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Every year thousands of children are reported missing to authorities across the country, but thankfully the vast majority of them are soon found safe and sound. For the few ongoing cases that remain unsolved, police and families work tirelessly to keep the investigation active and leads coming in. All they need is one clue to help break the case wide open and it can come at any time. When one young boy went missing in Texas, his family could have never imagined how it would play out. It’s a case that has stunned everyone involved and it really makes you wonder how could this have happened?
This past June 13, 2019 marked the 25th anniversary of the date that Nicholas Barclay went missing from San Antonio, Texas. He was just 13 years old when he went to play basketball with some friends near his house and afterwards he disappeared without a trace. His family did not report him missing at first because they thought he had run away and would soon be back. He had already run away from home several times before and had a troubled history of behavior. The police had been called to the house several times after he’d argued with his mother and he would also talk back to his teachers and skip school.
It got to the point where he had a sentencing hearing scheduled to see if he should be placed in a juvenile home, which he was vehemently opposed to. The night he disappeared was the day before the hearing, which was another reason why his family assumed he’d run off, to avoid going to court. By the time a missing person report was filed, and the police started searching, the trail had already gone cold. There were few clues to follow up on and no one seemed to have seen Nicholas.
Three years went by with no leads until one day authorities in Spain called and claimed they had found a boy who looked like Nicholas. They said he claimed to be 16 years old and had told them how he’d been kidnapped from America and trafficked to Europe before he finally managed to escape. Overjoyed that the long missing boy had finally been found, the Barclay family welcomed him back with open arms.
From the start the family noticed that the Nicholas they had known had changed a bit. However, they’d also been warned that he’d been through a lot and so when he seemed to act and look different than what they’d remembered, they didn’t really question it. His eyes and hair color were much darker than before, which he attributed to his captors having dyed and medically changed them in order to alter his appearance in a bid to conceal his identity. He also seemed to speak with a French accent, but he told them he was forbidden to speak English the whole time and had picked up his kidnapper’s accent. Not wanting to upset and question him too much after all he’d been through, the family let their suspicions slide and tried to get back to normal.
One man who couldn’t ignore the obvious differences was a private investigator named Charlie Parker. He didn’t buy the boy’s story and noticed that rather than being upset by what he claimed to have gone through, the boy was incredibly open about it all and retold his story to anyone who’d listen. He thought it was an imposter pretending to be Nicholas and after studying pictures of the two closely something finally jumped out at him and blew a hole in the boy’s story. The person claiming to be Nicholas did not have ears that looked anything like the missing boy’s ears.
A person’s ears are like their fingerprints, uniquely individual and unchanging with time. Since the ears did not match up, investigators, the Barclay family, and police finally knew the boy was lying and could not be Nicholas. It turned out that the boy was actually a 23 year old French man named Frederic Bourdin. He was a renowned con artist who’d been nicknamed “the Chameleon” by Interpol for posing as missing children and stealing hundreds of different identities. When Spanish police found him, they’d made an offhand remark about how he looked like the missing boy Nicholas Barclay, and from there he assumed the boy’s identity.
Naturally the Barclay family was stunned and heartbroken when they heard the news that they’d been lied to and that Nicholas was still missing. They had wanted to believe it was him so badly that they’d convinced themselves it was, despite the obvious differences. Due to all the strange twists and mysterious circumstances in the case, no one knows for sure who to believe or what really happened. For more information on the story check out the video and decide who you believe.
Watch the video below for the full story :
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