It will always be remembered as a decade of struggle and poverty. Theodore \"Theo\" Karl Raeken ist ein Neuzugang in der 5. It was the piece of the puzzle that could finally answer the decades-old question and forever reshape the Dunbar family history. If the sun doesn’t kill you, the humidity will. The statement was amended a few days later by stating that Bobby was Bruce, her son. D’Anna was 100% certain that he had found Elliott’s parents. A publication about unsolved mysteries from the deep ocean to space and from antiquity to present day. Review our Privacy Policy for more information about our privacy practices. Kids, pack your bags! In 1912 that was the equivalent of $25,000 dollars. News spread around the town that Bobby had been returned to his family — but so did the news that the Dunbars weren’t quite sure initially if the boy was theirs. Percy Dunbar went as far as offering up a reward to whoever could find his son. Before there was air-conditioning or ice-dispensers, the only way to keep cool during the broiling summer months was to take a dip at the local watering hole or find refuge under a shady tree. In reality, the “lake” is really a swamp crawling with alligators. The activity took place on August 23, 1912, which was then clearly remembered because, on that date, Bobby disappeared. So, what really happened to Bobby Dunbar? That confidence came from a young woman named Emily Dodds Farro, who turned out to be Elliott’s biological great-grandniece. She began to question the narrative that had been handed down through generations. Posted In: Information and Theories 1/15/12 By: Yona Williams In some crimes, a convicted individual may spent many years in jail before DNA testing can help prove their innocence. To this day, the descendants of Julia Anderson regard the Dunbars as friends and expect nothing more or less. The town, and more importantly, the jury at his trial, didn’t buy it. That question would haunt two families for generations. He never made mention of the second boy. Bobby Dunbar completely disappeared during a fishing trip with his mother and father. Brilliant! When D’Anna asked her why she wasn’t excited, she couldn’t understand it herself. Lessie Dunbar felt guilt. Like Sharon Elliott, the details are blurry, but it’s assumed he passed away shortly after his disappearance. Julia Anderson — the woman Walters claimed was the true mother of Bobby — substantiated Walters’s story. Although it was a shock to hear that she was adopted, Elliott was determined to find out who her biological family really were. Born in 1908, Bobby Dunbar was the first-born child of Lessie and Percy Dunbar. A Hot Louisiana Summer. In 1912 a scandal spread across America. Authorities and locals searched tirelessly for the Dunbar child. There are several theories that people call possible actual occurrences: To this day, Bobby Dunbar’s disappearance remains a mystery. He couldn't have been both, so who was he? However, since her cousins were from such a focused area, there was an issue of intermarriage, or what Belza called in genealogical terms, endogamy, where family trees become tangled with each other. Another obstacle D’Anna faced was the lack of technology, specifically for DNA. When Sharon Elliott discovered she was adopted, her adoptive mother told her the story about the day she was found. As their investigation progressed, tensions between the two women rose. There may be some hope after all. But how certain was D’Anna that Freda and Walter Roth were her biological parents? Lessie and Percy, as Bobby’s biological parents, report the incident to the police, who immediately search for the boy. Luck had graced D’Anna: The woman who answered was a relative of Freda and Walter Roth, and with her, DNA pieced together another part of the puzzle. Many began to lose hope. The boy that authorities thought was Bobby Dunbar was in the care of William Cantwell Walters, a handyman from North Carolina. This time, he obliged his daughter’s request. To this day, Margaret has yet to be fully forgiven by her family…at least not every member of it. Margret has just published a book on Bobby Dunbar called A Case for Solomon: Bobby Dunbar and the Kidnapping That Haunted a Nation. Traver’s reaction was completely unexpected. Unfortunately, this is also determined by speculation alone. And Emily has some of that DNA…” D’Anna was reluctant to give any hints as to who exactly that relative is, however, it was enough evidence to cement his findings: “We were 100% certain, and that’s when we let Sharon know.”. “I was totally convinced that it was Bruce Anderson all along.” Capulet meets Montague; a plague on both their houses! There were a couple of leads, however, they ended with disappointing results. Robert Clarence “Bobby” Dunbar was the firstborn child of Lessie and Percy Dunbar, who lived in Opelousas, Louisiana. Check it out here: Shop our UK ( and Germany ( merch stores too! Before Sharon Elliott died, Farro was able to find her birth parents, but it didn’t go as she planned. Honey, I don’t want to go on just any boring camping trip, let’s spice it up and sleep in a flimsy tent next to a nest of man-eating monsters left from the Cretaceous period! According to Anderson, “Bobby” was actually her son, Bruce Anderson, just as Walters had claimed. Bobby Dunbar was a four-year-old American boy who suddenly went missing while on a family picnic in Louisiana and apparently found eight … When D’Anna suggested it was because she understood that they were the people who abandoned her, her answer was simply, “Yeah, that could be.”