During the spring of 1913, two mothers found themselves in a peculiar situation—each insisting that the cherub-faced boy who had been found in the company of a travelling handyman in Mississippi was her son.

The first of the two women, a stout, unmarried field hand named Julia Anderson, insisted that the child was her son Charles, who was known by his middle name, Bruce. Anderson said she had allowed the handyman, an acquaintance of hers, to take Bruce on his travels for a few days—not for the 15 months the boy had actually been away.

The other woman, a well-dressed, married housewife named Lessie Dunbar, said the boy was her son Bobby, who had gone missing from a family fishing trip eight months earlier. At the time of the events in Mississippi, Lessie had already attained national recognition, as the search for Bobby Dunbar had generated headlines and attracted the attention of concerned parents across America. Now, as the drama surrounding the boy’s identity unfolded, the nation held its collective breath, wondering whether the mystery of Bobby’s fate had finally been solved.

How could two mothers look at the same child and each insist he was theirs, ultimately leaving it up to a court to determine the matter of custody? And with the boy being about five years of age—certainly old enough to acknowledge one or the other as his parent—why hadn’t he done so? With more than a century of hindsight, the answers now seem clear enough, though the passage of time has also raised additional, perhaps unanswerable, questions about the sad, confusing case of Bobby Dunbar.

The saga had begun almost a year earlier, in the summer of 1912, when the Dunbar family—parents Percy and Lessie, and sons four-year-old Robert (known as Bobby) and two-year-old Alonzo, went on a trip with relatives to central Louisiana’s Swayze Lake. During the outing, Bobby disappeared. A search was immediately undertaken, first by the family, then by hundreds of volunteers who combed the lake’s cloudy waters, looking for any sign of the missing boy. Had Bobby drowned? Had he fallen victim to one of the many alligators that roamed the lake’s waters? Had he been kidnapped? The latter seemed possible, as rumors swirled that an unknown man had been seen in the area. Yet, despite the extensive search, no firm clue was ever found indicating Bobby Dunbar’s fate or whereabouts.

Then, in April 1913, with the story of Bobby’s disappearance having spread throughout the country, the Dunbars learned that a child roughly fitting Bobby’s description had been found in the company of William Cantwell Walters, a vagrant who earned a meager living traveling the South and working as a handyman. Percy and Lessie traveled from their hometown of Opelousas, Louisiana to southern Mississippi, where Walters had been arrested for kidnapping and where the boy was currently being held by authorities.

Reporters from that era couldn’t seem to agree on whether the Dunbars immediately recognized the child as their son. Some stated that the parents weren’t sure the boy was Bobby and that the child himself didn’t seem to know either them or Alonzo. (Another account painted an altogether different—and almost certainly invented—portrait of the scene: the boy running into Lessie’s arms at first sight, embracing her as he called out “Mother!”) It wasn’t until a day after their initial meeting, when Lessie gave the boy a bath and said that she recognized markings on his body, that she identified him as her missing son. The child returned to Opelousas with the Dunbars, receiving a hero’s welcome complete with a parade and other festivities

However, the resolution to this mystery wasn’t quite as clear-cut as the Dunbars—and, indeed, anyone following the strange saga of the missing boy—hoped to believe. In fact, one could say the mystery was only beginning. The handyman, Walters, who was awaiting trial in Louisiana on charges of kidnapping, insisted that the boy the Dunbars had claimed as their own wasn’t Bobby. Instead, Walters said, the child who had been traveling the American South with him since February 1912—before Bobby’s disappearance—was named Bruce Anderson, and he was the son of Julia Anderson, an acquaintance who had allowed Walters to take Bruce on his travels.

Upon hearing of Walters’ arrest and the discovery of the boy, Anderson traveled from North Carolina to Louisiana to attempt her own identification. Like Lessie Dunbar, at first Anderson had trouble determining whether the boy was her son. Also like Lessie Dunbar, a day after her first attempt, Anderson stated that the boy found in Walters’ care was, in fact, her child. However, unlike Lessie Dunbar, Anderson had born three children out of wedlock, which earned her a tongue lashing from the press over her supposed moral failings and unfitness as a parent. Anderson also had little money with which to fight for custody. Therefore, despite the disputed identification, a court-appointed arbitrator ultimately awarded custody to Percy and Lessie, officially establishing the child’s identity as Bobby Dunbar.

