Bobby Dunbar’s story is almost more awful than a murder. It is the story of a lost boy and another who was most likely abducted from his mother to take his place. It is the story of two boys with nightmare lives, where the nightmare seems to last, for them, indefinitely.
Their story begins on August 23, 1912, when Percy and Lessie Dunbar took their boys, Bobby and Alonzo, on a trip to a lake in Louisiana. That day Bobby disappeared, everything appeared in the newspapers, he was searched for 8 months without interruption, and in the end the police found a boy who was thought to be Bobby. He was found in Mississippi with William Cantwell Walters, who was arrested on the grounds that he had abducted the child, despite the fact that the man always repeated that the child was not Bobby, but Charles Bruce Anderson, whose custody he had with his mother, Julia Anderson.
The Dunbar family immediately recognized him as Bobby, and they took him home. Julia, the child’s alleged mother, had not seen him for 13 months, and although she said she only gave Walters a two-day trip, she defended him, although the case, as she recounted, seemed an abduction. Eventually, she also identified the child as her son, Bruce, but the child went to the family with the lost child.
William Cantwell Walters was found guilty and spent two years in prison for kidnapping. The boy was raised as Bobby Dunbar, and in adulthood had children named Dunbar. Bobby died in 1966.
But in 2004, curiosity crushed his children, especially one of them, Robert Dunbar Jr. He agreed to do a DNA test with his “cousin”, Alonzo Dunbar, but the results were shocking. for the family. The two men were in no way related!
It seems that Bobby’s parents were not honest, the question that remains is this: what happened to the real Bobby on August 23, 1912? Did his parents do anything horrible to him? Did he drown? Was he kidnapped? This will remain a mystery forever.