. Freda and Walter were married four months before Elliott was born, no doubt trying to legitimize their union, however, despite their marriage, Elliott was left to fend for herself in the Arizona desert. 00:50:45 - Margaret Dunbar Cutright set out to discover if her ancestor Bobby Dunbar was actually the son her great-grandparents lost in 1912. The Disappearance of Bobby Dunbar. Reading the “Christian Woman’s” letter made things extremely clear for Margaret’s take on her grandfather’s case. As for Walters — his lawyer won an appeal, and he was released from prison. However, after carefully inspecting the boy for identifying marks, the Dunbars were able to positively identify the child as their little Bobby. He most likely fell into the lake and was eaten by an alligator, so his body could not be found. followed the investigation only to find that the child who had claimed to be the missing Dunbar child was not, in fact, the same child who disappeared in 1912. Can we pardon a mistake that not only separated two families, but also caused a mother a lifetime of grief and regret? Line of Duty's Adrian Dunbar has revealed that the highly-anticipated new series will be 'shocking' for viewers. Although she had been waiting for a long time to hear the news, it was a bittersweet experience for both D’Anna and Elliott. “When Emily’s profile came into the database, she was connected to Walter and Freda in such a way that it could have only been Walter and Freda,” said D’Anna. However, upon closer inspection, she said with confidence that the boy was hers. I like the theory that the Dunbars knew Bobby was dead, and out of grief or fear or guilt, they decided that that boy was Bobby. A child that small in alligator infested waters would have led to the boy’s death. She’s investigating a case involving her grandfather. About tiebreaker.com Science Jobs. So Bobby Dunbar, who has been considered her grandfather, was actually Bruce Anderson. His parents probably killed Bobby Dunbar. She asked him for a DNA sample. He said he remembers being with William Walters when he was arrested, but made no mention of the family camping trip. Each lead and clue was followed up on, but hit a dead end. Time stops for no one, not even for Sharon Elliott, who passed away in 2018 at the age of 86. That night was the last time anyone saw or heard from him. Robert H. Dunbar (* 1859 in Pictou, Nova Scotia; † Juni 1937) war ein kanadischer Curler. Bobby Dunbar (Bruce Anderson) had accepted this theory and adopted it as his life story. Mrs. Dunbar, in particular, was grief-stricken beyond words. Then in 2004, after an Associated Press reporter became interested in the story Bob Dunbar Jr, one of Bobby’s sons reluctantly agreed to a DNA test. Touched by Elliot’s story, Belza offered D’Anna her services. The letter received by Walters’s lawyer read: “Dear sir, in view of human justice to Julia Anderson and mothers, I am prompted to write to you. Upon answering, the lab assistant relayed to her, in an anti-climactic manner, that the DNA samples did not match. As much as D’Anna was invested in helping Elliott, his investigations came with difficult challenges—one of which was obtaining closed adoption records, which D’Anna had to appear in court to gain access to, even though it was in Elliott’s best interest. Unfortunately, it was all too late because the boy was already living comfortably in the Dunbar family. That wasn’t all he had to say. When a boy matching his description was discovered in Mississippi, the courts and the Du...– Lyt til The Disappearance of Bobby Dunbar Pt. No one knew where Bobby Dunbar was and why Bruce Anderson let himself down as Bobby. When searchers swept the area, all they turned up were a pair of footprints near a railroad trestle and reports of a stranger seen nearby. To have their long-held beliefs about their own family history had been decisively refuted. It was with her genetic collaboration that D’Anna could confidently say that he found what Elliott was looking for. For Elliott, it must have been devastating to come to terms with her past. Here's a true and unsolved mystery. In August 1912, the Dunbars took a fishing trip to nearby Swayze Lake in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana. In D’Anna’s investigation, he found a column about Freda and Walter’s marriage in 1931. August 1912 während eines Familienurlaubes in Swayze Lake, Louisiana. Search for episodes from PARANOID With Patrick Simpson with a specific tag: Latest episodes from PARANOID With Patrick Simpson. The Dunbars … It is the story of two boys lost, one seemingly gone forever and one taken and raised as another child. D’Anna would continue to investigate, but it wasn’t until 2017, when D’Anna attended a storytelling platform, that he met DNA genealogist, Bonnie Belza. It was a traveling tinker by the name of William Cantwell Walters near Columbia, Mississippi. A century ago, in 1912, a 4-year-old boy named Bobby Dunbar was reported missing by his parents. She was found in the middle of the Arizona desert in a hatbox on Christmas Eve 1931. Dunbar's parents claimed the boy as their missing son. “From everything I’ve heard, she truly believed that this was her son, Bobby. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. Nobody in the family wants to know.”