Chance Walsh: Desperate Search For Missing Newborn Baby — Parents Now Locked Up On Neglect Charge

Chance Walsh, a 9-week-old baby boy from North Port, Florida, was reported missing by his grandparents on Sunday, October 4 — but authorities now desperately searching for the newborn say that the baby may have been missing for much longer than that. And they point the finger at the baby’s parents, who are now under arrest in South Carolina.

Kristen Bury, 32, and Joseph Walsh, 36 are now being held on $150,000 bond in Jasper County, South Carolina, before they are extradited back to Sarasota County, Florida. The charge against them is child neglect.

But investigators in Florida clearly suspect something much worse.

“I get nauseous over these kinds of cases,” said Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department Captain Charlie Thorpe at a press conference, covered by WFLA-TV, about the Chance Walsh case on Wednesday. “It’s beyond frustrating because somebody knows what happened. Just tell us what happened — we’re talking about a child here.”

Bury and Walsh, according to a report in The Bradenton Herald newspaper, told detectives a wide variety of stories about what happened. But none of them explain where the newborn child is today.

The couple — who according to their own parents have been drug users for many years — apparently departed Florida on some sort of a road trip on or shortly after September 9. That was the last time the baby’s grandfather, Bury’s father Gary Millwater, says that he saw little Chance.

But it wasn’t until October 4 that the grandparents called police, to report the baby as missing because the parents wouldn’t let them see the child.

They called after Bury and Walsh told them that they were in South Carolina and had been in a car accident. That much appears to be true — but Sarasota investigators say that there was no sign of the baby in the crashed vehicle and in fact, not even room in the car to install a car seat for a baby.

The parents told investigators at first that their baby was fine. But their story soon changed to say that little Chance has died in the car accident after all.

But then they changed their tale yet again, claiming that they gave their baby away to a woman they met at a motel in Georgia.

There was indeed a woman at a motel in Augusta, Georgia, where the investigators have confirmed that Kristen Bury and Joseph Walsh stayed at one point on their journey. But surveillance footage from that motel shows that the couple checked in by themselves, with no baby in sight.

The woman they met there told Georgia detectives that Kristen Bury attempted to sell her some baby clothes. She said that Bury told her that her baby, to whom the clothes supposedly belonged, had passed away three weeks earlier, according to a press release from the Sarasota County Sheriff.

Sarasota detectives are working in cooperation with the FBI, as well as with the National Center For Missing and Exploited Children as they search for any clue about what happened to Chance Walsh.

Sadly, however, they may have found some clues on Monday, when the investigators sent a K9 unit to search the couple’s home in North Port, Florida.

In the house on Orduna Drive in the Sarasota suburb of about 50,000 in population, the investigators found exactly what they were hoping not to find — blood stains, all over the residence. They found blood on a bed, including on the pillows, mattreess and the comforter.

They also found bloodstains on the walls and in the bathroom, including on the bathroom mirror.

Cadaver-sniffing police dogs also indicated that there were human remains somewhere on the premises.

But the detectives have not yet confirmed that the blood is from nine-week-old Chance Walsh, and they have not uncovered any remains, if indeed there are any in the home.

[Images: Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office / WFLA Screen Capture]