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A Case for Solomon : Bobby Dunbar and the Kidnapping That Haunted a Nation - Tal McThenia

A Case for Solomon

Bobby Dunbar and the Kidnapping That Haunted a Nation

By: Tal McThenia, Margaret Dunbar Cutright

Paperback | 13 August 2013

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The spellbinding story of one of the most celebrated kidnapping cases in American history and a haunting family mystery that took almost a century to solve.

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, the boy was found in the pinewoods of southern Mississippi. A wandering piano tuner was arrested and charged with the boy's kidnapping-a crime 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. 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, the detective work of Bobby Dunbar's granddaughter Margaret Dunbar Cutright, and the science of DNA to discover the truth.

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.

Industry Reviews
"Rarely do nonfiction books engage me so deeply and satisfyingly as . . . A Case for Solomon has. Exhaustively researched . . . [the book] reads like fiction."

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