287: The Mysterious Disappearance of Bobby Dunbar w/ Tal McThenia

Most Notorious! A True Crime History Podcast

Erik Rivenes

True Crime, History, Education

4.7 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 29 March 2023

⏱️ 87 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1912, four-year-old Bobby Dunbar went missing in the Louisiana swamps. After an eight-month search that electrified the country and destroyed Bobby’s parents, the boy was found, filthy and hardly recogniz\xadable. A wandering piano tuner was arrested and charged with kidnapping— a crime then punishable by death.

But when a destitute single mother came forward from North Carolina to claim the boy as her son, not the lost Bobby Dunbar, the case became a high-pitched battle over custody—and identity—that divided the South.

My guest, Tal McThenia,first introduced listeners of NPR's This American Life to this case in 2008. A few years later he co-wrote, along with Margaret Dunbar Cutright (the granddaughter of Bobby Dunbar) the definitive book about this historical whodunnit, called "A Case for Solomon: Bobby Dunbar and the Kidnapping That Haunted a Nation".

The author's website: https://www.talmcthenia.com/

Listen to This American Life's "The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar" here: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/352/transcript

The author's recent Audubon article: https://www.audubon.org/magazine/fall-2021/the-strange-true-story-john-williams-and-charles

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome everyone to yet another episode of the most
0:29.9	notorious podcast. I'm Eric Rivenes. Thank you so much for sharing some of your
0:36.8	precious time with me. It is with great pleasure that I introduce today's
0:42.3	guest, Tal McTheney. He is an author and screenwriter whose writing has
0:49.2	appeared in Vanity Fair.com, Bloomberg Business Week, and Atlas Obscura, and many
0:56.2	other venues. He writes children's animated science mysteries for Mosa MacScience.
1:03.2	And in 2012, he co-wrote along with Margaret Dunbar Cutwright, a book that won
1:10.4	the Louisiana Literary Award. It is called A Case for Solomon. Bobby Dunbar
1:17.6	and the kidnapping that haunted a nation. If the story sounds familiar to you
1:23.4	at all, it was one of the more memorable episodes of the public radio series,
1:28.6	This American Life, which he wrote and reported for back in 2008. And I remember
1:36.2	listening to it when it originally aired. It's so good to have you on the show.
1:41.5	Thank you for joining me. Thank you. It's great to be here and to talk about the book.
1:46.6	So how were you first introduced to this case and how did it become an episode
1:52.0	of This American Life? And then how did it transition into a book?
1:57.9	I first heard about this story in 2004. I read a newspaper article in the Associated Press.
2:06.9	The article was about a hundred-year-old kidnapping. A little boy named Bobby Dunbar was
2:13.8	kidnapped from his home in 1912 and eventually recovered. The story had kind of
2:23.0	lingered in his family for a century. There was kind of a mystery in the story
2:31.9	around the actual identity of the child. And that mystery had festered within the family.
2:39.2	Finally, Bobby Dunbar's granddaughter, Margaret Dunbar, cut right, began digging into the story.
2:47.7	Doing extensive research into historical archives, court records. She interviewed a lot of people.
	...

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