CHARLEY ROSS.
it/ANY, perhaps most of our readers, will have heard more or
less of a kidnapped child named Charley Ross, whose fate in 1874 interested the whole American Union. The child has never been recovered, though the kidnappers have been traced, and one of them punished ; and the father, Mr. Christian K. Ross, of Philadelphia—partly as a last resort, and partly, as we judge, to remove a lingering suspicion that he himself had hidden the child to obtain a subscription—has published all the facts, and especially the fae-shulles of the letters from the kidnappers, which were at first concealed from everybody except the police. The story is certainly a remarkable one, and admits, as it seems to us, of only one plausible interpretation, which, nevertheless, no one who reads the story will be willing readily to believe.
The child Charley Ross was one of several children of a gentle- man residing in Germantown, a suburb of Philadelphia, in comfort- able, though not apparently in very prosperous circumstances. He lived in a pleasant house, with a large garden, in a street like Avenue Road, Regent's Park ; but he would, he says, have had some difficulty in raising the £4,000 demanded for the child's ransom. We may add, to prevent a natural hypothesis, that his own innocence of any connection with the affair has long since been demonstrated, and that he and all the members of his family have spared and are sparing neither trouble nor expense to discover
the lost child. On July 1, 1874, Mr. Ross, on returning home to Germantown, found two of his children, Walter, a boy of six, and Charley, a fair-haired child of four, absent, and from some statements of the neighbours believed that they had been carried off by two men in a light waggon or "buggy," a word used, apparently, in Pennsylvania to describe a kind of phaeton. This turned out to be the case, Walter, the elder lad, being brought back in a few hours by a friend who had found him crying outside a toy-shop in the neighbourhood, where he had been put down to buy crackers for the Fourth of July. He stated that two men, whom he described, had tempted him and his brother by a promise to give them candy and crackers to take a ride in the buggy, and had been driven in a direction which he remembered accurately ; that he had been sent into the shop, and that the men had driven off while he was engaged in his purchases, and disappeared with the boy Charley. The father has never seen the child again, and though the driver and his confederate have been found, it is-one of the strange facts of the case that the entire police of Pennsylvania, backed by the entire people of the State, and it may be said of the Union, have never succeeded in tracing that buggy. It clisailpeared, as Mr. Ross says, into the air. It was, of course, supposed at first by the police that the child had been carried off as an act of vengeance, to punish Mr. or Mrs. Ross for some real or fancied injury; but on the 4th of July a letter was received, with the post- mark of the same city, Philadelphia, stating that the writers had carried him off for ransom, and that his life depended upon no search being made for him. This was followed on the 13th of July by a second letter, in which the ransom was fixed at £4,000, and Mr. Ross was informed that no reward, even one of 120,000, would have any effect, the kidnappers being too closely bound together ; he was defied to find out the child's hiding-place, and he was assured that the moment a detective approached Charley the child would be put to death. In the twenty-three subsequent letters received this threat was perpetually reiterated, with the addition of a reason,— namely, that the abductors would, in the event of failure to obtain their prey, be compelled to seize a richer child, and to kill Charley and send his body home to his parents, in order to convince the next victim that they were in earnest. These threats, the grief of the Ross family, and the natural kindliness of the Americans—who are fonder of their children than any people in the world—roused the police and the people up to furious exertions. The entire city of Philadelphia was searched house by house and room by room,-8 feat never attempted before. All places of ill-repute were watched, all suspected persons for hundreds of miles were examined, the people, including even the criminal classes, joined in the hunt, and it became positively dangerous to travel about with a fair-haired
child of four. Figures of the child were shown by proprietors of waxworks, and so familiar did his features become to the com- munity, that the nickname of "Charley Ross" was applied to fair-haired children, and became a serious impediment to inquiry. The furor, indeed, would have been scarcely explicable, but that the Americans felt the serious danger which existed of an epidemic of child-stealing, and indeed of brigandage generally, a crime for which their wide spaces, immense forests, and long river and coast-lines offer extraordinary facilities. The whole population seemed united in the resolve that the crime should not be condoned, and though money was forthcoming to any amount, and one gentleman in particular called upon Mr. Ross merely to offer him the 20,000 dollars as a gift, he himself adhered steadily to his original view that in the interests of society the ransom must never be paid. The search was, in fact, universal, and was aided by suggestions, theories, and offers of help from every part of the Union, the excite- ment revealing, with other strange facts, such as the disap- pearance of several children, wholly unsuspected depths of superstition. Not to mention many offers of assistance from "mediums," all of whom failed, the following extraordinary letter of advice, written originally in German, was forwarded to Mr. Rosa, apparently from a sincere well-wisher :—
