Charlie Parker Interview

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Charlie Parker, a private investigator who plays a pivotal role in the investigation at the heart of documentary film The Imposter, talks to View's Matthew Turner about cold cases, keeping on your toes as a P.I., and never giving up until the truth is uncovered. I was hired by a company called Hard Copy, they had a TV show that investigated hot cases. They called me and said there was a boy who had just gotten out of being held captive in a prison camp, where he was held and tortured and raped, and all kind of things happened to him. They said; ‘We’ll pay you $500, go check it out’. So the producer and I went to the house, and fortunately it was almost like fate. I got to sit over here, while he interviewed and set up the camera. And right in front of me was a picture of the real Nicholas Barclay, and to my left was Beverly and Carey.

So I got to watch their reactions versus his, and I got to look at the photo and look at him. So I went over to the producer, after a while, and I said ‘Zoom in on his ears’. And he said ‘What?!’ and I said ‘Zoom in on his ears. Get me a big shot of his ears’. And then I took the photo. And when we got back to the office, we put it in Adobe Photoshop, and everybody laughed when I said that, I mean that’s what we call it – Adobe Photoshop! We put it in there, looked it up, zoomed in, to the last pixel and it wasn’t him. I mean, I knew it. So I pick up the phone, and I call Miss Dollarhide, or Beverly I call her, and I say ‘It’s not him, he’s not your son’, and she says ‘What?! What are you talking about?!’ And she never did you know, she went on, and nothing happened.

So two days later I had already called the ophthalmology school, to check about eyes, because he said he’d been injected in his eyes. And they told me ‘That’s not possible’. Except there was a drug for glaucoma, that would darken blue eyes, or darken brown eyes. But no drug known to man could change the colour of your eyes. Then I called Trinity University in San Antoine, and asked the language department, ‘Do men, who come back as prisoners of war, maintain the accent?’ They said, ‘In the Vietnamese war, some men kept it for as long as two or three days, but never after that.’ So I knew I had him. And two days later he called me. And he said, ‘Who do you think you are? The FBI thinks it’s me. Immigration thinks it’s me. And my family thinks it’s me. Who do you think you are?’ And I thought, ‘Jesus’.

I said ‘Whoever you are, if any harm comes to that family, I’m gonna find you. I’m gonna hunt you down and find you.’ Two more days passed, I go back to Hard Copy. Hard Copy says, ‘End of the story Charlie, we don’t want anything more to do with this’. So I go back to the producer, he said ‘This is something real bad Charlie, get out of it’. So I go to my wife and she says, ‘Go back to work, we need the money’ you know, so I’ve got all of these things and nobody believed me. No-one. And he called back.

And he accused me again, but what he really wanted to know, was what I had found out, and who I had told. So he and I developed an unusual relationship. He was reeling in me, and I was reeling in him. And it’s a strange relationship. Personally, I’ve had some dangerous cases, but he scared me to death. He had an aura about him. He’s got that kind of thing… the young kids like him, he's vampire-ish, he’s got that thing about him that just frightens people. My wife and I had lived the story, but at South By Southwest, we watched, and we became frightened again. It’s a way about him, and so I wouldn’t go away. The sad part is, he could have left anytime. He had that passport.

I spent four hundred bucks, which my wife nearly killed me over, to get him a polygraph. And he passed the polygraph! He passed it! I never knew anybody pass it, and could do that! So I’m thinking now, holy Jesus, now nobody’ll believe me! See, cops believe in a polygraph, they all believe in it. I mean, my God, it’s hooked to you – your blood pressure, your sweat glands, everything. And he passed it! And he walked out of that place like he was the King of the Mountain. ‘Told you so’. And I thought, you rat. And I’m begging people – it got so bad about the ears that I probably did become obsessed, but I wanted to tell my story. And Scotland Yard, it’s one of the ways they cracked James Earl Ray! Earl Ray, who killed Martin Luther King. When I told the FBI prosecutor that it’s one of the ways they got James Earl Ray, he says ‘Who’s James Earl Ray?’ He was so young, he didn’t know! So it was a frustrating time in my life.

Bart didn’t at first, Poppy did, the girl [producer Poppy Dixon]. Bart got in touch with me – I mean, look at Bart. Automatically you trust him, and he let me tell my side of the story, Nancy tell hers, everybody tell their side of the story. And I felt like he would tell the truth. And it was after he’d been caught, and years went by. And I never got any credit for it, when 20/20 came down, they gave all the credit to Connie Chung, as an investigative reporter, and Bourdin talked him into not letting me in on it, and so I didn’t get in on it.

All my buddies, they were PIs, they knew I’d worked it, and there was that show and they didn’t show me. It was heartbreaking. And the lady who had produced it told me, it was her job to bring Connie Chung back to life, to save her career, she said, so they did that about her. But I think he’ll do it again. I really do. I think he’ll impersonate someone older - another character. I think he’s dangerous as hell, and you don’t change from that. The bad part is, when he was in prison, he studied. About sociopaths, and he studied about psychology. He knows how to react to your questions, he’s a very smart guy.

Yeah, I am. I got some more digging to do, I got some more places to look. And Beverly, and Carey and I have a relationship. Carey called me on the phone two days before I came. She said, ‘Charlie, there’s some nutter on the internet that’s claiming he’s Nicholas Barclay’. And so I gotta check that out. My wife’s gonna die when I’m gonna fly to Florida to check that out. But I got to! And we gotta check the IP address, and see who the hell it really is!

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