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Bobby Dunbar and the Kidnapping That Haunted a Nation
Free Press
August 2012
On Sale: August 14, 2012
464 pages
ISBN: 1439158592
EAN: 9781439158593
Kindle: B004T4KRRY
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
A CASE FOR SOLOMON: BOBBY DUNBAR AND THE KIDNAPPING
THAT HAUNTED A NATION chronicles one of the most
celebrated—and most misunderstood—kidnapping cases in
American history. In 1912, four-year-old Bobby Dunbar, the
son of an upper-middle-class Louisiana family, went missing
in the swamps. After an eight-month search that electrified
the country and destroyed Bobby’s parents, the boy was
found, filthy and hardly recognizable, in the pinewoods of
southern Mississippi. A wandering piano tuner who had been
shuttling the child throughout the region by wagon for
months was arrested and charged with kidnapping—a crime that
was punishable by death at the time. But when a destitute
single mother came forward from North Carolina to claim the
boy as her son, not Bobby Dunbar, the case became a
high-pitched battle over custody—and identity—that divided
the South. Amid an ever-thickening tangle of suspicion
and doubt, two mothers and a father struggled to assert
their rightful parenthood over the child, both to the public
and to themselves. For two years, lawyers dissected and
newspapers sensationalized every aspect of the story.
Psychiatrists, physicians, criminologists, and private
detectives debated the piano tuner’s guilt and the boy’s
identity. And all the while the boy himself remained
peculiarly guarded on the question of who he was. It took
nearly a century, a curiosity that had been passed down
through generations, and the science of DNA to discover the
truth. A Case for Solomon is a gripping
historical mystery, distilled from a trove of personal and
archival research. The story of Bobby Dunbar, fought over by
competing New Orleans tabloids, the courts, and the
citizenry of two states, offers a case study in yellow
journalism, emergent forensic science, and criminal justice
in the turn-of-the-century American South. It is a drama of
raw poverty and power and an exposÉ of how that era defined
and defended motherhood, childhood, and community. First
told in a stunning episode of National Public Radio’s
This American Life, A Case for Solomon chronicles the
epic struggle to determine one child’s identity, along the
way probing unsettling questions about the formation of
memory, family, and self.
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