Who is bobby dunbar

After all, he was very young when this all transpired. As for Walters — his lawyer won an appeal, and he was released from prison. He never made mention of the second boy. After nearly a century of mystery, the identity of the boy who had been raised as Bobby Dunbar had finally been settled. However, is this enough? Can we pardon a mistake that not only separated two families, but also caused a mother a lifetime of grief and regret?

Did they want to fill the void of grief and guilt of knowing that they lost a child, or was it something more? Though many questions were answered in the identity of Bobby Dunbar, there are some questions that remain unanswered. Sharon Elliott discovered she was adopted when she was fifty-five years old. She was found in the middle of the Arizona desert in a hatbox on Christmas Eve Shocked by the circumstances surrounding her adoption, Sharon Elliott has been on the hunt to find her birth parents, and after 30 years of searching, she might have finally found them.

Is the case solved? When Sharon Elliott discovered she was adopted, her adoptive mother told her the story about the day she was found. It was Christmas Eve and newlyweds Ed and Julia Stewart were driving down a desert highway when their car broke down; a flat tire. They pulled over and took a look at the car.

Julia waited patiently and looked out into the desert landscape. Sometime during the repairs, Julia heard something out of place in the middle of the desert. It was familiar, like a sort of wailing. The Stewarts decided to investigate.

After a few minutes of searching, they found the source. The Stewarts were shocked to discover something out of place in the middle of the Arizona desert. It was a hatbox, and the wailing came from inside. The Stewarts were in disbelief to find a child wrapped in a blue blanket with a tuft of red hair peeking through the folds. Astounded to find a baby in the middle of the desert, the Stewarts decided to take the newborn to the nearest hospital.

Building a life together, Elliott grew up as a relatively happy child. However, as an adult, everything changed. Elliott was fifty-five when her mother told her she was adopted. At that moment Elliott felt like the world no longer tethered her to the ground and felt completely uprooted. It was in that instant that Elliott felt a void enter her life.

Her family lore and history no longer applied to her, and she was left wondering about the circumstances of her birth and wondered who here biological parents really were.

Although it was a shock to hear that she was adopted, Elliott was determined to find out who her biological family really were. Before her mother passed away, she left Elliott an envelope of clues consisting of old newspapers and certificates correlating with her adoption. Wanting to know more about her past, Elliott started asking questions by calling her local newspaper. When asked what drew Mr. However, over time and after getting to know Elliott on a personal level, his perspective on the story shifted and became a mission to help a woman find her roots.

You can still hear some disbelief as he recalled the memory. Unlike today, where finding out about our ancestry is as simple as spitting in a tube, back in , the concept was underdeveloped and restricted. As the years pushed forward, the case seemed to be getting nowhere. There were a couple of leads, however, they ended with disappointing results. But he feared time was running out. Would she find her biological parents?

Thanks to the popularity of at-home DNA kits, finding a possible DNA match with close or distant relatives was more accessible. When the results came in, they were both good and bad. The good news? Elliot had blood-related relatives! Mostly around Davenport, Iowa. However, there was one small problem: There were too many entangled family trees.

Sharon Elliott discovered she had third and fourth cousins in Iowa. This was good news! However, since her cousins were from such a focused area, there was an issue of intermarriage, or what Belza called in genealogical terms, endogamy , where family trees become tangled with each other. Understanding the time sensitivity, Belza was able to narrow down the gene pool and uncovered that Elliott had German ancestors.

With the ancestry came two names: Freda and Walter Roth. Instead, the couple was deceased. Anderson later confirmed that she had given permission for her son to accompany Walters, but that it was just for a couple of days while Walters visited his sister. Strangely, Anderson never reported her son missing even though Walters claimed that Bruce had been with him for over a year. The whole story was suspicious, so Percy and Lessie Dunbar traveled by train to Mississippi to see if they could identify the boy.

Lessie examined the child while he was asleep, but what happened next is disputed. Another source states that the boy woke up as Lessie stood over him and began to cry. I am not quite sure. Lessie finally recognized some familiar moles and scars and declared that the boy was, indeed, her son, Bobby. A judge agreed, and the family took him home, where they were greeted with a parade and brass band. When he came back, Bobby was still there. More small talk, and now a lot of looking each other over.

