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truepenny
A Case for Solomon: Bobby Dunbar and the Kidnapping That Haunted a Nation by Tal McTheniaMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is an excellent book about the Bobby Dunbar kidnapping case. (One of the co-writers is Bobby Dunbar's granddaughter.) It's beautifully and carefully written, exhaustive in its research, and as empathetic as possible with all sides.
(Short version: Bobby Dunbar, age 4, disappeared in 1912. In 1913, his (middle to upper-middle class) parents claimed a child found with an itinerant tinker as Bobby, even though the child had a well-attested (rural poor) identity as Bruce Anderson. W. C. Walters, the tinker, was tried for kidnapping and found guilty, though later released on a technicality. The protests of Bruce's mother were swept under the rug. The child was brought up as Bobby Dunbar. In 2004, one of his sons and one of his brother's sons agreed to a paternity test, which proved that in fact "Bobby Dunbar" was not Bobby Dunbar. Proving he was actually Bruce Anderson would require exhuming his body for a mitochondrial DNA test, and neither the Dunbars nor the Andersons feel this to be either necessary or desirable.)
McThenia and Cutright trace the story from Bobby Dunbar's disappearance, and they go very carefully into the reasons Lessie and Percy Dunbar came to believe, whole-heartedly and vehemently, that this was their child, and the reasons that they carried a lot of people with them. It's hard to tell from this distance and with mostly newspaper reports to go on (and McThenia and Cutright do a GREAT job with the newspapers, recognizing that the reporters were players in the story rather than objective recorders of it), what Bobby/Bruce understood about what was going on and why he did---or didn't---do certain things, such as his failure/refusal to recognize his real mother (he'd been traveling with Walters long enough that it's possible he really didn't remember her, although no one in 1913 seems to have entertained that idea), his passing all the "tests" of his identity that were reported in the papers, his general willingness to BE Bobby Dunbar. (Also, Bobby and Bruce seem to have had remarkably similar dispositions, so it wasn't as if he had to do any acting.) McThenia and Cutright offer some very mild speculations, but the inner world of a 4 to 5 year old child in 1913 is really just not available to us.
The book provokes a lot of unanswerable questions about the malleability of memory and identity, and the most unanswerable and bleakest of them all is, what happened to the real Bobby Dunbar? This is something McThenia and Cutright don't go into at all, and I wish they would have---not that there's very much there except the trail of his footprints that ended abruptly at the railroad tracks. To me, it looks like Bobby Dunbar really was kidnapped, but what happened to him after that is as much a mystery as what happened to Charley Ross. So it wouldn't have been more than a paragraph, but I would have liked just that acknowledgment that if "Bobby Dunbar" was really Bruce Anderson, there's still a child missing, a child whom the world stopped looking for in 1913.
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