00:00:06
Hey weirdos, I'm Ash. And I'm Elena. And this is [Music] Morbbit. This is morbid. It's morbid in
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the late morning. I'm tired. I know. You know when you sleep too like not to brag, but you know
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when you sleep too good. It's like when your hair is too soft. Yeah, you know. Yeah, it happens. Actually, guys, my
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hair was too soft this morning. I had to put some dry shampoo in. Her hair's too
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soft and she slept too good. I know. And my skin's too clear. My skin is actually
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not very clear right now. You're just really You're struggling. I know. I'm really out here. I have thoughts and
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prayers, everybody. I have a I have a prayer up. Prayers up for me. I have a couple spots on my face that I had to
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conceal. Don't feel today. So, you know, just like I say, prayers up. Just like you. I'm imperfect. Ash, she's just like
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us. This is an off-putting intro. It is very offputting. Imagine if this is the first uh the first episode someone
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chooses to listen to. Christ almighty. They're out. Sorry, they're gone. We lost them. It was nice knowing you. I'm
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a good person. I swear. I'm a good person. I swear. No, we're a little silly today. We are a
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little bit silly. I'm hungry, so that's going to play a role in this episode. I think I just ate my weight in chia seed
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pudding. Good for you, man. It was [ __ ] good. I have pineapple next to me if you want some. She does. Like you
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over like Elena, if you want some. Elena, I have some. If I could, I would give you the pineapple through the
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speaker, weirdo. But I haven't quite figured that out yet. Uh, thank you. I appreciate that. You betcha. I'll wait
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until after the episode. Yeah, it's weird to eat on mic. Yeah, I don't want to give you guys like a misophonia
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moment. That's pretty [ __ ] gross. Um, yeah, if you Oh, one fun thing is if you
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haven't listened to the rewatcher yet, uh, what the [ __ ] are you doing, dumbass? Uh, we're we're in the last
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season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer over there and then we're moving on to another show. The way that I was just
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about to say, yeah, just boop. No, we're not. We have not announced that yet. I'm
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not telling you, but I think it'll be one that you'll be excited about cuz it's a lot of fun. Yeah. And if you
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don't know what we're talking about, we have another show called The Rewatcher. We cover Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I've
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never seen it or like I've seen a couple episodes, but for the most part, I've never seen it. And Elena has and Mikey
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has. Yeah. And now we're going into another show that I have literally never seen even a single episode. And Elena
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has and Mikey has. Yeah. This is This one is going to be even more wild just because Ash, at least with Buffy, had
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seen like bits and pieces. Yeah. Just like growing up with you. But this one she's blind. Completely completely in
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the dark about. So, this is going to be a real real experience. In fact, I was getting You guys were talking about it
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in code earlier. Yeah, we were me and Mikey were texting hilarious moments. It was making me teed and we said, "Don't
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worry, we'll show you this conversation when they come up." You did. That was nice. That was nice of you cuz I was
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like, but there's something really fun with it, too, that we'll get to announce soon. A little added fun thing with that
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um season of the rewatcher. Is there? Yes. We were just talking about it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I
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was like, what? Anyway, h so yeah, go check it out if you haven't watched listen to the rewatcher yet. It's a lot
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of fun over there. It is fun and I think you guys will dig it. Yeah. And we do Scream, too. So, listen to Scream with
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Caleb with Caleb. We listen to We listen to and watch horror movies. We do both.
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We cover them and we all pick a different one every week and it gets pretty [ __ ] crazy. It does. It gets
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funny over there. Yeah, it gets silly. So, if you need if you needed to round out your morbid listening experience, I
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highly recommend that. Just a whole bunch of Elena and Ash. Yeah. Yeah. In France. In France. In France. All right.
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Well, I have a weird [ __ ] case for you today. Yeah, you do. I know this case uh like I knew of it but I didn't
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know all the details. Uh this is the case of Frederick Bordon and the disappearance of Nicholas Barlay
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Interante. It is an interesting case. It's pretty sad um but fascinating and you're just like how the [ __ ] did this
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happen? But I'll tell you how I am wondering that. So let's start at the beginning which is June of
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1994. Nicholas uh Barlay was 13 years old and he got into an argument with his mom over something pretty trivial.
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Nobody really knows like exactly what they were arguing about, but it was a pretty common occurrence between the two
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of them to be fighting. So, Nicholas was definitely a troubled kid. He had a lot
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going on. We'll get into some of it later, but that spe that specific day, his mother, Beverly Dollar, was really
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just in no mood to entertain this argument. So, rather than continue at all, she gave Nicholas $5 and she was
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like, "Go play basketball with your friends. Like, get out of the house." Yeah. A few hours later, after his
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friends had gone, like all gone home, Nicholas called the house to ask his mother to pick him up, but his halfb
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brotherther Jason picked up the phone and told him that their mom was sleeping and he didn't want to have to wake her
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up. So, he was like, "You got to walk home." And hours and hours passed and Nicholas never did return home. Oh, no.
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Yeah. What an That's such a sad way to, you know, just to think that they were arguing. They were arguing and then also
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being like, "No, I'm not coming to get you." Oh, that's sad. So sad. So, at first,
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the family ran away and they assumed, you know, he'd just be back soon. His sister, Carrie Gibson, said he'd run
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away before for a night or two. He was mad at mom and said, "I'm leaving. I'll find a new mom and a new home." He was
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not this nice, sweet, innocent kid. He was a very street smart city boy. But Nicholas didn't return after 3 days. So,
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Beverly filed a missing person's report at that point. But he's 13. Yeah. And he's been gone for 3 days. Yeah, that's
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not the likelihood of them finding him at this point is pretty low. Yeah. So, when the news that Nicholas had gone
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missing was made public, shockingly, it didn't come as a surprise to anybody familiar with the family, according to
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neighbors, the police would visit the house a few times per month because the arguments between Beverly and the kids
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or between Beverly and her boyfriend got so heated. Yeah. It seemed to be a pretty known fact that n that Nicholas
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was a difficult child. He was constantly getting into loud arguments with his mom. He was fighting with his brother
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Jason and he had been known to run away from home on occasion. Beverly said he thought he was an adult. We called him
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13 going on 30. It was very difficult to discipline him. If he made his mind up he was going to do something. There
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wasn't much I could do. So when he was reported missing, no one outside the family seemed particularly alarmed. His
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disappearance never made the news. It wasn't news to them. It was just news to us.
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Just sad. Yeah. So weeks and weeks passed, but there was no sign of Nicholas anywhere. No one heard from him
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at all. The belief that he had had just like run away pretty soon gave way to the belief that actually there might
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have been some kind of foul play involved. Beverly said, "I thought somebody offered him a ride and he got
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into the car." I think he would have gotten into a car with someone who kidnapped him. That's so scary. I know.
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Those weeks turned into months, the months turned into years, and it seemed like Nicholas was never coming back.
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Then out of nowhere in the fall of 1997, 3 years after he had disappeared, the family got a call from the US Embassy in
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Spain saying they had found Nicholas in a children's home and that he was desperate to return home. Can you even
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begin to imagine this? Like this like that would be unthinkable. Like you're just getting a call from a
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from a foreign embassy and they're just like, "Hey, your kid's here." Yeah. Just
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showed up. And how how long was this again? 3 years. 3 years later. Think of how long 3 years is. Yeah. Like 3 years
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is an eternity. An eternity. So, and every single day waking up just like filling in the blanks of what happened
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to your kid and then you get a call like, "Oh, he's he's just here and now he gets to come home." Yeah. Like you'd
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be you'd be I feel like the mix of complex emotions that you would be feeling would be so overstimulating
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because you'd be like it's like excitement, grief for what they could have potentially been through. How did
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they get there? Who was with them? What have they been dealing with? How'd they get all the way to [ __ ] Spain? Were
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they living in Texas? Yeah. Like holy [ __ ] Yeah. Well, according to the Spanish authorities, Nicholas had told
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them very little and was by all accounts very deeply traumatized by what had happened to him. From what they could
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piece together, this is like a little bit triggering. Uh Nicholas had been kidnapped from Texas by human
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traffickers who sold him into essentially sexual slavery until he was able to escape after 3 years of enduring
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that abuse. He ended up being discovered by uh two French tourists who were in Spain at the time and they found him by
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the side of the road near a diner and just called the police. After conducting a basic interview with him, the the
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authorities were convinced that he was an American and they were eager to return him to his family. His family
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obviously was elated by the news that after 3 years with no answers, their son and their brother, their loved one was
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coming home. Yeah. His sister Carrie coordinated everything with the embassy and she made plans herself to
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immediately travel to Spain to be the one to bring her brother home. But because of the circumstances of his
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disappearance, the case ended up being transferred to the FBI who would now be opening an investigation and vowed to
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capture the men who had kidnapped him in the first place. But this complicates things obviously. Oh, massively. Yeah.
