The Disappearance Of Bobby Dunbar — And His Eerie Return As Somebody Else
Wikimedia CommonsThe boy raised as Bobby Dunbar (left) posing alongside his family.
When young Bobby Dunbar went missing in 1912, the whole country was eager to find him and put an to this heartbreaking horror story. The four-year-old Louisianan vanished into thin air on August 23, during a trip to Swayze Lake. Lessie and Percy Dunbar searched everywhere, to no avail.
Desperate police dissected alligators and threw dynamite into the lake, and then offered a reward of $6,000 (about $160,000 today).
All seemed lost until eight months after Bobby’s disappearance, when police arrested a man named William Cantwell Walters on April 13, 1913, near Columbia, Mississippi. Walters was traveling with a boy matching Dunbar’s description.
He claimed the boy was named Bruce Anderson, the son of a woman named Julia Anderson, a field hand and caretaker for his parents. Regardless, the cops forcibly took the kid to the Dunbar home in hopes of reconciling the family with their missing child.
The Dunbars, however, didn’t recognize the boy as their son. They said his eyes were too small. And the boy didn’t seem to recognize them either — or his brother Alonzo.
Wikimedia CommonsNewspaper graphic showing the real Bobby Dunbar (left) next to the boy found with William Walters.
It was only after Lessie Dunbar saw him a second time and gave him a bath that she celebrated the return of her baby boy, claiming to recognize his moles and scars.
But the Dunbars had another factor to contend with: Julia Anderson, who rushed from North Carolina to Louisiana to get her son back.
In order to determine whether the boy really was Julia’s son — remember, these were the days before DNA testing — police showed her the newly found boy as well as four other children. But she couldn’t pick him out.
And so, devastated, she gave up and return home, while the Dunbars were confident they had successfully gotten their son back. But none of it ever sat right with Julia Anderson.
It would take nearly a century for the truth to come out.
In 1999, Bobby’s granddaughter, Margaret Dunbar Cutwright, began researching her family’s mysterious past, poring over documents in small-town libraries, historical archives, and courthouses. Her journey was chronicled by the Associated Press in 2004, and again in a 2008 episode of This American Life.
While the AP reported the story, Margaret’s father, Bob Dunbar Jr., consented to a DNA test. Dunbar Jr.’s DNA was compared his cousin’s, the son of Bobby Dunbar’s younger brother. The DNA tests would be able to tell them whether their fathers had truly been brothers, or whether Bobby was actually Bruce.
The results were staggering: Bob Dunbar Jr. was not related by blood to any of the Dunbar family. The returned child, all those decades ago, was in fact, Bruce Anderson.
The truth at the heart of this horror story is twofold: a desperate mother was robbed of her son, while another unknowingly raised a stranger — as her own child was likely dead, all along.
