Jones reportedly said - "try the boy out" at home.Īfter just three weeks labouring under Jones' convenient fiction, a distraught Christine Collins returned to authorities, armed with dental records and a troop of friends that supported her insistence that the child, while similar-looking to her son, was an imposter. Despite her doubts, Christine Collins was persuaded to - as investigator J.J. The boy had a vague story about being the victim of an abduction, which they used to explain differences in his appearance.Īs the Los Angeles Times reported on August 19, 1928, "Not only was the youth's body sadly emaciated and his face drawn, but his mind had been affected, according to officers who examined him, apparently the result, they said, of harrowing experiences he had been subjected to by his kidnapper." (Post continues below.)Įager to see the case brought to a swift conclusion, Los Angeles police insisted they had found Walter Collins. The true story that inspired the 2008 film, Changeling. But when the child was brought back to California, at Christine Collins' expense, the single mother looked at him and uttered the now-infamous words: The boy's discovery was a victory for the embattled Los Angeles Police Department, which had come under fire for corruption and incompetency in recent years (the previous December it failed to stop the grisly murder of 12-year-old kidnapping-for-ransom victim, Marion Parker). Reports of possible sightings flooded in from across the state San Francisco, Oakland and the town of Glendale, where a petrol station attendant claimed to have seen him in the back seat of a car, wrapped in newspaper from the neck down.Ī child, who identified himself as Walter Collins, had handed himself into authorities thousands of kilometres away in the midwestern state of Illinois. On March 10, 1928, the California boy's mother, Christine, gave him money to go to the cinema, but he never returned. For five months, police searched for nine-year-old Walter Collins.
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