morph into different personas.

By 1997, he was in Spain, alone and searching for another identity to take on when he stumbled across the case of Nicholas Barclay. He called American authorities pretending to be a Spanish police officer who had found a missing boy after piecing together Nicholas’s story from missing persons^[7] databases and news reports.

Bourdin looked nothing like Nicholas; his eyes were brown, not blue, and he spoke English with a thick French accent but he went to great extremes dying his hair blond, gave himself tattoos with a needle and ink and even scarring his body with a razor to match Nicholas’s records.

He told Spanish officials he’d been kidnapped and forced into a child sex trafficking ring, where he’d endured years of abuse, reports The Telegraph. The family wanted to believe that Nicholas had been found and his older sister Carey Gibson convinced herself it was her brother after speaking to Bourdin on the phone.

In October 1997, cameras captured the emotional reunion at the airport in Texas as Nicholas’s mother, Beverly Dollarhide, hugged the boy she thought was her son. For months, Bourdin lived with the Barclays and settled into family life but to outsiders, something felt off. How could a missing American boy suddenly return with brown eyes and a foreign accent?

The cracks began to show when private investigator, Charlie Parker, became involved and studied old photographs. He discovered that the shape of Nicholas’s ears didn’t match Bourdin’s, The Guardian reports. In 1998 a judge approved a court order for Bourdin’s fingerprints and DNA which confirmed this wasn’t Nicholas Barclay, it was Frédéric Bourdin, a 23-year-old Frenchman with a history of impersonating others.

Police arrested him, charging him with passport fraud and perjury and Bourdin pleaded guilty and was given a six-year federal prison sentence, far longer than any punishment he’d faced before. After serving time, he was deported back to France where he continued impersonating missing children for years.

In a surprising twist of events, Bourdin said the family had killed Nicholas and only accepted him to hide it but investigators found no evidence to support his claims and Nicholas’s disappearance remains unsolved. Nicholas’s case was made into the 2012 documentary The Imposter which explored how Bourdin tricked so many people and how the Barclays’ longing for closure blinded them to reality,

Nearly three decades after Nicholas disappeared, his fate is still unknown – the real Nicholas has never been found and the case is still a mystery.

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