Every Town - Unsolved VANISHING of 5 Year Old Anna Waters

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

5 year old Anna Waters story remains one of the most mysterious missing persons cases in all of Californias history. The reason for that is fairly simple to understand once you hear the details of her case, however her story and those around her is anything but basic. 👀 Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/scarymysteries 👁 FREE! Check Out Our Movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvtlOlODQ8g&t=5238s 🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT 💀 Exclusive Videos, Podcasts & Perks: https://www.patreon.com/scarymysteries  👁 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg 👁 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald 👁 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial 🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Every town has a dark side. The story of five-year-old Anna Waters to this day remains one of the most mysterious missing persons' cases in all of California's history. The reason for that is fairly simple to understand, at least once you hear the details of her case. However, her story, and those involved, is anything but basic. Anna lived in a rural area, out west and Half Moon Bay, California.

She resided in a modest home, with her two older stepbrothers, her mom, Michelle Benedict, and stepdad Joe Ford. And one day, after school, Manny just up and vanished, right out of the backyard and has never been seen since. There were no signs of a struggle, no evidence that pointed to where she may have gone or who had taken her. To complicate matters, her biological father was estranged from the family, and he also had a very weird friend that he lived with full-time in a run-down roadside motet. tell. So the questions then become, did any of these family members or acquaintances have anything

to do with creating this mystery? Or did a random person snatch the girl up in the middle of the day? Or maybe there was some sort of tragic accident we don't know about. It's tough to decide for sure, but usually in a case like this, the most obvious answer is the right one, so keep that in mind. Hey guys, it's Andrew. Thanks for tuning into this week's episode of Everytown. today, we're going to present everything that's known about Anna and her case and see if we can't get as close as we can to the bottom of it. Let's head on over to California now, and looking at the mysterious vanishing of five-year-old Anna Waters. The last time that Atlanta was seen was on January 16, 1973 at about 2.20 p.m. And at Tuesday, a dimpled, blonde-haired, brown-eyed

five-year-old at return home from kindergarten, per usual at around 1 p.m. and filled with that post-school energy. She asked her mom if she could go outside and play, to which there were no objections, so long as she changed out of her school clothes first, so she didn't get them dirty. Manna did as she was told, as fast as she could, and then headed out into the yard.

As mentioned, the family lived in a beautiful rural area on Purissima Creek Road in Half Moon Bay. The road, of course, got its name because it ran alongside the Purisima Creek, which flowed next to the yard. Michelle saw her little girl out the window, wandering through the garden, playing and exploring. Some time had passed, and at 2.20 p.m., a bad feeling suddenly washed over Michelle as she noticed that instead of the expected sounds of laughter and splashing from a five-year-old, there was a strange,

heavy, and disturbing silence. Heading outside, Michelle checked all sides of the house, and then the creek, calling out to her daughter. Anna knew better than to wander off. And it took a bit of about 40 minutes from the time she didn't hear her daughter to the point where she realized she was actually gone. Amped with a pit in her stomach at 3 p.m., Michelle called the police to report her child missing. The authorities came to the scene, and soon neighbors concerned about Anna's whereabouts joined in the search, and the authorities were equally efficient. In an attempt to locate her in the event that she had gotten lost, police sounded a siren

throughout the neighborhood, hoping that wherever Anna was, she would be able to follow the sound and make her way back to safety. She never did. Investigators didn't want to jump to any conclusions one way or the other. And they considered possibly that she had wandered perhaps to that nearby creek, which at that time of year was flooded and moving rapidly. However, even after a thorough search of the creek, there were no signs that the girl had been there.

The surrounding woods were also combed from end to end, nothing. The helicopters, divers, professional search teams, and the support of the entire community searched the area for more than four days. But the result was the same, and there was simply no trace of Anna. Now, some people involved started to consider the possibility that the child might have been kidnapped. After all, days had passed with no sign of the girl. She had no means to make it too far on her own if she had wandered off. And if she did, surely they'd find some piece of evidence by now.

The problem was with that theory, though, there was no sign of a struggling. in the yard, and even less evidence that anyone had been there in the minutes before Anna disappeared. Then again, maybe there wouldn't have been if Anna had perhaps known her abductor. Parissa Mc Creek Road wasn't exactly a busy one back in the 1970s. In fact, it was a pretty lonely place, so few people thought it was likely that Anna had been abducted by a passing motorist who, for some hard-to-imagin-reason, decided to walk up to the first defenseless child they found in kidnapper. and that is until a strange story came in.

