The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (15 page)

According to his real mother, Ghislaine, Bourdin called her in Europe. For all his disagreements with his mother, Bourdin still seemed to long for her. (He once wrote her a letter, saying, “I don’t want to lose you. . . . If you disappear then I disappear.”) Ghislaine says Bourdin confided that he was living with a woman in Texas who believed that he was her son. She became so upset that she hung up.

Shortly before Christmas, Bourdin went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror—at his brown eyes, his dyed hair. He grabbed a razor and began to mutilate his face. He was put in the psychiatric ward of a local hospital for several days of observation. Later, Bourdin, paraphrasing Nietzsche, wrote in a notebook, “When you fight monsters, be careful that in the process you do not become one.” He also jotted down a poem: “My days are phantom days, each one the shadow of a hope; / My real life never was begun, / Nor any of my real deeds done.”

Doctors judged Bourdin to be stable enough to return to Carey’s trailer. But he remained disquieted, and increasingly wondered what had happened to the real Nicholas Barclay. So did Parker, who, while trying to identify Bourdin, had started to gather information and interview Nicholas’s neighbors. At the time that Nicholas disappeared, he was living with Beverly in a small one-story house in San Antonio. Nicholas’s half brother, Jason, who was then twenty-four, had recently moved in with them after living for a period with his cousin, in Utah. Jason was wiry and strong, with long brown curly hair and a comb often tucked in the back pocket of his jeans. He had burn marks on his body and face: at thirteen, he had lit a cigarette after filling a lawn mower with gasoline and accidentally set himself on fire. Because of his scars, Carey says, “Jason worried that he would never meet somebody and he would always be alone.” He strummed Lynyrd Skynyrd songs on his guitar and was a capable artist who sketched portraits of friends. Though he had only completed high school, he was bright and articulate. He also had an addictive personality, like his mother, often drinking heavily and using cocaine. He had his “demons,” as Carey put it.

On June 13, 1994, Beverly and Jason told police that Nicholas had been playing basketball three days earlier and called his house from a pay phone, wanting a ride home. Beverly was sleeping, so Jason answered the phone. He told Nicholas to walk home. Nicholas never made it. Because Nicholas had recently fought with his mother over the tennis shoes he had stolen, and over the possibility of being sent to a home for juveniles, the police initially thought that he had run away—even though he hadn’t taken any money or possessions.

Parker was surprised by police reports showing that after Nicholas’s disappearance there were several disturbances at Beverly’s house. On July 12th, she called the police, though when an officer arrived she insisted that she was all right. Jason told the officer that his mother was “drinking and scream[ing] at him because her other son ran away.” A few weeks later, Beverly called the police again, about what authorities described as “family violence.” The officer on the scene reported that Beverly and Jason were “exchanging words;” Jason was asked to leave the house for the day, and he complied. On September 25th, police received another call, this time from Jason. He claimed that his younger brother had returned and tried to break into the garage, fleeing when Jason spotted him. In his report, the officer on duty said that he had “checked the area” for Nicholas but was “unable to locate him.”

Jason’s behavior grew even more erratic. He was arrested for “using force” against a police officer, and Beverly kicked him out of the house. Nicholas’s disappearance, Codey told me, had “messed Jason up pretty bad. He went on a bad drug binge and was shooting cocaine for a long time.” Because he had refused to help Nicholas get a ride home on the day he vanished, Chantel says, Jason had “a lot of guilt.”

In late 1996, Jason checked into a rehabilitation center and weaned himself from drugs. After he finished the program, he remained at the facility for more than a year, serving as a counsellor and working for a landscaping business that the center operated. He was still there when Bourdin turned up, claiming to be his missing brother.

Bourdin wondered why Jason had not met him at the airport and had initially made no effort to see him at Carey’s. After a month and a half, Bourdin and family members say, Jason finally came for a visit. Even then, Codey says, “Jason was standoffish.” Though Jason gave him a hug in front of the others, Bourdin says, he seemed to eye him warily. After a few minutes, Jason told him to come outside, and held out his hand to Bourdin. A necklace with a gold cross glittered in his palm. Jason said that it was for him. “It was like he had to give it to me,” Bourdin says. Jason put it around his neck. Then he said goodbye, and never returned.

Bourdin told me, “It was clear that Jason knew what had happened to Nicholas.” For the first time, Bourdin began to wonder who was conning whom.

