Man discovered his image on lacking individual web site then cracked case to search out his true identification
An adopted man stumbled across an image on a missing persons site that led to an astonishing discovery about his own hidden origins and family history
When Steve Carter browsed a missing persons site he definitely wasn’t looking to solve a 33-year mystery – he had no idea, in fact, there was a case to be cracked.
But a computer-generated image caught his eye, leading to an incredible revelation about his own identity in a plot that seems from a movie or TV series rather than real life.
The photo that stopped him in his tracks was an age-progressed image from a cold case, a computer’s guess of what a missing kid would look like now as an adult. “My first thought was, ‘Oh my God, that’s me’,” he said. Stunned by the uncanny resemblance, he found the pic was for a kid who went missing in Hawaii over 30 years earlier.
Steve, from Philadelphia, was adopted from an orphanage in Honolulu, Hawaii, at the age of four. That fact was never a secret. But he knew or remembered little about his life before that.
He had heard, though, about the bizarre case of Carlina White, who at three weeks old was kidnapped by a woman posing as nurse at a New York City hospital. At 23, two decades later, Carlina was reunited with her birth parents after finding her baby photograph on the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children website.
Carlina’s case prompted Steve to do the same. One evening in early 2011, acting on little more than a hunch, he decided to look on the missingkids.org website.
As he looked through age-progressed images from cold cases, the photo stopped him dead in his tracks. The missing child was listed as Marx Panama Barnes. He showed the image to his adoptive mother. “She’s like, ‘Oh my God, that’s you.’ And I was like, ‘That’s what I thought’,” he said.
His adoptive parents couldn’t see how he could have been missing as a baby then adopted at four. But he contacted the Honolulu Police Department. A DNA test was done and months of anticipation followed.
Finally, the results confirmed what Steve suspected – he was in fact Marx Panama Barnes. “That’s when it really started to sink in that I’ve got a family, I’ve got another family,” he said.
The mystery didn’t end there, though. His biological mother had dropped him off at the orphanage in 1977 then disappeared without a trace. His father, Mark, reported the pair missing, but the police got nowhere with their investigation.
Now aware of his own true identity, Steve began tracking down and reconnecting with relatives he never knew he had. He discovered he had an older half-sister, Jennifer Monnheimer, who was eight when he vanished.
It was she who convinced authorities to reopen her missing sibling’s case, which led to the age-progression photo being made. “We definitely shared a lot of similarities. Not just genetics-wise… We shared the same taste in certain things and had the same sense of humour,” Steve said.
He also met up with his biological father. On hearing his son’s voice for the first time, Mark said: “All I could say was, ‘Wow. Oh wow. Wow’.” He described the pain he went through at losing his partner and child in one go. “I spent about a year and a half going crazy driving around the island.”
Steve said he feels no malice towards his biological mother. “If you’re not in the right headspace and you’re dealing with other things, you might put the oxygen mask on yourself first,” he said. “I don’t blame her for anything.”
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