This Man Found A Picture Of Himself On A Missing Persons List, And It Changed His Whole World

Up until that point, Steve only knew the following things about his upbringing. Back in 1980, Steve Carter Sr. was a U.S. Army officer stationed on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. Then he and his teacher wife, Pat, decided to adopt a child. And when they encountered a three-and-a-half-year-old boy living in foster care, they knew that they just had to bring him home. “It was love at first sight,” Pat explained to People in 2012.

On September 23, 1980, Steve and Pat brought the boy home to live with them full time. According to Hawaii records, the little guy’s name was Tenzin Amea, and he had been in the state’s care for the past three years. His file stated that the fair-haired infant’s anonymous father was a native Hawaiian. The boy’s mother was down as Jane Amea, and she had been arrested when Tenzin was just five months old.

Now, however, it seemed as if the little boy’s luck had changed. Renamed William Steven Tenzin Carter — but known as Steve Jr. — the boy began a new life with the Carters in a wealthy area of southern New Jersey. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, he enjoyed a happy and normal childhood, playing sports and enjoying parties with the neighborhood kids.

As an adult, though, Steve began to wonder just who his birth parents might have been. By now, his purported Hawaiian heritage had become something of a family joke. “With his blonde hair, blue eyes, and light complexion,” Steve Sr. told South Jersey Local News, “[He] does not strike one as being of Polynesian extraction.”

In fact, Steve Jr. had his curiosity well and truly tweaked when he received a DNA testing kit as a Christmas gift. The results he got back were very surprising. Apparently, he was actually of Scandinavian descent. Yet although the mystery had deepened, it seemed as if Steve’s beginnings were destined to remain unclear. But then one day, he stumbled across an interesting news story that reignited his appetite to uncover his origin story.

In 2011 Steve came across an article about Carlina White, who had been kidnapped as a baby from a hospital in Harlem, New York City. Oblivious to her past, she had grown up in Connecticut believing that her abductor was her mother. But her real mom and dad were less than 45-minutes away. And it was only by researching missing people online that Carlina had finally discovered the truth. It was this aspect of the story that spurred Steve into action.

Genealogy and tracking down long-lost relatives had become much easier and quicker since the advent of the internet. And so Steve visited one of the websites mentioned by the abducted Carlina — missingkids.com. This online resource is operated by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and once there, Steve got scrolling for suitable subjects. Under an entry for a missing boy, he saw something that would turn his world upside down.

The listing for the lost lad called him Marx Panama Moriarty Barnes and reported that he had been missing since June 1977. And accompanying the entry was an artist’s impression of what Marx may have looked like as a mature man. And to Steve, it was like looking in a mirror. “I got chills,” he told People in 2012. “I was like, ‘It’s me.’”

Utterly shocked, Steve contacted the authorities and volunteered to have his DNA tested. Eventually, after eight long months, the results arrived. They proved that Steve and Marx were indeed the same people. Steve’s wife, Tracey, encouraged him to begin delving into his past — only for a heartbreaking story to emerge.

On June 21, 1977, journalist and Vietnam vet Mark Barnes had been working in the garden of his home in Hau’ula. And while he was busy planting, his girlfriend, Charlotte Moriarty, took their six-month-old son out for a stroll. Charlotte announced her intention to travel just a few blocks to pay a visit to a grocery store with little Marx.

Charlotte did not return, but — at first — Mark was not overly concerned. According to reports, Charlotte was something of a “free spirit” who had been known to take extended flights of fancy before. But when three weeks had passed with no sign of his girlfriend or their infant son, Mark contacted the police. Yet even though the authorities began searching for Marx, they were unable to turn up any clues.

For more than a year, a heartbroken Mark continued to scour the streets of Hawaii, hoping to stumble upon his missing family. And no matter how much time passed, he apparently never gave up hope that one day he would be reunited with his son. Little did he know that Marx was living a new life, with a new name and a different family, thousands of miles away.

Reportedly, the day after Charlotte and Marx had disappeared in the summer of ’77, a woman on the other side of Oahu returned home to unexpected guests. Somehow, she said, Charlotte had gained access to the property and was loitering inside with the infant Marx. Concerned, the homeowner had contacted the police.

