Bobby Dunbar

Robert Clarence 'Bobby' Dunbar was the young son of Percy and Lessie Dunbar of Opelousas, in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana. Born on May 23, 1908, he was four years old in the summer of 1912 when his family took a fishing trip to Swayze Lake. On August 23, 1912, Bobby vanished. Searchers dragged the alligator-infested lake and combed the surrounding swamp for weeks, fearing he had drowned or been taken by a gator, but no trace of the boy was ever found. His disappearance became a sensation across the South, and the reward for his safe return climbed to thousands of dollars.

Eight months later, in April 1913, authorities located an itinerant handyman named William Cantwell Walters traveling through Mississippi with a small boy who resembled the missing child. Walters insisted the boy was Bruce Anderson, the son of a North Carolina woman, Julia Anderson, who had entrusted the child to his care. The Dunbars were brought to see him. Lessie Dunbar at first seemed uncertain, but after bathing the boy she declared she recognized scars and marks and claimed him as her son. A Louisiana court awarded the child to the Dunbars, and Walters was later convicted of kidnapping, though his conviction was eventually overturned.

Julia Anderson traveled to Louisiana and identified the boy as her own son, Bruce, but as an unmarried mother facing local prejudice she was disbelieved, and her claim was rejected. The child was raised as Bobby Dunbar. He grew up, married, had children of his own, and lived out his entire life believing, and telling everyone, that he was the boy who had vanished at Swayze Lake. He died in 1966, the question of his true identity seemingly buried with him.

The mystery might have ended there had his granddaughter, Margaret Dunbar Cutright, not begun investigating the family story. In 2004, DNA testing was arranged: a sample from the son of the man raised as Bobby was compared with a sample from a verified Dunbar relative. The results showed no biological relationship, meaning the boy the Dunbars had raised was not Bobby Dunbar at all. The finding confirmed what Julia Anderson had insisted nearly a century earlier: the recovered child had almost certainly been her son, Charles Bruce Anderson. The DNA evidence resolved one of America's oldest identity disputes, vindicating Walters and Anderson, but it reopened another wound. The real Bobby Dunbar, who walked into the woods at Swayze Lake in August 1912, was never found. The most likely explanations remain that the four-year-old drowned, was taken by an alligator, or was abducted by a stranger. More than a century later, his ultimate fate is still unknown, even as the identity of the boy who took his name has finally been settled by science.