TEXAS BABY KIDNAPPING REUNITED AFTER 51 YEARS

A DNA MATCH LEADS PARENTS TO THEIR LONG-LOST DAUGHTER, BUT DISTURBING QUESTIONS REMAIN

- Michael Crooks

ALWAYS STRONG

Melissa's family, which includes four biological siblings, never gave up searching for her. Now that she is reunited with her family, she told the Daily Mail, "I don't want to focus on the anger. I'm going to focus on the happiness that is to come."

When Texan Melissa Highsmith received a Facebook message last year from a man who suggested he might be her father, she thought it was some sort of scam. Jeffrie Highsmith and his wife Alta Apantenco’s baby daughter had been abducted from their home in Texas five decades ago, and the heartbroken couple had been searching for her ever since. But 51 years later, a DNA match on an ancestry site pointed toward Melissa – then known as Melanie Walden – as being their long-lost child.

“She didn’t believe it,” Melissa’s brother, Jeff Highsmith, tells WHO from his home in Fort Worth, Texas. “But then she talked to her husband, and he said, ‘Wait a second, you should look into this.’”

It was good that she did, because after undergoing official DNA tests, police have confirmed that Jeffrie and Alta are Melissa’s parents. In a stunning development to what was the longest-running child abduction case in Texas, police revealed on May 4 that Melissa was the baby girl who had been kidnapped by a so-called babysitter when she was just 21 months old.

“For decades, my parents have chased leads, hiring their own labs and investigators,” Sharon Highsmith, one of Melissa’s three sisters, said in a statement. “And yet, these DNA tests, which are available to anyone, helped us find our lost loved one.”