Buckle in, folks. This is gonna be a doozy. So, let's introduce Steve Carter. Carter was adopted from an orphanage in Honolulu, Hawaii when he was four years old. As he got older, however, he grew more curious about his biological parents. "I had an amazing childhood. ... I was adopted and raised by two individuals who are just phenomenal. They'll always be my parents," Carter said on the What It Was Like podcast.
One day, Carter heard about a missing persons case on the radio. The disappearance involved a woman from Atlanta who found out she was abducted as a child by finding her missing kids' poster. That pushed Carter over the edge, validating his decision to investigate his own parentage. His curiosity led him to MissingKids.com (a website I didn't know existed until now).
There, he found it. A photo of himself as a baby next to a digitally altered image depicting what Carter likely looked like as he got older. The baby's name was Marx Panama Moriarty Barnes, a future James Bond villain if I've ever heard of one. Carter immediately knew, but he held off on acting on this new information until a friend encouraged him to call the police.
Carter completed a DNA test, and after a few months, the police confirmed that, yes, he was the missing child!
A Man From Hawaii Finds Out He's Been 'Missing' For Over 33 Years
Marx Barnes was reported missing in June of 1977. Reportedly, his mother took him for a walk and never returned home. Instead, she went to a stranger's home. She gave a fake name for herself and Barnes and was taken to a psychiatric hospital, leaving Barnes/Carter in protective care.
The baby became a ward of the state and then was placed into an orphanage. The child would eventually be adopted three years later by Steve and Pat Carter. "It would be a real shame if I didn't get to know the people I'm related to," Carter said in an interview with PEOPLE. "It's good to know where you've come from." In conclusion, I hope y'all got as much of a kick out of this one reading it as I did researching and writing about it. It's wholesome insanity to the fullest!