When the authorities arrived, Charlotte gave them false names for herself and the baby: Jane and Tenzin Amea. That's partly why Hawaii police were unable to connect the dots when Marx was reported missing some three weeks later. Heartbreakingly, before Mark had even begun searching for his son, the boy now known as Tenzin had slipped through the net.

Apparently, the troubled Charlotte was soon taken to a psychiatric facility, while Marx was entrusted to the care of the state. In a cruel twist of fate, the boy ended up living in an orphanage just 30 miles from his biological father’s home. And, a few days after she was admitted, Charlotte checked herself out of the hospital. She then disappeared completely, and so the truth about her son vanished with her.

But Mark had not been the only person left wondering about Marx’s fate. Jennifer, his half-sister who was eight years older than him, was also desperate to find out the truth. In fact, in 2001, the determined woman persuaded the Hawaiian authorities to reopen the case. Duly, they commissioned an artist to make a sketch of what Marx might look like as of then. And this was the very composite image that led Steve to discover his secret past.

When the truth was finally uncovered after more than 30 years, Steve did not hurry to reconnect with his relatives. He admitted to People that he was “terrified.” After months of waiting, though, he finally reached out to Jennifer on the telephone. And eventually, he spoke with his biological dad, who by this time was back living in his native California. As Mark recalled, “All I could say was, ‘Wow. Oh wow. Wow.’”

For Ma and Pa Carter back in New Jersey, it had been a difficult journey after Steve Jr. had informed them about Marx, Tenzin, and himself. “On an emotional level, I felt like we’d taken someone else’s child,” Pat confessed to People. But over time, the couple appeared to have come to terms with the situation. As Steve’s mom told the TV talk show The View in 2012, “It’s taken a while for us to get used to the idea that we have to share him. But I’m sure it’s going to be wonderful.”

Although Mark, Jennifer, and the Carter clan had yet to meet in person in 2012 — and there has been no further news coverage of the story since then. But while the experience had been an emotional one for all concerned, the Carters are no doubt thankful that their story had a pleasant ending. That is not always the case, of course. Because when an adult Shawne Bolton found out that she had also been reported missing as a child, her world completely unraveled.

Shawne had long been aware that the people who raised her weren’t her biological mother and father. She’d learned that, as a matter of fact, while she was still just a kid. That must’ve been quite the surprise for a child to take in, of course, but little did she know that things would get so much more shocking when she grew up.

Aged 26 and in a pretty good place in life, Shawne felt the time was right to try to track down her birth mother. She’d recently gotten engaged, so perhaps she was at a reflective point and felt now was as good a moment as any. Whatever her motivations were, she soon came up with a plan to set the ball rolling.

Shawne figured a good place to start would be to see if her mother had a criminal record. So, she got in touch with the police bureau in the area where she’d been born. She spoke to someone there and gave as many relevant details about herself as she could think of. The officer soon ran a check — and he found something remarkable.

The officer was aghast at what he’d discovered about Shawne. He knew she was in for a big shock here, so he told her to take a seat. He then revealed the strange truth about her life: Shawne had been marked as a missing person for decades. Her life story was far darker than she’d ever suspected.

Shawne’s far from the first adopted person to feel the need to search for their biological parents, of course — she just has the misfortune of discovering a nightmarish truth along the way. But the urge to probe is quite a common one. After all, it’s only natural to wonder about one’s own past.

Every adopted individual has their own reasons for wanting to delve into the past and each experience is unique. Some people have a far better time than others, as the circumstances behind each adoption can vary so greatly. One person, for instance, might learn who their biological mom and dad are and leave it at that while others will want to meet these people.

For obvious reasons, this whole process can prove very stressful for the people involved. Even in the best of cases, the emotions at play may be really difficult to deal with — especially if professional help isn’t sought. Lots of people, then, benefit from counseling as they attempt to maneuver through the situation.

