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.”
Beverly answered my questions forthrightly. At the airport, she said, she had hung back because Bourdin “looked odd.” She added, “If I went with my gut, I would have known right away.” She admitted that she had taken drugs-“probably” heroin, methadone, and alcohol-before the polygraph exam. “When they accused me, I freaked out,” she said. “I worked my ass off to raise my kids. Why would I do something to my kids?” She continued, “I’m not a violent person. They didn’t talk to any of my friends or associates… It was just a shot in the dark, to see if I’d admit something.” She also said of herself, “I’m the world’s worst liar. I can’t lie worth crap.”
I asked her if Jason had hurt Nicholas. She paused for a moment, then said that she didn’t think so. She acknowledged that when Jason did cocaine he became “totally wacko-a completely different person-and it was scary.” He even beat up his father once, she said. But she noted that Jason had not been a serious addict until after Nicholas disappeared. She agreed with the authorities on one point: she placed little credence in Jason’s reported sighting of Nicholas after he disappeared. “Jason was having problems at that time,” she said. “I just don’t believe Nicholas came there.”
As we spoke, I asked several times how she could have believed for nearly five months that a twenty-three-year-old Frenchman with dyed hair, brown eyes, and a European accent was her son. “We just kept making excuses-that he’s different because of all this ugly stuff that had happened,” she said. She and Carey wanted it to be him so badly. It was only after he came to live with her that she had doubts. “He just didn’t act like my son,” Beverly said. “I couldn’t bond with him. I just didn’t have that feeling. My heart went out for him, but not like a mother’s would. The kid’s a mess and it’s sad, and I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.”
Beverly’s experience, as incredible as it is, does have a precursor-an incident that has been described as one of “the strangest cases in the annals of police history.” (It is the basis of a Clint Eastwood movie, “Changeling.”) On March 10, 1928, a nine-year-old boy named Walter Collins disappeared in Los Angeles. Six months later, after a nationwide manhunt, a boy showed up claiming that he was Walter and insisting that he had been kidnapped. The police were certain that he was Walter, and a family friend testified that “things the boy said and did would convince anybody” that he was the missing child. When Walter’s mother, Christine, went to retrieve her son, however, she did not think it was him. Although the authorities and friends persuaded her to take him home, she brought the boy back to a police station after a few days, insisting, “This is not my son.” She later testified, “His teeth were different, his voice was different… His ears were smaller.” The authorities thought that she must be suffering emotional distress from her son’s disappearance, and had her institutionalized in a psychiatric ward. Even then, she refused to budge. As she told a police captain, “One thing a mother ought to know was the identity of her child.” Eight days later, she was released. Evidence soon emerged that her son was likely murdered by a serial killer, and the boy claiming to be her son confessed that he was an eleven-year-old runaway from Iowa who, in his words, thought that it was “fun to be somebody you aren’t.”
Speaking of the Bourdin case, Fisher said that one thing was certain: “Beverly had to know that wasn’t her son.”
After several months of investigation, Stick determined that there was no evidence to charge anyone with Nicholas’s disappearance. There were no witnesses, no DNA. The authorities could not even say whether Nicholas was dead. Stick concluded that Jason’s overdose had all but “precluded the possibility” that the authorities could determine what had happened to Nicholas.
On September 9, 1998, Frédéric Bourdin stood in a San Antonio courtroom and pleaded guilty to perjury, and to obtaining and possessing false documents. This time, his claim that he was merely seeking love elicited outrage. Carey, who had a nervous breakdown after Bourdin was arrested, testified before his sentencing, saying, “He has lied, and lied, and lied again. And to this day he continues to lie. He bears no remorse.” Stick denounced Bourdin as a “flesh-eating bacteria,” and the judge compared what Bourdin had done-giving a family the hope that their lost child was alive and then shattering it-to murder.
The only person who seemed to have any sympathy for Bourdin was Beverly. She said at the time, “I feel sorry for him. You know, we got to know him, and this kid has been through hell. He has a lot of nervous habits.” She told me, “He did a lot of things that took a lot of guts, if you think about it.”
The judge sentenced Bourdin to six years-more than three times what was recommended under the sentencing guidelines. Bourdin told the courtroom, “I apologize to all the people in my past, for what I have done. I wish, I wish that you believe me, but I know it’s impossible.” Whether he was in jail or not, he added, “I am a prisoner of myself.”
When I last saw Bourdin, in the spring of 2008, his life had undergone perhaps its most dramatic transformation. He had married a Frenchwoman, Isabelle, whom he had met two years earlier. In her late twenties, Isabelle was slim and pretty and soft-spoken. She was studying to be a lawyer. A victim of family abuse, she had seen Bourdin on television, describing his own abuse and his quest for love, and she had been so moved that she eventually tracked him down. “I told him what interests me in his life wasn’t the way he bent the truth but why he did that and the things that he looked for,” she said.