The guy has a flavour of narcissistic personality disorder hence the ability to 'con' and the complete lack of empathy. Not to mention the delusions of grandeur and no friends, i.e. people known for years rather than weeks.

There is no mention of narcissistic rage though, maybe when he went crazy he upped and left town rather than start shouting, so perhaps his personality disorder was in the same cluster as narcissistic personality disorder. Whatever the label, it all started to go wrong for him right from the beginning. If his parents went their separate ways at 10 months, who was there at 5 months when he was learning to smile? Why is it that babies learn to smile so young? They imitate and some parents are beaming ear to ear with smiles, despite the lack of sleep. Others not. I imagine a year in or when his mum started to have new boyfriends she didn't like having him as a constant reminder of that guy who left her, the father.

So the next thing is the disruption. A 'normal' child has 24/7 attention on them when they are two years old, it is all about them, they have no need to attention seek. This child can go to dinner parties with the parents and be passed around with all the attention on them.

Meanwhile, the child not given that attention has to seek attention by being disruptive. They get positively banished and the idea of being the loved center of attention just doesn't happen. School comes along and again, disruptive child gets excluded, out in special rooms and not on the team.

In this time excluded from the rest a lot can be learned about stuff through books and screens, so although reading is brilliant, it is also living life second hand, not through experience.

So, on to the developed adult pathology. The narcissistic injury has to be hidden from the world behind this mask of a fake identity. So an identity is just taken wholesale, off someone else. In this instance he did steal a hiker's name and outfit, probably even the tattoos were stolen, all to create this mask.

People get genuinely taken in by the mask, they think it is all real until 3 months later when they start to get drawn in even deeper by the mask. Fundamentally a full time narcissist without financial backing from a family estate or the dad that did run away will not be able to generate income on their own. This is because they are unemployable. They don't get the whole premise of work, they are still that disruptive child behind that mask and they do not think of others. So they are obliged to be a con artist. They live off the largess of others, not lined up as marks, it just works out that way, the pattern is set.

The relationships this guy made went fabulously at the start with 'love' from the marks able to explain away that missing money or that missing ability to care. Eventually suspicions do get aroused and people get tired of the narcissist. But they keep trying to reel them back in with feigned remorse, e.g. the letters to say 'sorry'. This is actually felt in a second-hand way by the real character behind the mask and they do know that they have just burned someone, they just don't feel it.

The true narcissist will not believe in personality disorders or psychiatry. They don't want to know that for the same reasons a smoker does not want to know the truth about cancer. They actually have no idea about their condition or what they can do about it, even if they do get to read the wikipedia pages pertinent to the topic. They will be set in this pattern for life.

One problem with 'the mask' is that it is set in time. So this guy things he is some hip climbing type. That is the mask. This will have to be worn and clung onto until old age, even if being on the run another identity has to be assumed.

So what I found intriguing about the article was a complete lack of psychiatry and the on-the-couch diagnosis of something out there in the narcissism spectrum. We all could do with education in this area just to save a lot of time. We also need to have those in the front line - police, medical staff, HR professionals, better able to not be taken in by these people.

To varying degrees we were all neglected as children, to varying degrees we were all overly smothered with love as children, we all have imbalances and levels of narcissism, sometimes healthy, sometimes not. But then there are con-men like this guy that are so far off the scale it is hard to identify with them as human once the mask slips.