It’s the same thing for the Dollarhide family. Most people who go to church don’t believe in God, very few of them really believe, but somewhere deep inside they try to convince themselves there is a God. How did this man with his French accent convince others that he was an American teenager? In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Bourdin stated that there was an unspoken collusion on the part of Nicholas Barclay’s mother, Beverly Dollarhide - that she knew damn well that this was not her son: Why, however, have we chosen this topic for The Displaced Nation? Well, we think that The Imposter is a film that you may be fascinated by, but we also think that there’s something about Bourdin’s tale, undeniably horrific and callous as it, that resonates with an expat audience. The essay is actually available on The New Yorker Web site and I can’t recommend it enough. This is where I first came across the story. (For anyone in the US who might be interested, it is available for streaming on Netflix.)Ī better use of your time may be spent reading about Bourdin in David Grann’s essay “The Chameleon,” which belongs to his essay collection The Devil & Sherlock Holmes. To be honest, The Chameleon is a disappointing film that despite being based on the most compelling of true-life tales is never itself compelling. In 2010 a fictionalized account entitled The Chameleon was released, directed by Jean-Paul Salomé. This is not, however, the first time that the story of Bourdin has been depicted on the cinema screens. Bourdin’s masquerade is so hard to believe, and so stranger than fiction, that it is of little surprise that is perfect material for a documentary. The film, a success at Sundance, is now in limited release in the US. With the release of the documentary film, The Imposter, directed by Bart Layton, the story of Bourdin has returned to the news. Bourdin lived with the Barclay family for three months before a private investigator revealed the truth. The police presumed Nicholas was dead until Bourdin concocted a tale that the child had been snatched by a pedophile ring and brought to Europe. This post is concerned with the case of Frédéric Bourdin, a 23-year-old brown-eyed Frenchman who convinced a Texan family, the Barclays, that he was Nicholas, their missing blue-eyed teenage son and brother.Ī conman, a fantasist, a sociopath, Bourdin already had a history of impersonating destitute children when in 1997 he convinced authorities in France and the US that he was the unruly child who at aged thirteen had disappeared from the Barclay family in San Antonio, Texas. We have ourselves a real-life Talented Mr Ripley. It sounds like the plot of a mystery novel, but it is, in fact, chillingly true. To succeed in such a deception scarcely seems possible. There was, it transpires, nothing to worry about all along. Insinuating yourself into their lives, claiming falsely the intimacy and bonds that only exists between immediate family - mother and son brother and sister - and to convince them that that son, that brother, that they feared murdered, has returned. Pretending to be a dead child is the cruelest trick you could play on a family.
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