In this podcast, the host discusses antisocial personality disorder and its connection to criminal behavior. The main story is about Nicholas Barclay, a troubled 13-year-old boy from San Antonio who goes missing. Three years later, a boy claiming to be Nicholas is found in Spain and reunited with his family. However, doubts arise about his true identity. After investigations, it is revealed that the boy is actually Frédéric Bourdin, a serial imposter with a troubled past. The story highlights the complexities of trauma, identity, and investigation.
Hey, yo, welcome to the podcast. I'm coming to you here today with Porter Sprig. Hey there. Today I'm going to be talking to you guys about antisocial personality disorder and its role in criminal behavior. Just so you guys get a background, the Mayo Clinic defines antisocial personality disorder as a mental health condition in which a person consistently shows no regard for the right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others. They lack remorse and do not regret their behavior.
This yarn starts off in San Antonio, Texas, and this is the story about this appearance and mysterious return of Nicholas Barclay. Nicholas, he was a troubled 13-year-old boy from San Antonio, Texas. Nicholas had blonde hair, he had a distinct tooth gap, and he weighed just north of 80 pounds at just 13 years of age. His mother Beverly said that he always did have a violent temper and an attitude problem. He lived in the suburbs of San Antonio with his mother Beverly.
Beverly had two other children from a previous relationship, and Nicholas himself did not know his father. His two half-siblings were much older, and at age 13, Nicholas already had three tattoos and had a juvenile criminal record for felonies, like breaking and entering, threatening his school teachers. He was diagnosed with ADD and had run away multiple times before, but his family usually would never really call the police because he was described as being a street-smart boy and he knew how to always get home, and he always would.
There are even reports of Nicholas hitting his mother, and the police have been called to his house multiple times for domestic disturbances. His mother Beverly also had a heroin addiction at this time that she was trying to kick, and as Nicholas started to grow more out of control as he got older, she had her older son Jason move in to help. Jason had his own drug issues, and he actually made the house life more volatile. The police were being called to the residence more often once Jason moved in.
I want to take you to June 13, 1994, and this was after Nicholas leaving his home to go play basketball. Once he was done playing, he called on his house for a ride home. His brother Jason picked up, and he told Nicholas to walk home because his mother Beverly was asleep and he didn't want to wake her up. But Nicholas never returned home. After three days, his family reported him missing, and initial police investigations were minimal as they just believed that he would just return.
Months later, Jason reported seeing Nicholas breaking into the family garage, which revived hope, but he disappeared again, and the case went cold. But a detail I will add here is that Beverly did not believe Jason, because Jason is the one that saw this, and my question to you is why would he lie about this? Fast forward, it wasn't until three years later, October 1997, when some tourists were walking around in Spain, and they stumbled upon a young boy who looked about 14 to 15 years old.
He seemed scared, dirty, and hungry, and he also had no form of identification on him. When the tourists realized that the young boy wasn't talking, they knew they couldn't just leave him there, and so they decided to call the police to come and help. The police responded to the call, and initially the voyagers didn't speak. He seemed too scared to even try. Because they couldn't find any information on him, the police decided the best thing to do was to transfer him to a child's home, so he could at least get a bed and some food.
While trying to work this out, they finally get the boy to talk, but the only thing he would say is that he had been hurt. Through the process of getting the boy into the group home, the police discovered that the shelter won't let a kid stay there who doesn't have a proper ID. So this is a problem for this child. He either needed to tell them his name, or they would fingerprint and photograph him and try to run it.
At a standstill, the boy breaks down and tells authorities that he's an American boy who had run away. Because of the time change, the boy has to stay in the shelter's office until the morning, and that way he'd be able to contact his family that next day. The next morning, Nicholas' mom, Beverly, all the way in Texas, gets a call at work that someone in Spain found her missing son, Nicholas. His mom called her daughter, Carrie Gibson, who's Nicholas' half-sister, at work to tell her what just happened.
When they spoke to Nicholas, he told an unsettling tale of abduction and abuse at the hands of a European pedophile ring. His sister, Carrie, traveled to Spain to bring him home, noting his altered appearance and demeanor. Despite his reluctance to share details, family members welcomed him in with open arms, celebrating his return. The FBI became involved in this case after his return to the U.S. because, obviously, this child had been abducted. Nicholas described his experience of his abduction by two men at the local park, forced transport to Europe via military planes, and years of captivity and torture.
