Police rekindle interest in cold case
Investigators hope to jog memories of Danny Barter's 1959 disappearance along Perdido Bay
Wednesday, July 16, 2008 By RYAN DEZEMBER
Staff Reporter for Mobile Register
ROBERTSDALE With the 50th anniversary of 4-year-old Danny Barter's disappearance approaching, investigators are renewing their interest in one of Baldwin County's most vexing cold cases.
On Tuesday, two of Barter's sisters traveled from Texas to Robertsdale, where Baldwin County Sheriff Huey "Hoss" Mack Jr. and one of his top detectives told them and members of the local Rotary Club that local and federal investigators are putting the case back on the front burner.
The Sheriff's Office is also pushing to bring national media attention to the unsolved disappearance in hopes of generating leads in the clueless case of a toddler who vanished from the shores of Perdido Bay in 1959.
"As we approach the 50th anniversary, it is still likely that Daniel Barter is alive somewhere in the United States not knowing he is Daniel Barter," Mack told the Robertsdale Rotary Club over lunch at Mama Lou's Restaurant. "This is a great mystery in Baldwin County."
Mack and Capt. Steve Arthur said that one difficulty in working the case is that there have never been credible leads in the case.
"There's no evidence that links this to anything because there is no evidence," Arthur said.
About a decade ago, Mack, who was the Sheriff's Office lead detective, said he was asked by then-Sheriff James B. "Jimmy" Johnson to pull the case file on Danny Barter. When he went looking, he found there was none.
Nowadays, a missing child case would generate a file that would overwhelm a kitchen table, Mack said.
In 1959, however, case files in rural Baldwin County were stored in the heads of detectives, or perhaps on a scrap of paper in a lawman's pocket. As such, the sheriff said, records of Barter's disappearance and the subsequent investigation exist solely in dusty newspaper clippings and the memories of family members, like sisters Wanda McNelly and Theresa White.
The story that those clippings tell starts 49 years ago on a Wednesday morning at a campsite on the eastern banks of Perdido Bay.
The Barter family parents Maxine and Paul, four of their six children, an uncle and a cousin was on vacation, camping on a Lillian-area lot where they planned to one day build a home. At about 9:45 a.m., they noticed Danny was gone. There was no trace of him, not the gray boxer shorts he was wearing, not the Nehi soda bottle he was drinking from, not the footprints his bare feet would have left on the beach had he wandered into the bay.
By afternoon, some 150 people were searching on foot, by boat and from the air. There were Baldwin County sheriff's deputies, Foley firefighters, volunteers and enlisted men from Pensacola Naval Air Station.
The following day, there were about 500 searchers. The bottom of the bay was dragged; sinkholes and thickets were scoured. On the third day, bloodhounds were brought to the scene. They repeatedly tracked the boy's scent to the same spot on a nearby road.
By the weekend, the search grew more grim: Dynamite was tossed into the bay in hopes of jarring a body loose. Alligators were hunted down and gutted, their insides examined for traces of the child.
Danny Barter was terrified of water, and so for years many in law enforcement ruling out an accidental drowning supposed he was stealthily snatched by an alligator. There were some who thought that he may have been abducted, but aside from the parents' recollection of a peeping Tom in their Mobile neighborhood and a suspicious man at a Lillian grocery store, there was nothing to convince investigators that Barter was kidnapped, Mack said.
Today, though, abduction is the prevailing theory, giving Barter's family and investigators hope that the boy who disappeared nearly a half-century ago might turn up somewhere as a grown man with a lot to learn about himself.
As such, the Sheriff's Office has started asking around for those who recall the disappearance, looking for new clues to surface. The FBI has become involved, helping local detectives conduct out-of-state interviews, Arthur said. And Mack said there has been a drive to get nationally televised crime shows to take an interest in the case.
Even the use of a medium has been contemplated, Arthur said, though costs have so far prevented a psychic from being hired.
On Tuesday, Arthur, Mack and Barter's sisters urged their audience to take the story to friends and neighbors, to make the case the talk of the town in hopes of turning up forgotten details.
"Time is of the essence; we're not getting any younger," Mack said. "In cases like this it's often the things you don't think are important that turn out to be important."
