Frédéric Pierre Bourdin[1] (born 13 June 1974)[2] is a French serial impostor the press has nicknamed "The Chameleon".
[6] Nicholas Barclay, aged 13 at the time he went missing, was last seen playing basketball with his friends in his home town of San Antonio, Texas, on 13 June 1994.
In February 1998, the FBI obtained a court order to take the young man's fingerprints and DNA, which were later identified as belonging to Bourdin.
[6] In August 2004, he was in Spain, claiming to be an adolescent named Rubén Sánchez Espinoza whose mother had been killed in the Madrid bomb attacks.
[3] In June 2005, Bourdin passed himself off as Francisco Hernandez-Fernandez, a 15-year-old Spanish orphan, and spent a month in the Collège Jean Monnet (a junior high school) in Pau, France.
He dressed as a teenager, adopted a proper walking style, covered his receding hairline with a baseball cap and used depilatory face creams.
"[1] Aired on 6 January 2009, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Stranger" (Season 10, Episode 11) fundamentally resembles Bourdin moving into a family's home by impersonating their missing daughter living in their home for some time before eventually being discovered as well as coming forward with allegations of her own abuse when confronted in court.
In 2010, a fictionalized account of the Nicholas Barclay case was brought to theaters under the title The Chameleon, by French director and screenwriter Jean-Paul Salomé.