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Yeah. So when Carrie arrived in SP in Spain to meet her brother, she really didn't know what to expect. I would have
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no idea what to expect. From what she had been told, he had experienced horrific abuse at the hands of his
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kidnappers. And obviously, she knew that going through an experience like that will leave some kind of long-term
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emotional effect on a person. Absolutely. Like psychological scars. And she also knew that 3 years had
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passed and in that time Nicholas would have changed physically, especially when you think about the jump from 13 to 16.
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That's a big jump. Yeah. So, it seemed likely that maybe she wouldn't recognize him immediately. And despite having
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prepared herself for the worst when they finally met in Spain, Carrie didn't have
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much trouble recognizing her brother. She said he had changed somewhat, but as far as she could tell, he was Nicholas.
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That said, there were things about him that did give her pause. She said he talked with a funny accent, but it was
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always a whisper, very quiet, like he was hiding. She also noticed that his eyes, which
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were always a very vibrant blue, if you look up pictures of him, he has like striking eyes. Now they were light
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brown. So that's weird. Yeah, that doesn't happen. Yeah. The handlers from the embassy explained that while he was
00:11:01
being held captive, the the abusers would beat him if he spoke English, so he learned to speak in a way that would
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please them. And they explained that according to Nicholas, the capttors had also injected his eyes with some sort of
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solution to change their color. Holy [ __ ] Yeah. And as for his quiet, skittish behavior, obviously Carrie
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rationalized it by reminding herself that he had been severely tormented and traumatized. Yeah. So that was going to
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change his behavior around others for sure. You know, so that night she spent hours going through an old photo album
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with her brother, just giving him updates on everybody, reminiscing, pointing out people, being like, "You
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remember auntie? You remember uncle. This like mom, you must miss mom." Yeah. and he said very little, but he seemed
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interested. And she said she could tell that he loved seeing the pictures. But before they could leave Spain and return
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to Texas, the US embassy obviously needed to certify Nicholas's identity. As far as Carrie could tell, it was her
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brother, but they needed actual like information to confirm that this was really him before they would issue him a
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passport. Of course. So the following day, Nicholas met with a judge from the embassy who had devised a strategy to
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determine if this was in fact Nicholas Barlay. In their meeting, the judge showed Nicholas five photographs of his
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family, his quote unquote family, and asked him to identify various people in those pictures. He correctly identified
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the first four, but he was unable to identify the fifth person, like the person in the fifth image. Huh. Yeah.
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Now, even though he hadn't been able to identify all five correctly, the judge reasons that four out of five was
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sufficient and the embassy issued him a new passport and he was off to return home to
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Texas. I mean, I trauma. That's the thing. I can I there's like that element of unthinkable trauma here. Yeah. That
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is playing a role in all of these decisions. I feel like it would play a role in most of my decisions. three
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years of being human traffked. I mean that's a that's something most of us luckily fortunately can never even begin
00:13:07
to conceive of human trauma that would come to that taught to speak a different language injected in the eyes to speak a
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different language right like like injected in the eyes like big I can see how they would be like okay yeah four
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out of five maybe he's not going to his memory is not going to be as clear right
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you know you can see it you can kind of see it yeah of course so with all the details and the paperwork squared away
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Carrie and Nicholas went to the report the next day and they were, you know, prepared to leave Spain. To Carrie, he
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seemed incredibly nervous about the flight or returning home, maybe a combination of both. She said, "I didn't
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understand why he was so nervous. He was constantly watching people, watching me.
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He was always watching me." Which obviously she had some kind of strange feeling about it. Yeah. Once they got
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back home though, Nicholas was welcomed with open arms by almost everybody in his family. At first, the attention and
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warmth did seem to be overwhelming for him. To the family, he seemed pretty shy, pretty withdrawn, obviously very
00:14:02
guarded. But like Carrie, they reminded themselves that he had undergone a profoundly traumatic experience. So it
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made sense that he wasn't like super duper happy, you know, like he was before. Yeah, of course. So within a
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couple months, Nicholas did seem to relax and he was settling in. He started hanging out with his old friends. They
00:14:20
were super happy to have him back, obviously. And he even seemed to be kind of developing a crush on one of the
00:14:26
girls in the neighborhood. The change was positive and it seemed to indicate that he was returning to his old self.
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But there was still one big hurdle before he and the family would be able to put this whole thing behind them.
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Because of the alleged kidnapping and the human trafficking, the FBI was obviously eager to pursue the case, and
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they wanted to speak with him immediately. So, after letting him get settled back in with his family, they
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scheduled a meeting with special agent Nancy Fischer, and Beverly and Nicholas sat down with her at the Texas Center
00:14:54
for Missing and Exploited Children. Given what had happened, Nicholas was obviously eager to get through the
00:15:00
interview as fast as he could and never talk about what had happened to him again. Can't blame him. Yeah. While that
00:15:05
would be easy to understand, though, there was still something about Nicholas and his behavior that struck Nancy
00:15:10
Fisher as unusual. Later, she said, "Not that people can't change in 3 years, but
00:15:15
this person did not appear to be 16. He had a shadow of a beard, a dark beard that I doubt Nicholas would have had at
00:15:21
the age of 16 since he had blonde hair." Yeah. And if you do look at pictures of
00:15:26
like when he was found three years later, he looks like he's in his 20s. Oh, 100%. Like he looks like a man.
00:15:32
Yeah, it's shocking. It is. Not to say that like differently, like you know, right?
00:15:38
Like some 16-year-olds, you're like, "Holy [ __ ] you look so much older." But this was this was a little different.
00:15:44
But he also obviously appeared to be nervous and uncomfortable, but almost unusually nervous and uncomfortable. But
00:15:50
like the others, Nancy was like, "He's been traumatized. He's been brutalized. It's going to change a person,
00:15:56
especially in this setting where they're disclosing the most horrific details about their abuse to a stranger. So, she
00:16:02
gave him a little bit of a leeway, a little leeway. Yeah. According to Nicholas, he said he had been abducted
00:16:08
by the quote military overseas on the night that he went missing. He said his captor approached him on the basketball
00:16:14
court, chloroformed him, threw him in a van, drove to the airport, and they left
00:16:19
the country. He claimed that from then on they would move him around often. He was always kept in rooms with other
00:16:25
children that were also being trafficked and they were regularly assaulted and sexually abused by highranking members
00:16:31
of the military. He said in a report prepared after the interview, Nancy Fischer described
00:16:37
various aspects of his abuse. Um this is pretty graphic, but she said every night
00:16:42
all the kids were raped and molested by men. These men were American, Mexican, European. They kept burning him and
00:16:48
giving him insects to eat. His left foot was broken by a crowbar. The boy's identity was changed by changing the
00:16:55
hair the hair color, eye color, or other ways. His eye color was changed from blue to brown by use of a solution.
00:17:02
This is horrific. There's unimaginable things. I can't even like go there. I can't either. Nicholas claimed that he
00:17:09
only managed to escape that night because his captors forgot to close the door securely and that's how he got out.
00:17:15
Damn. Yeah. He said he got out of the building and just ran for hours until he couldn't run anymore. And that's when he
00:17:21
was discovered by those two French tourists who obviously called the police. Which you wonder at that point
00:17:26
you're like, "So, did anyone else try to escape?" That was my immediate thought.
