The Nap That Never Ended: The Disappearance of Paul Leonard Baker

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

July 19, 2026

Paul Leonard Baker was three years old when he disappeared from his family's home near Beaufort, South Carolina, on March 5, 1987, and the story his stepmother gave police that day would go on to look almost identical to a story a different set of investigators would hear about a different child, in a different state, twenty two years later. In both cases, the woman responsible for watching the child claimed something had happened while she wasn't paying close enough attention. In one case, the child was eventually found alive, hidden under a bed. In the other, Paul Baker has never been found at all.

A Family Reshaped by an Affair

Paul's biological parents, James Arthur Baker and Lynda Solorzano, had been together through the earlier part of the decade, but their relationship fell apart in the mid-1980s after James began an affair with the children's babysitter, a woman named Susan. The fallout from the affair led to a divorce, and in the proceedings that followed, James was awarded full custody of both Paul and his six-year-old sister, Nina. Susan, the woman James had left his marriage for, became the children's full-time stepmother and primary daytime caregiver in the newly reconstituted household.

The Nap That Never Ended

According to the account Susan gave investigators, she put Paul down for a nap at around 11:00 a.m. on March 5, 1987, and then fell asleep herself. She said she woke up sometime between 12:30 and 1:30 p.m. to a phone call from James, who told her that someone had called him claiming to have the child. Paul was last known to be wearing a camouflage shirt, a blue jacket, red pants, and gray sneakers. A search of the home in the immediate aftermath turned up little physical evidence indicating where he might have gone or what had actually happened to him.

James initially pointed suspicion toward his ex-wife, Lynda Solorzano, but investigators cleared her fairly quickly. Susan submitted to a polygraph examination eight days after Paul disappeared, and the results came back inconclusive. James took his own polygraph four days after that, and he failed it. Later, on March 24, investigators conducting a more thorough search of the property found blood spatters inside the home, though what those findings ultimately indicated has never been made fully clear in the public record of the case.

A House Built on Abuse

The circumstances of Paul's disappearance took on a much darker shape eighteen days later, when authorities removed his six-year-old sister, Nina, from the home after learning that she had been living with untreated broken bones and severe, ongoing physical abuse. Nina told investigators that Susan had beaten her with a stick and locked her in closets, and that Susan had subjected Paul to similar treatment, including whipping him whenever he wet the bed. The picture that emerged was of a household where physical abuse of both children had been routine and severe enough that a missing three-year-old and a battered six-year-old were, disturbingly, part of the very same pattern rather than separate problems.

Susan ultimately pleaded guilty to assault and battery charges connected specifically to her treatment of Nina. She served eighty days of her sentence before it was suspended, and she completed five years of probation afterward. Neither she nor James was ever charged in connection with Paul's disappearance itself in the immediate years following it.

Extradition, and Still No Charges

The case saw a renewed push in 2000, when both Susan and James Baker, by then living in Florida, were extradited back to face scrutiny over what had happened to Paul thirteen years earlier. A grand jury ultimately declined to return an indictment against either of them specifically regarding Paul's disappearance, though Susan did face separate charges related to child neglect during that same period. With no indictment secured, the couple returned to Florida, and Paul's case settled back into the same unresolved status it had held for over a decade already.

Twenty-Two Years Later, the Same Pattern

The case might have remained a quiet, unresolved South Carolina cold case indefinitely if not for what happened in 2009, in the small town of Chipley, Florida. Susan Baker had, by then, taken on work as a babysitter, and in this new role she was caring for a seven-month-old infant named Shannon Lea Dedrick. Shannon disappeared while in Susan's care, setting off a search that lasted roughly thirty six hours before the infant was finally located, alive, hidden inside a cedar chest tucked under a bed inside Susan's own home.

When questioned about why she had hidden the baby rather than harming her outright, Susan claimed she had taken Shannon in order to protect her from parents she believed were using drugs, framing the abduction as a kind of misguided rescue rather than a crime. Investigators and prosecutors were not persuaded by that explanation. Susan Baker was tried and, in October 2010, convicted of three felonies connected to the Shannon Dedrick kidnapping. She received a sentence of twenty five years in prison. She and James divorced sometime after her conviction, ending the marriage that had begun with an affair decades earlier and had now outlasted one child's unexplained disappearance and another child's abduction and recovery.

A Cellmate's Unverified Claim

At some point during Susan's incarceration, a former cellmate came forward with an account that, if true, would finally answer the question of what happened to Paul on that March afternoon in 1987. According to this secondhand claim, Susan had told her cellmate that James had fatally beaten Paul, and that the two of them had subsequently buried his body in a neighbor's yard. Investigators have never been able to verify this account through physical evidence, and no remains matching Paul's description have ever been recovered from any location connected to the family's former residence or its surrounding properties. It remains, decades later, an unconfirmed claim rather than a resolved fact, one more piece of secondhand information layered onto a case that has never produced anything solid enough to close it.

Still Searching

Paul Leonard Baker's case remains classified as unsolved, with foul play strongly suspected given both the physical evidence recovered from the home in 1987 and the documented pattern of abuse his sister endured in the same household during the same period. His DNA has been entered into the National Missing Persons DNA Database in the hope that some future discovery might finally provide a match. Susan Baker remains, in the eyes of investigators and the public alike, the central person of interest in a disappearance that has now gone unresolved for well over three decades, a case made only more unsettling by the fact that the same woman went on to be convicted of hiding a different child under a bed more than twenty years later. Paul would be in his early forties now. No one has ever been charged with harming him, and no one has ever found him.

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