  The authorities, meanwhile, had started to doubt Bourdin’s story. Nancy Fisher, who at the time was a veteran F.B.I. agent, had interviewed Bourdin several weeks after he arrived in the United States, in order to document his allegations of being kidnapped on American soil. Immediately, she told me, she “smelled a rat”: “His hair was dark but bleached blond and the roots were quite obvious.”

Parker knew Fisher and had shared with her his own suspicions. Fisher warned Parker not to interfere with a federal probe, but as they conducted parallel investigations they developed a sense of trust, and Parker passed on any information he obtained. When Fisher made inquiries into who may have abducted Nicholas and sexually abused him, she says, she found Beverly oddly “surly and uncooperative.”

Fisher wondered whether Beverly and her family simply wanted to believe that Bourdin was their loved one. Whatever the family’s motivations, Fisher’s main concern was the mysterious figure who had entered the United States. She knew that it was impossible for him to have altered his eye color. In November, under the pretext of getting Bourdin treatment for his alleged abuse, Fisher took him to see a forensic psychiatrist in Houston, who concluded from his syntax and grammar that he could not be American, and was most likely French or Spanish. The F.B.I. shared the results with Beverly and Carey, Fisher says, but they insisted that he was Nicholas.

Believing that Bourdin was a spy, Fisher says, she contacted the Central Intelligence Agency, explaining the potential threat and asking for help in identifying him. “The C.I.A. wouldn’t assist me,” she says. “I was told by a C.I.A. agent that until you can prove he’s European we can’t help you.”

Fisher tried to persuade Beverly and Bourdin to give blood samples for a DNA test. Both refused. “Beverly said, ‘How dare you say he’s not my son,’” Fisher recalls. In the middle of February, four months after Bourdin arrived in the United States, Fisher obtained warrants to force them to cooperate. “I go to her house to get a blood sample, and she lies on the floor and says she’s not going to get up,” Fisher says. “I said, ‘Yes, you are.’”

“Beverly defended me,” Bourdin says. “She did her best to stop them.”

Along with their blood, Fisher obtained Bourdin’s fingerprints, which she sent to the State Department to see if there was a match with Interpol.

Carey, worried about her supposed brother’s self-mutilation and instability, was no longer willing to let him stay with her, and he went to live with Beverly in her apartment. By then, Bourdin claims, he had begun to look at the family differently. His mind retraced a series of curious interactions: Beverly’s cool greeting at the airport, Jason’s delay in visiting him. He says that, although Carey and Bryan had seemed intent on believing that he was Nicholas—ignoring the obvious evidence—Beverly had treated him less like a son than like a “ghost.” One time when he was staying with her, Bourdin alleges, she got drunk and screamed, “I know that God punished me by sending you to me. I don’t know who the hell you are. Why the fuck are you doing this?” (Beverly does not remember such an incident but says, “He must have got me pissed off.”)

On March 5, 1998, with the authorities closing in on Bourdin, Beverly called Parker and said she believed that Bourdin was an impostor. The next morning, Parker took him to a diner. “I raise my pants so he can see I’m not wearing a gun” in his ankle holster, Parker says. “I want him to relax.”

They ordered hotcakes. After nearly five months of pretending to be Nicholas Barclay, Bourdin says, he was psychically frayed. According to Parker, when he told “Nicholas” that he had upset his “mother,” the young man blurted out, “She’s not my mother, and you know it.”

“You gonna tell me who you are?”

“I’m Frédéric Bourdin and I’m wanted by Interpol.”

After a few minutes, Parker went to the men’s room and called Nancy Fisher with the news. She had just received the same information from Interpol. “We’re trying to get a warrant right now,” she told Parker. “Stall him.”

Parker went back to the table and continued to talk to Bourdin. As Bourdin spoke about his itinerant life in Europe, Parker says, he felt some guilt for turning him in. Bourdin, who despises Parker and disputes the details of their conversation, accuses the detective of “pretending” to have solved the case; it was as if Parker had intruded into Bourdin’s interior fiction and given himself a starring role. After about an hour, Parker drove Bourdin back to Beverly’s apartment. As Parker was pulling away, Fisher and the authorities were already descending on him. He surrendered quietly. “I knew I was Frédéric Bourdin again,” he says. Beverly reacted less calmly. She turned and yelled at Fisher, “What took you so long?”