00:17:29
I was literally just going to be hearing that like other kids showed up. Yeah, they left the door open and one kid's
00:17:35
running. I'm assuming everyone is going to run. Obviously, there's fear, but but
00:17:40
there's going to be at least another one. More than one. Yeah. So Fischer said later, "This was a horrendous
00:17:45
interview and I was shaken by it when I left because I felt all the horrific emotional side effects that go with
00:17:50
listening to such a story." So she thanked Nicholas for being super candid with her and she assured him they were
00:17:56
going to find the people who had done this to him and bring them to justice. Before leaving, she reminded the family
00:18:01
that because this was an open and ongoing case, they really should avoid speaking with the press because it could
00:18:07
compromise the investigation. Yeah. Despite the warning, the news about Nicholas's ordeal and his return home
00:18:13
had already gotten out and the family was constantly getting calls from reporters. About 2 months after Nicholas
00:18:19
had got home, private investigator Charlie Parker got a call from a producer at Hard Copy, the national news
00:18:25
uh magazine program, and they wanted to do a story on Nicholas, but they were having trouble getting in touch with the
00:18:30
family. So, it was their intention to hire Parker, who worked out of San Antonio, track the family down, and get
00:18:36
their consent to cover this story. Parker actually had no difficulty getting hold of Beverly and Nicholas.
00:18:42
And to his surprise, they seemed pretty eager to share their story. Huh. Which was not great because the FBI literally
00:18:47
said literally just said don't do that. And like anything the FBI tells me to do, I'm I'm prob's going to listen.
00:18:52
Yeah. If they say don't do that because it's going to compromise a giant child trafficking ring that they're trying to,
00:18:58
you know, eradicate. Take down. Yeah. Listen to that. I'm going to listen. Yeah. No. Just a few days after reaching
00:19:04
out to the family though, Parker found himself invited into the family home. He was watching as the local news taped an
00:19:10
interview with Nicholas just sitting in the living room. In that specific interview, Nicholas is wearing a large
00:19:16
jacket pulled up around his neck, a widebrim hat, and dark sunglasses. Okay. Interesting. His responses to the
00:19:24
interviewer's questions are very short, very quiet, and delivered with a distinct heavy French accent,
00:19:31
which is [ __ ] weird. Yeah. Like that would make you people questioning this. I get it. Yeah. Like this is it's
00:19:38
[ __ ] strange. It's strange. I can't imagine my like like my child goes missing three years later comes back
00:19:45
with different eyes, a dark beard, and a [ __ ] French accent. That's it's the eyes that I'm having trouble. Yeah, that
00:19:53
I would have. But again, like I understand desperation Yes. could could also be playing a role into this that
00:20:00
you are just desperate to have your child back and you will just kind of ignore the red flags because you're like
00:20:06
I just want this to be him. It's like the case that you covered the Bobby Bobby Dumbar Bobby Dumbar case. Yeah.
00:20:11
It's like you just desperately want your child back so you'll just kind of put yourself in a headsp space of like this
00:20:19
has to be him. Yes. Because otherwise something terrible happened otherwise he's gone. Yeah. I can't take that.
00:20:25
Right. And I'm sure like in some ways it would feel like don't rip this child away from me like if you know like
00:20:32
they're thinking like this is my child or even like they've convinced themselves you know like they've
00:20:36
convinced themselves and it's like don't take him away again kind of. Exactly. So
00:20:39
Charlie Parker was watching the interview in a separate room where he could see Nicholas clearly. And as it
00:20:44
happened he also found himself standing next to a photograph an old photograph of Nicholas on the wall. as he watched
00:20:50
Nicholas being interviewed, his eyes just kept darting back and forth between the photograph and the young man in the
00:20:55
other room. And the more he examined the photo in front of him, the more he started, you know, kind of noting the
00:21:01
differences between the two. He said there was a moment where the hair stood up on the back of your neck and there
00:21:06
was just something wrong about it. The fact that he just like knew he just like innately Exactly. Yeah. Not wanting to
00:21:13
tip anybody off to his suspicion though, the next day Parker asked Beverly if she
00:21:17
had a picture of Nicholas that he could borrow to kind of study some more. Yeah.
00:21:21
And he remembered that, and this is interesting, he remembered that when Martin Luther King Jr. assassin James
00:21:27
Earl Ray was arrested in London, the authorities used a comparison of his ear in those photographs or in a photograph
00:21:33
of Ry in order to confirm his identity. So Parker enlarged the photo of Nicholas
00:21:39
and compared it to the photo of 16-year-old Nicholas in his passport. And to his surprise, the boy's ears were
00:21:45
not even remotely similar in the two photos. And our ears don't change. No, it's entirely possible for somebody to
00:21:53
dye their hair, change the way they speak, maybe even change the color of their eyes to seem like they're somebody
00:21:58
else. But again, our ears are like our fingerprints. They're formed when we're very young. And you know, barring some
00:22:04
kind of mutilation, they just don't change as we grow older. So, that being the case, Charlie Parker now had
00:22:10
compelling evidence that the boy living in in Beverly's house was not Nicholas Barker, which also is [ __ ]
00:22:17
horrifying. Terrifying. Horrifying. Like, I have goosebumps now. Like, I've read through this multiple times. I have
00:22:24
goosebumps. I can't. So, fearing that the young man could be a spy or have some kind of nefarious intent, Parker
00:22:32
called Nancy Fischer, special agent Nancy Fischer, to report his discovery, and he was stunned to find that Fischer
00:22:38
didn't seem too interested in what he had to say. Huh. In fact, the most she was willing
00:22:43
to tell him was just be careful that he didn't intrude on a federal investigation unless he wanted to get
00:22:48
charged for the crime. Oh, yeah. Later she said, "I thought I didn't have a right to question their statement that
00:22:54
this was their family member because how could they be wrong? I mean, no one would be wrong about something like
00:22:59
that. Why would you ever take in a stranger, not just a stranger from this country, but a stranger from another
00:23:04
country who speaks with a French accent? This has to be Nicholas Barlay." Which I
00:23:09
again, I understand that totally that thought process. Like I totally get where they're coming from. Like and I I
00:23:15
get that, but also you're an FBI agent. Well, for sure. That's the thing. Like I
00:23:20
that's I to this is so [ __ ] up like this whole thing cuz it's like it's different cuz she's an FBI agent. That's
00:23:27
where that's where like to like that's your job. It's different cuz you're an FBI agent but then at the like I was
00:23:31
just saying that but then at the same time when the [ __ ] do you run into that during your career? Well that's and it's
00:23:36
like at this point it's so hairy because you are questioning a grieving a family
00:23:43
who's been grieving for three years. Yes. the loss of their child and it's like and now they have this hope and
00:23:50
they are telling you this is their family member. They're like steadfast about it. It must be a very strange
00:23:56
position to be in to know that it is not and to be like how are you not seeing it
00:24:02
right? You know like we think of the Bobby Dunar case and we were saying like how can you not know that's not your
00:24:07
son? I think I think self desperation plays a a part of just controlling the part of your brain that logically tells
00:24:15
you that is not your child. It just shuts it off. I think that's the thing. And I think when unless you've been in
00:24:21
that position, it's probably hard to understand to understand. But looking from this point of view, you say, "Dear
00:24:28
FBI agent, question." You got to question it. If you ruffle some feathers, you ruffle some feathers. You
00:24:33
got to let it slick off your back and be like, "Sorry, I'm just doing my job." Right. Well, you know, we're here
00:24:39
talking about it, so you know, something happened. Exactly. So, Nancy Fischer might not have wanted to believe that
00:24:44
they were dealing with a straightup impostor, but there were others who were far less willing to entertain this whole
00:24:49
charade. As part of the FBI's investigation into the case, Nicholas was sent to see forensic psychologist
00:24:55
Bruce Perry in order to collect more information about his claims about being trafficked. He later said, Bruce said,
00:25:02
"I introduced myself and when he spoke back, immediately I thought, something's wrong here. As a contractor with the
00:25:08
FBI, Perry had interviewed countless survivors of traumatic situations, actually unfortunately similar to those
00:25:15
that Nicholas said he had gone through. And nothing about the boy's behavior seemed to support his story. Most
00:25:21
significantly, Nicholas spoke pretty casually about the details of this abuse that he supposedly went through without
00:25:27
showing any of the physical and largely unconscious signs of somebody who's been
00:25:32
abused. There was also the fact that he seemed entirely incapable of speaking fluent English or speaking without an
00:25:39
accent. Like it seemed like he could not do. Yeah. Perry said that told me about
00:25:44
the development of his brain and the development of language. You just cannot be raised for the first six or seven
00:25:49
years of your life in an English-speaking home and not be able to speak English without an accent. I can
00:25:55
guarantee you that this kid was not raised in an English-speaking family, which it really is fascinating how
00:26:01
people can like pick those little parts of your pathology. Yeah. And point to like nope. Proves it. You know what I
00:26:09
mean? And it's so fascinating just how the brain works and how even no you might so badly want to change that but
00:26:15
you just can't. Like your brain is just wired that way. Yeah. So Bruce Perry reported his suspicion to Nancy Fischer
00:26:22
and along with what she'd heard from Charlie Parker at that point she could not ignore the obvious fact that whoever
00:26:27
it was who had returned home from Spain with Carrie Gibson was not Nicholas Barkley.
