This was fortunate, and Bourdin’s exposure would not have happened when it did without Parker’s involvement.

But relying on the investigative interest of a television news magazine is not a systematic solution to the problem.

It was a circumstantial one that happened to work in this specific case.

The protocols that have been developed since — more systematic biometric verification of returned missing persons, more robust fingerprint checking against international databases as standard procedure — represent an attempt to institutionalize verification rather than relying on it to arise organically from investigative interest.

The Barclay-Bourdin case was, among other things, a case study in the systemic vulnerabilities of verification systems, and its legacy includes improvements in those systems.