. She had no idea the impact of what she was saying to me. Thanks to modern science, the answer to that question would finally be answered. Then in 2004, Bob Dunbar Jr., son of Bobby Dunbar, consented to a DNA test. “The way we know this is because Freda and Walter were related to somebody who is not related to anybody else by blood,” D’Anna said. Unlike today, where finding out about our ancestry is as simple as spitting in a tube, back in 1988, the concept was underdeveloped and restricted. Some claim that the boy immediately called the mother to Lessie and recognized his youngest sister. Police are trying to resolve Julia Anderson’s problems with the Dunbar family. Not to mention that she felt she had a responsibility to clear up Walters’ past crime. Another obstacle in D’Anna’s path, but that didn’t stop him from doing his homework. Her grandfather was not the same Bobby Dunbar who had gone missing in the swamp. He went to school, worked, and had a family. My thought was to prove that daddy was Bobby Dunbar…I just pondered, you know?”. And so began the curious case of Bobby Dunbar. A true journalist and storyteller, he takes his responsibilities seriously and honorably. The Stewarts decided to investigate. Der Fall erregte eine große mediale Aufmerksamkeit und zog eine achtmonatige polizeiliche Suche nach dem verschwundenen Kind nach sich. However, is this enough? ‎Margaret Dunbar Cutright set out to discover if her ancestor Bobby Dunbar was actually the son her great-grandparents lost in 1912. She was in the audience the day D’Anna was telling Elliot’s story. It was familiar, like a sort of wailing. Who wouldn’t be happy if his missing son could go home and live as happily as before? No, not really. When the results came in, they were both good and bad. Wanting to know more about her past, Elliott started asking questions by calling her local newspaper. Would she find her biological parents? Linda Traver is the granddaughter of Julia Anderson. The reveal of Bobby Dunbar’s true … Follow us as we retrace Sharon’s journey, conducted by Arizona Republic Journalist, John D’Anna. Sometime during the repairs, Julia heard something out of place in the middle of the desert. It was in that instant that Elliott felt a void enter her life. A DNA test conducted on Bobby Dunbar Jr. and the son of Lessie and Percy Dunbar’s other child, Alonzo, established there was no blood relation! On August 23, 1912, the Dunbars packed up their bags and made their way north over the city of Opelousas toward Swayze Lake. For her birthday, Margaret’s husband gave her a card to the Library of Congress and she spent weeks in the reading rooms there. Coupled with the fact that Julia didn’t bring any further issues to court, the legal move stalled until she got there. Despite knowing that Bobby Dunbar was, in fact, Bruce Anderson, Margaret’s family remained firm and committed to their family as they had known it. “I think she had to have, on some level, known,” began Margaret. The family planned to go fishing in the area around Swayze Lake, St. Landry Parish, Louisiana. You need to look more into Lessie and Percy and judge their characters. With the heat becoming unbearable, they decided to head into the Bayou to cool off and enjoy some family time together. However, the disappointment was inevitable. “All right, if my past is wrong — Bobby Dunbar, all the legends, all the stories — and then all of the sudden you find out, well, that’s not who your blood says you are. Some reported that they all didn’t recognize the boy, but the next day Lessie recognized the child by his physical features and was convinced that it was Bobby Dunbar, her son. On the night of August 23, 1912, four-year-old Bobby snuck away from his family’s tent and wandered toward Swayze Lake. The police carried out the search, and finally, after eight months, the child was found and returned to his parents. Despite its name, Swayze Lake is only a lake by name. Bobby Dunbar returns home to live with his parents, Lessie and Percy. They reported the incident with heartwarming stories. Bobby then expressed that he wanted to go with Paul Mizzi, a family friend, to the lake to shoot garfish. Why do this? I did need to put down what I believed and be able to look at it with fresh eyes.” With a new perspective, Margaret began to see things that shook her entire family’s foundation. What she found rocked her family to its very core. “It just simply dawned on me, oh, my god, she’s right. Perhaps Freda and Walter were periodic visitors to the state of Arizona? Robert Clarence Dunbar, known as Bobby, was the first child of Lessie and Percy Dunbar. As they continued their research, the two women discovered a gold mine of information. As Bobby’s biological parents, they don’t stay silent when faced with such cases. Her family lore and history no longer applied to her, and she was left wondering about the circumstances of her birth and wondered who here biological parents really were. Elliott had to be prepared for the potential rejection, or possibly never finding her birth parents. With two young sons, the Dunbar family was a growing family of four. The next question that left D’Anna scratching his head was how Elliott ended up in Arizona if Freda and Walter were from Iowa? “They were related by marriage, somebody in Walter and Freda’s family was only related to them by marriage and not to anybody else. At the time, the story of the Lindbergh kidnapping swept the nation, making the case relevant once more. But both women were diligent researches and equally committed to discovering the truth about their family histories, even if it contradicted what they thought they knew. One theory proposed is that Ed and Julia Stewart, the couple who found Elliott, fabricated the