00:26:32
So fearing now that the family might be in danger, she immediately called Carrie
00:26:35
Gibson, his sister, or quote unquote, and told her what they learned. And to NY's great surprise, Carrie seemed
00:26:42
uninterested in hearing that the young man living in their house was not her brother, and may in fact be a dangerous
00:26:47
person. Oh. Later, Carrie said she didn't remember uh Nancy Fischer putting it in like those exact words that this
00:26:54
person might be dangerous. But the fact remained that no matter how she phrased it, the family was determined to hold on
00:27:00
to the belief that their lost loved one had come back to them and it seemed like
00:27:05
nothing was going to change their minds, which you like we're saying over and over again, you can understand a sad
00:27:10
situation. It really is. Very quickly, the Dollarhead family had gone from willing participants in an FBI
00:27:16
investigation to now a serious obstacle in finding the truth. A few days after Nancy Fischer informed the family about
00:27:23
the potential danger, she actually went to Beverly's home to obtain permission to get a DNA sample from Nicholas, but
00:27:29
the agents were met at the door with a very uncooperative Beverly. Oh no. Not only did she refuse to allow them near
00:27:35
Nicholas, quote unquote, but when they pushed the issue, she threw herself onto the floor and started screaming, "No,
00:27:41
and you can't pick me up and you can't make me." Yeah. Which is sad. It's The whole thing. It's heartbreaking. The
00:27:48
whole thing is heartbreaking. I mean, this is awful. Yeah. From Nancy Fischer's perspective, though, the
00:27:53
change was remarkable. She said, "She wasn't just apathetic. She was hostile. I no longer saw them as a grieving,
00:27:58
victimized family. I saw them as a questionable family. There'd be no reason for them to accept a stranger
00:28:03
into their lives unless there was something to hide cuz she's looking at it like this is a bit nefarious now."
00:28:10
Yeah. Cuz it cuz I understand that you need to question that. You need to say because you you have to look at it from
00:28:17
a totally, you know, unbiased point of view, not living in the emotion of it all. You need to be like, why are you
00:28:24
trying to keep this? If I'm telling you this is could be a dangerous stranger, this is likely not your son, right?
00:28:31
Like, why can't we investigate this, you know? But then you look at the family and you say, "Well, I don't want you to
00:28:39
put my my loved one, who I think this is my loved one, through more trauma, right? And I just want to go on with my
00:28:46
life." Right. But you can see how it would look nefarious from the other side. Yeah. And the thing like it
00:28:52
wouldn't be super traumatic to get a DNA test to confirm your identity, I don't think. Exactly. You know, like But but
00:28:57
again, but I've never gone through this experience, so who knows? But while Nancy Fischer and the other FBI, the
00:29:03
other agents from the FBI continued trying to work with the family, private investigator Charlie Parker was kind of,
00:29:09
you know, in the background there, he was tailing quote unquote Nicholas everywhere he went at this point. At
00:29:15
times, he would reach out in the hope of forming a connection that would allow him to get more information. And after
00:29:21
about a week or two, his efforts seemed to pay off. One afternoon, Charlie Parker invited quote unquote Nicholas
00:29:26
out for breakfast at a local restaurant. And they sat down together. They apparently ordered some hot cakes and
00:29:33
the conversation eventually turned to the night that Nicholas disappeared several years earlier. Parker said, "You
00:29:39
really made your mother mad." Referring to the fight that he had gotten in with his mother before he left to play
00:29:44
basketball. Mhm. And at hearing that, the man sitting across from Charlie Parker put his fork down, looked up at
00:29:51
Parker, and said, "She's not my mother, and you know it." I would. Holy [ __ ] [ __ ] my pants.
00:30:00
Charlie Parker was probably like, "Wow, I thought that was gonna be a lot more difficult." And also, obviously, Charlie
00:30:06
Parker knew. He fully knew like he had gone studied the ears and everything. Inately, he knew. You don't go that hard
00:30:12
unless you're pretty sure that you're right, right? But then to have somebody confirm it must be just a whole
00:30:17
different thing. You must be orbiting at that point. Like, I would be shot into the Kyper belt. And then you're also
00:30:24
like, "Okay, cool. Who the [ __ ] are you sitting across from me? Who the [ __ ] are
00:30:28
you? And two, what the [ __ ] do we do next? Yeah. Like, what what do I do with this information? Because now I know
00:30:33
it's like, is the family gonna take this? Yeah. And how are they going to take it? Exactly. So, once the
00:30:39
confession was out of his mouth, it didn't take long for the imposttor Nicholas's story to fall apart. A short
00:30:45
time after that breakfast meeting with Charlie Parker, he was fingerprinted by the FBI who ran the prints through the
00:30:51
international database and almost immediately got a hit, which like fantastic. Why the [ __ ] didn't you just
00:30:57
do that as a precaution originally? Okay, thank you. Cuz my first question was going to be, wait a second, they
00:31:03
didn't fingerprint him? Why didn't I think of that? We could have started like that judge's idea was super cute
00:31:08
and like super fun. Like family pictures, fingerprints, right? dental records, the whole nine. And what's wild
00:31:16
is I didn't question earlier why they didn't do fingerprints or D. I think I probably just assumed they did. I think
00:31:22
I assumed they did and now I'm like, wait a second. Yeah. No. Why wouldn't you do that to begin with? Clear as day.
00:31:28
Yeah. Wow. Certainly is. The fact that they didn't fingerprint him to begin with is mindboggling. Baffled. Truly
00:31:35
baffling. My baffleds are baffled. Truly. So, the young man who had been passing himself off as Nicholas Barlay
00:31:41
for several months now, living in this family's home was in fact 25year-old, a 25-year-old French man
00:31:50
named Frederick Bourdain. Yeah. So, see, there was a reason he looked that old. Not only was he 25, he was a fugitive
00:31:57
wanted by the Interpol on several counts of impersonating other people all around
00:32:02
Europe. Oh no. They had been living with a [ __ ] fugitive. Oh, no. Can you like can you imagine you think your
00:32:11
13-year-old son disappeared like you're not only you think he did he did disappear. Three years later he comes
00:32:17
back. The FBI is like, "Yay! Woo! Woo! He's back. We showed him some photos. He knows you guys. It's great." And then
00:32:24
you find out you've been living with a 25-year-old French fugitive. I'd be like, "What the Who did
00:32:31
I piss off in a past life?" Seriously, I'd be like, "What the when does it end?" Truly, when does it end? Holy
00:32:38
[ __ ] A 25-year-old French fugitive. You've just been laying your head down at night with that man in your house.