A friend of the Waters family came forward and reported seeing two men, one much younger than the other, and a white truck parked on the side of the road just minutes before Anna disappeared. And he hadn't recognized them as being from the area, so it stuck out to him. This story then took on added significance, when Anna's half-brother later recalled that about a month before her disappearance, a man and a woman had tried to lure Anna into a vehicle parked on the street near the house. He said the woman had long dark hair and a white loose-fitting shirt with embroidery on it. A man, he couldn't describe all that well as he remained in the car. Based on the boy's description of the vehicle, authorities concluded that it was in 1960s Chevy Impala

and that it had Washington plates. The police took action on these, but their investigation didn't confront. whether the two incidents were related, nor did it reveal who these people were, or whether they had anything to do with Anna's actual vanishing. Still, these people were certainly suspects now. Maybe not people whose involvement in the kidnapping could be confirmed, but considering the circumstances, people who likely knew something in regards to what actually happened. Perhaps all four of them were part of the same social circle. Maybe the man in the Chevy was one of the men in the white truck, but then who was the other guy? On the surface, what you've heard here

so far sounds like a situation that seems implausible, to the point that you might think these eyewitness testimonies might not even be accurate. But once you dig into Anna's family background a little more, the strangeness of the whole case becomes clearer, but not also in a weird way, makes her story all that much more complicated. Anna was the first and only child of the marriage between Michelle Benedict and George Waters, who has a bit of an interesting background. And the son of missionary parents, George was born in the Philippines, and unfortunately spent some time as a POW in a Japanese concentration camp until he and his family were liberated by the U.S. Army at the end of World War II.

After that, George worked hard, and he was actually super smart. Some even saw him as a bit of a child prodigy at the time. Dedicated and hardworking, he went on to secure a teaching position at the age of 22, at the prestigious American Farm School in Greece, one of the country's most well-respected educational institutions. He earned his doctorate, and it was during his time as a teacher that George met Michelle, a woman older than him, married at the time,

and the mother of two children. There isn't much information about how the relationship between the pair developed. What is clear, though, is that the couple married in record time in New York City in 1964. And three years later, the daughter Anna, was born. So it seemed like the beginning of a happy growing family. But after Anna's birth, George began to break down. He started to behave erratically and unpredictably. It got to the point where he had to seek professional help, and that's when he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

And after that, the marriage dissolved. At the time of Anna's disappearance, George was working as a doctor living in San Francisco, about a 50-minute drive from Half Moon Bay. The investigation found no evidence that George had been in half-moon bay on the day his daughter disappeared, although toward noting that he was not properly treated for his schizophrenia. In fact, although his behavior was pretty far from normal, while his family refused to have him institutionalized or even acknowledge his mental state because it would mean losing his medical license. But the part of his story that interests us most isn't necessarily Georgia's fragile mental state. On his own, he wasn't a direct threat to little Anna.

The real threat was the other George in his life. It was sometime in 1967. The same year Anna was born that George Waters met George Brody, a man who would change his life forever, though not for the better. Brody was several years as senior, and they met while Waters was treating a woman dying of cancer. Over the true nature, these two men's relationship was never made clear. In the same year they met, Waters' relationship with Anna's mother rapidly deteriorated,

and he divorced his wife and then began living with Brody full-time in a small hotel room they rented together in San Fran. Once they moved in with one another, Waters began to support Brody financially, completely, and, according to some accounts, wouldn't make any decisions in his life without consulting him first. And his relatives saw the older man as a cunning and manipulative individual who had created a kind of cult of personality, with himself as the warshiped and Waters as the worshipper. And to anyone with common sense, the relationship between the two men seemed completely unfair and one-sided. Not only was Waters young and vulnerable, it wasn't even 30 years old and suffering from an untreated mental illness. As such, it was a near-perfect recipe for disaster,

almost perfect, because one thing was missing. The cherry on top, George Brody's strange fixation, Brody was relishing in his control over his newfound sugar daddy, so to speak. However, as is often the case with people with narcissistic tendencies, they always wanted more for himself. Now, at birth, Anna had been christened as Anna Christian Waters. That was her name given at birth. However, on the day of her disappearance, her full name, at least legally, was Anna Effie Waters. And the reason for that change?

Well, that was because of Brody. The word Efe has an unmistakable exotic sound, as if its origins came from French or Italian. But contrary to that intuition, the word Efe has no meaning whatsoever. Not in English, not in French, not in Latin, not in any other known language. And this is where the story becomes unmistakably strange. George Brody, the new best friend of Anna's father, was strangely obsessed with the girl. And he swore up and down that Anna was the reincarnation. of a woman he lived with a few years back.

His obsession was so intense that he convinced the girl's mother to legally change her middle name, Christian, to Efe. The reason for this name, and not another, was equally strange. Brody had simply chosen that combination of letters because he wanted it to match Anna's name numerologically, so it would match his own. Brody has five letters, as does Efe. From there, things got even weirder, as any responsible father. would have been worried to death and done everything in their power to find a missing daughter.

