Steven Damman

Case background and investigation

On the afternoon of October 31, 1955, Marilyn Damman left her two children, two-year-old Steven and seven-month-old Pamela, in a stroller outside a bakery in East Meadow, on Long Island, while she went inside for about ten minutes, according to an Associated Press report carried by HeraldNet in 2009. When she came out, the stroller was gone. It was found around the corner with Pamela unharmed inside, but Steven was missing. Morbidology, citing contemporary newspaper coverage, puts the time at about 2:45 p.m.

More than 2,000 people searched for Steven for about 28 hours before Nassau County police called off the organized search and turned the case over to detectives, the AP reported. His parents, Jerry and Marilyn Damman, appealed publicly for his return and asked that he be given medicine for his anemia. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children lists him as last seen outside a store, wearing dungarees, a blue shirt, a red sweater and brown shoes, with a small scar on his chin and a mole on the back of his right calf.

In November 1955 the family received three ransom letters demanding increasing sums of $3,000, $10,000 and $14,000. According to Wikipedia and the Charley Project summary cited there, the letters were traced to a Queens College student who had no connection to the disappearance. Authorities have treated the case as a kidnapping by a stranger.

In 2009 John Barnes, a Michigan man then 54, came forward saying he believed he was Steven, citing a scar and a mole that matched the boy's description and a sense that he did not belong in the family that raised him. After early tests did not rule him out, the FBI laboratory compared his DNA with that of Steven's sister, Pamela Horne. On June 18, 2009, the FBI announced that the two did not share the same mother, ruling Barnes out, ABC News reported.

Steven Damman has never been found. His case remains open with the Nassau County Police Department, and NCMEC continues to circulate an age-progressed image of how he might look as an adult. Nassau County police said in 2009 that leaving children outside a shop in this way was probably not unusual at the time.