Bobby Dunbar

This is a story about a boy who disappeared, and a boy who was found.

For ninety years, everyone believed they were the same boy. They weren’t.

Swayze Lake

On August 23, 1912, a family from Opelousas, Louisiana, went on a camping and fishing trip to Swayze Lake, a swampy lake in the bayou country of south-central Louisiana. Percy and Lessie Dunbar brought their two young sons, Alonzo and Robert, who was four years old. Everyone called him Bobby.

At some point that afternoon, Bobby wandered away from the family’s camp. When his parents realized he was gone, they began searching frantically. They found a few small footprints along the shore of the lake. Then nothing.

The search that followed was enormous. Hundreds of people combed the swamps and woods for days. They dragged the lake. They even dynamited parts of it, hoping that a body would float to the surface. Some people cut open the bellies of alligators to see if Bobby was inside.

Nothing was found.

The Man With the Piano Tuner’s Cart

Eight months later, in April 1913, word came from Mississippi that a boy matching Bobby’s description had been found in the company of a man named William Cantwell Walters.

Walters was a drifter, a handyman and piano tuner who traveled from town to town across the rural South in a horse-drawn wagon. He had a young boy with him. When authorities questioned him, he said the boy was the son of a woman named Julia Anderson, who had worked for his family, and that she had allowed him to take the boy with him.

The Dunbars traveled to Mississippi. At first, according to some accounts, Lessie Dunbar was uncertain whether the boy was her son. The next day, after she bathed him and examined him closely — looking for moles and scars she remembered — she declared that he was Bobby.

The Dunbars brought the boy home to Opelousas. The town threw a parade.

The Other Mother

But the story didn’t end there.

Julia Anderson, a poor, unmarried woman from North Carolina, came forward. She said that the boy was not Bobby Dunbar. He was her son, Charles Bruce Anderson. She had allowed Walters to take him on his travels for a time, she said, because she worked as a field hand and couldn’t take care of him. She wanted him back.

The case became a sensation across the South. The newspapers covered it closely. There was a custody fight. Julia Anderson was brought to Louisiana and shown the boy, alongside several other children. Some reports said she couldn’t pick him out right away; others said she recognized him. Many people in Walters’s home community in Mississippi supported her story and said they knew the boy as Bruce.

But Julia Anderson was poor and uneducated, and the Dunbars were a respectable middle-class family with money and influence. The court sided with the Dunbars. William Walters was tried and convicted of kidnapping. He maintained his innocence. His conviction was later overturned on appeal, but he was not retried.

Julia Anderson went home to North Carolina without her son.

Bobby Dunbar

The boy grew up as Bobby Dunbar. He lived in Louisiana, married, and had four children of his own. He died in 1966.

Throughout his life, he believed he was Bobby Dunbar. His family believed it too.

The Granddaughter

Decades later, Bobby Dunbar’s granddaughter, Margaret Dunbar Cutright, began researching her family history. She found old newspaper clippings and court records about the kidnapping and the custody battle, and became curious about the questions that had never been answered.

In 2004, with the help of a DNA test, she found out. Scientists compared DNA from her father, Bobby Dunbar Jr., to DNA from a son of Alonzo Dunbar, Bobby’s younger brother. If the boy who came back had really been Bobby Dunbar, the two men would share the DNA passed down through the Dunbar men.

They didn’t. The boy who came back in 1913 was not related to the Dunbars at all.

He was, almost certainly, Bruce Anderson, Julia’s son.

What Happened to Bobby?

The DNA test answered one question and raised another. If the boy found with William Walters wasn’t Bobby Dunbar, then what happened to the real Bobby?

Most likely, he died at Swayze Lake that August day in 1912 — drowned in the lake, or perhaps taken by an alligator, in a swamp that hid his body forever. His parents searched, and searched, and then, eight months later, they were offered a boy who looked something like their son. They wanted desperately to believe. And so they did.

It’s hard to blame them. It’s harder not to think of Julia Anderson, who said for years that the boy was hers, and was dismissed and disbelieved because she was poor. And of William Walters, who was convicted of a crime he probably didn’t commit. And of the boy himself, who lived his whole life under someone else’s name.