She was playing with the family cats one minute. Five minutes later, she was gone, and the only clue investigators ever found was a man who believed she'd lived a previous life as someone else entirely.
A Quiet Afternoon Near Half Moon Bay
Anna Christian Waters was five years old, living with her mother, Michaele, and stepfather on Purissima Creek Road, a rural stretch near Half Moon Bay in San Mateo County, California. On January 16, 1973, Anna came home from kindergarten around 1 p.m., changed out of her school clothes into jeans, a striped shirt, and rubber boots, and went outside to play in the yard, despite the wet, chilly weather.
Her mother checked on her periodically through the early afternoon and found her playing happily in the garden and on the back porch with the family's cats. Around 2:00 p.m., Michaele could still hear Anna outside. By 2:15 or 2:20, the sounds had stopped. When Michaele went out to check, Anna was gone.
A Search Focused First on the Creek
A creek ran behind the family's property, swollen at the time from recent rain. Fearing Anna had wandered too close and fallen in, San Mateo County sheriff's deputies, joined by nearly a hundred volunteers and personnel from the state's Division of Forestry, concentrated their initial search along the creek bank. Deputies sounded a loud siren, hoping Anna might hear it and come out from wherever she was hiding.
Extensive searches of the creek — including scuba searches and repeated foot searches along its full length to where it empties into the Pacific Ocean — turned up nothing. Purissima Creek Road wasn't a road that saw much traffic beyond residents, which made the idea of a stranger passing through and taking her seem, at first, unlikely. As the days passed without any sign of Anna, investigators began shifting their attention elsewhere.
A Father's Strange Second Life
One thread investigators and Anna's family have returned to for decades involves her biological father, Dr. George Henry Waters. Around 1967, George had begun a close, unusual relationship with an older man going by the name "George Brody" — likely an alias, according to Anna's family, who described him as exercising an almost cult-like influence over George.
George's behavior grew increasingly erratic in the years that followed, and he was eventually diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. His own family declined to have him committed, reportedly out of concern that doing so would cost him his medical license. Despite coming from a wealthy family and having trained at a prestigious medical school, George moved into a cheap hotel in San Francisco's Tenderloin district with Brody after divorcing Anna's mother in 1969, supporting Brody financially and, by most accounts, rarely making a decision without consulting him first. There's no evidence the two men's relationship was romantic; family members have described it more as a guru-and-disciple dynamic, with George entirely under Brody's influence.
Brody, troublingly, took a particular interest in Anna specifically. He believed her to be the reincarnation of a woman he'd once lived with for decades — a claim that didn't even line up chronologically, since Anna was born before that woman had died. At Brody's insistence, Anna's mother was pressured into legally adding the invented word "Eifee" to Anna's middle name, so that the numerical value of her name would supposedly align with his own.
After Anna disappeared, George never once contacted his ex-wife to ask about the search or express concern. His only recorded response was instructing his attorney to stop his child support payments.
Police and a private investigator looked into both George and Brody at length, searching for any evidence connecting them to Anna's disappearance. They found none. Brody died of cancer in December 1981; his death certificate listed no birthdate, no known relatives, and no social security number — details that have only deepened suspicion about who he really was. George took his own life roughly two weeks later, by poison, in his hotel room; his body wasn't discovered for about a week. Before his death, he destroyed most of the documents relating to himself, Brody, and Anna.
Two Separate, Unsettling Encounters
Outside the Brody theory, investigators have also pursued leads involving strangers. A family friend reported seeing two men — one notably younger than the other — in a white panel truck near the Waters property shortly before Anna disappeared. Neither man was ever identified.
Separately, roughly a month before Anna vanished, her older half-brother recalled an incident the children had never told their parents about at the time: a man and woman pulled up alongside Anna and her half-brothers in a 1960s-model Chevrolet Impala with Washington State license plates and tried to coax Anna into getting into the car. She refused, and the couple drove off. The woman was described as having long dark hair and wearing a loose white embroidered shirt; the man's description was less clear. Whether this couple had any connection to Anna's disappearance weeks later has never been established.
More Than Fifty Years, No Resolution
Anna's mother, Michaele, spent decades searching for answers, eventually writing a book about the case, Searching for Anna, and maintaining a dedicated website chronicling the investigation. She has said publicly that she continues to hold out hope her daughter is alive somewhere, possibly without any awareness that she was ever reported missing.
The case has never been solved. Investigators were unable to substantiate any of the theories that have circulated over the decades — not the Brody connection, not the men in the white truck, not the couple in the Impala. Anna would be in her late fifties today.
If you have any information about the disappearance of Anna Christian Waters, you're encouraged to contact the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office at 1-650-363-4911.
Sources
Anna Christian Waters — The Charley Project
https://charleyproject.org/case/anna-christian-waters
The Heartbreaking Disappearance Of Anna Waters — Vocal Media
https://vocal.media/criminal/the-heartbreaking-disappearance-of-anna-waters
She Vanished While Playing In The Backyard, And Her Half-Brother Said A Man And Woman Tried To Lure Her Into Their Car Weeks Earlier — Chip Chick
https://www.chipchick.com/2025/10/she-vanished-while-playing-in-the-backyard-and-her-half-brother-said-a-man-and-woman-tried-to-lure-her-into-their-car-weeks-earlier
Disappearance of Anna Christian Waters — EverybodyWiki
https://en.everybodywiki.com/Disappearance_of_Anna_Christian_Waters