The Chameleon - Frédéric Pierre Bourdin

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Hello and welcome to Citation Needed.

The podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts because this is the internet.

That's how it works now.

I'm Eli Bosnik and I'll be setting the tone this evening, but I'll need some standout talent to help me do it.

First up, two men head and shoulders above the rest, Noah and Heath.

The only scenario where I can imagine that would be true is very not safe for work.

Chicken fight!

Somebody says chicken fight.

Exactly.

And also joining us tonight, Shy Town's least shy, Tom and Cecil.

Chicago, it's a beautiful city.

Come flick our beam.

We're only shy until you park where we had set our cone after we shoveled the street.

Before we begin tonight, I'd like to take a second to thank our patrons.

Patrons, without the folks who give us money over at patreon.com/slash citation pod, we could blend into the ocean of white guys laughing at their own jokes.

But thanks to you, we're well-funded, white guys laughing at our own jokes.

And turns out that's how we get the president.

If you'd like to learn to join their rank,

we could be better funded.

We're funded.

That's what I'm doing.

I mean, I well was.

Yeah,

thank you.

Endowed.

If you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around till the end of the show.

And with that out of the way, it's a good sized endowment.

Tell us, Noah, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event will we be talking about today?

After we're done talking about Heath's good-sized endowment, we're going to talk about the chameleon.

And Tom,

you wrote an essay.

All right, we're just going straight into it.

That's fine.

And Tom, you wrote an essay about a person who leaves their life behind.

And Tom, you wrote an essay about a person who leaves their life behind and escapes their very sense of self.

Does this have anything to do with you having to shock yourself awake by any chance?

You know, I think everything does, Eli.

At this point, everything.

That's fair.

So tell us, Tom, what do you stare at the ceiling thinking about while everyone else in your house is asleep?

Well, there are a few times in our lives that we get to sort of reinvent ourselves.

One of the liberating things about starting college or moving to a new area is the opportunity to shed old baggage and expectations and show to the world a version of ourselves unencumbered by the ghosts.

of our own pasts.

These moments challenge the idea that who we are is a linear narrative and that the self is a constant rather than an intentional construction defined by a sort of symbiotic collaboration between us and our interaction with society.

Symbiotic collaboration.

Are you doing a research?

What the fuck is this?

This is a fucking pitch book.

What is happening?

This is part of my

Atlantic right now.

Okay.

Because it's about fishing.

Yeah.

These opportunities to reinvent and redefine the self usually mean taking on a new style of life.

Boo!

Show me your chameleon tips.

Boo!

I like that we have one section of the show where we've agreed we can heckle.

It's nice.

That first paragraph.

So sorry, Milan.

I'm in it.

Whoa.

Me and Cecil are like, fucking what?

Write about space lessons.

Write dumber.

I don't know what to tell you.

These opportunities to reinvent and redefine the self usually mean taking on a new style of dress or embodying a newfound confidence or some other adjustment or enhancement of the prior self.

Very rarely does this manifest in, for example, a grown-ass man taking on the identity of a missing child in ocean away from his own home in a desperate gambit just to be loved.

And it is definitely rare that the same guy tries the same thing over and over again in country after country.

Story is fucking amazing.

But for Frederick Pierre Bourdin, the need to be anyone but himself was taken to the extreme.

Okay, I know he's going going to be a different age, but I am picturing a 45-year-old guy walking up to a house in Victorian short pants with a big lollipop and being like, Mama, Papa, I pretend.

I genuinely think that's what he was picturing too, Eli.

You know, the story's going to get really close to what Eli just said, actually.

It's very close to that.

I wrote that joke before I read that.

We can tell.

Born June 13th, 1974, a date I'm going to need you to remember.

No.

All right.

Frederick Pierre Bourdin first came to be in Nanterre, France, born to 18-year-old Gelaine Bourdin, a troubled young margarine factory worker.

That butter work was outstanding.

Shut it down.

Hap.

You just have to stick to it.

That's just so good.

Jelaine claimed that the father was her 25-year-old co-worker, Casey.

Unfortunately, it was less a buttery love story, and more, I can't believe he's not single, since Casey was, alas, already married, a fact he failed to disclose to the lovelorn Jelaine.

Jelaine was left to raise Frederic alone, which is, of course, a hell of a lot of work and a hell of a lot harder if you're still very nearly a child yourself, and even more difficult if it is 1974 in France, where single teenage mothers were, try to restrain your shock, not particularly well treated socially.