In 1914 Walters went on trial in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana (where Swayze Lake was located) for kidnapping Bobby Dunbar, a charge for which he faced the possibility of the death penalty. Despite testimony from Julia Anderson (who asserted that the child was, in fact, Bruce) and from residents of Poplarville, Mississippi, who said they had seen the boy in Walters’ company before Bobby disappeared, Walters was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The verdict was overturned a few years later on a technicality. Prosecutors decided not to seek a new trial, so Walters was set free. He died in the late 1930s of blood poisoning from a splinter he received while working for a family in Florida.

Following the trial, life returned to whatever semblance of normality the parties involved in the incident could establish. Julia Anderson got married and had seven additional children. She settled in Mississippi, where she worked as a nurse and midwife until her death in 1940. She never forgot the son from whom she had been separated, and made sure her younger children knew about the existence of their older brother Bruce.

For Percy and Lessie Dunbar, the passage of time was less kind. In 1927 they obtained a divorce that had been preceded by years of clashes over parenting decisions and allegations of infidelity. Percy died a few years later, in 1931, while Lessie died in the 1970s.

Bobby himself got married in 1935 and, despite the turmoil of his early years, led a happy life as an adult, working as a salesman and raising four children of his own before passing away in 1966. Though the whispered questions surrounding his identity had never completely faded, it seemed that, with Bobby’s death and the passage of time, those queries would eventually come to an end.

And perhaps they might have had technology not advanced to the point that DNA tests became capable of determining whether or not individuals were genetically related. In 2004, after much debate (and facing opposition from some of his relatives, who wanted to let the matter rest), Bobby’s son, Bobby Dunbar, Jr., took a DNA test, with his results compared to those of one of his uncle Alonzo’s sons.

The result?

No match. The child whom Percy and Lessie Dunbar had taken home and raised as Bobby Dunbar hadn’t been their biological son.

And with that discovery, new questions suddenly arose. How could such a misidentification have occurred, one that led to a child being raised by a family that, genetically, was not his own? Likely, several factors came into play, chief among them classism. Julia Anderson had little money and had born children out of wedlock. On the other hand, Lessie Dunbar was a married woman who enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle and social status in her community. With all the attention Americans had paid to the loss and eventual “discovery” of Bobby Dunbar, it came as no surprise that the public wanted a resolution that would give the sad story a happy ending: a lost child reunited with married parents who could give him the lifestyle and material comfort he wouldn’t have enjoyed with Julia Anderson.

How can one explain the fact that both sets of parents, despite initial uncertainty, insisted the child was theirs? In the Dunbars’ case, because the boy wasn’t, in fact, Bobby, the reason for such doubt is clear. Yet what led them to eventually identify the child as Bobby? Perhaps their shattered minds didn’t want to face the reality of what had likely happened to the “real” Bobby at Swayze Lake and therefore worked overtime to convince them that the child was, in fact, their lost son. Conversely, maybe they knew at heart that the child wasn’t Bobby, but sought a resolution that would restore their family and remove them from the limelight that had shone on them for the past several months.

For Julia Anderson’s part, it seems fair to say that 15 months is a significant amount of time to be separated from one’s child, especially when that child is four years old and growing rapidly. The boy who left her care in February 1912 may have looked much different when he was discovered nearly a year and a half later, thereby accounting for her initial uncertainty as to his identity.

Also perplexing was the fact that the child himself hadn’t initially identified either the Dunbars or Julia Anderson as his parent(s). Again, in the Dunbars’ case, this isn’t a surprise, as the boy truly didn’t know them. With respect to his inability to identify Anderson, it seems likely that Bruce—if, indeed, that’s who the child was—either didn’t recognize Julia Anderson as his mother or felt no familial connection to her. The suggestion has also been raised that Bruce was hesitant to give up the material comforts to which he had become accustomed during his brief time with the Dunbars; this, coupled with the fact that he was being told over and over that he was Bobby Dunbar, led his young and confused mind to seek the easiest resolution: life with the Dunbars at the expense of identifying Julia Anderson as his mother.