But Hollis' work got in the way again, and eventually Bobby left. But 30 minutes after he left, it dawned on me what I had done. Here was a man that I'd been looking for for 20, almost something years, anyhow, and Mother had been telling me about. Here he is, looking me straight in the eye, and I didn't do nothing about trying to find out more about the situation. But I didn't. I just didn't, and I regret that. Hollis' sister, Jewel, had a similar story. She was working at a service station that she and her husband ran at a crossroads outside Poplarville.

A man came in and talked to her for maybe an hour, she says, just sat and drank coffee, looking only at her and asking all kinds of questions.

But he didn't identify himself. After he left then and I got to thinking about it, I said, that is who I believe he was-- Bobby. When Margaret heard this story during her first visit with Hollis and Jewel back in , she had her doubts. But later, Margaret was visiting with her uncle and aunt, her father's siblings. And while they were in the car, Margaret was telling them about her research and the mysterious encounters that Hollis and Jewel remembered.

In the rear view mirror, she saw her uncle and aunt exchange a charged look. Then they told her this story. Here's Margaret's uncle, Gerald, Bobby Dunbar's youngest son. It would have been , so I would have been 13 years old, right? We were coming back from a trip, my brother's wedding in Ohio, in Cincinnati. And on the way back, we went through Mississippi. And I remember my dad pointing. He says, those were the people that they came to pick me up from.

And he asked, he said, should I stop? And my mother sort of responded, if you think you should. And so they did. We stopped. Then he went into the store. And so we stayed there for maybe 30 minutes or so. And he came back, and we left. Margaret, the granddaughter of Bobby Dunbar, and Linda, the granddaughter of Julia Anderson, interpreted this eerie coincidence differently.

They'd been discussing Margaret's research on the phone and online since they first met. On the one hand, they were ideal research partners since they both were singularly fascinated with the story.

But on the other hand, it was an uneasy alliance. Margaret was totally convinced that it was Bobby Dunbar all along. I was totally convinced that it was Bruce Anderson all along. We understood that we were both coming from different angles.

But what was there to do but butt heads, you know? And yet, we tried to do it very subtly for months. Good morning to everyone. And we are certainly glad to have all of you with us. Agreeing to disagree gets old fast. The differences between Margaret and Linda came to a head in Columbia, Mississippi, when Margaret was invited to share her research at the Historical Society in town.

The sound you're hearing is from a video of the event. In the front of the room were Julia Anderson's children, Hollis and Jewel. Several times during her presentation, Margaret used phrases like this.

The illegitimate child of a domestic, Julia Anderson. Jewel and Hollis bristled. That was their mom she was talking about. Margaret went on to describe Julia like a character in a story-- working in the fields with coarse hands and bare, dirty feet.

And she made it clear that she didn't really believe the Anderson family's version of what happened, that Bobby was Bruce, but her own family's, that Bobby was Bobby, son of her great grandparents, Percy and Lessie Dunbar.

When Jewel and Hollis got home and told Linda what happened, she got mad. I truly don't believe that, when she spoke and the way she spoke, I don't believe that she meant to say it to be as derogatory as we took it either, if you want to know the truth.

She had spoken the truth of Julia Anderson had children out of wedlock. So she was a loose woman, which, if you have to accept that, you have to accept it. But I wanted her to see it from my point of view, you know? I felt like she had looked at it from her point of view long enough, that it was my turn. And I don't remember if it was a written letter or email, but I told her, the very woman that you maligned at that meeting today could very well turn out to be your great grandmother.

You keep wanting to know all about Julia. You need to look more into Lessie and Percy and judge their characters. And that did not make me happy. It sort of angered me to have her say that. But in retrospect, she was absolutely right. I did need to put down what I believed and be able to look at it with fresh eyes.

Coming up, what Margaret discovers. Plus, the kidnapper speaks. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our story unraveling the century-old mystery of what happened to Bobby Dunbar continues. Again, here's Tal McThenia. By , Margaret had been researching for four years.

