10 Baffling Details Surrounding Bobby Dunbar, Who Vanished Only To Reappear As A New Child

6 /10 Mole On The Neck

The police eventually took William into custody on the suspicion that he had kidnapped the boy from Louisiana.

When a wire arrived from the town of Hub in Mississippi, Percy and Lessie, along with Bobby’s brother Alonzo rushed to see the boy. Then strange things happened; the parents were not immediately sure if he was their son.

When Lessie called Bobby and tried to hold him, the only response she received was best described as indifference. Bobby had a mole on his neck, and so was the boy in question.

5 /10 A Friend In Need

Despite the doubt, Percy and Lessie took him to New Orleans to meet John M. Parker, Sr., a family friend who later became the governor of Louisiana.

They asked Parker to examine the boy and determine whether or not he was Bobby Dunbar. After moments of studying the boy and questioning several witnesses, Parker decided the boy was indeed Bobby.

Percy and Lessie soon took a train for Opelousas. William Walters was charged with kidnapping and also brought to Opelousas to stand trial. He was later convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

4 /10 Becoming Bobby Dunbar

At that time, kidnapping was a capital offense in Louisiana. Although William was sentenced to life in prison, he only spent about two years behind bars.

He was then granted a new trial, but the town of Opelousas eventually stopped pursuing any charges for too much money had been spent on the case. William was released and continued to live in obscurity.

The court also determined that the boy was right where he belonged. From that point on, he was no longer the son of Julia Anderson but Bobby Dunbar from Opelousas.

3 /10 Decades Of Acceptance

Bobby Dunbar, or the boy raised as him, went on to have four children of his own.

Nearly nine decades after his death in 1966, his granddaughter Margaret Dunbar Cutright revisited the legend about the kidnapping and set herself to once again set the record straight.

Margaret is the son of Bob Dunbar, Jr., the eldest son of Bobby Dunbar. The investigation began following the death of her brother in a 1999 plane crash.

Bob Jr. gave her daughter a scrapbook filled with articles and newspapers clipping about her grandfather’s kidnapping case.

2 /10 A Visit From Bobby Dunbar

Several years into the investigation, Margaret was able to track down the Anderson family.

She found letters and news stories detailing how reliable witnesses testified during the trial that the boy – his grandfather – had already been with William Walters for some time before Bobby Dunbar went missing in August 1912. 

Margaret became acquainted with the Andersons too. At least two of them, Hollis and Jewel, claimed to have been visited once by a man named Bobby Dunbar from Opelousas in their younger days. When Margaret told her uncle Gerald Dunbar, he corroborated the story.

1 /10 DNA Said It All

Bobby Jr. agreed to submit a DNA sample to prove whether his father was Bobby Dunbar or Bruce Anderson. It was compared to a sample obtained from David, one of Alonzo Dunbar’s sons.

Because the Y chromosome is passed down almost unchanged from father to son, matching the DNA samples between one of Bobby’s male offspring and Alonzo would determine the biological relationship.

Had the DNA matched, they must have been related. But it didn’t. In other words, Bobby Dunbar Jr. had no biological relationship with his supposed male cousin David. Margaret’s father was not a Dunbar after all.