A little disclaimer here, his account included horrifying details of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of a sex trafficking ring. Eventually, Carrie, his half-sister, was allowed to speak to him, and then Beverly, his mother. They were sent photos of Nicholas now, who looked somewhat like his old self. His hair is a bit darker, his eyes are a different color, but he still has the same tooth gap and the same tattoos. I will say this, Nicholas explained that his eye colors changed due to experiments that were run on him in the sex trafficking ring, that they inserted dye into his eyes.
But they can't help notice the slight changes. They could tell how bad the last three years had been on Nicholas. He's covered from head to toe when he arrives. He's wearing a scarf, sunglasses, a hat, and a jacket. And Carrie explains that he had been like this the whole time. Something I'd like to note is that while the entire family runs up to embrace Nicholas at the airport, Beverly, his mom, hangs back. She seemed almost bothered or skeptical.
This is such a weird situation. Beverly can't get over how different he was. He doesn't seem like her son that she once knew, but the entire family acknowledges that this is Nicholas and that he's been through a lot of things that would definitely change a person. And soon after, he's able to recount old stories to family members and bring up memories from before he was even abducted. During this time, the FBI needs to be involved in this case.
Now, since this kid has been kidnapped, flown overseas, they need to interview him and get evidence. But after that, the family pushes back. They don't want any tests done. They don't want him to be interviewed, nothing. There's not much they can do if the family isn't willing to work with the FBI. And so soon after, Nicholas reintegrated back into school with his local friendships, but his behavior became erratic with incidents like stealing a car. The family attributed these actions to his traumatic experience.
During this time, a private investigator named Charlie Parker was hired by media outlets in hopes to create a documentary. His job was to find and figure out what happened in Spain and uncover this full story. But once Charlie started, he soon began uncovering inconsistencies of his own. Some things just didn't sit right with Charlie. You could see the outline of a beard come in on Nicholas's face. But this isn't crazy for a 16-year-old necessarily, but Nicholas was always underdeveloped.
He also found it weird that Nicholas still covered up with a hat, sunglasses, and scarf. And despite family pushback, Nicholas agreed to have a sit-down interview with the private investigator. Charlie asked the cameraman specifically to zoom in on Nicholas's ear, because like fingerprints, ears are very distinct and don't change. When comparing the photos he got from that interview with the photos that he had of Nicholas, the ears seem to be very different. Dr. Bruce Perry, a forensic psychiatrist, reinforced doubts, noting that Nicholas displayed behaviors inconsistent with genuine trauma.
Perry concluded the teen likely wasn't American. Something that was strange was that he kept talking with a French accent even after he came back to the United States. And this is not something that's necessarily weird if someone spends a lot of time, like three years, especially in the development years, in another country. But usually when you return home, that accent wears off after a couple of months, but this accent never seemed to wear off. FBI investigations turned toward uncovering what they assumed to be an imposter's identity.
This was met with much resistance from the family. So the family is all insisting, this is our Nicholas, this is our son. And it's not lining up, this is probably some other guy. Yeah, the FBI, the private investigator are all very suspicious, but the family doesn't want to cooperate. And despite the family efforts, further tests confirm the truth. The returning teen was not Nicholas Barclay. Nancy Fisher, faced with the lingering question of who the imposter was and the motives behind the deception, this gripping story highlights the complexities of trauma, identity, and investigation.
The imposter was revealed to be a Frenchman, Frédéric Bourdin, a serial imposter with over 500 different identities before taking on Nicholas Barclay. Bourdin confessed his true identity to private investigator Charlie Parker. Bourdin was a French Algerian with a troubled past. He had spent years crafting false identities to secure shelter and avoid hardships starting in his youth. He was born in Nantes, France. Bourdin's childhood was full of racial prejudice and family neglect. He became adept at fabricating stories and manipulating others, which escalated to him impersonating children to access social services.
And it's all led until 1997, where our story started. Wait, how old is he? He's 23. A question I have for you, actually, is how do you think Frédéric Bourdin was able to pull this off? How was he able to even pass as Nicholas? If he's a serial imposter, he maybe had developed tricks about how to maybe pick up a memory from someone else and then share it with someone who doesn't know you heard that story from another sibling.
