Title: ACase for Solomon
Author: Tal McThenia & Margaret Dunbar
Cutright
Review: How much would you be willing to do to
get your son back? On a family
picnic/camping trip the Dunbar family lost their young four year old son
Bobby. One minute he was there, and the
next he had disappeared. Unfortunately
no body was ever found so closure was never an option. What ensued was one of the largest manhunts
ever seen as they scoured the entire south for little Bobby, ultimately finding
a little boy in the possession of a vagabond piano tuner.
Claiming they had
found their son the Dunbar’s were anxious to take him home and restart their
life. Only problem was another Mother
came forward to claim the boy as her little Bruce; that she knew the wandering
William Walters had him. An actual court
case took place, and more importantly a court of public opinion happened in the
papers of the day. The book documents
both cases as we see rather than a battle of good versus evil, we have a fight
between two desperate mothers, rich versus poor, truth as people desired it
rather than truth as it is. In the end
we see a family destroyed as they hang on to the tiny threads of hope, and a
fractured family rebuilt.
The scrap book of the
case containing all the historical newspaper articles is passed down to Bobby
Dunbar’s granddaughter. Having grown up
with the Dunbar family legend of the kidnapping the articles painted a very
different picture than the romanticized version she had been told. This began a multi-year quest to find out the
truth – who was Bobby Dunbar? Through
painstaking research a clear story begins to emerge, which is ultimately
confirmed through modern DNA testing.
What emerges is not a
story of right versus wrong, but rather a tale of extreme sadness as a
desperate family tries everything they can to heal their family. It also provides a historical look that the
ends definitely do not justify the means as the the events surrounding Bobby
altered the Dunbar family for generations, still causes fractures that remain
to this day.
A fantastic book
analyzing the damage loss and denial can do to a family. A modern true retelling of King Solomon as
one mother makes the ultimate sacrifice for the love of her child. As a bonus it shows the influence, for better
or worse, the media can have.
Unfortunately that influence hasn’t changed at all today.
Publisher: Published
August 14th 2012 by Free Press (first published January 10th 2012)
ISBN:
978-1-4391-5859-3
Copyright: 2012
Pages: 464
Quick Review: 4 Stars out of 5
Why I Read It: I love a good true crime/psychology
book
Where I Obtained the Book: Sent to me by the publisher for
review.
Synopsis: 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.
Author Biography:
Other Reviews: Publisher Weekly, Book Diary
Interview: The Diane Rehm Show
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