Man discovered sickening truth about his life after seeing an aged picture of himself online

A man discovered the truth about his life after he was browsing the internet and saw a picture that looked alarmingly like him.

Philadelphia man Steve Carter was looking through a missing children website in 2010 when he came across an image of what one of the missing children might look like at a later point in life.

Carter, at that point in his 30s, had spent his early childhood in foster care before being adopted by a family at the age of four. But when he saw the picture of what a baby named Marx Panama Moriarty Barnes might look like all grown up, he couldn't help but notice a similarity to himself.

He sent the picture to as many people he could asking them if they could see the resemblance too and many of them did.

At the time, ABC News reported that his friends and family told Steve he should probably call the police and talk to them, and a few months later he was going in for a DNA test to determine whether he was the missing child or not.

He was the composite picture and thought it looked a lot like him (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children)

As it turned out, he was indeed the missing child he thought he looked like, and he learned the truth about his younger years.

It transpired that Steve's biological mother Charlotte Moriarty would sometimes go missing and take her baby with her, with the man's biological father Mark Barnes saying she would normally come back within a few weeks.

However, one time Charlotte took off with the baby and did not return.

One of these times she'd had the police called on her and Charlotte had been put into a mental health facility while the child was placed into foster care.

When she'd been arrested Charlotte had claimed her name was Jane Amey and that her baby's name was Tenzin, giving a birthday for him that was one day off his actual one.

Since a wrong name had been given, police were not able to track down the boy's biological father and after three years in foster care he was put up for adoption where he then joined the Carter family.

When Steve discovered the truth he was able to reconnect with his father and that side of the family, gaining a bunch of new half-siblings.

Incredibly, there are some cases of missing individuals who just turn up a long time later.

Wisconsin woman Audrey Backeberg had last been seen walking to a bus stop in 1962, but several decades later police announced that she'd been found 'alive and well'.