The next question: Was the boy found in Mississippi and raised as Bobby Dunbar actually Bruce Anderson? The DNA test that proved Bobby Dunbar wasn’t, in fact, Bobby Dunbar, relied on genetic material passed along through the father (in this case, Percy Dunbar, Bobby Dunbar, Sr., and Alonzo Dunbar). Therefore, the same test couldn’t be used to determine whether Bobby was Bruce Anderson, as it wouldn’t have revealed genetic links between Bobby Jr. and relatives of Julia Anderson. In order to establish Bobby Sr.’s maternity, his body would have had to be exhumed, a course of action that neither the Dunbars nor Julia’s family wanted to take. Still, it seems a likely conclusion that the Dunbars had actually raised Julia Anderson’s child—Bruce Anderson.

Perhaps the most shattering question of all is: What happened to the “real” Bobby Dunbar? Though, of course, his true fate has never been determined, it seems logical to assume that Bobby wandered off and fell victim to misfortune, perhaps by drowning or succumbing to an animal along the lake. Therein lies the true tragedy of the story, for although the boy who grew up as Bobby Dunbar lived most of his life separated from his biological relatives, his ultimate destiny was a happy adulthood, which was certainly better than the fate that likely befell his namesake on the shores of a Louisiana lake more than a century ago.

In March 1922, Andreas Gruber’s farm was the setting of some strange—and altogether creepy—occurrences. From a forest at the edge of his property, Gruber had discovered a set of footprints leading to his farm…but no set of footprints leading back. He had heard footsteps in his attic, Gruber told his neighbors, and had also found a newspaper that didn’t belong to anyone in his family. His house keys had even gone missing. Many people in Gruber’s situation would have contacted the authorities, or at the very least sat up nights with a shotgun in hand, waiting for an intruder to appear. However, Gruber must not have been overly concerned; he neither reported the happenings to the police nor moved his family away from the farm where the threat of ominous activity seemed to grow every day.

That lack of action cost Andreas Gruber dearly. By the beginning of April, he was dead, as was every member of his household.

In what has become known as the “Hinterkaifeck murders,” named after the southeastern German farmstead where Gruber and his family met their end, six people—Andreas; his wife, Cäzilia; their widowed daughter Viktoria; their grandchildren, 7-year-old Cäzilia and 2-year-old Josef (who were Viktoria’s children); and the family’s maid, Maria Baumgartner—were brutally slaughtered by an assailant who remains unknown to this day. Though more than 100 suspects have been considered, German police academy students who re-examined the case in 2007 determined that with the passage of time, not to mention the archaic investigatory practices that produced the evidence with which modern-day authorities must work, there is no chance that the murders will ever be definitively solved.

Neighbors who paid a visit to Hinterkaifeck on Tuesday, April 4, 1922, several days after the farm’s inhabitants had last been seen, likely had no idea that they would be encountering the scene of a crime that would occupy the minds of both police and armchair investigators for decades to come. The search party had been drawn to the farm because young Cäzilia had missed school the previous Saturday, while the entire family hadn’t shown up for church on Sunday—incidents unusual enough to merit a visit from concerned townsfolk. The reason for these absences became apparent when the bodies of Andreas, his wife, his daughter, and his granddaughter were found in the barn, their heads destroyed by what investigators would later determine was a mattock, a tool similar to a pickaxe. In the house, neighbors discovered the bodies of Josef and Maria, who had fallen victim to the same method of attack. Investigators were called to the scene and pinned the date of the deaths as Friday, March 31. This determination was especially eerie because neighbors had reported seeing smoke coming from the Grubers’ chimney throughout the weekend—an indication that the murderer had remained on the property for at least a few days following the crime. This belief was supported by the fact that the farm’s animals had been fed, the family’s food had been eaten, and a bed had been slept in, all while the bodies of the Grubers began the slow process of decay.

The destruction of Hinterkaifeck’s residents was a conspicuous end to a family that already had a specter of scandal surrounding it. The Grubers, at least some of them, were not well-liked by members of their community. Andreas was said to be a recluse who beat his wife and children (and, if rumors were to be believed, who had engaged in an incestuous relationship with Viktoria that had resulted in the birth of Josef). In addition, six months before the murders, the Grubers’ previous maid had left the farm in a hurry, claiming that she heard strange voices and footsteps and insisting that the house was haunted. The new maid, Maria Baumgartner, started her job on March 31—the last day of her life.