She'd taken all the articles from the scrapbook and all the articles from all the libraries and typed them, over 1, total. Margaret had maps, and photo albums, and tape recordings, and books on her shelf like, Social History of the American Alligator.

That year, she started looking for descendants of William Walters, the wandering handyman, the man who'd kidnapped her grandfather. In , Walters was convicted of kidnapping Bobby Dunbar. His lawyers appealed, and the state supreme court ordered a retrial. But incredibly, because the first trial cost the town so much money, prosecutors decided to drop the case instead. Walters was released. She pored over the names in the book and started making phone calls.

We always called him Uncle Cant. I never knew he had a William Cantwell until all this came up. He was always Uncle Cant. We met with Jean and her sister Barbara in Savannah, Georgia. Just like Hollis and Jewel and Margaret, they'd grown up hearing the Bobby Dunbar story, too, only their version was a little racier. Well, the story we heard was that this Miss Julia Anderson was a fine young lady.

But you know, mostly, fine young ladies get entrapped. And I'll tell you what, there's many a handsome, young, sweet-talking man come around and entrapped them. So that's what happened to Miss Julia, as the story went. Now, I know it was rumored that Uncle Cant was the father and that one of his brothers was the father.

It could have been Uncle Bunt. He was a rounder. He was a real rounder. But they all denied it. They said it was another feller. Jean and Barbara grew up on a farm in Georgia with their ailing grandfather, Rad, William Walter's brother. After getting released from jail, William Walters had gone back to his life as a tinker, a traveling handyman, tuning pianos in people's parlors and fixing organs in country churches.

And at least once or twice a year, his travels would bring him around to his brother's house for a visit. Seeing Uncle Cant come with his wagon a-trinkling and a-bouncing, the pots and pans a-bouncing against each other, you couldn't help but know it was Uncle Cant.

But Grandpa would lighten up. Oh, he would just brighten up. There's Cant. Young'uns, put some more wood on the fire. Go see what's in the kitchen. Fix him some supper. He'd always come about dark. Every time I remember him coming, it was about dark, wasn't it, Barbie? And it didn't matter if we'd already had supper and the fire had gone out in the stove. We had to light up the fire and fix Uncle Cant some supper so he could sit with Grandpa till midnight. But each and every time he'd come-- and he would come several times a year and stay a month at the time, or three, two to four weeks-- they sat and talked over the case of the kidnapping and how innocent he was.

It was like it had just happened. During one visit, Jean and Barbara's grandfather asked William Walters what he was doing traveling around the country with somebody else's boy in the first place. Walters explained that Julia was in dire straits, and she couldn't take care of Bruce. And he was planning on bringing the boy back once she got on her feet. And also, there was the business element.

Uncle Cant told Grandpa that, with that little boy with him, people were a lot nicer when he stopped to spend the night. Because he would stop along the road at farm houses and around in his travels and ask for a night's lodging and hay for the horses. And then he would do things for them-- tune their pianos, organs, or whatever.

And he said, with that little boy, the mothers just couldn't wait to get their hands on the little boy and feed him, and cuddle him, and bathe him. In fact, a woman told me one time she had a neighbor-- if I'm getting off the beaten path, but it'll kind of explain it-- that was ugly as homemade sin.

And she was all the time wanting to take her little grandchild with her everywhere, shopping, and to the grocery store, and walking.

And I said, well, why does she want to carry him along with her all the time? She says, well, she is so ugly it makes her look better to have a little child along with her. So that could have been Uncle Cant having that little child, especially the ladies in the house were a lot nicer. Margaret had also tracked down the granddaughter of William Walters' lawyer, who had saved in a closet the complete defense file from the kidnapping case.

When Margaret heard that, she dropped everything, bought a portable scanner, and showed up at the woman's doorstep. She spent a week scanning the entire thing and then four months back at home typing and deciphering it. The defense file was a gold mine. It had correspondence from the governors of Mississippi and Louisiana, handwritten letters from Julia Anderson, and dozens of sworn affidavits from Mississippi residents saying that the child was Bruce Anderson and that they'd seen him in the area with Walters months before Bobby Dunbar went missing.

