A 53-year-old Texas woman got the shock of her life when she found out that she was abducted as a baby 51 years ago and taken away from her biological parents. Melissa Highsmith was finally reunited with her family in November 2022 after a DNA test proved she was the baby who went missing on August 23, 1971, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports. And while this story ultimately has a happy ending, the nearly half-century the Highsmith family spent apart is difficult to process.
When Melissa Highsmith was 21 months old, her mother, Alta Apantenco, was working as a waitress after separating from Melissa’s father and moving to Fort Worth. She placed an ad in the paper for a babysitter and a woman who called herself Ruth Johnson answered.
She agreed to meet Alta at the restaurant where she worked for an interview but never showed up. However, she did call Alta later on and reiterate her interest in the job. She also claimed she babysat other kids and would be happy to have Melissa too. “Ruth” later picked Melissa up from Alta’s roommate despite never having met Alta face to face. That was the last time Alta ever saw her daughter.
Fast forward to 2022, when Jeffrie Highsmith, Melissa’s father, submitted his DNA to 23andMe. The database found a match to three grandchildren, the children of someone named Melanie Brown. A DNA test later found that Melanie Brown was actually Melissa Highsmith.
Melissa Highsmith never knew what happened to her
Clinical laboratory scientist and amateur genealogist Lisa Jo Schiele worked with the Highsmith family to track Melissa down after they were connected following an interview on The Vanished Podcast in late 2022. With a lot of digging, Schiele helped Alta and Jeffrie track Melissa down, and they finally saw one another face to face just after Thanksgiving last year.
As for Melissa Highsmith, she never even knew she had been kidnapped. In fact, she thought the woman who raised her was her biological mother. “My whole life was a lie,” she told the Star-Telegram. “They told me things like I was Japanese and I’m not. That my father was Japanese and he’s not.”
She added that she didn’t have a happy childhood and suffered years of abuse before leaving at 15. She had no contact with the people who raised her for the next 17 years. However, after finding her biological parents, she did contact the woman who raised her, who confirmed that she was baby Melissa. She hasn’t heard anything from the woman since, and the statute of limitations on filing kidnapping charges has passed.
Melissa hopes her story will help others going through a similar experience keep hope alive.
“It’s given so many people hope with my case and I hope that it’ll bring awareness to all the (cold) cases that are still under investigation and let them know that there’s a lot of people out there that are still missing, but just don’t give up hope,” she said.
“There’s so many that are just unsolved and sitting on the shelf. They need to be able to reopen these cases, but they don’t have enough people to investigate these cases and not enough funding.”
