Just one story this month, but it’s quite the story…
On August 23rd 1912, a four year old boy named Bobby Dunbar went missing while on a fishing trip with his parents in Louisiana. Sounds like a tragic tale, and it certainly was one…but not solely for the reasons you might expect. Bobby Dunbar, you see, was found eight months later, and handed back to his parents. He’d been discovered with a man named William Cantwell Walters, who was travelling through Mississippi with the boy and was immediately arrested. So, where’s the tragedy? Well, while the Dunbars accepted the boy as their missing son, Walters insisted that the child was actually another boy entirely: Bruce Anderson. His claim was backed up by a woman named Julia Anderson, who claimed that she was the boy’s mother and had entrusted him into Walters’ care. An inability to correctly identify the boy when questioned, as well as a bad reputation (Anderson had three children, all out of wedlock), led to the woman being dismissed as an unreliable witness; the boy stayed with the Dunbars, and Walters was sent to prison, despite significant evidence pointing to his innocence. He was released two years later, following an appeal, but with little money to her name, Julia Anderson was unable to push for a court case herself, and so the boy in question remained ‘Bobby Dunbar’ until his death in 1966.
Decades later, the granddaughter of ‘Bobby Dunbar’ began examining the details of the whole story, in the hope of proving once and for all that her grandfather was the little boy who’d gone missing in Louisiana. Sadly for her, and the rest of her family, her research led her to the only plausible conclusion: that the original Bobby Dunbar had in fact disappeared, most likely died, on the fishing trip, while the boy raised as him was Bruce Anderson. In 2004, a relative of the family submitted to a DNA test, which confirmed that he was not related to Bobby Dunbar (the original one. My word, this is confusing). This test was not entirely conclusive, given that it didn’t take into account the unlikely, but still possible, chance of an unknown illegitimate birth within the family…but let’s be honest, it’s really the last piece of proof this puzzle needed. Pretty mental story, right? It’s hard to imagine how it could ever have happened. while there was a gap of eight months, the Dunbars would surely recognise their own son; were they simply too relieved, too undone by grief, to think rationally when presented with a possible replacement? Did they really, truly believe Bruce Anderson was Bobby? Reports from the time don’t provide much of an answer: some said that the Dunbars welcomed the child as their own immediately, while others claimed that both parties were unsure of each other. Another strange element to the story is the question of why William Walters had been travelling with Bruce Anderson for over a year, when his mother had supposedly only agreed to a short trip to visit Walters’ sister. What on earth was going on there? Nothing about this story isn’t strange, but ultimately, as I said, everything about it is tragic.
