The Picnic That Never Happened: Catherine Barbara Davidson

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

September 13, 2025

Catherine Barbara Davidson, called Cathy by her family, was six years old, living in Chicago, Illinois, with her father Robert Davidson, her stepmother Anna, and her siblings. On September 1, 1973, according to the account the family gave police, the Davidsons drove out to Warren Dunes State Park in Sawyer, Michigan, for a holiday picnic. While the adults unpacked the car, Cathy and her five older siblings wandered off together to explore Painterville Drain, a small waterway that empties into Lake Michigan nearby. Roughly fifteen minutes later, according to the family, the other five children returned to the picnic site. Cathy did not. An extensive search of the park and surrounding area turned up almost nothing, only a single pair of green underpants whose connection to Cathy was never conclusively established one way or the other.

A Story No One Could Break

For decades, that account held. All five of Cathy's older siblings corroborated their parents' version of events at the park, and investigators at the time found no direct evidence contradicting the family's story, even as some who worked the case privately found Robert and Anna's outward composure in the aftermath of their daughter's disappearance somewhat unsettling. Without any witness willing to say otherwise, and without physical evidence pointing anywhere specific, Cathy Davidson's case settled into the familiar shape of an unsolved, presumably tragic drowning or abduction, one more name on a long list of children who vanished from public places during the 1970s and were simply never found.

A Sister Born After the Disappearance

The story that had held for more than forty years finally began to unravel because of a family member who was not even alive when Cathy disappeared. Joy, a younger daughter born to Robert and Anna after Cathy vanished, came forward to law enforcement in 2016 and 2017 with an account that contradicted the family's official story in its most basic detail. According to Joy, the family had never actually gone to Warren Dunes State Park with Cathy at all. Instead, she said, Cathy had died inside the family's own home in Chicago, on Hermosa Avenue, killed there by Anna, who Joy said had bound and gagged the six year old and placed her inside a closet.

Joy told investigators she had grown up hearing her older siblings describe what had happened inside that house, recalling accounts of the other children listening as Cathy scratched at the inside of the closet door before the sounds eventually stopped entirely. One of Cathy's older sisters, according to Joy's account, ultimately opened the closet and found her lying inside in a fetal position, already dead. The trip to Warren Dunes State Park, in this version of events, had been staged afterward specifically to provide a plausible public explanation for Cathy's absence, one involving an unsupervised group of children exploring near open water, rather than anything that would point back toward what had actually happened inside the family home.

Not everyone in the family has accepted Joy's account. Three of Cathy's other siblings have publicly disputed the allegations, suggesting Joy's motivations may have been rooted in some form of grievance against Anna rather than a genuine, accurate memory passed down from the other children who were actually present in 1973.

A Family That Became a Cult

Whatever happened to Cathy in 1973, the trajectory of the family she left behind grew considerably darker in the years that followed. Robert and Anna eventually relocated first to Georgia and then to rural Florida, where they founded a religious sect called the House of Prayer for All People, eventually growing to around two dozen members. The couple took on new names, becoming known as Johan and Anna Young, and built the group around a strict interpretation of Old Testament teaching that included corporal punishment, required members to surrender their personal finances to the group, enforced restrictive dress codes, and maintained deliberate isolation between members and their own outside families.

After Robert's death in 1988, investigators say Anna's control over the group, and the abuse documented within it, only escalated further. A twelve year old member of the group was reportedly forced to bathe in bleach at one point and was later found tied to a bed suffering from severe burns, an incident that led to Anna's conviction on child abuse charges in the early 1990s, for which she ultimately served only about six months. A two year old boy named Marcos Cruz was reportedly abandoned at a church in Puerto Rico after Anna declared him, in her own words, full of the devil, and his own fate afterward remains its own separate unresolved mystery.

A Pattern That Repeated Itself, Twice More

The method Joy described in Cathy's death, confinement inside a closet without food, without her medication, without any way out, was not an isolated act. Investigators eventually connected Anna to at least two additional child deaths carried out through strikingly similar means over the following years. Katonya Jackson, a three year old member of the group, died in 1983 after being locked in a closet and deprived of medicine she needed. Emon Harper, a toddler, was starved and beaten to death in 1989 after being confined to a closet in the same manner. In 2017, at seventy six years old, Anna was finally arrested and charged in connection with Emon Harper's murder.

A Conviction, Then a Sentence She Barely Served

The case moved slowly through the legal system given Anna's age and the decades that had passed since the underlying deaths. In 2021, Anna Young entered a plea of no contest to second degree murder in connection with Emon Harper's death and to negligent manslaughter in connection with Katonya Jackson's death. She received a thirty year sentence for the murder charge and a concurrent fifteen year sentence for the manslaughter charge. Anna died on March 31, 2021, at the Florida Women's Reception Center, having served only forty two days of that sentence before her death at age seventy nine.

Anna Young was never formally charged in connection with Cathy Davidson's death specifically, despite Joy's detailed account naming her directly as the person responsible. The FBI and Michigan State Police have continued to treat Cathy's case as an active investigation even after Anna's death, working with Joy's account and whatever additional corroboration investigators have been able to develop from other family members and former group associates in the years since she first came forward.

Fifty Years Without a Body

Cathy Davidson's remains have never been recovered, whether from the Chicago home where Joy says she actually died, or from anywhere else. The FBI has continued publicly appealing for information connected to the case well past its fiftieth anniversary, hoping that renewed attention might draw out either physical evidence connected to wherever Cathy's body was ultimately taken after her death in 1973, or additional witnesses willing to corroborate or expand on the account Joy eventually provided. What the investigation has established with reasonable confidence, even without a body, is that the entire public story of Cathy's disappearance, an unsupervised group of children exploring near Lake Michigan, a fifteen minute gap, a search that found nothing but an unidentified pair of underpants, was very likely constructed after the fact specifically to conceal something that had already happened, quietly, inside a family's own home.

Still Missing

More than five decades after her family reported her lost at a Michigan state park, Catherine Barbara Davidson remains formally classified as missing rather than confirmed deceased, a legal and investigative distinction that persists even though the man and woman most likely responsible for her death are both now gone themselves, one having died in 1988, the other having died in prison in 2021 while serving a sentence connected to an eerily similar killing of a different child. What Cathy's case ultimately illustrates, perhaps as starkly as any other, is how long a fabricated story can hold, corroborated even by the other children who lived through whatever actually happened, until one family member born after the fact finally decided the official version was no longer worth protecting.

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