00:32:44
Yeah. Pretending to be your child. And also, this guy, what the [ __ ] It's weird. This family lost their
00:32:52
13-year-old child and you pray upon that. You got to be Yeah. You got to be the lowest form of scum. He is a
00:33:01
mentally ill human being. He, I will say, has a very tragic backstory. It by no means excuses what he did, but
00:33:09
there's some psychological thing that played out here. So, in retrospect, it obviously seems unbelievable that
00:33:17
anybody would have looked at a 25-year-old man, specifically this 25-year-old man, and believed him to be
00:33:23
16-year-old Nicholas. Like, I you I was telling you I was doing this case and you looked at the pictures and you were
00:33:28
like, "How the [ __ ] did I think?" Um, yeah. But he had gone out of his way to make himself appear younger. And when it
00:33:35
came to manipulating people, he was a master manipulator. Still, the difference between the two people is
00:33:41
immediately apparent. Bourdain himself said in a 2011 interview. I mean, who wouldn't see it? Yeah, he himself was
00:33:48
like, "Yeah, that's [ __ ] crazy." Yeah, I see that. When I saw the pictures, I was like, "I don't I don't
00:33:53
know about that." Yeah. Oh, I don't know about that. One of these things is not like the other. Yeah. So, the revelation
00:33:59
that Nicholas was actually Frederick Bourdain was a shock to many of the people who had, you know, closely
00:34:05
followed the story or who who were involved in this story. But it also raised several new questions. Chief
00:34:11
among them, who the [ __ ] was this guy and why did he want to impersonate an American teenager? Given that his
00:34:17
history is almost entirely self-reported and the fact that he is a consumate liar
00:34:22
and con artist, it's pretty difficult to know how much of his personal history is
00:34:26
true. But throughout the last decade or so, it does seem like he has this kind of remarkable willingness to be honest
00:34:33
about his life and his crimes. So, it's possible that he told the truth with regard to his history and his motives
00:34:39
for this whole thing. Yeah. So, uh Frederick Pierre Bordin or Bordon was born June 13th, 1974 to a single mother,
00:34:47
Gileain Bourin, in Nantara, France. Uh France. Why did Why can't I say France? France. France. Why did I say it like a
00:34:56
prompt in prompt? Anyway, at the time of his birth, his mother was very young and
00:35:00
his father was an older man from Algeria and he was already married at the time.
00:35:05
So, Gileain never told him about her pregnancy. Uh, not very prepared or very interested in being a mother. Frederick
00:35:12
ended up being raised by his grandfather who he claimed was an abusive racist who
00:35:17
treated him very badly because he was mixed race. Frederick said, "Before I was born, I already had the wrong
00:35:22
identity. I was already prepared not to know who I really was, which is really sad. That is sad. In a 2008 interview,
00:35:28
Gileain recalled that her son was like any other child, totally normal in his early years. But she said she didn't
00:35:34
have much experience with him when he was young. Okay. Yeah. Just before he turned three, he was removed from the
00:35:40
home and placed with her parents because of her lifestyle. At the time, she was a
00:35:44
heavy drinker. She usually didn't have a job. She was in no way fit to be a mother. Yeah. And besides all that,
00:35:50
according to one relative, she really didn't want anything to do with that child. That's sad. It is really sad.
00:35:54
It's really sad. It's doesn't give you a right to traumatize people later in life. But no, it's very sad. You feel
00:36:00
sad for the child. Yeah. When he did see her, Frederick remembered his mother being very dramatic, constantly needing
00:36:05
attention. So relatable. While most people would have been happy to see their children and, you know, make their
00:36:12
children the center of attention. Guilain seemed kind of frustrated when the focus wasn't on her. and when like
00:36:18
Frederick was getting attention. So she would feain illness when he was around and especially when they were alone
00:36:23
together and make him run and get help. He said to me to to see me frightened gave her pleasure. That's [ __ ] up. So
00:36:30
she's like [ __ ] up. Yeah, that's really [ __ ] up. If this is true cuz again this is I was going to say cuz
00:36:35
remember he's a con man, right? Caught between his grandfather's abusive, you know, abuse and his mother's disinterest
00:36:42
and you know whatever was going on there. Frederick started creating fantasies in his head about who his real
00:36:47
father might be. And when he entered school, he started telling stories about his father. He told his classmates that
00:36:53
his dad was a British secret agent, among other lies. But no matter how outrageous the stories about his home
00:36:59
life were, his peers more often than not seemed to believe him. A former teacher
00:37:04
of his said he had this way of making you connect with him. And they described Frederick as a quote precocious and
00:37:10
captivating child who had an extraordinary imagination and visual sense drawing wild beautiful comic
00:37:16
strips. So he like there was a lot going on in his mind for sure. At the same time that his creative side was emerging
00:37:22
at school like cool cool teachers started noticing other more troubling aspects of his personality. Not cool not
00:37:29
cool not cool. He was rebellious. He acted out a lot and he showed what teachers described as signs of mental
00:37:35
distress. M. So something was going on. At one point he told his grandparents that he had, this is awful, had been
00:37:41
molested by a neighbor. Oh god. But it doesn't seem like they did anything to report that or have that investigated.
00:37:48
So after that, he became even more rebellious and even more defiant. When he was 12, his grandparents weren't able
00:37:55
to control him anymore, and he was usually in trouble for acting out at school or stealing from neighbors. So
00:38:01
his behavior got him sent to a facility for troubled children. And that's a fact. Yeah. During his time in the
00:38:07
children's home, he seemed to get even more creative with the stories that he was telling. He got more dramatic, more
00:38:12
detailed. In 1990, when he turned 16, he was required to move to a different children's home for older kids. But
00:38:19
after just a few days there, he ran away and hitchhiked Paris, where he invented
00:38:23
his first fake identity. He said he was a lost British teenager named Jimmy Sale. Later, he said, "I dreamed they
00:38:29
would send me to England, where I always imagined life was more beautiful." But the problem was he spoke almost no
00:38:35
English. So the authorities in Paris didn't believe his story and eventually he confessed, gave them his real name
00:38:41
and they promptly returned him back to the home. Oh jeez. Yeah. So lots of failures here. Yeah. So his performance
00:38:48
of Jimmy Sale lost British teen might not have been very convincing uh to win him a free trip to England, but it did
00:38:54
seem to work for like a little bit. Like he was almost convincing them. In fact,
00:38:58
if he had spoken English and been able to give some other details and, you know, explain away flaws in his story,
00:39:04
he might have been able to pull it off. He wasn't super far from pulling it off.
00:39:08
So, it was then that he established a strategy of impersonation that he would now employ countless times over the next
00:39:14
two decades. By 1992, he had impersonated more than a dozen fictional children and just bounced around from
00:39:22
one children's home to the other, just lying about his identity. But now that he was 18, things were different. They
00:39:29
didn't send 18-year-olds to children's homes. They sent them to prison or just like kicked them out to live on the
00:39:34
streets. And at the same time, he hadn't received any education or life lessons,
00:39:39
anything that you need to live successfully as an adult. Yeah. So, he decided he just wouldn't live as an
00:39:44
adult. Instead, he continued impersonating children all over France, fleeing when he was found out, only to
00:39:52
start his ruse, restart his ruse somewhere else with a new fake identity. By that time, he had accumulated a
00:39:57
pretty significant record with the Interpol for lying to authorities, falsifying his identity, falsifying
00:40:03
documents. It was true that he had broken the law by creating so many fictional identities, but it also seemed
00:40:10
to be one of the few things that he was actually really good at. Like, he got caught obviously because you can only
00:40:16
put up things like that for so long, but he was the way he got away with it for a
00:40:21
while. He got away with it for a while. the way he would manipulate people like they did believe him. Yeah. He had this
00:40:27
this ability to make people believe him. Yeah. Which is really [ __ ] scary. Which also makes you question a lot of
00:40:33
his background. Yeah. That you can't that you can't verify at least that you can't Well, he kind of said having spent
00:40:40
so many years in institutional care, he had a keen understanding of how to elicit sympathy from adults and how to
00:40:46
exploit their guilt. Absolutely. He knew which buttons to push in order to get what he wanted while also making them
00:40:52
overlook obvious inconsistencies in his story. In the time that had passed since
00:40:56
his teen years, his fantasies and his stories had gone from, you know, creative play to now criminality. Yeah.