Jelaine coped with these challenges by by drinking, partying, and neglecting young Frederick.

Until at the age of three, Frederick's grandparents went to court to gain custody of the boy, and the grandparents quickly put three hours of distance between themselves and Jelaine.

Hey, Tom, are you Frederick Pierre Bourdain's final transformation?

Did you want us to remember June 13th because it's your birthday?

Oh,

buddy.

No.

Does it say Patty?

Shut up.

Got my lollipop.

Or as I might say, no.

But that didn't mean that Frederick never got to see his mom.

They did have occasional visits together, though one would be hard-pressed to describe them as particularly heartwarming.

According to Frederick, his mom got a kick out of scaring him by pretending to be very ill and getting her son worked up and worried.

A claim Jelaine denied, though she did admit to attempting actual suicide in front of Frederick.

You know, so she's a fun lady.

Wow.

Second worst Jelaine I've heard of.

Yeah.

Now, as you might imagine, Frederick was beginning to show some issues.

Being a person is already hard, and navigating adolescence often particularly so.

But when you are growing up, raised by your grandparents, because your dad was a married man who slept with your teen alcoholic mom who cosplays dying with you as a funny prank,

it is more so.

What Frederick figured out, though, was that he could lie, he could just tell people whatever shit he wanted about his family because no one ever checks resumes or calls.

Do you remember that moment when you realize you can just say whatever and people might believe you?

It's so empowered that moment.

Still living it.

Still living it, Bieffleton.

Better and better every day.

It's so much easier.

What was your first big lie, Eli?

Do you remember it?

Do you remember that moment?

Probably like, I love you too.

Same girl.

So Frederick invented a story about his father's career as a spy, and he used this as a cover for why dad was never around.

And the story worked among his peers, giving Frederick not just relief, but a tool he could use.

And soon, creating fictional stories about his life became compulsive, making it incredibly hard for adults in his life to know when he was crying wolf or being honest.

Quickly growing into a rebellious teenager made it even harder to tell when the boy was being truthful, and his credibility was so shredded that when he told his grandparents that their neighbor had molested him, nothing was investigated.

As soon there was also neighborhood thefts that Frederic was involved in as well, and Frederick's grandparents took a page from the family playbook and they abandoned him to a juvenile facility in an attempt to set him straight.

Should we be surprised that the French are giving up on him so early?

Oh, But I bet abandoning him to an institution of disciplinarians worked great though, huh?

Yeah, right.

Frederick was less than thrilled with becoming a ward of the state.

And soon after relocating to the juvenile institution, he began seeking out and setting up elaborate traps to trick adults into sympathizing with him.

Laying out in the street, he would pretend to have been hurt or have amnesia, coaxing passerby into taking him in.

And his rescuers would see the helpless child and sweep him up into the warmth and protection of hospitals and shelters and police stations where frederick would keep up the ruse for as long as he could reveling in the care and attention of absolutely anyone who would care for him okay i mean i love an elaborate sympathy trap but that's like my sexual style But you're making it smarter than it has to be, Freddie.

Like the truth is a simple sympathy trap for you.

You could just use that.

Now, in 1990, at the age of 16, he was relocated to another youth home, but quickly decided he wanted out.

And he hitchhiked all the way to Paris and lived and begged on the streets until an idea occurred to him.

He could take his amnesia act to a new level.

He could lie himself into a whole new life.

Quote, I dreamed they would send me to England, where I always imagined life was more beautiful, he later told journalists.

And just hearing anyone describe England as more beautiful than Paris should be a clue as to how bedrock deep Frederick's delusions ran.

The delicious cuisine, the sunny weather,

the welcome embrace they offer to outsiders.

England's got it all.

Inventing a character he called Jimmy Sale, he approached Paris police officials and attempted to convince them that he was a missing child, separated from his family in England.

One glaring flaw in the story, he could not speak English, something the English are pretty well known for.

I don't know, Tom.

I once heard a British guy pronounce hodder in a way that had no consonants.

His clever gambit had failed, and he was swiftly returned to the youth home he had fled from.

He'd escaped severe punishment due to his age, but this pattern of deception, specifically the impersonation of missing children, would continue for most of his life.

It's Lamnesia.

I am fucking England.

