The Dunbar family’s fishing trip to Swayze Lake in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana, on August 23, 1912, ended in tragedy when four-year-old Robert Clarence Bobby Dunbar disappeared from the family’s lunch spot. Only a set of bare footprints leading away from the area was found after searches of the swamp and a nearby railroad trestle produced no sign of the boy. His parents, Lessie and Percy Dunbar, mounted a nationwide search, distributing postcards and offering a reward; the description included a scar on his left big toe from an infant burn.

In April 1913 a boy matching that description was found in Mississippi with itinerant handyman William Cantwell Walters. Walters said the child was Charles Bruce Anderson and in the care of Julia Anderson. The Dunbars identified and reclaimed the child, Walters was arrested and convicted of kidnapping (the conviction was later overturned), and the boy grew up as Bobby Dunbar, marrying and raising a family before his death in 1966. Decades later a 2004 DNA test showed the man raised as Bobby Dunbar was not biologically related to the Dunbars, supporting that he was likely Bruce Anderson. The whereabouts and fate of the original Robert Clarence Dunbar remain unknown.

Did anyone have contact with the Dunbars or Julia Anderson around 1912–1913 who can add details about the search or identification?