The Barclay case is the most famous of Bourdin’s impersonations, but placing it in the context of his broader career is important for understanding what drove him and why the Barclay case had specific features that distinguished it from his other deceptions.

Bourdin’s career of impersonation appears to have begun in his mid-to-late teens and continued, with periods of interruption for imprisonment, into his thirties.

The most common pattern was to present himself at a school or social service agency as a young, parentless, or abandoned teenager.

He would claim various histories — abuse, abandonment, family tragedy — that generated the sympathy and protective response of the institutions he targeted.

In most of these cases, the impersonation was not based on a specific real missing person.