David Grann - The Devil & Sherlock Holmes

On March 5, 1998, with the authorities closing in on Bourdin, Beverly called Parker and said she believed that Bourdin was an impostor. The next morning, Parker took him to a diner. “I raise my pants so he can see I’m not wearing a gun” in his ankle holster, Parker says. “I want him to relax.”

They ordered hotcakes. After nearly five months of pretending to be Nicholas Barclay, Bourdin says, he was psychically frayed. According to Parker, when he told “Nicholas” that he had upset his “mother,” the young man blurted out, “She’s not my mother, and you know it.”

“You gonna tell me who you are?”

“I’m Frédéric Bourdin and I’m wanted by Interpol.”

After a few minutes, Parker went to the men’s room and called Nancy Fisher with the news. She had just received the same information from Interpol. “We’re trying to get a warrant right now,” she told Parker. “Stall him.”

Parker went back to the table and continued to talk to Bourdin. As Bourdin spoke about his itinerant life in Europe, Parker says, he felt some guilt for turning him in. Bourdin, who despises Parker and disputes the details of their conversation, accuses the detective of “pretending” to have solved the case; it was as if Parker had intruded into Bourdin’s interior fiction and given himself a starring role. After about an hour, Parker drove Bourdin back to Beverly’s apartment. As Parker was pulling away, Fisher and the authorities were already descending on him. He surrendered quietly. “I knew I was Frédéric Bourdin again,” he says. Beverly reacted less calmly. She turned and yelled at Fisher, “What took you so long?”

In custody, Bourdin told a story that seemed as fanciful as his tale of being Nicholas Barclay. He alleged that Beverly and Jason may have been complicit in Nicholas’s disappearance, and that they had known from the outset that Bourdin was lying. “I’m a good impostor, but I’m not that good,” Bourdin told me.

Of course, the authorities could not rely on the account of a known pathological liar. “He tells ninety-nine lies and maybe the one hundredth is the truth, but you don’t know,” Fisher says. Yet the authorities had their own suspicions. Jack Stick, who was a federal prosecutor at the time and who later served a term in the Texas House of Representatives, was assigned Bourdin’s case. He and Fisher wondered why Beverly had resisted attempts by the F.B.I. to investigate Bourdin’s purported kidnapping and, later, to uncover his deception. They also questioned why she had not taken Bourdin back to live with her. According to Fisher, Carey told her that it was because it was “too upsetting” for Beverly, which, at least to Fisher and Stick, seemed strange. “You’d be so happy to have your child back,” Fisher says. It was “another red flag.”

Fisher and Stick took note of the disturbances in Beverly’s house after Nicholas had vanished, and the police report stating that Beverly was screaming at Jason over Nicholas’s disappearance. Then there was Jason’s claim that he had witnessed Nicholas breaking into the house. No evidence could be found to back up this startling story, and Jason had made the claim at the time that the police had started “sniffing around,” as Stick put it. He and Fisher suspected that the story was a ruse meant to reinforce the idea that Nicholas was a runaway.

Stick and Fisher began to edge toward a homicide investigation. “I wanted to know what had happened to that little kid,” Stick recalls.

Stick and Fisher gathered more evidence suggesting that Beverly’s home was prone to violence. They say that officials at Nicholas’s school had expressed concern that Nicholas might be an abused child, owing to bruises on his body, and that just before he disappeared the officials had alerted child-protective services. And neighbors noted that Nicholas had sometimes hit Beverly.

One day, Fisher asked Beverly to take a polygraph. Carey recalls, “I said, ‘Mom, do whatever they ask you to do. Go take the lie-detector test. You didn’t kill Nicholas.’ So she did.”

While Beverly was taking the polygraph, Fisher watched the proceedings on a video monitor in a nearby room. The most important question was whether Beverly currently knew the whereabouts of Nicholas. She said no, twice. The polygraph examiner told Fisher that Beverly had seemingly answered truthfully. When Fisher expressed disbelief, the examiner said that if Beverly was lying, she had to be on drugs. After a while, the examiner administered the test again, at which point the effects of any possible narcotics, including methadone, might have worn off. This time, when the examiner asked if Beverly knew Nicholas’s whereabouts, Fisher says, the machine went wild, indicating a lie. “She blew the instruments practically off the table,” Fisher says. (False positives are not uncommon in polygraphs, and scientists dispute their basic reliability.)

According to Fisher, when the examiner told Beverly that she had failed the exam, and began pressing her with more questions, Beverly yelled, “I don’t have to put up with this,” then got up and ran out the door. “I catch her,” Fisher recalls. “I say, ‘Why are you running?’ She is furious. She says, ‘This is so typical of Nicholas. Look at the hell he’s putting me through.’ ”

Fisher next wanted to interview Jason, but he resisted. When he finally agreed to meet her, several weeks after Bourdin had been arrested, Fisher says, she had to “pull words out of him.” They spoke about the fact that he had not gone to see his alleged brother for nearly two months: “I said, ‘Here’s your brother, long gone, kidnapped, and aren’t you eager to see him?’ He said, ‘Well, no.’ I said, ‘Did he look like your brother to you?’ ‘Well, I guess.’ ” Fisher found his responses grudging, and developed a “very strong suspicion that Jason had participated in the disappearance of his brother.” Stick, too, believed that Jason either had been “involved in Nicholas’s disappearance or had information that could tell us what had happened.” Fisher even suspected that Beverly knew what had happened to Nicholas, and may have helped cover up the crime in order to protect Jason.

After the interview, Stick and Fisher say, Jason refused to speak to the authorities again without a lawyer or unless he was under arrest. But Parker, who as a private investigator was not bound by the same legal restrictions as Stick and Fisher, continued to press Jason. On one occasion, he accused him of murder. “I think you did it,” Parker says he told him. “I don’t think you meant to do it, but you did.” In response, Parker says, “He just looked at me.”

Several weeks after Fisher and Parker questioned Jason, Parker was driving through downtown San Antonio and saw Beverly on the sidewalk. He asked her if she wanted a ride. When she got in, she told him that Jason had died of an overdose of cocaine. Parker, who knew that Jason had been off drugs for more than a year, says that he asked if she thought he had taken his life on purpose. She said, “I don’t know.” Stick, Fisher, and Parker suspect that it was a suicide.

Since the loss of her sons, Beverly has stopped using drugs and moved out to Spring Branch, where she lives in a trailer, helping a woman care for her severely handicapped daughter. She agreed to talk with me about the authorities’ suspicions. At first, Beverly said that I could drive out to meet her, but later she told me that the woman she worked for did not want visitors, so we spoke by phone. One of her vocal cords had recently become paralyzed, deepening her already low and gravelly voice. Parker, who had frequently chatted with her at the doughnut shop, had told me, “I don’t know why I liked her, but I did. She had this thousand-yard stare. She looked like someone whose life had taken everything out of her.”