Who is Melissa Highsmith? What we know about the Fort Worth woman abducted as a baby

Fort Worth police said this week that an official DNA test has confirmed the identity of Melissa Highsmith, a Texas woman who was kidnapped as a baby in 1971 and reunited with her family in November 2022.

Here’s what we know about Melissa Highsmith and the story of her disappearance.

What happened to Melissa Highsmith?

Melissa Highsmith was 21 months old when she was abducted from her Fort Worth home by a babysitter in 1971, according to her family.

Melissa’s mother, Alta Apantenco, had left the toddler in the care of her roommate, who handed her off to the babysitter on Aug. 23, 1971.

Melissa’s mother was working as a waitress, according to an account of the case from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. She had just separated from Melissa’s father and moved to Fort Worth. She placed an ad in a newspaper looking for someone to care for her child.

A woman who called herself Ruth Johnson answered the ad and agreed to meet Melissa’s mom at the restaurant where she worked, but she never showed up. The babysitter called the mother later, saying she really wanted the job, had a nice big yard and cared for other children as well. Melissa’s mother hired her, and the babysitter picked Melissa up from the roommate at their apartment on East Seminary Drive when Apantenco was at work, the family said.

As a single mom who feared losing her job, Apantenco made the difficult choice to hire the babysitter without meeting face to face, the family said.

The roommate told police that the woman calling herself Ruth Johnson who picked up Melissa seemed nice and was dressed to impress, wearing white gloves.

Melissa’s mother didn’t see her again for 51 years.

How was Melissa Highsmith found?

Melissa’s father, Jeffrie Highsmith, submitted his DNA to 23andMe, a website customers can use to find relatives and create a family tree. The database found a match to three grandchildren, who are the children of Melanie Brown, her husband, John Brown, wrote on Facebook. A DNA test of Melanie Brown — who also went by Melanie Walden — was done and confirmed she is Melissa Highsmith, he wrote.

The family worked with Lisa Jo Schiele, a clinical laboratory scientist and amateur genealogist, who helped them understand the DNA results and research public records to find their missing daughter, according to a statement from the family. The Vanished Podcast, which interviewed the family for a two-episode series that aired in the fall of 2022, connected them with Schiele, according to a post on the podcast’s Facebook page.

“This is not the hardest genealogy puzzle I’ve ever solved,” Schiele said. “I hope what I do gives other families the confidence to do the same. Never give up.”

Melissa reunited with her parents and two of her four siblings for the first time on the weekend after Thanksgiving in 2022.

“I couldn’t stop crying,” Melissa’s sister Victoria Garner, wrote in a Facebook post. “I was overjoyed and I’m still walking around in a fog trying to comprehend that my sister is right in front of me and that we found her.”

Where was Melissa Highsmith for all those years?

Melissa has lived in Fort Worth most of her life and never knew she had been kidnapped, her family wrote in posts on a Facebook page called “WE FOUND MELISSA!!!”

Family members have said that they don’t know what happened to the person who took Melissa as a baby.

Fort Worth police said that although the statute of limitations has expired to file a kidnapping charge in Texas, they are still investigating and asked for the public’s help with any additional information concerning Melissa’s abduction. The police department’s Major Case Unit can be reached by calling 817-392-4439.

What has Melissa Highsmith said about her abduction and her life?

Growing up, Melissa Highsmith thought the woman who raised her was her mother, she said. She was shocked to learn that wasn’t true.

“My whole life was a lie,” Melissa told the Star-Telegram at a rally for cold cases Saturday in Fort Worth.

“They told me things like I was Japanese and I’m not. That my father was Japanese and he’s not,” Melissa said about the family who raised her after she was kidnapped.

She said that she didn’t have a happy childhood. She described her home life as abusive and said she ran away at 15 years old and “worked the streets” to survive.

For 17 years after running away from home, Melissa didn’t have a relationship with the people who raised her and was not in contact with them, she told the Star-Telegram.

When the Highsmith family approached her just before Thanksgiving about taking a DNA test, Melissa wasn’t sure what to think, she told WFAA-TV in November. “I really didn’t think I was that girl,” she said. But, “once I saw the baby picture, and I put my baby picture against it, it’s like my twin.”

“So when they came to me and said you are our sister or you are our daughter that we’ve been looking for all this time, it was quite a shock,” Melissa told the Star-Telegram on Saturday. “All of my life, things didn’t seem right and I didn’t know why.”

At that point, Melissa got back in touch with the woman who raised her, who confirmed to her “you are baby Melissa,” Highsmith said. Since then, the woman who raised her has gone silent, she said.

Melissa attended the event in Fort Worth on April 29 to call for more resources to investigate cold cases, including missing person cases and murders.

“I felt strong to be here,” Melissa told the Star-Telegram at the event. “It’s given so many people hope with my case and I hope that it’ll bring awareness to all the (cold) cases that are still under investigation and let them know that there’s a lot of people out there that are still missing, but just don’t give up hope.”

“There’s so many that are just unsolved and sitting on the shelf,” Melissa said. “They need to be able to reopen these cases, but they don’t have enough people to investigate these cases and not enough funding.”