Cold cases are resolved every year through new forensic techniques, new witnesses with finally loosened tongues, new evidence emerging from changed circumstances.

Genetic genealogy — the use of consumer DNA databases to identify unknown remains by connecting them to living relatives — has resolved cases that were cold for decades.

Digital record search has located people who disappeared before such records existed.

For Nicholas Barclay, these possibilities remain open.

The case is still listed as active.

Somewhere in the thirty years since he disappeared, there may be a thread that has not been pulled, an evidence fragment that has not been connected to its source, a person who knows something and has not yet said it.

If that resolution ever comes — if the question of what happened to Nicholas Barclay on June 13, 1994, is ever answered — it will need to stand alongside the remarkable story of Frédéric Bourdin’s deception as the other half of a case that has never been complete.