The French Con Man Who Fooled The FBI — How A 23-Year-Old Impersonated A Missing Texas Boy And Lived With His Family For Months

The Role Of The Media And Missing Children Culture

The Barclay case unfolded in a specific media environment that is worth understanding: the American culture of missing children that had been building since the early 1980s.

The 1981 murder of Adam Walsh in Florida, and the extraordinary advocacy that his father John Walsh subsequently engaged in, had transformed the American cultural relationship to missing children over the preceding decade and a half.

The face of a missing child on a milk carton was a specific cultural artifact of this period.