Bourdin says that when Isabelle first approached him he thought it must be a joke, but they met in Paris and gradually fell in love. He said that he had never been in a relationship before. “I’ve always been a wall,” he said. “A cold wall.” On August 8, 2007, after a year of courtship, they got married at the town hall of a village outside Pau.
Bourdin’s mother says that Frédéric invited her and his grandfather to the ceremony, but they didn’t go. “No one believed him,” she says.
When I saw Isabelle, she was nearly eight months pregnant. Hoping to avoid public attention, she and Frédéric had relocated to Le Mans, and they had moved into a small one-bedroom apartment in an old stone building with wood floors and a window that overlooked a prison. “It reminds me of where I’ve been,” Bourdin said. A box containing the pieces of a crib lay on the floor of the sparsely decorated living room. Bourdin’s hair was now cropped, and he was dressed without flamboyance, in jeans and a sweatshirt. He told me that he had got a job in telemarketing. Given his skills at persuasion, he was unusually good at it. “Let’s just say I’m a natural,” he said.
Most of his family believes that all these changes are merely part of another role, one that will end disastrously for his wife and baby. “You can’t just invent yourself as a father,” his uncle Jean-Luc Drouart said. “You’re not a dad for six days or six months. It is not a character-it is a reality.” He added, “I fear for that child.”
Bourdin’s mother, Ghislaine, says that her son is a “liar and will never change.”
After so many years of playing an impostor, Bourdin has left his family and many authorities with the conviction that this is who Frédéric Pierre Bourdin really is: he is a chameleon. Within months of being released from prison in the United States and deported to France, in October, 2003, Bourdin resumed playing a child. He even stole the identity of a fourteen-year-old missing French boy named Léo Balley, who had vanished almost eight years earlier, on a camping trip. This time, police did a DNA test that quickly revealed that Bourdin was lying. A psychiatrist who evaluated him concluded, “The prognosis seems more than worrying… We are very pessimistic about modifying these personality traits.” (Bourdin, while in prison in America, began reading psychology texts, and jotted down in his journal the following passage: “When confronted with his misconduct the psychopath has enough false sincerity and apparent remorse that he renews hope and trust among his accusers. However, after several repetitions, his convincing show is finally recognized for what it is-a show.”)
Isabelle is sure that Bourdin “can change.” She said, “I’ve seen him now for two years, and he is not that person.”
At one point, Bourdin touched Isabelle’s stomach. “My baby can have three arms and three legs,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t need my child to be perfect. All I want is that this child feels love.” He did not care what his family thought. “They are my shelter,” he said of his wife and soon-to-be child. “No one can take that from me.”
A month later, Bourdin called and told me that his wife had given birth. “It’s a girl,” he said. He and Isabelle had named her Athena, for the Greek goddess. “I’m really a father,” he said.
I asked if he had become a new person. For a moment, he fell silent. Then he said, “No, this is who I am.”
– August, 2008
True Crime
A POSTMODERN MURDER MYSTERY
In the southwest corner of Poland, far from any town or city, the Oder River curls sharply, creating a tiny inlet. The banks are matted with wild grass and shrouded by towering pine and oak trees. The only people who regularly trek to the area are fishermen-the inlet teems with perch and pike and sun bass. On a cold December day in 2000, three friends were casting there when one of them noticed something floating by the shore. At first, he thought it was a log, but as he drew closer he saw what looked like hair. The fisherman shouted to one of his friends, who poked the object with his rod. It was a dead body.
The fishermen called the police, who carefully removed the corpse of a man from the water. A noose was around his neck, and his hands were bound behind his back. Part of the rope, which appeared to have been cut with a knife, had once connected his hands to his neck, binding the man in a backward cradle, an excruciating position-the slightest wiggle would have caused the noose to tighten further. There was no doubt that the man had been murdered. His body was clothed in only a sweatshirt and underwear, and it bore marks of torture. A pathologist determined that the victim had virtually no food in his intestines, which indicated that he had been starved for several days before he was killed. Initially, the police thought that he had been strangled and then dumped in the river, but an examination of fluids in his lungs revealed signs of drowning, which meant that he was probably still alive when he was dropped into the water.
The victim-tall, with long dark hair and blue eyes-seemed to match the description of a thirty-five-year-old businessman named Dariusz Janiszewski, who had lived in the city of Wroclaw, sixty miles away, and who had been reported missing by his wife nearly four weeks earlier; he had last been seen on November 13th, leaving the small advertising firm that he owned, in downtown Wroclaw. When the police summoned Janiszewski’s wife to see if she could identify the body, she was too distraught to look, and so Janiszewski’s mother did instead. She immediately recognized her son’s flowing hair and the birthmark on his chest.
The police launched a major investigation. Scuba divers plunged into the frigid river, looking for evidence. Forensic specialists combed the forest. Dozens of associates were questioned, and Janiszewski’s business records were examined. Nothing of note was found. Although Janiszewski and his wife, who had wed eight years earlier, had a brief period of trouble in their marriage, they had since reconciled and were about to adopt a child. He had no apparent debts or enemies, and no criminal record. Witnesses described him as a gentle man, an amateur guitarist who composed music for his rock band. “He was not the kind of person who would provoke fights,” his wife said. “He wouldn’t harm anybody.”
After six months, the investigation was dropped, because of “an inability to find the perpetrator or perpetrators,” as the prosecutor put it in his report. Janiszewski’s family hung a cross on an oak tree near where the body was found-one of the few reminders of what the Polish press dubbed “the perfect crime.”
One afternoon in the fall of 2003, Jacek Wroblewski, a thirty-eight-year-old detective in the Wroclaw police department, unlocked the safe in his office, where he stored his files, and removed a folder marked “Janiszewski.” It was getting late, and most members of the department would soon be heading home, their thick wooden doors clapping shut, one after the other, in the long stone corridor of the fortresslike building, which the Germans had built in the early twentieth century, when Wroclaw was still part of Germany. (The building has underground tunnels leading to the jail and the courthouse, across the street.) Wroblewski, who preferred to work late at night, kept by his desk a coffeepot and a small refrigerator; that was about all he could squeeze into the cell-like room, which was decorated with wall-sized maps of Poland and with calendars of scantily clad women, which he took down when he had official visitors.
The Janiszewski case was three years old, and had been handed over to Wroblewski’s unit by the local police who had conducted the original investigation. The unsolved murder was the coldest of cold cases, and Wroblewski was drawn to it. He was a tall, lumbering man with a pink, fleshy face and a burgeoning paunch. He wore ordinary slacks and a shirt to work, instead of a uniform, and there was a simplicity to his appearance, which he used to his advantage: people trusted him because they thought that they had no reason to fear him. Even his superiors joked that his cases must somehow solve themselves. “Jacek” is “Jack” in English, and wróbel means “sparrow,” and so his colleagues called him Jack Sparrow-the name of the Johnny Depp character in “Pirates of the Caribbean.” Wroblewski liked to say in response, “I’m more of an eagle.”