Going through such a fraught experience alone might be extremely difficult for an individual to take on their own. Aside from the intense range of emotions it’s likely to stir up, the search itself can be cumbersome and exasperating. It often requires regular people to become something akin to amateur detectives.

On the plus side, the search for a person’s biological parents might be a little easier nowadays than it was in the past. That’s because we have access to the internet, which can make it a lot easier to track down other people. This may be a great thing for some people — but it doesn’t always work out well.

Some people might really want to stay hidden and social media making them so easy to find isn’t something they appreciate. And the issues can be even more serious when kids are involved. Say a person gave up a child for adoption but then decides they want to see them years later. They could cause a lot of damage to that kid’s life by reaching out to them directly.

Of course, social media isn’t the only means available to people looking for their biological family. If a person knows any information at all — say, their birth mother’s name, or the area where they themselves were born — then that might be enough to work with. With details like those, it might be possible to contact authorities to see if they might lead you in the right direction.

As it happens, this is the kind of approach Shawne Bolton opted to take in her own search for her biological family. Shawne had been aware that the people who raised her weren’t her real mom and dad since she was about ten years of age. But it was only in adulthood that she was able to begin looking for the woman who’d given birth to her.

Nowadays, Shawne’s a big TikToker and she’s used the app to tell her incredible story. Speaking of her childhood, she says in one video, “For the first ten years of my life, I didn’t know that they weren’t my parents. I thought that my dad was my dad, and my mom was my mom.”

So it wasn’t until she was 26 that Shawne decided to try to find her real parents. Unfortunately, she didn’t have very much information to work with. But she did at least know where she was born. While that was a good first step Shawne had to think outside the box a little as her search progressed.

Shawne’s initial attempts to find her birth mom didn’t really pan out, so she came up with a clever idea. She realized that taking a look at police records of crimes in the city of her birth might actually be quite revealing. And it turns out she was right about that.

By this point in time, in her mid-20s, Shawne was doing pretty well for herself. She had a couple of kids of her own and also had a wedding planned. But all that positivity was soon to be severely compromised by her search. The story she was about to learn would shake her to the core.

In one of her TikTok videos, Shawne recalled the moment when she gave her details to the police officer in the town where she’d been born. This guy had then taken a look in the archive — and what he found was disturbing. Shawne said, “[The sheriff] became extremely interested in who I was and my personal information and, after a few minutes of having a conversation about who I was, he asked me to please sit down and that he had something to tell me.”

Hearing that request must’ve been an intense experience in and of itself. Why would the officer have asked Shawne to be seated? What had he found out? “I sat down,” Shawne explained in her video. “He told me that he couldn’t find any information on my mother but that I was a missing person.”

The sheriff informed Shawne that at the beginning of 1980 — just months after she’d arrived in the world — an account was placed on file about a missing child. This kid, the details laid out, had been kidnapped. And that child, it was now clear, was actually Shawne.

Apparently, a search for Shawne was initiated after her disappearance had been recorded by the police. But nothing ever came of it. Nobody was ever able to track her down and instead she grew up none the wiser about these events. Yet how had this happened — and were the people who raised her aware of it?

So Shawne’s understandable search for her birth parents had taken a very disturbing turn. And things weren’t to get any lighter anytime soon. The revelations were to keep on coming, too, after she hired a private investigator to do some digging. She wanted answers — but they wouldn’t be pretty when they came.

The P.I. in question got to work and even managed to track down Shawne’s birth mother — yet that’s not all. This investigator learned the truth of what’d really happened all those years ago. And despite the fact that the police had recorded that Shawne had been kidnapped as a child, the reality was even more disturbing. Her birth mom had actually sold her.

Shawne’s real mother had exchanged her child for money before then going to the police and claiming her child had been kidnapped. She even pretended to help look for the missing kid, presumably to keep her story looking believable. Not even her own relatives knew about the plan she’d set in motion. As Shawne herself later explained in a video, “My mother’s family — they all believe I was kidnapped.”