Or, yeah, but what's weird to me is that he specifically chose a kid in Texas who went missing as his next imposter. Like, did he really want to go to the United States or why? Why was that his pick? It seems like as a French man who's 23 years old, that's not the first person I would try to attend a date. Yeah, good question. So Bourdin said that after the toy found him on that day on the streets, he lied and just said he was a missing American boy, even though he had no idea where he was going with this one.
He didn't know a name, and that night before, I'm not sure if you remember this, but how he was going to wait in the office overnight. He was impersonating a Spanish police officer, telling him that they found a boy from the U.S. who had been missing for a few years. The U.S. police station gave him the information for the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Bourdin then called the center and said a child had been found, but no one knew who he was.
He loosely described himself, all the way down to the gap between his teeth. He was vague enough to make it so there was multiple possibilities, and the center said, oh, we do have a missing kid from 1994 in San Antonio. His name is Nicholas Barclay. It sounds like the description you've given. So Bourdin asked for a fax to see what the kid looked like to get his case file. No way. And he got these tattoos? Well, the center then sent Bourdin, impersonating an official, a colored photo of Nicholas Barclay in his missing person file.
He looked at it and he decided that it was close enough, and he told the Americans that the missing boy is right here in Spain. I think that's just a clear sign of deceitfulness, which is one of the largest signs in antisocial personality disorder, and we see that he engaged in chronic lying and deception, in this case including impersonating missing children. That was kind of his MO, impersonating Nicholas Barclay, and he's jumping through all these hoops in order to secure a false identity.
It just reeks of APD. But back to the story. The next morning, Bourdin got to work on his plan. After talking to Nicholas' family, he had a few weeks before Carrie, his supposed half-sister, would be there to get him. He would spend these weeks still at the children's home in Spain pretending to be Nicholas. He dyed his hair. He had his roommate use tint ink and a needle to replicate Nicholas' tattoos. He had every detail about the disappearance because they sent him the case file.
At one point he even got scared that this plan would not work and he tried to run away, but he was eventually found and brought back. He came up with a story to explain the different eye color and that the alleged sex ring had performed the experiments, but there was still so much he didn't know. He didn't know his family member's names. He didn't know if Nicholas was right or left-handed. But when Carrie shows up, she embraces him.
He can't believe his plan is working. He decided to stay covered up just in case anyone would notice the subtle differences. His hairline was also starting to recede because he's 23, which wouldn't work if he was the supposed 16th. The hat was necessary to wear at all times. The family continued to embrace him, attributing things like his French accent and behaviors of trauma. Borden, though initially anxious about the exposure, relaxed into the role, convincing most people around him.
And one of the most clever things that I think he did was that he would watch old family videos and try to mimic the things that he saw real Nicholas do. He developed a habit of sitting in front of the TV on the floor in a very particular way, like Nicholas had. And something you talked about, Porter, is that, yes, he would recount stories he heard from other family members to different family members in order to build rapport and establish himself.
And we see APD here as well and his ability to adopt these different personas, manipulate people, and just fabricate all these different stories to show extreme manipulation skills. You will even see later how Borden exploited the vulnerabilities of grieving families to gain attention and affection. This whole charade fully unraveled after his television interview and further scrutiny, followed by the confession of Parker and fingerprint analysis confirming his identity. And this all completed into the complex tale of deception driven for a desire for belonging.
Frederick Borden, who was a notorious imposter, was arrested in Texas. Borden was charged with perjury and passport fraud. Something else he does while he's in jail is that he continues to exploit families of missing children by fabricating false information to them. And like I said, this is just primarily just to gain attention because when he wasn't doing this, he was on the phone with local media offering stories of how he was able to dupe this family of people, his Barclay.
And when he's confronted about his manipulative actions, he kind of shrugs off the pain he caused. And I just want to take a quick pause to just highlight his lack of remorse here, how he showed little to no remorse for the distress he caused as he continued to create these false narratives. And another sign of ADP is impulsivity and recklessness. And he was such a high-risk individual, like posing as children despite legal and personal dangers is frankly insane.
The fact that he willingly slept in a stranger's house on the opposite side of the world pretending to be their son for five months is baffling to me. And despite that, he even had the decision to re-offend shortly after his release. He's very impulsive without regard for the consequences. Because you'd think maybe somebody else might have tried to get over to the United States and just ran away instead of continuing to do this impersonation for so long.