The police immediately set about in search of a motive, which, they hoped, would lead to a suspect. Robbery was ruled out; although the Grubers were well-off, none of their valuables had been touched. Maybe the motive was revenge. Viktoria had claimed that a local man named Lorenz Schlittenbauer was Josef’s father; at the time of her murder she was planning to sue Schlittenbauer for financial support. Schlittenbauer was one of the neighbors who had discovered the carnage at Hinterkaifeck, and the men with him at the time noted that he seemed oddly unfazed upon finding the body of the woman he had once courted. Police investigated him, but ultimately didn’t find enough evidence to charge Schlittenbauer with the crime.

Another proposed suspect was Viktoria’s husband, Karl Gabriel. He had been declared dead while fighting in World War I, but his body was never found. According to one theory, Gabriel didn’t, in fact, die. Instead, he faked his death with the intention of starting a new life, then changed his mind. When he traveled to Hinterkaifeck and found his wife either engaged in an incestuous relationship with her father or having borne the child of Lorenz Schlittenbauer, Gabriel killed the entire family in a fit of rage. Admittedly, this theory strains credibility, for although Gabriel’s body was missing, several soldiers indicated that they had seen him die in a trench in France.

Not only have a suspect and motive remained elusive for nearly a century, the sequence of events that led to the deaths of the Grubers and their maid can’t be definitively established. With no survivors to describe what happened at Hinterkaifeck on March 31, 1922, any theory is merely conjecture. However, investigators believed that somehow the murderer was able to lure the four eldest Grubers to the barn, one by one, and then kill them. At that point, the murderer entered the house and killed Josef and Maria. Most of the Grubers were found wearing their nightclothes, so the murders probably occurred in the evening, under cover of darkness. The attacks were devastating enough that Andreas, the elder Cäzilia, and Viktoria died immediately, but the younger Cäzilia had apparently been alive for a few hours after the assaults; she was found with tufts of her own hair in her hands, likely pulled out in spasms of pain and despair.

The indignities heaped upon the Grubers didn’t end with their deaths. Their heads were sent to Munich for investigation, but were lost during World War II. Therefore, the six bodies buried in a graveyard in Waidhofen, the municipality in which Hinterkaifeck was located, are headless. One year after the crimes, the farm was demolished so that it would no longer serve as a grim reminder of the violence that had visited the community.

Although the students who investigated the murders in 2007 indicated that the case could never be solved, they did settle on the most likely suspect. However, out of respect for the individual’s descendants, his name was not made public. Thus, the possibility exists that the man who committed the Hinterkaifeck murders will in death—as he did in life—escape the earthly penalty of having his identity exposed as one of history’s most depraved murderers.

Ireland’s lush, green landscape and friendly inhabitants belie a darker atmosphere, one suffused with fog-shrouded hills and peopled with creatures like the wailing banshee. However, not all of Ireland’s monsters reside strictly in the realm of fantasy. Following are three famous real-life stories of murder and mayhem in the Emerald Isle.

 

The Mary Russell Murders–When the Mary Russell left present-day Cobh, County Cork in February 1828, headed for Barbados with a cargo of mules, seven of the brig’s crew members had no idea that this trip through the Atlantic would be their last. In June of that year, near the Cove of Cork on Ireland’s southern coast, the Mary Russell’s captain, an Englishman named William Stewart, flagged down an American vessel called the Mary Stubbs. Stewart sought help, claiming that he had been forced to kill his mutineering crew members. The scene that the Mary Stubbs’ captain, Robert Callendar, encountered upon boarding the Mary Russell (as described later by a journalist who visited the ship when it had docked), was stomach-churning: seven decomposing bodies were bound to iron bolts, their heads smashed in and their bodies covered with blood. Stewart’s claims of mutiny were called into question when, while Callendar was aboard, two surviving Mary Russell crew members emerged from the ship’s hold and sought refuge with the Mary Stubbs. During a subsequent inquest, these survivors, as well as two young boys who had been aboard the Mary Russell, related what had happened during the ill-fated trip. Upon leaving Barbados for the journey back to Ireland, Stewart, previously known as a kind and even-tempered captain, had begun behaving erratically, insisting that his crew was planning to kill him. One by one, Stewart tied up the Mary Russell’s men (though two of them–William Smith and John Howes–managed to escape and seek refuge in another part of the ship). Stewart then killed the bound men with a crowbar. During his August 1828 trial in Cork for the murder of one of the crew members, James Raynes, Stewart was found not guilty due to “mental derangement.” He was sent to an asylum for detention and treatment. Several years later, Stewart’s psychosis returned and he killed a hospital attendant at Cork Asylum. Stewart himself died in an asylum in Dundrum (now a suburb of Dublin) in 1873.

