What is known is this:

Nicholas Barclay disappeared on or around June 13, 1994.

He was thirteen years old.

He has never been found.

Frédéric Bourdin successfully impersonated Nicholas Barclay for approximately sixteen months, fooling the family, briefly fooling law enforcement and immigration authorities, and being exposed only when a private investigator sent fingerprints to Interpol.

He served six years in federal prison and was deported to France.

The questions that remain — about what happened to Nicholas, about what the family actually knew, about the true nature of the relationship between the fraud and the disappearance — have not been resolved and may never be.