April 26, 2009

Bobby Dunbar



On August 23, 1912 a 4 year old child disappeared in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana. At the end of an 8 month long nationwide search, authorities believed that they had found the missing child. The Dunbars identified the boy as their son, Bobby Dunbar. However, another woman, Julia Anderson claimed that the child was not Bobby Dunbar, but was in fact her own son, Charles Anderson. A battle ensued, after which, custody was awarded to the Dunbars.

The real Bobby Dunbar had been on a fishing trip near Swayze Lake when he disappeared. When the child thought to be Bobby Dunbar was found, he was in the company of a man by the name of William Walters from Mississippi. Walters was convicted of kidnapping and America rejoiced over the return of Bobby Dunbar to his parents. When Julia Anderson came forward to claim the child for her own, she stated that she had allowed the boy to go with William Walters on a tinkering journey. At that time, Walters was granted an appeal for a new trial. However, the city never went through with the new trial due to concern for costs. Also, Julia Anderson was made out to be a woman "of loose morals", leading the courts to turn down her claim to custody of Bobby/Charles Dunbar/Anderson.

The Dunbars raised the boy as Bobby and he went on to have 4 children of his own. He died in 1966. After his death, one of his granddaughters, Margaret Cutright, became intrigued by the old mystery and began to conduct her own investigation. In 2004, her efforts led to conclusive DNA evidence that the boy raised as Bobby Dunbar was not a blood relation to the Dunbar family. This means that William Walters had been wrongfully convicted all those years ago. The fate of the real Bobby Dunbar is still unknown. Cutright's opinion is that he fell into the lake while on the fishing trip and was eaten by an alligator. I can't decide which is stranger: that no one knows for certain what happened to Bobby Dunbar, or that an unknown boy (possibly Charles Anderson) lived his whole life without knowing his own true identity.


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1 comment:

  1. I feel bad for Julia Anderson (if that really were her son) because her son had to live with another family unknowingly and never had a chance to appreciate his mom for giving birth to him. But still, she sounds suspicious.

    It's stranger that the parents had identified the wrong child as their own son-- wouldn't they have known exactly what their son was like?

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