11. Bobby Dunbar vanished on a family vacation. Less than a year later, a young boy was identified as the missing infant, but something just wasn’t right
In the summer of 1912, Lessie and Percy Dunbar decided to take a family vacation. They took their four-year-old son Bobby on a fishing trip to Swayze Lake, Virginia, not far from their home. But this was no idyllic family getaway. Within a few hours, their son had vanished. They searched and searched but couldn’t find him. Little Bobby had been kidnapped. Eight months later, the police claimed to have found him. But something wasn’t right…
Sure, they found a boy who matched Bobby’s description. What’s more, he was in the company of a slightly suspect man by the name of William Cantwell Walters. He was a traveling handyman, who went from town to town fixing pianos. The police were sure they had solved the case. They arrested Walters for kidnapping and returned the boy to the Dunbars. And that’s when things really started to get strange. According to some reports, the parents immediately recognized the boy as Bobby. But other accounts have it that they needed some convincing. Bobby’s older brother also failed to recognize his own brother.
For his part, Walters insisted that the boy was the son of a female friend of his, a certain Julia Anderson. Indeed, he argued that the kid was Bruce Anderson and that his mother had sent him off with Walters on his travels. The case went to court. Despite all the doubts, the Dunbars won. The child was brought up in the family home, while Walters went to prison for kidnapping. The boy raised as Bobby went on to lead a normal life and have four children of his own. Walters was released after just two years, while Anderson, who maintained her boy had been taken from her, moved far away and took solace in her strong Christian faith.
The story didn’t end there, however. In 2004, DNA testing on a relative of the Dunbars proved almost conclusively that the boy they raised as their own was not in fact Bobby. Indeed, the fate of Bobby Dunbar, who vanished on that autumn day in 1912, remains one of America’s most enduring mysteries.