story. She discovered that Julia Anderson could have possibly been telling the truth — despite what her family told her. Walters, meanwhile, was sentenced to two years in prison for kidnapping and could be released from prison. Two mothers — both claiming the same boy as their own. Margaret Dunbar Cutright grew up knowing the story of her grandfather and this grey area in the family’s lineage. It is now presumed that the real Bobby Dunbar either drowned in the swamp or was killed by an alligator. Margaret pursued the test certain that the results would match her assumptions. Percy Fawcett. After he “accomplished” his assignment, D’Anna took away two things from his journey: the first was the impact that he made, “a story like this may seem like just a feature story about an old mystery case, but the impact it made on the lives of two people particularly, Sharon and Emily, it sort of shows the power of what we do and the power of storytelling.”, The second thing D’Anna took away from doing his duty as a storyteller was realizing that his story reminds us where we come from. What do you think happened to Bobby? Unfortunately, there were some challenges (to read John D’Anna’s original story. All her life, she had been told that her uncle was “kidnapped” by the Dunbar family who had raised him as the son that went missing on that fateful camping trip. It was during his time as an editor that he received a call from Elliott about her story of being the famous “Hatbox Baby.”. Legal steps were taken so they would not lose their child a second time. Others claim to be his parents. Linda Traver, the granddaughter of Julia Anderson, and Margaret Dunbar, the granddaughter of Bobby Dunbar, both believed the boy who had been traveling with Walters was a part of their families. With a bit of encouragement, D’Anna had Elliott’s DNA analyzed, and gave Belza access to Elliott’s DNA account. As time went on, Margaret began to seriously consider the possibility that the real Bobby had fallen into the swamp during that fateful family camping trip. What began as an organization project led to an obsessive investigation of her family’s history. Walters claimed that the boy was the son of his sister-in-law. Julia didn’t have the money to take the matter to court, so she chose to go home to Mississippi. Do you think Bobby Dunbar’s mystery will find a new answer? The media began to speculate that Walters was responsible for the kidnapping of both Bobby Dunbar and Bruce Anderson, and it was Bruce Dunbar who had died. They reviewed the legal files generated between William Walters and his lawyer in 1913. D’Anna said in our interview, “Something else that I think is important as journalists, we’re always told to you should never become a part of this story…I did become a part of this story…, I’m not saying we should be involved in every story, but I think that, if we ever stop responding to our sources and our readers and the subjects we write about, if we ever stopped responding to them as human beings, then we might as well hang it up.”. When it came to surface that Margaret didn’t believe Bobby Dunbar was really Bruce Anderson, Travers was “bristled” at the assumption that her family history was no more than a fictional story. Thanks to the popularity of at-home DNA kits, finding a possible DNA match with close or distant relatives was more accessible. On August 23, while on that trip, Bobby disappeared. However, when she was asked to identify the boy, she too was uncertain that the boy was hers. Time to take a step back to the days before DNA analysis. After the news of her grandfather caught traction in the media, her relatives felt as though she had disrespected her family’s history and heritage, and to add insult to injury, in a very public way. “I got up from where we were sitting on the couch, and I went around, and I think I hugged his neck, just knowing that, man, we were family. Other stories that were thought to be unsolved have resurfaced, solving age-old investigations, one of which was the disappearance of Bobby Dunbar, a young boy who was kidnapped one night in 1912 and was infamously rumored to have been replaced by another missing child. In fact, child abandonment alarmingly increased during the 1930s, labeling abandoned children as “doorstep” babies. Luckily, Elliott found not just her birth parents, but a great-grandniece to boot. 30 of the greatest metal detector finds EVER - Science 101. One day in 1999, Margaret Dunbar’s father, Bob Dunbar Jr., gave Margaret a photo album containing newspaper clippings about her grandfather’s disappearance. Public Domain/Wikimedia . Thanks to Dodds’ help, he was able to find the answers Elliott needed. There was one last thing Margaret could do. The boy was also thought to be Bobby Dunbar, Lessie and Percy’s son. “You know, she was really going up against the entire family, including myself” Swin later recounted. Until the end of his life, Walters always said that Bobby Dunbar was not Bobby Dunbar but rather Bruce Anderson, his nephew. And while the identity of the boy who had been traveling with Walters had been officially confirmed, there were still unanswered questions. Sharon Elliott’s story is not the only story that was solved by DNA analysis. “I actually had to wind up going to court myself, and I actually represented myself in front of a judge,” D’Anna said reflectively. On that day, Percy Dunbar, Bobby's father, had to leave for work much to young Bobby's dismay, who, in a tantrum about his father leaving, broke the strap of his straw hat.