In 1997, he made his way to Spain following a series of failed impersonations.

But unfortunately for Frederick, Spain had far stricter views on legal documentation than he had previously encountered up until this point.

Remember, Frederick had been pulling this shit for a long time and he wasn't getting away with it.

He got caught each time, but he was a kid.

And kids get away with all kinds of shit because kids are expected to do stupid shit because their brains are made of incomplete garbage jelly.

Don't worry, listeners.

Tom's kids don't listen to this shit.

They do, but they have brains made of incomplete garbage jelly.

They're not going to remember.

They can't.

When Frederick was caught impersonating another imaginary missing kid this time, the Spanish authorities were less than amused.

And Frederick quickly realized he was about to be fingerprinted, which would, he understood, be disastrous for his scams.

Frederick was going to need to think fast, which he was, it turns out, both really good at and really fucking bad at.

Starts gnawing off his fingers.

Fuck, they still look French.

Frederick knew that if he was going to fool the authorities, he was going to need to act quickly.

to set up an identity he could simultaneously lay claim to and which would get him the hell out of of Spain.

So, Freddie told the authorities that he was an American boy who had run away, and he insisted on contacting his family himself so he could gain access to a telephone.

And he also insisted on some privacy.

Sorry, okay.

He told the Spanish cops that he was a fugitive American kid and that he needed a private conference room.

Yeah, he told them that in French, and they said, Yes.

They probably said, C.

Yeah,

What is happening?

So as soon as he was alone, Frederick began secretly making calls to the police in the United States.

And he was posing as a Spanish official.

Fishing for leads, Frederick contacted agencies across America reporting that there was a boy from the States that they couldn't identify and asking if they had anyone matching.

his own description.

Now, matching is a strong word, though.

Big pin in that for later.

Fairly quickly, he landed on the profile of Nicholas Barclay, who had gone missing at 13 in 1994 from San Antonio, Texas.

And for the first time, Frederic Bourdin didn't just create a new life for himself, he stole one.

Hello, is this the police?

Who am I?

Well, I was hoping you could answer that, actually.

So after establishing that this was the identity he planned to steal, Bourdin still had to prove it to the Spanish authorities.

So he convinced the Center for Missing and Exploited Children to send him a fax with a photo of Nicholas Barclay.

And there were definitely going to be some challenges.

So one challenge, for example, was that Nicholas Barclay and Frederic looked pretty much nothing at all alike.

They did not have the same eye color, for instance, or the same hair color.

And Nicholas had tattoos, which I do not understand because he went missing at 13.

But that's what the article said.

Texas.

Sure.

Yeah, there.

And also, Frederick was seven years older than the missing line.

What?

I didn't do nearly enough absurd lying when I went to Spain.

I could read so many weird things.

I've said that.

I've said that about him.

He explained in French that he's Nick from Texas and he needs to use the fax machine.

It's also 1997.

What the fuck does a 13-year-old have a tattoo of?

Johnny Bravo?

Like, what is the fuck?

Now, back at the shelter, while the authorities try to work out the veracity of this insane story, Frederick said about his transformation.

He bleached his hair.

He had a girl in the shelter replicate the described tattoos.

And he said about concocting a story about having been kidnapped and sold into sex trafficking.

Oh, and those sex trafficking kidnappers had also injected his eyes with permanent eye color changing eyeball dye,

which is totally real and not something he just made up.

Was he any trafficked by Lopan from Big Trouble in Little China?

Sorry.

Sorry.

Only green-eyed victims of kidnapping, please.

Send the rest back.

The kidnapped, sex-trafficked kid story was not.

particularly plausible, but it did elicit deep empathy and concern.

And so everybody just immediately switched from being dubious to being generous and sympathetic.

And all the weird peculiarities and oddities in Frederick's mannerisms and behaviors were now perfectly explicable as being the result of the, you know, adrenochrome harvesting program he had supposedly been abducted into.

Yeah, you get that kid near a pizza parlor basement.

He just starts shaking.

Now, of course, when a U.S.

citizen and Texas native and a child, no less has been kidnapped, sold into sex slavery, and after having been missing for years, they resurface, There is going to be some attention paid.

Are we sure it's not Julane Maxwell?

No, I don't think we should be sure of that at all.

Now, Bourdin was informed that the U.S.

Embassy was on the way to meet him, along with his sister, Carrie, who is coming to collect him and bring him home to their mother, Beverly, in Texas.