00:41:03
But the motive always seemed to be the same. Despite having become an, you know, a straightup con artist and an
00:41:09
impersonator, his identities weren't about money or anything like that or like stealing from people. He just said,
00:41:15
"For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be somebody else. Someone who was acceptable, which is really [ __ ]
00:41:21
sad." I know. That's the thing. If it's like that's really the case, then that's
00:41:27
devastating. And it he never got charged with like any theft or anything like that. Like he was always just charged
00:41:33
for being a con artist and like falsifying documents to be a child. Well, and it's like you wanted to like
00:41:39
he he's wanting all these things that he didn't get and these people treated him
00:41:43
so badly, but then he's going and like destroying people's lives. It's [ __ ] up. And it's like that's not going to
00:41:49
help. It's not going to help. I think he didn't learn like compassion and compassion, empathy, like relating two
00:41:56
things to one another, humanity. And it's like I think if he had seen a psychologist while he lived in those
00:42:02
children's home, he might have turned out to be a very different person. Yeah, potentially. But like you were just
00:42:07
saying, because he had the childhood he did, being passed around people who just
00:42:10
truly couldn't give a [ __ ] he never felt wanted or loved anywhere. But when he created stories about being a lost
00:42:17
child or sometimes a mute, traumatized teenager, he found the kind of sympathy and care that he always wanted. Even
00:42:23
being placed in a children's home, he said he felt more comfortable than he ever had been with his mother or his
00:42:28
grandparents. Wow, that's really sad. He said nobody ever gave a damn about me. So to be put in a place where somebody
00:42:33
really cared about me, I was reborn. Wow. which is sad. That's real. That's horrifying. Yeah. But unfortunately, no
00:42:40
matter how good he was, like we know, the characters and identities he made for himself over the years only lasted
00:42:46
so long before he was found out and had to move on. Mhm. In October of 1997, his
00:42:51
latest scheme had earned him a stay at a child welfare home in Spain, where a judge gave him 24 hours to prove that he
00:42:57
was a teenager or face criminal penalties. He was going to go to prison. So panicked that now he had overplayed
00:43:03
his hand and could wind up in jail. He told the manager of the home that he was an American teenager who'd been
00:43:09
kidnapped and brought to Spain and all he wanted was to go back home. He played the trauma card and convinced the
00:43:15
manager to let him be the one to contact his family in private. And he even got them to agree to letting him do it in
00:43:22
the manager's office like alone. I which is wild. How does certain people just have this ability? Because
00:43:29
here's the thing, like it is insane, but I know people who I think could pull this off 100%. That's the thing. There
00:43:35
are certain people who just have this ability. Yeah. Con artists are scary [ __ ] people because you hear like
00:43:44
there have been people in my life and I'm like, how the [ __ ] did you get away with doing that? And like how do you not
00:43:49
care about hurting somebody like that? How did people just let you do it? And how do people let you do it? But they
00:43:54
do. It's crazy. So this happened the night before he was to be fingerprinted by the Spanish
00:43:59
authorities. Fingerprinted. The night before. He spent the entire night placing calls to various police stations
00:44:07
and cities across the US. Every time he would claim that he was a Spanish police
00:44:11
officer who had found a missing American boy, but he said the boy refused to speak to them. So he was reaching out on
00:44:17
the boy's behalf to find out whether or not this boy matched any of their missing children. Wow. Which like
00:44:23
imagine getting that call. You'd like you'd be sus about that call. Absolutely. So he Yeah, he did. Like he
00:44:29
struck out repeatedly that night, but then he got a hit at the Texas Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
00:44:35
After providing terrible what was basically a description of himself. The operator told him the description
00:44:41
sounded a lot like that of Nicholas Barlay, a teenager from San Antonio, Texas, who had gone missing 3 years
00:44:47
earlier in 93. So, Bourdain asked the operator to fax a photo of Nicholas, and he did, or they did. And when the image
00:44:56
of the missing boy came through, Frederick was like, "This is a long shot. Like, I don't really even look
00:45:00
like this kid, but I'm going to try cuz it's my only hope." Wow. He said he thought to himself in that moment, he's
00:45:06
been missing three or four years. I can guarantee one thing. There would be a change. If there's a change, there will
00:45:11
be doubt. If there's doubt, then I have a chance. That is chilling. It is. That is so chilling because he did not give a
00:45:20
[ __ ] about what that could do to this family. He didn't even think about it. He just said, "I can't go to prison, so
00:45:25
this is what I have. I can't go to prison, so I'm just going to ruin this family's life." Yeah. Wow. So, it was
00:45:30
then that 25-year-old con artist Frederick Bourdain transformed himself into 16-year-old missing teenager
00:45:37
Nicholas Barlay. While the authorities started contacting the embassy and the family, Frederick worked fast to make
00:45:44
his appearance match that of Nicholas to the best of his ability. He dyed his hair blonde. He even had one of the
00:45:50
other residents tattoo him with the initials that Nicholas had tattooed on his hand and his ankle. Yet even those
00:45:56
alterations, like with those alterations, tattoos, he got Yeah, he dyed his hair. He got tattoos for this.
00:46:02
But even with those alterations, he was sure that he would be found out immediately and sent to prison. He just
00:46:07
was like, "It's worth a try." Wow. Later, he said, "You can't prepare to play a role or be a person you don't
00:46:13
know." But when the first interview happened and the embassy official seemed satisfied with the story, it did seem
00:46:19
possible, still highly unlikely, but possible that he could pull it off. Then, in the days that followed, he
00:46:25
thought surely he'd be discovered as a fraud at any minute. But every passing step, everyone seemed to believe his
00:46:31
story with no hesitation. The reality is that obviously like a lot of people don't want to question a story
00:46:37
like this. No, of course not. Especially one that he had told where, you know, he'd been traumatized and everything.
00:46:43
So, it worked. So, it just it all the cards fell into place. Yeah. And it was pretty much what he assumed. People were
00:46:50
easy to manipulate when you knew what buttons to push. And he did know what buttons to push, the trauma buttons.
00:46:55
Yeah. But his biggest challenge, he figured, came when Casey Gibson, Nicholas's real sister, arrived in Spain
00:47:02
to pick him up. Frederick was convinced that after days of pretending he was going to be found out when Casey got
00:47:08
there. But he said Casey didn't appear the slightest bit suspicious. So, it seemed like he might actually get to
00:47:13
leave Spain. In fact, when it came to establishing his identity for the passport, something he definitely
00:47:19
thought was going to trip him up. Yeah. It was Casey who prepared him for the test unknowingly.
00:47:24
Oh man. The night before Frederick was to meet with the judge at the embassy. Again, remember they spent hours going
00:47:30
through family photos and telling stories. Oh, you're right. So, when the judge asked him to identify those people
00:47:35
in the family photos, he had been given all the information he needed not even 24 hours earlier. Wow. Yeah. Just by it
00:47:43
all just kind of fell into place for him. He didn't even have to do the work. Yep. Wow. For years, years at this
00:47:50
point, he had passed himself off as dozens dozens of fake teenagers with varying degrees of success. But this was
00:47:57
the first time he had taken the identity of an actual person. And he was still convinced though that sooner or later
00:48:03
someone was going to realize he wasn't Nicholas. It's obviously one thing to create a fake persona and like come up
00:48:09
with your own backstory, but it's quite another to adopt the identity of a person who had 13 years of experiences
00:48:15
with a family. Yeah. and like an American family, you know, that's it's pretty different. Yeah. So, when they
00:48:23
arrived in San Antonio, he said the Dollarhide family welcomed him with open arms. Like Carrie, it seemed they didn't
00:48:29
notice the glaring differences between Frederick and Missing Nicholas. They didn't want to. No, of course they
00:48:34
didn't. Each new person he met seemed to adopt the position that since he had gone through this traumatic ordeal, he
00:48:40
would almost certainly have changed in some way. And he said if anybody was suspicious, they didn't let on. Wow.
00:48:46
aside from one person who did not seem even remotely interested in entertaining the ro the ruse. When they knew Nicholas
00:48:54
was going to be coming home, the family organized a party and all the relatives and neighborhood friends came over to
00:49:00
the house to welcome him when he got there. The only person who wasn't there was Nicholas's half brother Jason, the
00:49:06
one who had called, remember? And Jason said like, "No, I'm not waking up, Mom. You got to walk home." That's tough.
