These Parents Haven’t Seen Their Children In Over 30 years

When Unsolved Mysteries rebooted on Netflix in the summer of 2020, the country saw a renewed interest in several different cold cases. As mentioned before, the death of Alonzo Brooks was basically reopened because of the attention that the show brought. Another story that has gotten renewed attention centers around the disappearance of Christopher Dansby and Shane Walker. Both kids were abducted from a Manhattan playground in 1989. Both kids have not been seen since.

“It’s like a nightmare, and everyday you wake up, and you’re still in the nightmare. Some days, I just don’t want to go on,” Allison Dansby, who was 26 when her son disappeared, said in 2014. She elaborated on her tragic experiences in the Unsolved Mysteries episode.

With these kids now having been missing for over 30 years, hope is starting to dwindle. However, without any bodies found, there is still a chance for the families to be reunited. For those that haven’t seen the episode or heard of the case, Here’s what we know about the circumstances of the children’s disappearances.

Despite being separate cases, there are some eerie similarities. Both Shane and Christopher’s families lived in the same apartment. Although they disappeared in different months, their abductions took place on the same day of the week, and around the same time of day. What was the most disturbing part? Both stories involve the appearance of the same brother and sister right before the kids were abducted.

On May 18, 1989, 26-year-old Allison Dansby took her two-year-old son, Christopher (called Choo-choo by his family), to the playground at the Martin Luther King Jr. Towers housing project. At around 7 p.m., Allison left Christopher with her mother and friends while she made a quick run to the store. By the time Allison returned, her son had vanished.

Christopher had been seen playing with a 10-year-old girl and a six-year-old boy right before he disappeared. The same goes for Shane Walker. On August 10, 1989, he was at the same park with his mom, Rosa Glover. Glover recalls that the brother and sister insisted on playing with Walker; she reluctantly agreed.

Glover was briefly distracted by a man who sat down next to her. When she looked up, her son was gone, and she saw the two kids running on the other side of the fence. “They said, ‘We left him in the park,’” she recalled — but he wasn’t in the park. He was gone.

According to Ken Lindahl, a retired inspector for the NYPD, the siblings, and their parents were interviewed by NYPD at length. “There was a belief that they had acted as decoys and somebody stole a kid,” Lindahl said in the Unsolved Mysteries episode. However, he also said there was no indication that they were involved in Walker’s disappearance. Their identities have never been released.

After the boys’ disappearances, there were extensive searches conducted of the area, and the parents’ phones were tapped. However, there were no leads. Rumors about their fates were all over the Harlem community and news coverage. Most prevalent was the unfounded, but persistent, idea that Dansby and Walker were taken for an adoption ring, a theory that was even mentioned in the New York Times.

“I think they were probably taken by people who couldn’t have children, people who were desperate to have a baby,” Mary Murphy, a reporter for WPIX-TV, said during the episode. Rosa Glover agreed, saying, “I think what happened, those two kids took him out there. Whoever had him took him away.”

Dansby and Walker’s disappearances are often connected to the disappearance of 6-week-old Andre Bryant. She was abducted on March 30, 1989, in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Bryant’s mother, 22-year-old Monique Rivera, took her son on a shopping trip with two friends. She never returned.

Monique’s body was found days later on City Island in The Bronx. Her son Bryant was nowhere to be found. His father, Timothy Bryant, hasn’t given up hope. “Andre you have a whole family waiting here for you. Come home, man,” Bryant said in 2011.

At the end of the episode, Unsolved Mysteries presents a hopeful scenario. Carlina White’s story was mentioned as someone who was eventually reunited with her family after her abduction. At 19 days old, White was taken from a Harlem hospital by a woman pretending to be a nurse. White was raised by her abductor, “Ann” Pettway, in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

White became pregnant with her daughter 23 years later, she needed her birth certificate. That’s when she learned it had been forged, adding to her suspicions about how she grew up. “ She then noticed her daughter, Samani, looked like her own baby photo on the National Center For Missing and Exploited Children. That’s when she called the center’s hotline.

White reunited with her biological parents, Joy White and Carl Tyson — and that’s where the Unsolved Mysteries episode concludes her story. Unfortunately, Christopher Dansby and Shane Walker haven’t had a chance at their reunion. Yet.