Now, Frederick knew that this was the most dangerous part of the con, since he knew nothing whatsoever about his supposed family.

Or Texas.

Or America.

In any sane world, this would be the part of the story where the sister meets the fraud in real life and the whole thing blows up in his stupid lying face.

We do not, however, live in a sane world.

Oh, it gave you that idea.

Filled with anxiety about trying to act like someone he did not know, he waited for everything to fall apart around him.

Frederick was convinced that there was no way he was going to be able to pull this next part of the scam off.

Surely the sister of the missing boy would see right through him.

But instead, Carrie greeted Frederick warmly and professed to seeing similarities in him to her uncle, and she declared herself convinced.

But it's the next part of the story that really enabled Frederick to continue.

All right.

Well, turns out Texans have an any old missing kid policy, which is good news for Frederick.

So while he mops his brow, we'll take a quick break for some apropos of nothing.

Hey, Chief, you got a second?

Of course, Johnson.

Come on in.

So I got some concerns about the Barkley case.

Terrible stuff.

Terrible stuff.

Talk to me.

Right, so this kid.

A lot of his story doesn't add up.

How did he get to Spain?

Them sex trafficking bastards.

Right.

Sex traffickers who

changed his eye color?

Yes, yeah, all right.

Now, I need to look into that.

There could be others who've had that same thing done now.

Could there be?

Because I haven't heard about that anyway.

The eye ink?

Right.

Also, he's missing a lot of details in the Barkley kid's life.

He couldn't tell us about the tattoos.

He has like literally on his own body.

And he, I mean, he sounds French.

Now, Johnson, I like that you're skeptical, but you have to understand that when that kid's been through as much as this kid has, well, I mean, it changes you.

You think he's been molested so bad that now he's French?

I do.

Okay, I'll call his family.

Poor kid.

Right, right.

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All right.

When we left off, Frederick had talked himself into a sweet new gig as a teenager in Texas in the 90s.

So,

how was he at Battletoads, Tom?

Bad, bad.

Everybody was bad at Battletoads.

Jesus.

I bet he's the same.

In a bid to reconnect her missing brother to his family, Carrie eagerly showed Frederick dozens of family photos, and she tried to catch him up on what he had missed, and they reminisced about the past.

Unknowingly, she provided him with the ammunition needed to convince the embassy of his new identity.

See, the embassy insisted on a test.

before he would be released and handed over to the custody of Kerry and subsequently sent to the United States.

What they wanted was for Frederick to identify and name members of his supposed family from photos.

a task that he handled with ease since Carrie had just spent hours essentially helping him cram for the test.

Oh, don't you remember the song we used to sing with all our uncles' names?

Sorry, they went with an oral version of a DNA test instead of just a DNA test?

Now, the ruse had taken on a life of its own, and soon Frederick was flying to Texas, a place he had never been with Carrie, a sister that was was not his sister that he had just met.

Frederick was unsure how long any of this con could last.

It was so insane that he was pulling this off that even he couldn't believe that he wasn't getting caught.

Holy shit, I am almost rid of this pesky health care which my country has had since the year I was born.

USA, USA.

Now, at the airport, the excited and nervous family of the very real and very missing Nicholas Barclay greeted the very French and very much older Frederick.

Everyone in the family had heard about the ordeal that Frederick/slash Nicholas had and very much hadn't endured, and they were all determined to treat him as kindly as possible.

Despite his uncharacteristic quietness, the Barclay family welcomed him home.

Adjusting slowly to the pace of change in San Antonio, Bourdin began settling in, seemingly finding the love and family connections he had always been searching for.

And for a minute, it seemed to kind of be working.

Kind of like when you're house sitting and someone's goldfish dies, and then you just kind of replace it with a new goldfish.

Sure, yeah, but the goldfish is seven years older and has a French accent.

Yeah, that could be the amnesia from the lost adrenochrome.

I just hope the second half of this story is this 22-year-old's dominance as a high school sophomore running back.

That is what I'm hoping for.

Now, United States officials were not quite done with him yet.

He was called into the San Antonio Missing Children's Center by the FBI in November of 1997.

And there he was interviewed to collect his testimony of what had happened to him so they could capture his abusers.

And immediately, the interviewer was suspicious.

of Bourdin's appearance.