Well, something I will add, when he stole the car earlier, he drove it to Oklahoma. And he was only caught because he was pulled over because he was speeding. So I'm not sure if that was his plan to run away. But his reason for coming to the United States wasn't like, I want to be in the United States. And it was more so he was just, I'm going to infiltrate another family. I'm going to pretend to be a child.
He even says to himself that he feels more comfortable pretending to be other children. He never really saw himself grow up. So he had done this all growing up, even when he was an actual kid, he just pretended to be other kids? Yeah. I mean, at 23 years old, you already had 500 other aliases before Nicholas Barclay. Crazy. So this next part is tricky because it's hard to believe Borden, but he claimed that Nicholas' family actually fed him details to impersonate their son.
And this would explain the extreme acceptance of his story despite the inconsistencies. He later alleged that Nicholas' mother Beverly and brother Jason were involved in Nicholas' disappearance. And this is supported by Beverly's inconsistent polygraph results. And with Jason's death of a cocaine overdose, left the investigators without any conclusive evidence. A homicide investigation was opened to find the real Nicholas, but later closed due to insufficient proof. And Borden received a six-year sentence and was deported to France in 2003.
So he served six years in American jail, deported to France, because he was wanted by Interpol to face a four-month jail sentence for insulting the magistrate. Frederick told the courtroom, I apologize to all the people in my past for what I have done. I wish, I wish that you believe me, but I know it's impossible. Whether in jail or not, I am a prisoner of myself. Frederick Borden was deported, after he was deported to France and serving a four-month jail sentence.
He was only free for three months and he was caught trying to pose as a 14-year-old missing child named Leo Ballet. On May 3rd, 2005, now a 30-year-old, Borden approached a child welfare office in France claiming to be the 14-year-old Spanish boy, Francisco Fernandez now. He was sent to a St. Vincent de Paul shelter where he became the most popular with the young children housed there. Because they thought he was Francisco Fernandez? Yeah, he was a 14-year-old but actually 30.
Frederick was only taught five weeks later after a staff member working at the shelter recognized him from a television show she had watched the night before about the imposter. Even after his release, Borden continued impersonating missing children across Europe, showcasing his linguistic skills and psychological manipulation. And this is yet another example where we see ADP's repeated criminal activities indicate a pattern of failing to meet societal norms or lawful behavior. And yet again, he did not consider the emotional or legal repercussions of his impersonations.
The DSM-5 criteria for antisocial personality disorder for adults, which can be found in the Psychology of Criminal Conduct Fixibus by James Bonta, says that a sign of ADP is a disregard for the rights of others or violation of age-appropriate social norms. And also it's followed by three other signs. And three of the signs that has throughout this story is that breaking into cars is one of the signs, lies to obtain goods or favors, and just steals in general.
These all three are categories that Borden falls into when looking at ADP. And these are just some of the top traits we see on display. And we've already talked about a lot of these, but just deceitfulness and manipulation, impulsiveness, aggressiveness, irresponsibility, and lack of remorse. Eventually, Borden settled in France, marrying and becoming a father. Despite his troubled past, he stated his actions were driven by a desire for love and attention rather than criminal intent. To this day, the whereabouts of Nicholas Barclay remain unknown.
These traits combined with the recurring fraudulent activities and lack of regard for societal norms strongly suggest patterns of antisocial personality disorder behavior in Borden. In this case, we see Borden having erratic behavior, stealing a car, he's aggressive when he gets bad, acting erratic, and as he integrates back into the daily life, pretending to be Nicholas Barclay. And according to the same Psychological of Criminal Conduct 6th edition book, it states that APD is differentiated from other personality disorders by a persuasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others.
We see Borden repeatedly disregard the rights of the Barclay family and so many more people as he's had over 500 aliases. And he just managed to hurt that many people. According to the New Yorker, one of the police captains assigned to the case said, when he was, when he talked in Spanish, he became a Spaniard. When he talked in English, he became an Englishman. Of course he lied. For what? An act. Authorities were unsure what kind of rhetoric that committed, as it is not done for any kind of purpose.
It's due to Frederick Borden wanting attention and affection from others. Frederick Borden labels himself perfectly. On his arm, it reads, Chameleon Nantes, directly translating to, The Chameleon from Nantes.