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The Murder of Bridget Cleary–In the late 19th century, tales of fairies and other fantastical creatures were taken as a matter of fact by many denizens of rural Ireland. That became a problem for Bridget Cleary, who, in March 1895 in County Tipperary, found herself accused by her husband Michael of being a changeling, or a fairy left behind in place of a human. Michael Cleary was said to be so convinced that his wife was a changeling that when she fell ill, he attributed the cause to her status as a folkloric creature. Bridget underwent a series of torturous “cures,” including forced feedings and having urine thrown on her in an attempt to cast out the supposed fairy. As her condition deteriorated, a priest was called to the Cleary home to administer last rites. Then, in mid-March, Bridget disappeared. It wasn’t until March 22, when her burned body was discovered in a shallow grave, that the truth about her fate was revealed. In July 1895, Michael Cleary, as well as Bridget’s father Patrick Boland and seven other people, went on trial, some for “wounding” Bridget and some for murdering her. According to testimony, Michael Cleary had been threatening his wife with a piece of burning wood when her undergarment caught on fire. At that point Michael threw lamp oil on her. He rebuffed any attempts by others to help his wife, insisting that the fire would get rid of the changeling and bring back the “real” Bridget. Though no one could say whether Bridget was still alive when Michael threw the oil on her, her husband was found guilty of manslaughter, ultimately serving a 15-year sentence. Four others were found guilty of the wounding charges. The case of Bridget Cleary was widely publicized throughout both Ireland and Britain; in the latter, it served as a cautionary tale of the supposed dangers of letting Ireland’s citizens govern themselves, a topic of heated debate at the time. (The Republic of Ireland ultimately achieved independence from the United Kingdom in 1922.)

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Who Murdered Moll McCarthy?–In December 2015, Michael D. Higgins, president of Ireland, signed a posthumous pardon of Henry “Harry” Gleeson, who in 1941 had been convicted of and executed for the murder of a woman named Mary “Moll” McCarthy. Gleeson had been a laborer on his uncle’s County Tipperary farm, which was next door to the ramshackle cottage in which McCarthy lived with her seven children (who were said to have been fathered by six different men). McCarthy was a prostitute, exchanging sexual services for food and other necessities, and her illicit activities made her a source of suspicion among many members of the community. McCarthy’s scandal-plagued life ended in November 1940, when she was shot twice in the face. Gleeson discovered her body in one of his uncle’s fields on the 21st of that month. Though Gleeson had an alibi for that day, the police arrested him for McCarthy’s murder. During Gleeson’s trial in early 1941, the prosecution presented the theory that Gleeson was the father of one of McCarthy’s children and that he had killed McCarthy to prevent the secret from getting out. Gleeson denied the allegation. Despite the existence of medical evidence indicating that the murder had occurred on November 21–the day on which Gleeson had found McCarthy’s body and the day for which he had an alibi–the prosecution insisted that the murder could have occurred on November 20, a day for which Gleeson didn’t have an alibi. On February 27, Gleeson was convicted of murder; he was hanged on April 23. However, his conviction and execution didn’t silence the questions surrounding McCarthy’s death. Gleeson’s pardon was the result of years of dogged research on the part of individuals who believed in his innocence and who poked several holes in the prosecutors’ case, uncovering evidence that the prosecution had deliberately withheld. Gleeson’s pardon, then, begs the question: Who actually killed Moll McCarthy? Proposed suspects include members of the Irish Republican Army, who, it’s said, suspected that McCarthy was an informant, or one of the fathers of McCarthy’s children. However, with the pardoning of Gleeson and the passage of time, it’s unlikely that the true culprit will ever be discovered.