He appeared older than 16, and, you know, his dark five o'clock shadow was not typical of a blonde teenager.

All right.

So, gentlemen, let me show you here a photo of Nicholas in front of him.

Oh my God.

And tell me what you think.

Because in this photo,

he is supposed to be 16.

Come on, 16.

Okay, so as 22 years old as he looks, he also looks at least that French.

He looks like he's about to star in Dear Heaven Handsome.

You know what I'm saying?

He looks like the sex trafficker that he made up.

Visually, he's the opposite of the kid next to him in the pictures you showed us.

Also, after seeing this picture, he will not dominate as a running back at any age.

That's all I'm saying.

No dominant.

The facial expression of the kid who got kidnapped looks like he's thinking there's a 49-year-old French guy next to me.

So despite the misgivings of the investigator, Frederick had a narrative advantage.

See, he hadn't been abducted, of course, into sex slavery, but he had undoubtedly been abused.

And he adroitly spun stories of the fictitious sex ring he claimed to be subjected to by weaving in bits and pieces of the very real traumas he had endured or observed in various facilities over the years, including details like his untreated broken right hand and cigarette burns and a permanent limp.

And it all helped to solidify the tale that he was telling.

So a private investigator by the name of Charlie Parker was hired to track down Bourdin for an interview about his past.

And comparing a photo of Nicholas to Frederick, Parker was startled to notice how different their eye colors were.

Huh.

And I presumably he did not buy the magical eye dye story.

So he also then remembered that ear shapes are very unique to individuals.

In fact, I just learned reading this story.

And so he tracked down photos to compare and he concluded that Frederick Bourdin was just definitely not Nicholas Barclay.

Okay, I'm glad the PI knew about like ears and eyes and stuff, but also that's an old French guy.

The reason is because that's an old French guy.

So he then alerted FBI agent Nancy Fisher, who had interviewed Frederick at the Missing Children's Center, and they were both at a loss as to how to proceed since the family was claiming Bourdin as theirs.

And they were also nervous about this guy's intentions.

Like, was he a spy, a terrorist, a pedophile trying to infiltrate the schools?

Was he perhaps a French guy in his mid-20s dodging the Spanish police and desperate for the love of literally anyone?

Well, I'm sorry, wait, can a family just claim someone like that?

Because if so, several of my long-lost brothers are in a prison in El Salvador right now.

You're going to have to call Baquayla yourself.

Yeah, apparently.

Now, Bourdin was flown to Houston under the guise of getting therapy for his traumatic experiences.

And in Houston, he was really being interviewed by Dr.

Perry, a forensics expert, to further examine his story.

And he did not display any of the normal biological reactions to discussing intense trauma.

Oh, and also, Borden's heavy native French accent raised some red flags because, of course, it did.

Finally, thank you.

Like 50 people just never noticed that.

What was happening?

And like, Dr.

Perry knew that this person could not have been raised in the United States and then just lose his native accent in only three years abroad.

I'm sorry, can you say burger one more time?

It sounds like you're saying burger.

Well, but

did the doctor also know that you can't gain nine years in three years abroad as well?

I'm really loving the image of just the one heath doctor being like, what's happening?

Did you say three years is nine years in metric?

That's nothing.

What are you saying?

So Perry concluded that obvious things are obvious.

and he presented his findings to Agent Nancy Fisher, who notified Carrie right away that pretty much there was no way this grown-ass French man was actually her long-lost, now 16-year-old Texan brother.

And according to Fisher, Carrie was shocked on the phone, but she collected Bourdin at the airport just as she would have her true brother.

And despite warnings from the FBI, the family doubled down on embracing Frederick.

So much so that when the FBI requested blood samples, the mom actually laid down on the ground and refused to cooperate.

Jesus.

Now, if I give you my blood, you're just going to tell me it's a 43-year-old Frankie.

I'm pregnant.

This reaction raised suspicions in not only the investigators, but with Bourdeon himself.

So think about this for a minute.

You've infiltrated a random family you know nothing about and you are living with them and they are raising you like you are their long-lost 16-year-old son.

But you know, you've got to know, none of this makes any sense.

You know, you don't look anything like this, kid.

You are clearly much older.

You don't know where anything is.

You have a heavy French accent.

Why was the family so insistent on believing your bullshit?

Why do they think you were, in fact, Nicholas?

And it's perhaps because the family knew that you were not.

