Watch: Melissa Highsmith, kidnapped in Fort Worth 51 years ago, shares her story
Last Saturday, Melissa Highsmith gathered with nearly 100 other people to rally together and walk around downtown Fort Worth. They held signs urging local law enforcement to “thaw cold cases.” Nearly everyone there had been impacted by an unsolved criminal case, whether it be a murder or the disappearance of a loved one.
She had a message for each of them, “Don’t give up hope.”
Highsmith didn’t know she had been missing for 51 years. Abducted as a 21-month-old baby from her mother’s Fort Worth home in 1971, she was reunited with her biological family in 2022.
Highsmith spoke to the Star-Telegram on April 29 about what she called the “the longest child abduction case that’s been solved.”
Growing up, 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,” Highsmith told the Star-Telegram at the cold case rally.
“They told me things like I was Japanese and I’m not. That my father was Japanese and he’s not,” she 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 found her through genetics website 23andMe and approached her just before Thanksgiving about taking a DNA test, Melissa wasn’t sure what to think.
“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 said. “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.
On Thursday, Fort Worth police announced that they have received results of an official DNA test that confirmed Melissa Highsmith’s identity. Police are investigating the case, though they said the statute of limitations has passed to file a kidnapping charge in Texas.
This story was originally published May 5, 2023 at 1:19 PM.
