![]() In 1991 when he was 20, Bourdin stayed at a Glasgow care home for two months after convincing staff he was 14 and had been sold to Irish child abusers. The film, which had its UK premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival this week, tells how the conman kept up the deception in 1997 by dyeing his brown hair blond, going back to school, and using a pen to fake a tattoo on his hand.Īnd when the real identity of the man who would later be called The Chameleon was revealed, the truth about his life seemed even more incredible than the story he had invented.īourdin had spent years pretending to be orphans across Europe.įrom the age of 16 he conned himself into foster homes, orphanages, schools and kids’ hospitals, each time using a different name and an elaborate sob story. The amazing story has now been made into a British documentary called The Imposter explaining how for five months Bourdin convinced family and friends that he really was Nicholas. He was Frenchman Frederic Bourdin who had never set foot on US soil before. It took a private investigator to unearth the truth – the new Nicholas was an impostor. The family seemed unconcerned that Nicholas now had blue eyes, not brown as before, his ears had changed shape and he had a French accent. Texas schoolboy Nicholas, who disappeared aged 13, turned up three years later thousands of miles away in Spain.įor mum Beverly it was like a miracle, and she showered him with affection after he was flown home. Check out his Michael Jackson moves about 2:25 into this video.THE Barclay family were euphoric when missing teenage son Nicholas was found alive and well. Update: This looks to be Bourdin’s YouTube account where he’s posted several videos of himself speaking into the camera. ![]() After that, the story proceeds like the craziest episode of Law and Order you’ve ever seen. ![]() At some point, Bourdin’s story gets intertwined with that of Nicholas Barclay, a teen who went missing in Texas in 1994. That’s an interesting story by itself but just the tip of the iceberg. When he talked in English, he was an Englishman.” Chadourne said of him, “Of course, he lied, but what an actor!” A police captain in Pau noted, “When he talked in Spanish, he became a Spaniard. In 2004, when he pretended to be a fourteen-year-old French boy in the town of Grenoble, a doctor who examined him at the request of authorities concluded that he was, indeed, a teen-ager. “I can become whatever I want,” he liked to say. He was unusually adept at transforming his appearance-his facial hair, his weight, his walk, his mannerisms. News reports claimed that he had even impersonated a tiger tamer and a priest, but, in truth, he had nearly always played a similar character: an abused or abandoned child. His aliases included Benjamin Kent, Jimmy Morins, Alex Dole, Sladjan Raskovic, Arnaud Orions, Giovanni Petrullo, and Michelangelo Martini. Frédéric Bourdin is a Frenchman in his early thirties who has spent much of his life impersonating kidnapped or runaway teens.Īt police headquarters, he admitted that he was Frédéric Bourdin, and that in the past decade and a half he had invented scores of identities, in more than fifteen countries and five languages.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |