"A Case for Solomon" is a nonfiction narrative accomplishing an unusual feat: reprising headlines from 100 years ago and creating a new headline for contemporary readers.
In the year 1912, 4-year-old Bobby Dunbar seemingly vanished during a family get-together near Opelousas, La. Lessie and Percy Dunbar, Bobby's parents, worked with law enforcement agencies not only in Louisiana but also in Mississippi and other states where Bobby might have been transported. Month after month, Bobby remained missing, and his recovery seemed increasingly hopeless.
Then, after about eight months, police arrested William Walters, an itinerant laborer traveling around the South with a boy who looked like Bobby.
The apparent resolution to the apparent crime became complicated, though, with the appearance of Julia Anderson, an impoverished single mother who hailed from Poplarville, Miss. She saw the publicity surrounding the Walters arrest and said the boy was her son, Bruce. Furthermore, Anderson said, Bruce was traveling with Walters not as a victim, but with permission.
In the year 2012, a DNA test might have pointed to the truth quickly. Not in 1912. The boy remained in limbo. Law enforcement agencies battled over jurisdiction. So did elected politicians. Attorneys disseminated conflicting versions to benefit their clients. Journalists published wildly contradictory accounts.
Even within the extended Dunbar family, nothing seemed simple. Some relatives felt certain the boy traveling with Walters was Bobby Dunbar. Other relatives, aware that Lessie and Percy were emotionally unbalanced, believed the parents were so desperate that they might be claiming somebody else's child to be their son. The marriage of Lessie and Percy seemed reborn with the discovery of their son. But was Bobby really their son? What if their biological son was still missing? Maybe dead?
As for Anderson, well, she fared poorly in the court of public opinion. Without resources to match the Dunbars in actual court or the court of public opinion, she found herself sometimes portrayed as a liar and a woman of easy virtue.
In actual court, a Louisiana jury found Walters guilty of kidnapping. The boy traveling with Walters grew up as a member of the Dunbar family. His descendants received instruction to disbelieve everything claimed by Anderson. The co-author of this book is one of the those descendants. But, unsure whether to accept the conventional wisdom, Margaret Dunbar Cutright decided to seek 21st-century DNA testing. Anybody reading the next paragraph of the book review should halt now, or be prepared for a spoiler alert.
Welcome to the next paragraph. The DNA testing showed Julia Anderson was telling the truth. The young boy accompanying Walters was indeed Bruce Anderson, not Bobby Dunbar. As this book relates the discovery, in 2004 a paternity test demonstrated that one of Bobby's sons and his apparent first cousin "did not share the same DNA. Julia Anderson's children and grandchildren had long known this truth" in their hearts and minds, but felt relieved to receive scientific evidence.
Deciding to disseminate the truth generations later, Cutright began collaborating with New York journalist Tal McThenia while he was working on a radio documentary about the case, a piece that eventually aired on the show "This American Life." They conducted research together across the South, and they conducted research separately. The duo tracked down members of the Dunbar, Anderson and Walters families, many of whom cooperated, even though some of them would end up emotionally hurt. The truth surely sets some people free but manages to enslave others.
The "kidnapped" boy who grew into the man recognized by most of the world as Bobby Dunbar seemed whole until his death in 1966, despite the divorce of Lessie and Percy, despite many other hardships. He became a devoted husband and the father of three children, two sons and a daughter.
As Cutright says, Bobby Dunbar "was not crippled or even particularly burdened by the events of his childhood and questions over his identity. But nor was he free from them. Unbeknownst to his children, and possibly even his wife, he had visited the Poplarville, Mississippi, family of Julia Anderson Rawls at least once." When Bobby's son Bobby Junior asked his father point-blank, "Who do you think you are?" the father replied, cryptically and admirably, "I know who I am, and I know who you are, and nothing else matters. It's how we live our life that counts."
Bobby's children felt the uncertainty, if only by osmosis. Periodically, the sensational case would arise again in the news. The children became adults and began to understand the distinction between their father being the actual Bobby Dunbar and being awarded to the Dunbars via a court decision. Court verdicts, after all, are frequently about who won and who lost because of skillful lawyers and sympathetic jurors and technical rulings by judges, not about Truth with a capital T.
The saga related in the book is so mind-bending that some readers might need to digest certain passages about family connections more than once, as I felt compelled to do. It is worth the effort.
NONFICTION
"A Case for Solomon: Bobby Dunbar and the Kidnapping That Haunted a Nation"
By Tal McThenia and Margaret Dunbar Cutright
Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 464 pages, $26.99
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