And they were still very glad to see you

because they killed Nicholas.

Okay, what?

Wait, okay.

So this family murdered a 13-year-old.

And then they got a call from the U.S.

State Department that their murder victim was found in Spain.

And they were like, yep, sure was.

That was a freebie, right, guys?

It was great.

So.

Maybe that happened, right?

There's a theory.

Thanks for that.

It's fucking crazy that Tom is just saying maybe, right now.

There is a theory that the family knew a lot more about the true cause of the disappearance of Nicholas.

Nicholas's half-brother, Jason, had lived with Nicholas and his mother at the time of the boy's disappearance.

And Jason had a heavy drug addiction.

I'm sorry, are we just accusing this actual family of murdering their kid?

Oh, it's not just murder.

They 100% murdered their kid.

I'm not done with that.

I don't know if I'm comfortable with it myself.

Well, I'm super down with it.

Can you join me in the Ramsey Corner?

Yes.

I'm going in Noah's King.

Can you see you?

Super fucking.

I agree with you.

You could also see the documentary called the imposter.

That's his story.

So Jason had a heavy drug addiction, which had spilled over onto his mother, and the stress and the drugs and all the frustrations that come with these things created a very hostile and very volatile home life.

And Frederick Bourdin, he's in this house and he feels trapped, not just by the possibility of being discovered, but also he's now got this creeping paranoia that the family he's living with could have actually been the ones that harmed Nicholas themselves.

Yeah, I mean, it's scary, but I feel like the family's not going to do a second murder at the same time.

Yeah, they'd be asking for it at that point.

Why not?

They've had practice.

Oh, okay.

This one seems to be working out.

Okay, sir, but this raises the very real possibility that Carrie was giving him the whole, hey, do you remember our extended family tree treatment on the plane on purpose, right?

Which is fucking awesome.

So the FBI obtains warrants for fingerprints and DNA samples from the family and from Bourdin.

And Interpol returned the results of his true identity.

And just like that, the jig is up.

On March the 4th, 1998, Frederick was detained and arrested for illegally entering the United States and assuming the identity of a missing child.

But by now,

Frederick was so convinced that the family had something to do with the disappearance of Nicholas that upon his arrest, all he wanted was an audience with the San Antonio Police Department to inform them of his suspicions.

The whole thing was so suspicious that they promptly opened their own homicide investigation.

Hey, this guy with an incredible track record of ridiculous lies, he seems trusting them, right?

That guy?

He is right now.

After Beverly, as the mom, passed two polygraph tests, Agent Fisher insisted on one more, as she herself was increasingly sure the family was up to something.

Beverly failed that last test spectacularly, but

polygraphs are basically forensic dowsing rod bullshit.

And Beverly claimed that she failed because she lied about stealing, but she was truthful about everything pertaining to her son.

And the whole family stands together in their convictions that they don't know what happened to Nicholas.

And the truth of what happened to Nicholas Barclay remains a mystery.

I think we all know what happened.

That was a JBR snake.

He got JBR.

He's Taylor Swift now.

Okay.

So look, I know that two of our co-hosts are uncomfortable with the accusations that have been made on the air.

So I will simply direct everybody to the documentary, The Imposter, where they interviewed this family, asked them if they killed their kids, and their answers are basically,

you dundeed it.

You done did it.

All right.

All right, though, but it would be pretty awesome if it turned out that

the kid was in France pretending to be Bourdin.

Yeah, it's much better.

Yeah.

so Bourdin was convicted of perjury and

fraudulently obtaining a passport and spent six years in jail.

He was released in 2003 and deported back to France.

Within months, he attempted to steal the identity of Leo Bailey from Grenoble, France, a 14-year-old missing boy.

Pick an adult, dude.

What are you doing?

He was found out when DNA.

Damn this baby.

He was found out when DNA testing was done proving that he was not Leo.

And also in 2003, he would have been 29.

And they still had to use DNA rather than like their eyes for this.

In Spain in 2004, he pretended to be a boy named Ruben Sanchez Espinoza and claimed his mother had been killed in the Madrid bomb attacks.

Once again, he was caught.

Returning to France in 2005, the now 31-year-old Bordin Bordin spun yet another story.

This time claiming to be Francisco Hernandez Fernandez, a 15-year-old Spanish orphan.

This time claiming his parents had been killed in a car accident.

