The FBI last night squelched the claim by a Michigan man that he was the victim of an infamous child abduction on New York’s Long Island more than half a century ago.

The FBI said that DNA tests proved that John Barnes was not Steven Damman, the two-year-old child snatched outside a grocery shop on the afternoon of Hallowe’en 1955 while he waited with his little sister Pamela for their mother buy a loaf of bread.

“DNA samples show John Barnes and Pamela Damman Horne do not share the same mother,” the FBI said. “All interested parties have been notified of the DNA test results.”

The Michigan labourer had said yesterday he was 99 per cent convinced that he was the snatched toddler.

The man who raised him, however, had insisted that he really was his biological son. He called his claims “a bunch of foolishness”.

Although he was unable to produce a birth certificate, Richard Barnes said that the boy had been with the family since the day he was born in a naval hospital in Pensacola, Florida, on August 18, 1955. “We brought him home two days later, and he’s never been out of our sight,” he said. “I’m his dad.”

Steven Damman’s disappearance was the Madeleine McCann case of its day, sparking front-page headlines and a nationwide search for the missing boy.

Marilyn Damman, then 22, left Steven with her seven-month-old daughter, Pamela, in a pushchair while she went into a shop in East Meadow, Long Island.

When she returned ten minutes later, both children had disappeared. Pamela was found in her pushchair several blocks away but Steven had vanished with his jellybeans.

“This was an important case. Children do not go missing in this way,” Lieutenant Kevin Smith, of the Nassau County police, told Today.

Almost 54 years of investigation yielded no breakthrough — until now.

“Out of the blue last March a man calls our police department and tells us how he believes he may be the missing boy,” Lieutenant Smith said.

“He had reached out and found what would be his biological sister. They privately went to a place where they could get their DNA tested. The DNA tests that came back revealed that they could be siblings.”

Mr Barnes said that he had long suspected that he was not part of the family who raised him. “As I got older I realised how different I was from my mother and father and something was not right,” he said.

“I was not sure if I was kidnapped or switched at birth or adopted. I just knew I did not come from these people. I did not fit in with my family.

“I did not look like them. They were all dark complected [sic] — brown eyes, dark hair. They were shorter than I was. They have different personalities.”

About 15 years ago, Mr Barnes began researching his possible origins but was rebuffed by his family. “I talked to me dad about it but he was not interested,” he said.

Then his mother summoned him to her deathbed. He believes that she tried to tell him he was not her biological son. “She did not tell me that. She was trying to tell me that.”

Mr Barnes tracked down Pamela Damman, who could be his biological sister. “When I first talked to him it was just an immediate friendship — like we had known each other for years,” she said.

It's all in the ears

The answer to the puzzle could all be in the ears. “The only thing you can look for is the ear. The ear is very unique, very similar to a fingerprint,” said Glenn Miller, a forensic imaging artist at the US National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, which prepared an “age progression” portrait of Madeleine McCann.

Of particular interest is whether the person has an attached or detached ear-lobe, he added. Despite the increasing use of “age progression” photographs in missing-child cases, forensic artists say that unless the ears settle the argument, it is nearly impossible to make an identification from pictures alone.

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