Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - Kidnapped Boy Found After 73 Years - The Luis Albino story

Episode Date: February 17, 2025

This is the story of Luis Albino, who was kidnapped and found 73 years later after an ancestry dna test.

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Then out of nowhere, a woman wearing a green bandana approaches them. And she offers the younger brother some candy. And younger brother's like, sure I want some candy, who doesn't love candy? And the woman is like, well, come with me and I'll take you to the store to get some. And so the younger brother leaves with her to go to the store. with her to go to the store and get some candy. And that is the last time anyone ever saw him. Now the boy, his name's Luis, and he's six, and the other boy with him in the park is his older brother, Roger's 10. And when the woman starts to leave with Louise, Roger's like, well,

I want to go too. I want some candy. And he starts to follow them. And so he walks along, following them, but then after a while, he starts thinking, where are we going? Something about this ain't right. Now keep in mind this is happening in 1951. So this is way before Stranger Danger, way before there were nationwide campaigns notifying kids not to get into cars with adults they don't know. And so anyway, Roger feels like something isn't right. And he decides, this is weird. I'm telling my mom. And so he stops following them and he runs home. Minutes later, he's home and he tells his mom. Now his mom is this woman, who will just call mom. And he tells her what happened that his little brother just left with some woman in a green bandana offering candy,

and of course mom freaks the fuck out. And boom, she runs back to the park to see if she can find Luis. But unfortunately, there's no trace of him or the strange woman anywhere. They are gone. And pretty quickly, Mom goes to the police. And this is a whole hurdle to get them involved because she doesn't speak English, like she and the boys just recently immigrated to California from Puerto Rico. But after they crossed the language barrier, police get to involved and this huge nine block search gets underway. Soldiers from a local army base help out and they start looking and the Coast Guard helps by searching the Bay Area nearby and this story makes the news locally and that gets it a little attention there. But still there's no sign of little

Louise. And of course mom is destroyed by all this but there's not much else she can do. And this is during a time where there are no amber alerts, no surveillance cameras, no missing children computer database. All they have is a 10-year-old's description of what happened that day. And so every day, mom goes to the police station to see if there are any updates hoping that they'll have something. And every day, she gets the same answer. No news, no leads, no Luis. And years pass. And mom stops coming every day and she just comes once a week, and eventually that turns into her coming once a month. And as more time passes, she starts to only come to the police station once a year. And at this point, office know her so well that she'll just walk into the station without saying a word and they'll look at her and they'll just shake their head and

She'll know that that means they have no updates for her but despite that mom never stops believing that her son is still alive and she never gives up hope ever So then I guess you have to ask what happened to Luis? Well obviously he was kidnapped and we don't know a ton of the details of this part like we know he was taken from the park we know he and the woman got on a plane and that they flew from California to somewhere on the East Coast, and we don't exactly know where. And we know that then, somehow, Luis ends up getting adopted by a couple. And that couple raises him as their own. And Luis knows he was adopted, but he doesn't know he was originally stolen. But anyway, from there, he lives a fairly normal life. Like he grows up, he later joins the Marines, he goes and fights in the Vietnam War,

he comes back, and then he goes and fights in the Vietnam War a second time. And then eventually he comes back for good, and he becomes. a firefighter, he gets married, he has kids of his own. Meanwhile, mom, on the opposite side of the country, she still hasn't given up hope. Like she still goes to the police station about once a year to see if there are any updates, and there aren't. Even so, she continues to keep baby Luis's photo in the house, and she keeps a newspaper clipping about his abduction in her wallet at all times. And so decades pass, 54 years after Luis first went missing. And it's 2005.

And at this point, mom is 92 years old. And sadly, she passes away, never having found her son. So any hope of Luis ever being located or reunited with his original family are just gone. Until... More time passes, and it's now 2020. And that is when we meet this woman. Her name's Alita. Alita's 63.

And one day, just for fun, she decides to take one of those ancestry DNA tests through the male. So she takes it and she gets the results back. And whoa, that's weird. She's a match with some man she doesn't recognize. Not only that, the results say

that she shares 22% DNA with this guy. And so she's thinking, oh, this must be like a cousin or an uncle or something. And so she sends this mystery guy a little message because you can message each other through the site. And then she waits. And she waits. And she waits.

And the mystery guy never replies. And so she's like, all right, whatever. And she moves on. And four years go by. And one night she's watching some documentary on TV. And this reminds her somehow of that random unknown man that she shares DNA with. And so she decides to give it another shot and dig a little deeper and figure out just who this guy is. And so she starts looking up his name online and she comes across some pictures of him and the guy

is of course, Luis. Now, Alita had heard all her life about an uncle she has who went missing when he was six years old. I mean, the family has always talked about him. And so she's looking at these pictures of adult Luis on the internet going, could this be him? That uncle? And she starts comparing them to childhood photos she has of her uncle. And she's like, yeah, I think that's him. And so, of Eventually, she goes to the police. And she's like, oh, you have to look into this. I think this guy was my uncle who was kidnapped, literally back in 1951. And police can't believe it.

And they actually do agree to help, as the case was never solved. And so they open it back up, and then they get the FBI involved, and then the California Department of Justice joins in. And after a bit of investigating, the FBI goes, and they track Luis down, and he lives somewhere on the East Coast. And so I guess the FBI goes to him, and they're like, we think you might be this kid who was kidnapped back in 1951. And Luis is like, I was kidnapped?

See, because he still didn't even know, like he thought he had been legitimately adopted. So they convince him to take a DNA test just to be sure, and of course it turns out that his DNA is a match with Alita and the remaining members of his family. And so now, after 73 years, 73 years, he finally flies from the East Coast back to Oakland. California to meet his biological family.

A man reunited with his family 70 years after being abducted after he was found through a voluntary DNA swab test. Now keep in mind, most of these family members, he's either never met or he just doesn't remember. But one person he does remember, his brother, Roger, who he reunites with, and this is a picture of the two of them. That's Luis on the right and Roger on the left. So then, after all that, who was responsible for this kidnapping? Well, unfortunately, that's a tough one, because 70 years have gone by. We don't know who the woman in the green bandana was, and Luis was six years old so he doesn't remember too many details of it,

and his adopted parents aren't even alive anymore. So, honestly, I don't know if we'll ever know.