And in this compulsive liar's fever dream, he further invented a story involving his escape from an abusive family member.

And the story worked well enough.

The story worked well enough that at 31, they believed him and he briefly attended, or I guess like reattended junior high school.

Junior

fuck up.

And there is a picture here, guys, of what this guy looked like in 2005 in junior high school.

I'm going to do so.

He did many crimes in Spain, like right after.

I am the king of Spain.

I'm flying to Spain to take my throne right after.

He doesn't even look young for 30.

Yeah, that's right.

He looks like Johnny Galecki playing a Bond villain.

He looks like Doogie Hauser if he graduated a year late and became an adjunct professor.

100%.

100%.

So an administrator at the junior high was watching a television program about Bourdin and recognized him.

Although one might have imagined that his receding hairline and the moonwalking, heartfelt lip-sync performance of 80s icon Michael Jackson in front of his new class in 2005 might have raised some eyebrows before that.

Now, this time he was convicted and sentenced to four months in prison.

Hey, guys, I know that this person was dealing with some very real trauma, and I empathize with whatever he went through, but he needed to go to jail for this stuff for longer than this.

Doesn't help.

All in all, Frederick Pierre Bourdin is speculated to have assumed at least 500 false identities.

Come on.

In 2007, in 2007, guys, just two years after pretending to be a junior high school student, he married his wife Isabel, a French woman he had been dating for about a year.

And I have no idea who he told her he was or how he explained to her like literally anything about his life that had happened at all ever.

But whatever.

Together, they had five children.

But by March of 2017, the couple had split.

And in a Facebook post, he started impersonating his own child.

This got confusing.

In a Facebook post, he announced that she had been unhappy for a decade and ultimately left him for another man.

Was it him?

But in 2008, after the birth of his first child, Bourdin was asked by a staff writer at the New Yorker if he had become a new person in this role as husband and father.

And he replied, No,

this is who I am.

Aw.

All right.

They totally killed their child.

If you'd like to summarize what you learned in one sentence, what would it be?

That kid everyone had in high school who looked weirdly older than the other kids and could buy beer without getting carted.

That was probably a 30-year-old French guy all along.

That's what I suspect now.

Yeah.

All right.

Are you ready for the quiz?

I am indeed.

All right.

Tom, we've got a French beggar who impersonates a kid who got murdered by their family in the United States.

Obviously, he needs a musical.

What's the title?

A

Lie Miz.

The story of

Jean Valjean.

Bene Ramsey.

Holy shit.

Amazing.

Amazing.

Only one answer provided.

Only one answer needed.

It is A, my friend.

Nailed it.

Oh, I don't want to go after that.

Lie Miz would have been good enough all on its own.

But then you've got this, the fucking amazing Jean-Bel Benet Ramsey joke, which is also a callback fucking kudos.

Okay.

Here's my way worse joke.

What's the easiest way to spot a French guy pretending to be a Texan?

A, he's barbecuing a snail.

B, he looks like he's had access to health care his whole life.

C, he thinks the H and Yee-Haw is silent.

Or D,

he's a grown-ass man speaking broken English with a heavy French accent who doesn't understand American pop culture references, doesn't know how baseball works, doesn't remember any of his friends, drives on the wrong side of the fucking road, can't name the last three presidents.

And holy fuck, how the hell did he ever think this possibly could have worked?

Secret answer, E, all of the very much.

It is, it is all of the above.

Yeah.

Okay, Tom.

They made a movie about his parents' whirlwind romance at the margarine factory.

What was it called?

A

La La Land, Olegs, B,

Barefoot in the Park.

C,

cholesterol about Eve, or D.

Grease.

Grease.

Grease is the word, my friend.

Grease is the word.

Oh, I'm sorry.

It was cholesterol about Eve.

I'm sorry.

I was pretty sorry, too.

All right, Cecil, you win.

And why on earth would I?

There's no way.

This is written in for me, audience.

Thank you very much.

Eli's is going to come next.

That's right.

That is what was written in their script.

All right.

Well, for Cecil, Tom, Noah, and Heath, I'm Eli Bosnik.

Thank you for hanging out with us today.

We'll be back next week.

And by then, I will be an expert on something else.

Between now and then, you can listen to our other podcasts in the other podcast places.

And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com slash citationpod or leave us a five-star review everywhere you can.

And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with us on social social media, or check the show notes, be sure to check out citationpod.com.

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