He went to play basketball on a June night in 1994 and did not come home.

What happened to him remains one of the most haunting unanswered questions in a case full of unanswered questions.

Frédéric Bourdin was a real man.

He looked into a family’s grief and saw an opportunity.

He took it.

For sixteen months, he occupied the space left by a missing child.

The gap between those two facts — the missing boy and the man who briefly filled his absence — is where the full complexity of this case lives.

It is a complexity that no amount of additional investigation has resolved, and that may, in the end, be unresolvable with the evidence available.