00:49:11
Since Nicholas's disappearance, Jason blamed himself for everything. and um he was a heavy drug user for years.
00:49:18
Unfortunately, it made him slip a lot further into into his addiction. A couple weeks after the party though,
00:49:24
Jason did finally come by the house to visit with the family. And when he walked in, he gave quote unquote
00:49:30
Nicholas a hug. But Frederick said he remained very standoffish for the entire visit. And he seemed to be viewing his
00:49:37
quote unquote brother with a very wary look. In fact, despite spending hours with the family that day, they only
00:49:44
spoke one time. As Jason was preparing to leave the house, he looked at Frederick suspiciously, said, "Good
00:49:51
luck," and left. Good luck. Good luck. Holy [ __ ] Chills you to your [ __ ] core. Can you Fred was probably
00:50:02
like, "Oh, yep. Oh, yep." The fact that this is not like it is a movie now, but the fact that this whole story is not
00:50:10
just a movie originally is [ __ ] fact that this is real. That it's real is insane. Wow. Good luck. Holy [ __ ] So,
00:50:18
he'd been doing this for a lot of years obviously, so he knew when his lies were
00:50:22
starting like he could tell when people were realizing coming onto him when things were going to fall apart. Yeah.
00:50:27
His resemblance was slight at best. And again, he spoke with a very strong French accent, so the lie should have
00:50:33
been obvious from the start pretty much. And he said that being the case, within
00:50:37
a few months of being in San Antonio, he started questioning if the lie was so obvious, why would the family be so
00:50:43
willing to accept him as their missing child? Yeah. So now he's starting to kind of be suspicious of this family. Oh
00:50:49
lord. When Nicholas disappeared in 1994, the authorities assumed, like we said in
00:50:54
the beginning, that maybe he had just run away from home. Yeah. And Nicholas actually had been picked up by the
00:50:59
police shortly before he disappeared for stealing a pair of uh tennis shoes. And
00:51:03
it was possible that the theft and like some other things that were going on at the time was going to result in him
00:51:08
being placed in a juvenile facility. Like he was supposed to go to juvie that summer. Holy [ __ ] Add that to the fact
00:51:15
that unfortunately Beverly Dollar also struggled with addiction and his brother Jason like we know was an addict at the
00:51:21
time and also was frequently abusive to Nicholas. Oh, like they did not get along well with each other. I feel
00:51:27
really bad for Nicholas. I do too. He had a very sad life. But all that gathered together, it made sense to the
00:51:34
San Antonio police that he would have run away at the time. Yeah. But years later, as more and more people started
00:51:40
digging around in the family's history, some people started to wonder if the family knew more than they were saying.
00:51:45
Wow. And that's maybe why they were so willing to accept go along with the roose. Yes. Exactly. It was clear
00:51:52
obviously that Jason immediately saw through Frederick, but he seemed perfectly willing to let everybody else
00:51:58
go on pretending, which Frederick said struck him as very strange. Well, that was when you said he said good luck and
00:52:05
left. I'm like, all right, if you can tell that this is not your brother, you're not worried for your family. Why
00:52:10
are you just letting this go? Right. And guys, that's exactly how Frederick felt.
00:52:16
Yeah. Which I'm It's wild to be on Frederick's level right now. I know. I hate it. thought process-wise, but but
00:52:22
it just makes sense. Like, yeah, it is a it's a question that you have to ask, right? You can't just pretend that
00:52:28
that's not weird. No, it is [ __ ] weird. Later, Frederick said it was clear that Jason knew what had happened
00:52:34
to Nicholas, which is chilling. And that's, you know, according to Frederick. I'm not saying that he did.
00:52:39
Yeah. At the same time, PI Charlie Parker, though, also began to suspect that the family might have been involved
00:52:45
in Nicholas's Charlie Paka. Oh [ __ ] In his research, he learned that a few months after Nicholas's disappearance,
00:52:52
and this is fact, it's not like alleged or anything, Jason called the police to report that he had seen his brother
00:52:58
trying to break into the house one night. But when he called out, Nicholas ran away again and was never seen ever
00:53:04
again. Huh. Parker knew that while sure this could have been true, it also very well could have been Jason attempting to
00:53:12
make the authorities think that Nicholas was still alive, which was a kind of strange thing to do unless maybe he knew
00:53:20
what had happened to Nicholas. Eek and maybe knew who was involved or trying to keep the keep it going. Yeah. Getting
00:53:28
back to Frederick though, once the positive ID had been made, he was arrested for lying to the FBI. It's kind
00:53:33
of a big deal as he should be. Yeah. They will definitely always arrest you for that. Yeah. Um and he was also
00:53:38
arrested for entering the US on a false passport among various other things. Upon being arrested though, he told the
00:53:44
local FBI and lo the the local police and the FBI that he was confident that Nicholas's family had killed him and had
00:53:51
welcomed him into the family as a way of further covering up their crime. Oh, that's awful. Which is so [ __ ] The
00:53:58
accusation along with other facts of the arrest were enough to make the family give up their insistence that this was
00:54:03
Nicholas. And this whole thing finally came to an end. Ah, years later, Beverly herself admitted that after a few weeks
00:54:11
of having Frederick in their home, she did start to doubt whether or not he was Nicholas. But she kept that suspicion to
00:54:17
herself. She said one of the things that tipped her off was quote, "Nicholas was
00:54:21
always was a warm child, always hugging her and kissing her. But she said this person in her house was cold and
00:54:27
extremely guarded. She had noticed it the first time that they hugged at the airport and she never really like he
00:54:34
never really seemed to get comfortable around her and vice versa. But she said at the same time she just wanted to
00:54:41
believe so badly that it was her son that she went along with it. Well, and also it's like if he's just been in part
00:54:47
of a human trafficking ring, he might not want he might not want to touch you. Yeah. Like he might not want to be
00:54:52
touched at all. Right. So it's like that would not shock me. No. Like I would expect that to be honest. I'd be like
00:54:58
you probably don't want anyone touching you regardless of who they are, what their intention is, right? So that
00:55:03
wouldn't like shock me. Wouldn't shock me either. And that wouldn't be like a weird thing to point out that like Yeah.
00:55:09
You know what I mean? Like I I feel like that would just be like part for the course with that kind of thing. You
00:55:14
would think so. I think we also right now have a lot more information about like what happens to people and like
00:55:18
what that all entails. in that immediate moment, you know, but still it's weird. I agree with you. So,
00:55:28
while Frederick sat in a cell, Nancy Fischer started now looking into the claim that the family was responsible
00:55:34
for Nicholas's disappearance. Unfortunately, and you know, not surprisingly, the family was not
00:55:39
cooperative with the investigation. I'd be pretty pissed if this happened to me.
00:55:43
But Beverly refused to help. She said, "If Jason did something to Nicholas, I didn't know about it." And I can't
00:55:48
imagine Jason ever doing that. It's just not in his makeup, which like he was abusive to
00:55:53
Nicholas, so he's, you know, well, like I'm not I'm not again I'm not like I don't know what happened here, so I'm
00:56:01
not going to say anything happened. I to me that's just a strange way of wording
00:56:05
that. Yeah. If I have children, I'm not saying like if if one of them killed the
00:56:10
other one, then I don't know about it. Yeah. Like that's that's not going to be in my vocabulary. Like that's not going
00:56:16
to be even in the orbit of possibilities. It's going to be of course that didn't happen. There's no
00:56:22
[ __ ] way that would happen. Exactly. And again, I'm not saying that means that something happened. I'm just a
00:56:26
weird way to strange way to word that. Completely agree. Like I just I wouldn't have worded it like that. I will say,
00:56:33
you know, hot dog and a trench coat. Take it for what it is. She took two polygraph exams and passed them. Okay.
00:56:39
But then they had her do a third and she failed every single question on the third one. So that shows are just [ __ ]
00:56:47
They're [ __ ] How do you pass two with flying colors and then the third one one
00:56:50
with flying colors every question. Yeah. And also like if you already passed two,
00:56:54
why are they making you take a third? Exact. Because they know it's [ __ ] Yeah. I'm like this is a waste of time.
