A 13-year-old boy walks home from a basketball court in San Antonio and vanishes. Three years later, his family flies across the world to bring him home from Spain. There's just one problem. The young man they pick up isn't their son. He isn't even American. He's a 23-year-old Frenchman with brown eyes, dark hair, and an accent you could spot from across a room. And somehow, for nearly five months, nobody in that family said a word. This is the story of Frédéric Bourdin, the impostor the world came to call the Chameleon, and the missing boy whose name he wore like a coat.

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🖤 SOURCES & FURTHER READING

Here is everything used to research this episode.

🔗 WEB SOURCES

The New Yorker - The Chameleon

The Scotsman - Interview: The private detective who uncovered The Imposter

The Mirror US - Our missing son returned home after three years, but it was actually a French conman

KSAT - Case of missing San Antonio boy from 1994 remains a mystery

The Charley Project - Nicholas Patrick Barclay

Swallowing The Camel - Fake Teens V: Serial Teen Frederic Bourdin

Grunge - Frederic Bourdin: The Crazy True Story Of A Serial Impostor

📚 BOOKS

David Grann - The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (contains the expanded "Chameleon" essay)

Christophe D'Antonio - Le Caméléon (the authorized Bourdin biography)

🎬 DOCS

The Imposter (2012), directed by Bart Layton

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