Daniel Barter

Case background and investigation

Daniel Barter, known as Danny, was four years old when he disappeared during a family camping trip to Perdido Bay on the Alabama Gulf Coast. According to the Charley Project, he was born on December 12, 1954, and lived with his family in Mobile, about an hour's drive from the campsite. CNN reported that he was the third youngest of Paul and Maxine Barter's seven children.

On the morning of June 18, 1959, Danny had just come back from a trip to a store with his father, CNN reported. The Charley Project states that he was last seen playing near the bank of the bay between 9:30 and 10:00 a.m., barefoot and wearing only gray boxer shorts, while his parents prepared fishing gear. His mother began looking for him ten to fifteen minutes after she had last seen him and could not find him.

The search was immediate and extensive. According to the CUE Center for Missing Persons, it involved several hundred volunteers and emergency personnel, U.S. Navy personnel, bloodhounds, helicopters, skin divers and mounted posses. Because the area is swampy and home to alligators, hunters killed and opened alligators to check for remains; none were found. The CUE Center's summary says the bloodhounds repeatedly followed the boy's scent to the same spot on a nearby road. No physical evidence of what happened to him was recovered.

Danny's mother told the Mobile Register in 1959 that her son was afraid of the water and that she had come to believe someone picked him up along the road. The Charley Project records that the family later described incidents before the disappearance in which unknown men appeared to be watching the children, including a man seen looking into the boys' bedroom window in Mobile. Investigators were not able to confirm an abduction at the time, and no ransom demand was ever received.

In 2008 the FBI and the Baldwin County Sheriff's Office reopened the case. An FBI spokeswoman told CNN in 2009 that a lead arose when someone was overheard discussing what had happened to the boy in a public place; no further details were released. The FBI published an age-progressed image, and relatives gathered at the campsite in June 2009 to mark fifty years. The Charley Project notes that many original investigative files have been lost or destroyed. Danny's father died in 1965 and his mother in 1995. No arrest has been made and Danny has never been located; the Charley Project classifies the case as a non-family abduction.