00:56:59
But Nancy Fischer said of the third exam, she practically blew the blew the instruments off the table. Damn. I was
00:57:04
like yikes. Jason himself was even more uncooperative. When Nancy Fischer sat down to interview him a few weeks later,
00:57:11
she said he was hostile. He refused to help in any way. Shortly after that interview, he checked himself into um
00:57:18
rehab for drugs, but he left halfway through before finishing the program and he died from an overdose a short time
00:57:24
later, which is very sad. Yeah. Uh the investigation into the family pretty much stalled because they couldn't find
00:57:31
any the investigators couldn't find anything concrete leak linking the family to his disappearance. But, you
00:57:38
know, there were suspicions still. Nancy Fischer said, "I do feel like the family
00:57:43
knows the whereabouts of Nicholas Barlay. I think Beverly and Jason knew at one time what happened to Nicholas
00:57:49
Barlay." And that's just the FBI speaking. I'm not saying I know what happened. That's just the FBI saying it.
00:57:54
Other investigators shared the belief. They cited the history of violence in the home, the evidence of the abuse
00:57:59
documented before Nicholas went missing. But unfortunately, to this day, he remains a missing person. That's really
00:58:05
sad. That's really sad. After a few weeks of arguing back and forth with the prosecutor, Frederick Bordon accepted a
00:58:12
plea bargain. And in September of 1998, he pleaded guilty to perjury and obtaining and possessing false
00:58:18
documents. When asked why he had perpetrated this crime against a grieving family, he told the judge he
00:58:24
was merely seeking love, which outraged the family and would outrage me. That's great. Go find love somewhere else. Go
00:58:32
figure out my grieving family. Like, that's [ __ ] up. Go [ __ ] yourself. The judge actually sentenced him in this
00:58:39
case to 6 years in jail, which is more than three times the recommended sentence for that charge, which is
00:58:44
pretty crazy. Yeah, it is. When you think about like all that goes into the scheme that he played out, like it's
00:58:51
pretty diabolical what he did. It's like, but I remember he took a plea, so there were some charges that were
00:58:55
dropped. So, the judge did everything he could. After Frederick completed his sentence, he was obviously deported back
00:59:02
to France where he got right back to his old ways, impersonating fake teenagers,
00:59:06
which did nothing. No, literally did nothing. He was continuing to impersonate people and he actually spent
00:59:12
time in prison like multiple times. Eventually, he got out and met and married a woman named Isabelle, who he
00:59:19
met when he uh when she reached out after seeing him on TV discussing his history and what she described as his
00:59:25
quest for love. Ladies, we have to do better. It's true. Okay. We have to do better. Yeah. We
00:59:32
really, really have to do better. Yeah, we do. Okay. They are still married to this day and they did have five children
00:59:39
together. Wow. According to Frederick's mother, when the family got the invite to the wedding, they didn't go because
00:59:46
she said no one believed him. I wonder why. Like, that's bad. If you're sending out a wedding invite and everybody,
00:59:54
nobody believes that you're even getting married. like you've been lying for a long time. You're a pathological liar.
00:59:58
It's sad. It's sad. As for his new role of a husband and father, those who know him best do not believe that Frederick
01:00:05
has changed at all. According to his mother, he is a quote liar and will never change. His uncle uh Jeanluke
01:00:11
Drowart said he agreed saying, "You can't just reinvent yourself as a father. You're not a dad for 6 days or 6
01:00:18
months. It's not a character. It's a reality." Yeah. And that's that. And that's it. That's
01:00:25
the that on that. Holy [ __ ] What a wild thing that played out here. The real like loser in all of this. Like the
01:00:36
person who lost is Nicholas. Yeah. He's lost still. And and he's almost lost in the story. He is. You know what I mean?
01:00:44
Like it's like absolutely. No matter what, the story became something so different. And it's like when you really
01:00:50
boil it down, you're like, "What happened to that 13-year-old boy that day?" And it doesn't really It didn't
01:00:57
seem like there was like a lot of investigation that happened. That's the thing. I'm like, "Why are we not
01:01:02
figuring out what happened to him?" And I think there wasn't a lot of investigation because they were like,
01:01:06
"Oh, he ran away. He had ran away before." So, and it's like obviously that doesn't mean that they And it's
01:01:12
like, "Yeah, he ran away and he obviously came back." Yeah. You're telling me that kid just ran away and
01:01:17
never came back. Never popped up anywhere? Yeah. Ever? Yeah. Like Nicholas Barlay just does not exist
01:01:23
anymore. I don't know what happened to him obviously. I don't think he ran away. I think somebody did something bad
01:01:30
to him. Whether it was somebody who did it like while he was walking home. Yeah.
01:01:35
It could easily be a stranger. You know, the FBI could be right to suspect the family. Who know? Like I don't know.
01:01:40
Again, that's the FBI suspecting Yeah. that something was closer to home here. That's on the FBI. That's on That's on
01:01:45
the FBI. I'm not uh I'm definitely not the Federal Bureau of Investigations. You know, I I too am not the Federal
01:01:53
Bureau of Investigation. Would you tell me if you were I would I the day I become the Federal Bureau of
01:01:58
Investigations, I will absolutely update you. I'll text really quick. Thank you so much. Right when it happens. That's
01:02:04
super great. I'll throw it on my Instagram. Perfect. Uh I won't see it. Yeah, you won't see it, but everybody
01:02:09
listening will. Uh yeah that I this is a strange story. Yeah. An upsetting story and no one wins. No in this story
01:02:22
which is like very sad. Something I forget what you said earlier but like like you or you were saying he just gets
01:02:28
lost in this story. The other the other thing is he maybe wouldn't have gotten so lost in this story if Frederick
01:02:33
hadn't done what he did. He absolutely wouldn't have. Cold cases get investigated all the time. 3 years into
01:02:39
that, they might have found something if they continued looking, but they thought
01:02:43
he had came that they they thought he had come home. And then when they realized it wasn't him, they had a whole
01:02:48
other situation to deal with, but they were having to deal with, okay, is this him or not, right? And it's like, and
01:02:53
that's precious time they could have spent looking into this case and he's just gone. Nicholas is just gone now.
01:02:58
And then by that point, the family's angry and upset. And then some of them have I think some of them are pushing
01:03:04
back on on like investigations and it's like you've really lost the sauce here and it's like again there's a
01:03:11
13-year-old boy who went missing that just is gone gone in this whole thing and it's just the Frederick show.
01:03:18
Hopefully someday they can you know like reopen up an investigation and figure out what happened. Like we always say
01:03:23
what happened to him. Cold case is never cold and like No, they're not. A 13-year-old should never go missing and
01:03:28
not be found. That's the thing. That's [ __ ] up. Come on. It's like something. It's just sad that I think in his 13
01:03:35
years of life, he like he didn't get to be happy often. It sounds like he didn't
01:03:40
get a lot of uh lot to be to be a kid. Yeah. You know. Yeah. Sad case. It is a sad case. And you know, Frederick's
01:03:48
childhood is [ __ ] sad, too. Maybe. Maybe. Well, he was in he was in those homes, so that's sad, you know? Like
01:03:54
that's facts. Yeah. So that's sad that he had to be put into homes. For sure. It's just a sad case all around, but
01:04:00
that's a bummer. Don't impersonate people. Okay. Don't do that. Like unless it's for like like you're impersonating
01:04:05
like Kermit the Frog's voice. Yeah. Do voice impersonations. Those are fun. Yeah, those are fun. Yeah. Not like not
01:04:10
like other not missing children. Don't do that. I don't have to tell you that. Yeah. I have to tell you turn this off
01:04:16
and seek help. Yeah, that should really go without saying. All right. Well, we hope you keep listening and we hope you
01:04:21
keep it weird weird, but not so weird that you don't take our advice and um not impersonate missing children. Stupid
01:04:28
dicks. Yeah. Just like be cool. Don't be all uncool. Don't be all just in [Music]
01:04:43
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