Tal McThenia and Margaret Cutright - A Case for Solomon

Start: 08/22/2012 7:00 pm

Timezone: America/New York

In 1912, four-year-old Bobby Dunbar, the son of an upper middle-class Louisiana family, went missing in the swamps. Eight months later, he was miraculously found in the company of a wandering piano-tuner, William Walters, who was arrested and tried for kidnapping. But when Julia Anderson, a destitute single mother, came forward to claim the boy was actually her son, Bruce, the case exploded. Which family did he really belong to?

The boy grew up as Bobby Dunbar and raised a family of his own. In 2000, his granddaughter, coauthor Margaret Dunbar Cutright, began to dig into the legend. After years of research, debate, and a DNA test, the truth finally emerged: her grandfather was Bruce Anderson, who had been legally kidnapped by the Dunbars. For Margaret’s family, it was a wrenching blow. For the descendants of Julia Anderson and William Walters who had known the truth all along, the news brought comfort and vindication.

First told in a stunning episode of Public Radio’s This American Life, A Case for Solomon incorporates family and archival research to weave a unique, gripping drama of family and childhood, class and power. It is the story of an epic struggle to determine one boy’s identity that raises unsettling questions about the formation of self.