In a strange twist, it seems Shawne’s birth mother actually suggested to police that the man who ended up raising her — a guy named Steven — was responsible for the kidnapping. It’s an odd detail, sure, but maybe it indicates that she wanted her child to be found by the cops — and maybe even be returned to her? Regardless, nothing ever came of this as investigators failed to look into Steven’s affairs properly.

So, Shawne was raised by Steven and his partner Angie, totally unaware of what’d transpired during her infancy. Her mother had sold her to these two people. That’s obviously a very messed-up thing to have happened. But maybe a silver lining could’ve been found had they raised Shawne well. Tragically, though, they didn’t.

Shawne suffered a great deal of abuse at the hands of Steven and Angie. Her childhood was a traumatic, cruel experience and she had little to no stability. Looking back now, she thinks she may have been treated in this horrendous way because of the circumstances by which she’d come into the lives of Steven and Angie. Whatever the case, their behavior was abhorrent.

In one of her TikTok videos, Shawne tried to make it clear to people watching what it’d been like for her growing up. Speaking of her childhood, she said, “It was confusing. I couldn’t work out why they didn’t love me and why they treated me as terribly as they did.”

Sadly, even learning the truth after all these years failed to lead to any sense of closure for Shawne. When the P.I. managed to locate her birth mom, Shawne reached out and arranged a meeting. But far from being a cathartic experience, it was pretty unpleasant. Her birth mother denied any wrongdoing and never even said sorry.

Sadly, reconnecting with the extended family didn’t work out, either. Shawne’s biological grandmother had never known the truth about what’d happened and she’d mourned the baby grandchild she believed she’d lost forever. But when she actually got to meet Shawne, she found her newfound grandkid didn’t match the image she’d built up inside her head over all those years. The two just didn’t click.

By this point in time, Shawne must’ve been so emotionally drained. After learning such a terrible thing about her past, she now had to deal with essentially being rejected by a family she never knew she had. Thankfully, though, there was to be a small consolation in an otherwise harrowing story.

Shawne’s TikTok videos detailing all these crazy things that’d happened to her proved really popular. Lots of people saw them and some were obviously very supportive. And one person even tried to help by tracking down her biological father. Shawne now had one last roll of the dice at finding a family member she could get along with.

The person who tracked down Shawne’s biological father didn’t publicly disclose their method, so it isn’t entirely clear how they managed it. But sure enough, they pointed Shawne in the direction of a man they thought was the right guy. Shawne then reached out and he agreed to a DNA test to see if they matched.

Sure enough, the DNA test showed that this guy really was Shawne’s dad. As he later explained to his newfound daughter, she was conceived by accident and he didn’t have anything to do with her life. Now, though, the two of them seem to be getting along okay. And she even included him in one of her TikTok videos.

By the end of this debacle, Shawne was left with so much to process. She’d been failed, time after time, right from her earliest days and into her adulthood, where she was left to investigate her own disappearance with no real help from the authorities. Naturally, such an intense and upsetting experience made her feel pretty shaken up.

Yet despite all that they put her through, Shawne claimed to still have positive feelings for the people who raised her. As she put it in one of her videos, “I did feel love at times... when you’re in an abusive situation, you will take even little bits of love and cherish that. It’s complicated.”

Still, Shawne’s also taken the understandable decision to sever all contact with both her adoptive parents and her biological mom. She instead wants to put all her effort into healing and having a better relationship with her own children. Given all she’s experienced, she’s actually pretty well-adjusted, though she obviously has things to work through.

“I’m doing much better now,” Shawne explains in an upload. “I own my own business. I don’t have any contact with any of my family. I do have a very complicated relationship with my children that I would love to repair. And I spend every day trying to do that. I’m not perfect.”

Shawne’s also determined to repair her relationship with herself. As she put it in a caption on one of her videos, “Love all the pieces of who you are. We grow and become different people with every choice we make! Choose happiness and self-love.” And for what it’s worth, a lot of her viewers were extremely supportive.

People expressed a huge amount of sympathy for Shawne, with some claiming to be heartbroken by her story. And lots of viewers were happy that she was working through everything and wished her the very best for the future. Hopefully, all that support will help her finally put this terrible chapter of her life to bed.