Missing Persons

One of the funniest lines I use when I describe cleaning my daughter’s bedroom closet is, “I found Jimmy Hoffa’s body and the lone gunman from the grassy knoll.” Today, as I was relating my “discovery", my daughter asked me who Jimmy Hoffa was.

I decided to sit her down and pull up an article on the website about Mr. Hoffa and his famous disappearance. I was aware that several years ago evidence had been presented prompting police to search a farm home in hopes of finding Mr. Hoffa’s body, but to no avail. The search, and my funny line, continues.

I don’t know if many people are as interested in missing persons cases as I am, but it does seem that our culture is obsessed with unfinished mysteries and the unknown. A link from the article I looked up on Jimmy Hoffa took me to a list of people who had mysteriously disappeared...a list that goes all the way back to the year 1021. Some of the names or accounts were very familiar – the Roanoke colonists, Amelia Earhart, Glenn Miller (yes, missing, not dead!). But one story caught my eye, not only because it comes out of Louisiana (surprise!), but the fact that, while new evidence came to light just a couple of years ago, the missing person case still remains. Or does it?

In 1912, a 4-year old boy named Bobby Dunbar went missing in Louisiana. After an extensive search that included dynamiting a lake and slitting alligators to see if the child had been eaten by one (I told you, Louisiana), a drifter was caught with a boy that matched the description of Bobby Dunbar. Only, the boy wasn’t Bobby Dunbar. Unfortunately, the drifter spent 2 years in jail before his conviction was overturned; but interestingly, what wasn’t overturned was the boy. The Dunbars retained custody, and the boy (who the drifter claimed was his brothers’ child) grew up, had 4 sons, and died as a Dunbar.

91 years later, DNA proved that there was no match between one of those sons to the nearest Dunbar relative, and that the boy recovered was most probably the child the drifter claimed him to be, Charles Anderson. After reading many more articles, each with more details than the last, the question that many were left asking was: “So what happened to Bobby Dunbar?"

The sensational story of the child swap and ongoing legal battles for the drifter consume our mind that we almost forget that the missing person in this case was never found. The only trace of little Bobby included tiny foot marks leading to railroad tracks, and then nothing.

It was Bobby Dunbar’s granddaughter who conducted an investigation of her own and who brought about the request for DNA testing. She finally relented that the real Bobby Dunbar had probably fallen into the lake and was eaten by an alligator.

What made her arrive at this conclusion? Growing up as a Dunbar, did she hear whispers at night and stories at school? Revelations by guilty consciences that maybe, maybe, the “missing child” was a ruse designed by a guilty father who carried out an elaborate hoax to avoid telling his wife that his carelessness had cost them their child. $1000 was the reward offered, and in 1921, that was a lot of money. But not for Percy Dunbar, a prominent businessman. $1000 was not a lot for a man with something to hide. Was it uncovering this truth that led her to start her own investigation into who her grandfather really was?

So, while the body of Jimmy Hoffa may never be recovered (well, outside of my daughters' closet), maybe one day, the truth about what happened to Bobby Dunbar can finally be told, and he can be removed from the missing persons list.