But waters in this situation didn't seem too concerned at all. The only thing he did when he learned of his girl's disappearance was to call his ex-wife to ask if he could stop paying child support. And there was no sign of remorse from him, no sadness or even simple curiosity about his daughter's whereabouts and how the case was unfolding. The needless to say his indifference didn't reflect well on him. It made him look suspicious in the eyes of many. And one of the people most suspicious of the two Georges was Joe Ford and his stepfather.

Ford was convinced that the little girl he loved as his own daughter hadn't disappeared by accident. He was even more convinced that Waters and his buddy Brody had to have had something to do with it. And it makes sense if Brody were the one pulling the strings. One siphoning money from Waters didn't want his cash going to some little girl. so he convinced a very mentally unstable Waters to get rid of her in one way or another. And were they the two that actually kidnapped her? Who knows? But maybe they paid somebody to do it. And I would also track them with why Waters reached out to his wife asking the only question about not paying that child support. And Ford felt the same way, and was so sure of this, that he spent several years closely following and monitoring the movements of the two Georges,

in a desperate attempt to find some evidence to incriminate them. However, like all the investigators who participated in the search for Anna, he was unable to find a single piece of the hard evidence he needed. It's been said that in the years following Anna's mysterious vanishing, Ford wrote a heated letter to George Waters accusing him of being responsible for the disappearance. Ford made sure to be in the room next to the apartment where Waters and Brody were living, just to hear their reaction when they read it. Apparently, Anna's stepfather sat in there, and after they finished, he heard Waters say,

I'm glad the girl is dead. These statements are quite compromising if true. However, this story has never been proven. The disappearance of Little Anna Waters shocked everybody in California. Their story is considered one of the strangest missing persons cases in all the state's history. And part of the pain for her loved ones in a situation like this is the not knowing. What happened exactly? Is Anna actually dead, or did somebody take her?

And perhaps, since she was so young, she doesn't even remember her former life and is out there alive with some other people having raised her. It's a thought that many have had, but to this day, no one knows for sure. By December of 81, years after the vanishing of a girl who would have been 13 by that time, George Brody passed away from cancer. Interestingly, his death certificate had a few peculiarities. There was no date of birth for one, no known relatives, not even a social security number on it. He existed for sure, and his family had met him and seen him from time to time, but he also sort of didn't exist.

I mean, nobody even knows if George Brody was his actual name. Not even in death, could it be sorted out. It didn't help that in the weeks following Brody's death, his loyal servant, George Waters, set out to eliminate all existing documents about himself, Brody, and also about missing Anna. He destroyed everything he possibly could, likely to make sure there were no loose ends that could ever tie him to the crime. And once Waters felt he had gotten rid of it all, while he downed a handful of pills in his hotel room he rented for so many years, his exact date of death is unknown as his body was found several days later. On February

8th, 2008, just 23 days before what would have been Anna's 41st birthday. Her mother Michelle released Searching for Anna, a dramatic and heartbreaking 228-page book that tells the story of those years of efforts and attempts to find the daughter who, unfortunately, never reappeared. At the time of the making of this episode, Anna would be 57 years old if she were still alive. In case remains open, and over the years numerous portraits have been created to represent what she might look like now. In the end, some believe Anna was kidnapped by a random driver, most likely someone not quite right in the head, who, by an unpleasant, twist of fate, happened upon her at a moment when no one was watching. But most investigators say this

theory makes little sense, and is one of the least likely. Statistically, most missing children are abducted by people they actually know. It's unlikely that a young child would agree to go with a stranger, and it's even less likely that she would have been forcibly taken from her backyard without anyone hearing anything or leaving the slightest sign of a struggle. The possibility that she fell into the creek and drowned is one of the most considered scenarios. But given the depth to which the surrounding areas have been explored, most investigators claim that this is virtually, if not absolutely impossible, that Anna's body was never found. And then, of course, there's waters and is somewhat non-existent, mysterious, and obsessed with Anna friend Brody.

Well, we certainly hope Anna is out there somewhere living her life, completely unaware of the trauma she endured when she was younger. Well, chances are, that's not reality. And sometimes, even though cases don't technically get solved and the answers are not 100%, well, that doesn't mean that you don't know what happened. The most obvious answers are usually the correct ones. And given who Anna's father was, how he acted, and his association with Brody. It's more than likely they were involved in her disappearance in one way, shape, or form. What they did exactly and what their motivation was will never know for sure. And so, likely forever, in case of Santa Waters, will remain a very strange, unsolved mystery.

So that's it for this week's episode of Everytown. Hope you all enjoyed it. If you want more creepy content, go check us out at patreon.com slash scary mysteries. Get access to all sorts of bonus episodes that we put out every single week. Remember to come back next week for another episode filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories. Because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.