There are, at the core of this case, three fundamentally different accounts of what happened, and they cannot all be true simultaneously.

The first account is Bourdin’s official story at the time: that he was Nicholas Barclay, returned after captivity, and that the family accepted him in good faith because they loved their missing child and wanted him to be found.

The second account is Bourdin’s later accusation: that the family knew he was not Nicholas, accepted him anyway, and that this acceptance was motivated by a desire to conceal something about what had actually happened to Nicholas.

This account implicates Jason, who is now dead and cannot respond, as potentially responsible for Nicholas’s disappearance.