  In custody, Bourdin told a story that seemed as fanciful as his tale of being Nicholas Barclay. He alleged that Beverly and Jason may have been complicit in Nicholas’s disappearance, and that they had known from the outset that Bourdin was lying. “I’m a good impostor, but I’m not that good,” Bourdin told me.

Of course, the authorities could not rely on the account of a known pathological liar. “He tells ninety-nine lies and maybe the one hundredth is the truth, but you don’t know,” Fisher says. Yet the authorities had their own suspicions. Jack Stick, who was a federal prosecutor at the time and who later served a term in the Texas House of Representatives, was assigned Bourdin’s case. He and Fisher wondered why Beverly had resisted attempts by the F.B.I. to investigate Bourdin’s purported kidnapping and, later, to uncover his deception. They also questioned why she had not taken Bourdin back to live with her. According to Fisher, Carey told her that it was because it was “too upsetting” for Beverly, which, at least to Fisher and Stick, seemed strange. “You’d be so happy to have your child back,” Fisher says. It was “another red flag.”

Fisher and Stick took note of the disturbances in Beverly’s house after Nicholas had vanished, and the police report stating that Beverly was screaming at Jason over Nicholas’s disappearance. Then there was Jason’s claim that he had witnessed Nicholas breaking into the house. No evidence could be found to back up this startling story, and Jason had made the claim at the time that the police had started “sniffing around,” as Stick put it. He and Fisher suspected that the story was a ruse meant to reinforce the idea that Nicholas was a runaway.

Stick and Fisher began to edge toward a homicide investigation. “I wanted to know what had happened to that little kid,” Stick recalls.

Stick and Fisher gathered more evidence suggesting that Beverly’s home was prone to violence. They say that officials at Nicholas’s school had expressed concern that Nicholas might be an abused child, owing to bruises on his body, and that just before he disappeared the officials had alerted child-protective services. And neighbors noted that Nicholas had sometimes hit Beverly.

One day, Fisher asked Beverly to take a polygraph. Carey recalls, “I said, ‘Mom, do whatever they ask you to do. Go take the lie-detector test. You didn’t kill Nicholas.’ So she did.”

While Beverly was taking the polygraph, Fisher watched the proceedings on a video monitor in a nearby room. The most important question was whether Beverly currently knew the whereabouts of Nicholas. She said no, twice. The polygraph examiner told Fisher that Beverly had seemingly answered truthfully. When Fisher expressed disbelief, the examiner said that if Beverly was lying, she had to be on drugs. After a while, the examiner administered the test again, at which point the effects of any possible narcotics, including methadone, might have worn off. This time, when the examiner asked if Beverly knew Nicholas’s whereabouts, Fisher says, the machine went wild, indicating a lie. “She blew the instruments practically off the table,” Fisher says. (False positives are not uncommon in polygraphs, and scientists dispute their basic reliability.)

According to Fisher, when the examiner told Beverly that she had failed the exam, and began pressing her with more questions, Beverly yelled, “I don’t have to put up with this,” then got up and ran out the door. “I catch her,” Fisher recalls. “I say, ‘Why are you running?’ She is furious. She says, ‘This is so typical of Nicholas. Look at the hell he’s putting me through.’”

Fisher next wanted to interview Jason, but he resisted. When he finally agreed to meet her, several weeks after Bourdin had been arrested, Fisher says, she had to “pull words out of him.” They spoke about the fact that he had not gone to see his alleged brother for nearly two months: “I said, ‘Here’s your brother, long gone, kidnapped, and aren’t you eager to see him?’ He said, ‘Well, no.’ I said, ‘Did he look like your brother to you?’ ‘Well, I guess.’” Fisher found his responses grudging, and developed a “very strong suspicion that Jason had participated in the disappearance of his brother.” Stick, too, believed that Jason either had been “involved in Nicholas’s disappearance or had information that could tell us what had happened.” Fisher even suspected that Beverly knew what had happened to Nicholas, and may have helped cover up the crime in order to protect Jason.

After the interview, Stick and Fisher say, Jason refused to speak to the authorities again without a lawyer or unless he was under arrest. But Parker, who as a private investigator was not bound by the same legal restrictions as Stick and Fisher, continued to press Jason. On one occasion, he accused him of murder. “I think you did it,” Parker says he told him. “I don’t think you meant to do it, but you did.” In response, Parker says, “He just looked at me.”