I would say I’m 14
because I would be younger, so people would care more.
I would speak with a smaller voice.
And because I was still looking younger,
physical appearance wasn’t a big problem at the beginning.
And then I received a picture where I saw a big blond boy, blue eyes,
and I said, “Well, this is it, I’m going to prison.”
But because of who I am,
I said, “OK, at least I got to try to be that person.”
All my life I’ve been pretending to be someone else.
And I discovered by changing identities,
I could do whatever I wanted.
I am Frederic Bourdin, and I had over 500 identities.
[The Man Who Was 500 Missing Children]
When I was 18, I went to Torino in north Italy.
I called the police saying I was a tourist,
and there was a young, 14-year-old-boy.
He was looking like he’d been abused, and very scared.
So the police came. They took me to a children’s home.
They were very caring for me
because they thought I was from this country.
And I went from north to south and back to Austria,
Germany, Switzerland, all the time running around.
Sometimes they would put me in foster families
or sometimes they would put me in a normal home.
But when you were caught in one place,
you’ve got to find another place and tell another story
or the same story with another identity.
You go in a shelter, you stay there.
And then you go when you feel like it.
But this one was different.
[Missing Child: Nicholas Barclay]
I called the police pretending to be a tourist.
I’d found a young boy that needed assistance.
They wanted to know who I really was.
And I realized at that moment
that I had to convince them that I was someone who exists,
but I couldn’t tell them who I really was.
I told them I’m coming from the US.
They told me to call the Center for Missing and Exploited Children
in Arlington, Virginia.
I told them that I work in a children’s home,
that the police gave us a young kid who’s been missing,
apparently, from the US for a certain number of years.
So the woman wanted to really help.
[She] made some research, and she came with the name Nicholas Barclay.
So she gave me the case number.
And the police officer of San Antonio, Texas,
who was looking for the case,
he was very excited.
He said he was going to contact the family.
It unleashed all kind of reactions.
The embassy, the sister, the judge, the prosecutor.
I wasn’t just someone to be identified now.
I was an American
who has been missing for three years and four months.
I couldn’t go nowhere. I couldn’t run away.
So I dyed my hair, I put tattoos that I saw that he had.
So the sister came.
I couldn’t imagine [for] one second what was going to be her reaction.
She looked at me saying, “I knew it was you.
I knew I would recognize you.”
She put herself into so much stress...
so much anxiety, so much suffering
that she couldn’t fail.
She went all across the world to get her brother,
her missing brother.
She couldn’t get the answer, “It’s not you.”
She knew I wasn’t.
But she knew I had to be.
We went to Madrid. We stayed in a hotel overnight.
The next morning, we were on the plane.
When I got to the US, my first fear when I was there
was that Nicholas was just going to come back home
and say, “Oh, God. What the hell?“, you know?
And my second fear was that he was dead
and somebody from there killed him.
The husband said, “Oh my God, you were abducted,”
because that was a story I said.
I just didn’t want to say by who or what.
But he said, “Well, you should talk to the FBI
and try to save the other kids.”
And I didn’t want to because there was nothing to say.
A few weeks later, I took their car and I drove to Oklahoma,
which was about a thousand miles away from there,
and the police arrested me.
They were mad at me, you know, “He took our car.”
To be forgiven, I said, “OK, I’m going to talk to the FBI.”
I met the FBI agent,
and I was already knowing what I was going to tell her:
I’d been abducted by the US military,
something absolutely horrible.
And I said, “OK, I’m going to be left alone now,”
because of what she said.
She said, “Oh, don’t worry, we’re going to look for it.
Nobody’s going to harm you.
Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
So it picked up the curiosity of different people,
and they contracted a private investigator named Charlie Parker
to come and talk with their TV crews
and interview me.
While they were doing that interview,
apparently he saw a picture of Nicholas in the back, on the wall,
and he thought my ears weren’t the same.
And he put himself inside his head that I wasn’t Nicholas Barclay
and I was maybe a terrorist.
The FBI wanted me to meet, so we went on a plane to Houston,
and it was a brain doctor.
It's not the kind of doctor that you can lie to.
He listened to me for a few minutes.
And then he went to an FBI agent, and he told them,
which I didn't know at the time,
but told them, “This can’t be Nicholas Barclay.”
So the FBI called the family and said, “This is not your son.
This is not your nephew. This is not your brother.”
Then he drove me back to the apartment.
And at that moment, I was waiting for the cops to show up at any moment.
And then the phone rang.
They talk on the phone,
then they said, “Yeah, we’re going to arrest you now.”
Six years was a good price.
I could have gotten up to 45 years.
[Missing Child: Leo Balley]
When they deported me to France, I found myself alone pretty quick,
so I contacted the gendarmerie,
and I said to them that I was Leo Balley,
a kid that’s been missing from 1996.
And... they believed me.
I went through hitchhiking
around the place where he disappeared.
And I called the gendarmerie again.
I said I was a tourist, and there was a kid there,
and his name was Leo or something.
They came there and they find me,
and they said, “Don’t worry, Leo, we’re going to take care of you.”
And then the DNA spoke and the fingerprints, too,
and they discovered that I was Frederic Bourdin, not Leo,
and they sent me to prison.
[Faked identity: Ruben Sanchez Espinosa]
He didn’t exist.
It’s an identity that I took when I was in south France.
Just like I did it so many, many times,
I chose that name, Ruben, which was a friend of mine from Spain.
Sanchez Espinoza was a name that sounded Spanish.
I was in a children’s home in Barcelona in Catalonia.
And because I don’t like when they ask me where my family is,
I told them that they had been killed in the Madrid bombing...
so they would leave me alone.
There was no Ruben Sanchez Espinosa
with his family dead in the bombing in Madrid;
it’s a creation of my head.
[Faked identity: Francisco Fernandez]
Francisco’s story was that his mother was French, his dad was Spanish,
and he was with his younger brother in a car accident
and he was the only one who survived this thing
after a few months in a coma.
After the accident,
he was supposed to have been sent with his uncle.
And his uncle was abusive— alcoholic and abusive.
And that’s why he ran away.
I got caught because...
one of the people who worked at the school saw me on TV...
and told her boss.
They verified together, and then they called the police.
Why do you think this ended up
being your last experience as an impostor?
Because...
I adopted a cat.
There’s one thing about me, I can’t abandon him.
And what I know is that I’ve got five children.
There is no greater joy than to look after my children.
I’ve been to many countries,
and I want my kids to see those beautiful places that I’ve seen.
I want them to be happy and to know not too much like me,
but more than a little.