A woman who was kidnapped as a child was reunited with her family 51 years later.
Melissa Highsmith disappeared in 1971 when, just 22 months old, she was taken by a babysitter from her parents’ home in Fort Worth, Texas.
Melissa’s mother, Alta Apantenco, worked as a waitress and needed a babysitter, so she placed an ad in the newspaper.
Melissa Highsmith as a child. photo: Facebook
Ms Apantenco hired a woman who expressed interest in the job without meeting her in person.
While she was at work, her roommate turned Melissa over to a babysitter who allegedly kidnapped her and never came back.
According to the family, Ms Apantenco has faced years of allegations from investigators that she may have killed her daughter and covered up the crime.
But the family never gave up on their search for Melissa, and in recent years they’ve created a Facebook page called Finding Melissa.
But the breakthrough came when they used the Ancestry and 23AndMe websites after getting advice from a genealogist.
“Every time my mother deluded herself. After 51 years, she didn’t want to have another DNA test. She was tired and she was hurt and guilty for carrying this all these years,” said Victoria Highsmith, Melissa’s sister .
“I am grateful that we convinced her to agree to send her DNA… It is thanks to this, and my father’s submission, that we were able to find Melissa.”
Victoria said they found Melissa not through her DNA sample but through her children’s DNA and that the match returned quickly after both of her parents sent in their samples.
“Within three weeks we found my sister. It was like, ‘Boom, boom, boom,’ we found her,” said Victoria.
Melissa, now 53, has lived in Fort Worth most of her life and never knew she was kidnapped, her family wrote in a post on a Facebook page called We found Melissa!!!
During a church service on Saturday, Melissa was reunited with her mother, father Jeffrie Highsmith, and two of her four siblings.
“I couldn’t stop crying. I was overjoyed and I’m still walking through the fog trying to figure out that my sister is right in front of me and that we’ve found her,” said Victoria.
“It’s a Christmas miracle! It’s great to meet her. It was like looking inside me, like me, like us. She’s so happy to be in our life.”
