Kriti Mehrotra
Netflix’s ‘Unsolved Mysteries Volume 2: Stolen Kids’ chronicles the two eerily similar disappearances of toddlers Christopher Dansby, 2-years-old, and Shane Walker, around 19-months-old, from the same park in New York City over the span of a few months in 1989. Christopher went missing from there while playing on May 18, and three months later, Shane underwent the exact same thing.
This episode from the rebooted series explores what happened in the moments before the two different families realized that their kids vanished, along with the possible explanations about what could have happened to them. So, if you’re here because you’re curious to know more about Shane’s case, you’ve come to the right place. Here are all the details for you.
What Happened To Shane Walker?
Shane Walker was last seen on August 10, 1989, at the Martin Luther King Jr. Towers playground located at 113th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, Manhattan, New York, after his mother took him there to enjoy the summer evening sun. While they were there, his mother, Rosa Glover, was approached by two kids, a girl who seemed about 10-years old and a boy who was about 6, to ask if they could play with Shane. Rosa was usually super protective and never allowed it, but on that day, because the kids kept on insisting, she said okay.
While the three of them went on to play on the slides, an African-American man sat right beside Rosa on the park bench and began a conversation with her. He spoke of things like rising crime in the neighborhood, kidnapping and pointed towards his own scars, talking about how he got them from fighting. By the time Rosa looked back towards the slides for her son, maybe after a few long minutes, he was gone, and so were the children he was playing with. Immediately, she began a frantic search for Shane, but she was unable to locate him anywhere nearby.
Then, a short while later, Rosa saw the two kids he was playing with re-enter the park through a hole in the fence. When she asked them where Shane was, all they said was that they’d left him in the park. Unbelieving, she took them to the police station and reported her son missing. The two kids were extensively questioned, along with their parents, but nothing of importance came to light. The officers also interrogated the man who sat next to Rosa in the hopes of getting him to admit that maybe he’d distracted her on purpose so that someone else could abduct Shane, but even he checked out.
Was Shane Walker Ever Found?
After everything was said and done and the police did a thorough canvass of the area to come up with nothing, they concluded that Shane was probably not taken by a member of his own family. Subsequently, they made a public announcement, stating that they had a suspect and were looking for an unidentified African-American male for questioning. They described him to be between the ages of 19 to 24 and about 5-feet-8-inches tall. They also specified that he was wearing a yellow shirt and acid-washed jeans on the day Shane disappeared. But alas, nothing ever became of it.
In the months that followed, the authorities got a tip that Shane was buried somewhere deep in a building, so they tore it apart piece by piece in order to find him, but there were no signs of him anywhere. Then, to ensure that no stones were left unturned, they investigated pedophiles, serial killers, and baby-selling black market rings. But again, no matter what they did, they never found anything conclusive to go on. Even with their task force and reward money and different angles, unfortunately, even after more than 30 years, Shane has never been found.
The strangest thing, though, remains to be the fact that Christopher and Shane both disappeared from the same park, on the same day of the week (Thursday), during the same summer, at roughly the same time (Shane at about 5 p.m. and Christopher at 7 p.m.). In addition to that, not only were they both African-American toddlers, but they were also both playing with the same two kids before they were last seen by their families. However, because of the lack of evidence, it remains unclear whether these two cases are connected in any other way or not.
