Andrew Bookless, toddler in the picture above, was a resident of Long Island in New York. He disappeared in the winter of 1992-93 and was declared dead in 1999. But his identity was only recently identified from a decades-old photo recovered on a drowning victim in the Titicus Reservoir in1993. From Fox
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. — A treasured old photograph , a police investigator's long-shot appeal to the public and a retiree's sharp memory have combined to solve a 15-year-old drowning mystery.
State police in Somers, N.Y., tried for years to identify a body found in the Titicus Reservoir on June 13, 1993, carrying 38 pounds of rocks in a backpack. The man left no clues to his name and matched no local missing-persons reports.
The only lead was a black-and-white snapshot found on the body that showed a grandfatherly man holding a small boy in the crook of his arm, both wearing attire from the 1950s or early 1960s.
Police assumed the toddler was the drowning victim, but years of investigation produced only dead ends. Then, with a few remarkable coincidences last month, Andrew Bookless got back his name.
Bookless was eventually identified through dental records -- though only after police seeking to identify the little boy wrongly guessed a vintage light fixture in the picture may have been in western Massachusetts.
When they circulated the photo in the Berkshires, retired teacher Terry Yacubich, who had moved to Pittsfield from Bellport, N.Y., recognized a building behind the man and little boy as one she had known from her days on Long Island.
Bookless' family, it turned out, once lived in the very spot the picture was taken.