And then there was this letter, written by William Walters himself just days after he was arrested and thrown in jail, addressed directly to Percy Dunbar, who had just taken the boy home with him. I had no chance to prove up, but I know by now you have decided you are wrong.

It is very likely I will lose my life on account of that. And if I do, the great God will hold you accountable.

That boy's mother is Julia Anderson. You ask him, and he will tell you. I did not teach him to beg or bum. But in as much as you have him, take good care of him. So you have a lost Robert and me a lost Bruce. May God bless my darling boy. Write me, if I don't get lynched. I think you will be sad a long time, but hope not too bad.

The defense file was pages of evidence that directly challenged Margaret's family legend. And pretty soon, Margaret reached a breaking point.

Toward the very end of me typing the defense file, which was not in chronological order, I came across a letter that totally-- it was my epiphany. It was a letter written by a Christian woman. I don't even know her name. She just signed it "A Christian Woman. And it says, "Kindly pardon me. I am ill in bed. But this matter has just worried me. Dear sir, in view of human justice to Julia Anderson and mothers, I am prompted to write to you.

I sincerely believe the Dunbars have Bruce Anderson and not their boy. If this is their child, why are they afraid for anyone to see or interview him privately? I would see nothing to fear, and this seems strange. The Dunbars claim that--". The letter goes on for six pages, laying out a point-by-point, common sense argument that the Dunbars have the wrong child.

Why haven't pictures of Bobby and Bruce been printed side by side so the world could see whether they look alike or not? Why is Julia judged more harshly for wavering than Lessie, when neither of them recognized the child at first?

Which gets A Christian Woman to her biggest point-- a look back at that fateful night in Mississippi when the Dunbars first saw the boy and didn't recognize him, until Lessie gave him a bath and saw his moles and scars.

This is a farce. If the Dunbars do not know their child who has only been gone eight months by his features, why, they don't know him at all. Reason, by reason, by reason, this woman is giving me every-- she apparently followed this very closely in the newspapers.

And it just simply dawned on me, oh, my god, she's right. What a farce. What a farce this is. The idea for a DNA test had been floating around for years, but Margaret hadn't wanted to do it unless all her uncles and aunts, Bobby Dunbar's children, agreed to it. And then, four years into her research, a reporter from the Associated Press, Allen Breed, got wind of the story. Margaret remembers being in the room when Allen asked her father if he would consent to a DNA test.

She was startled at his answer. Later, after his mom bathed him and examined his body more closely for identifying marks, however, she was convinced. It was her Bobby! The Dunbars returned to Louisiana, where a parade complete with brass band welcomed them. The town was overjoyed at the mysterious matter having concluded so happily. Back in Mississippi, Walters vigorously protested his innocence.

Understandable, as kidnapping was a capital crime in Louisiana back then. If I do, the great God will hold you accountable. Then, his luck may have turned. The woman he mentioned, Julia Anderson, turned up in Louisiana, and claimed everything he said was true. While Walters stood trial in a court of law, Anderson was judged in the court of public opinion, and found just as guilty.

She returned to Mississippi, leaving the boy behind with the Dunbars. One Dunbar, Margaret Dunbar Cutright, grew up listening to a version of events saying the boy — and her grandfather — was Bobby Dunbar.

Then, in , she happened to receive an album from her dad containing old newspaper clippings relating to the story. As part of her investigation, Margaret just had to reach out to the Andersons. As both were interested in discovering the truth more than they wanted to prove their families were necessarily in the right, they formed an unlikely alliance.

They pooled their resources and what they knew, and set out to discover who that boy truly was — Anderson or Dunbar — once and for all. The more they dug into the open sore that was their family history, however, the more they drifted apart. With tensions gradually mounting, eventually a full-blown feud between the two families erupted.

Linda Traver recounted that she was convinced the boy was Bruce Anderson, while Margaret was sure he was Bobby Dunbar. In retrospect, Margaret later said, she was absolutely right.

Despite the rift between them, Margaret and Linda continued their research, and unearthed a real gold mine of information.