The Lost Identity of Steve Carter: A Childhood Mystery Solved After 34 Years
- Aug 26, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: Jul 23
Picture getting ready for work one morning, half listening to the news, when a story stops you cold enough to wonder if it's actually about you. That's exactly what happened to Steve Carter, a salesman from Philadelphia, and it ended up unravelling one of the longest running missing child cases in American history, his own.
A Happy Childhood With a Hidden Past
Steve Carter grew up in New Jersey after being adopted from an orphanage in Honolulu at age four. His adoptive parents, Steve and Pat Carter, gave him a stable, loving childhood by every account. "I had an amazing childhood," he later told the What It Was Like podcast. "I was adopted and raised by two individuals who are just phenomenal... They'll always be my parents."
Even so, gaps in his own story lingered. Steve knew almost nothing about how he'd ended up in that Hawaiian orphanage, or why. His birth certificate had been created a year after his actual birth, a detail that nagged at him for years without ever quite adding up. It was a silence he'd learned to live with, until an ordinary morning in 2011 changed everything.
The Story That Sparked It All
That morning, Steve had CNN on in the background while getting ready for work. The segment covered a woman in Atlanta named Carlina White, who'd discovered as an adult that she'd been abducted as an infant from a Harlem hospital in 1987, and had only pieced it together after finding her own baby photo on a missing children's website. Steve heard the same story again later that day on the radio, then a third time via a tablet notification. It felt less like coincidence and more like a nudge.
So he acted. He went to MissingKids.com and searched three simple terms: Hawaii, male, missing 34 years. What came back stopped him cold: an age progressed photo of a baby who'd vanished in the late 1970s, and the digitally aged face looking back at him was unmistakably his own.
A Missing Baby Named Marx
The photo belonged to Marx Panama Moriarty Barnes, a six month old boy who disappeared on June 21, 1977, in Hau'ula, Hawaii. That day, his mother, Charlotte Moriarty, took him out for a walk and never brought him home. His father, Mark Barnes, reported them both missing, having no idea what had actually happened.
Charlotte turned up days later at a stranger's house, using a fake identity for herself and her son, going by the names Jane Amey and Tenzin. Whoever she gave those names to grew suspicious, and she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital soon after, with baby Marx placed into protective custody. Charlotte checked out of the hospital not long after and was never seen again. Because of the false name she'd given, police had no way to connect the baby in state custody to the missing child Mark Barnes had reported. The two cases simply never got linked.
Unable to trace his real identity, the boy became a ward of the state, spent time in an orphanage roughly 30 miles from where his family had lived, and was adopted three years later by Steve and Pat Carter, who renamed him Steve and eventually moved the family to New Jersey.
DNA Brings the Truth to Light
At first, Steve figured the resemblance was just an unsettling coincidence. Friends he showed the photo to disagreed, and pushed him to contact the authorities. He eventually submitted a DNA sample, and months later, in early 2012, the results came back: a 99.9 percent match. Steve Carter was Marx Panama Moriarty Barnes.
Reflecting on it later, Steve described a strange kind of guilt alongside the shock. "I kind of took on a kind of 'guilt factor' because I felt like I should have been doing more to alert my biological family that not only am I safe, I'm extremely happy," he said. Even now, he's not entirely certain the woman found with him as a baby was his mother at all. "I was found with a woman in a house in Honolulu," he later recalled. "I was taken to CPS. That woman was taken into a psych ward and then left. Nobody saw or heard from her since. Nobody knows if she was my mom."
Reconnecting With a Lost Family
The discovery introduced Steve to a half-sister, Jennifer, who'd been eight years old when their mother disappeared with her baby brother. Jennifer had spent years assuming both her mother and Marx were dead, until she convinced Hawaiian authorities in 2001 to reopen the case. That decision is what eventually produced the age progressed image Steve stumbled across a decade later. Without Jennifer pushing for that reopening, there's a real chance the photo, and the whole discovery, never happens.
When Steve and Jennifer finally spoke, the connection was immediate. "We definitely shared a lot of similarities," Steve said. "Not just genetics-wise... We shared the same taste in certain things and had the same sense of humour."
He also connected with his biological father, Mark Barnes, over the phone. For Mark, hearing his son's voice after more than three decades was overwhelming. "All I could say was, 'Wow. Oh, wow. Wow,'" he told People. Mark had spent years unable to let the disappearance go. "I spent about a year and a half going crazy driving around the island," he said of his search at the time. The two spoke and exchanged letters over the following years, though they never got the chance to meet face to face before Mark died in 2023.
The Mystery of Charlotte
What actually happened to Charlotte Moriarty was never resolved. Family letters describe a turbulent relationship between her and Mark, and a pattern of disappearing for days at a stretch even before the final vanishing act.
"She was more of a free spirit," Steve has said of her. "If you're not in the right headspace and you're dealing with other things, you might put the oxygen mask on yourself first. I don't blame her for anything." He's speculated she may have started a new life somewhere in East Asia, but there's no confirmation either way. She was never seen again after walking out of that Hawaiian hospital.
A Life Reframed
Steve now carries two birthdates, three birth certificates, and by one count, ten names across his two identities, an almost absurd amount of paperwork for one person's life. Despite everything, he's spoken often about how fortunate he considers himself, both for the loving adoptive family that raised him and for the family he unexpectedly gained as an adult.
That gratitude has clearly reached other people too. On one occasion, a stranger recognised him on a bus and told him her own child had been missing for 22 years; Steve's story had given her something to hold onto. "For anyone dealing with a missing loved one," he's said, "always have hope. There is a chance that person is doing well and will surface again to be reunited with you."
Cases like this are rare but not unheard of. Barbara Jane Mackle's story is another reminder that even the most frightening disappearances don't always end the way you'd expect. For Steve, the mystery wasn't a kidnapping in the traditional sense, but the effect was the same: a family that spent decades not knowing, and a reunion nobody saw coming.
Steve Carter's story is a rare example of a missing child case resolving itself decades later, not through a break in the investigation, but through one man's own curiosity and a website built for exactly this kind of long shot. It's also a story about identity, about how the people who raise you shape who you become just as much as the biology you're born with, and about how those two things can sit alongside each other rather than compete.