" DEAR FRIEND,—In your present situation I ant deeply touched, and if possible, will render you my assistance to regain your child. I have read in a small book how the robbers wanted to extort money from you. If you follow my advice, you shall have your child, without any ransom, in a very short time. But you must have faith in the works of God, which will result in the restoration of your flesh and blood. Buy a spring chicken that has not laid an egg (but do not bay it of a woman); kill the chicken at night, without being seen or heard; cat out the chicken's heart on Friday, but nothing else. Take the heart in the left band. You must first lay seven skewers (new) on the table. Hold the heart in the left hand and ran around the table. Then take one _ -skewer with the right hand, in the name of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost ; then pierce the skewer from the top through the middle of • the heart, and say, As I am piercing the heart of an innocent hen by this thrust, so shall the thrust pierce the heart of the guilty robber who took my flesh and blood.' The second skewer you have to pierce through the front part of the heart, and say,' This thrust shall pierce the robber's soul, until there is restored what I have lost.' The third skewer you pierce through the heart, and say, 'You daring robber, if you intend to dive, you have to give back to me my—(here you add the name of the boy). The fourth skewer you pierce from the other side, and say, It stands to you, robber, for life or death; what is not thine is mine.' The fifth skewer from the bottom of the heart, and say, Five wounds Jeans was carrying, and you robbers shall be stricken by them, in the name -of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.' Sixth skewer pierce from the top of the right side, and say, The innocent chicken's blood shall bring your deeds to light.' The seventh skewer from the top of left side, and -say, Seven pierces shall have your heart until you restore the little -child, which you have taken•' and if you do not do so, you shall fall sway like Boricates and that tree which God cursed.' Dear Friend Ross, if you do as I have written to you, they must give you back your own flesh and blood within twenty-one days, for the robbers will fall -away and find no rest. After you have pierced the heart with seven skewers, you must burn it the same night, just when the clock strikes twelve,—throw it in the fire in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy - i3host., Amen. But nobody must know anything about it but God
• alone. If it is God's will, you shall have your child within the stated time, and should you not have it within the twenty-one days, do the -same as first mentioned, but with the power of the Devil, and you will have your child sure. That person who stole your child comes in your - store a great deal to find out what you say and do; • therefore be very 'quiet, so that he cannot work against this undertaking. When you -have your child restored, then I will learn about it. I shall make my- self known, and let you know who helped you. I have already helped a great many persons. Sending you my best respects, and hoping you will have courage that nothing will happen to you. Your most obedient 'servant, ."
The energy of the police and the sympathy of the people, how- ever, elicited nothing, even the permanent watch kept up on the letter-boxes leading to no result beyond the belief, which appears to have been correct, that the abductors resided within a short distance of Philadelphia. A long correspondence was kept up with the kidnappers, their letters being answered through the personal column of the Philadelphia Ledger; and in one letter the kidnapper stated voluntarily that the child was living disguised as a girl, a statement we italicise because it was palpably an invention, and affirmed that he would have lowered the ransom, but for the public excitement. It is characteristic of the country that he also soothed the father by saying that Mr. Ross .could recoup himself for the ransom-money by exhibiting the child at a dollar for each admission; and that this was true, a showman offering Mr. Ross 30,000 dollars for a few weeks' hire of the baby when recovered. At last a man in New York, whose name is suppressed, told the Superintendent of Police there that a man named Mosher, a ship-carpenter, known to be a river-thief, with a confederate, one Douglas, had laid a plot for seizing one of the Vanderbilt children, and hiding him in a sloop till a ransom had been obtained, and he thought that they might possibly be the guilty persons. The crime indeed seems to have struck all Americans as so abnormal that it was unlikely to occur to many criminals, and the men were on this slight evidence hunted with such extraordinary energy that they were compelled to wander from place to place to find the means of subsistence, and finally to take to burglary. On December 14 they attempted to rob the house of Judge Van Brunt, of the Supreme Court of New York, situated on Bay Ridge, Long Island, and after firing at their captors, were shot by his brother and nephew. Mosher fell dead on the spot, but Douglas lived for fifteen minutes, during which he volun- tarily confessed that he and Mosher had stolen Charlie Ross. He was, of course, interrogated as to the disposal of the child, but declared, with every appearance of sin- cerity, that he did not know, and that Mosher alone knew where the child was. He would, however, now be returned within a few days. He died without saying anything more, and with him or Mosher the secret died also, for no further trace of the lad has ever been discovered. The most rigid search was made among all Mosher's friends and associates, and one more man was arrested and punished as a confederate, but no clue worth mentioning has ever been obtained. Nearly three hundrhd child- ren, all locally believed to be Charley Ross, have been seen by his father, and in two instances at least children have personated the character, while in one, a child, unconscious of fraud, stated facts only known to the family ; but the actual Charley Ross has never been discovered, and the parents, though they still live in hope, are evidently exhausted with the endless investigations of two years.
There is absolutely as yet no clue to this singular puzzle, and we confess we incline—though not strongly—to the belief not only that the child is dead, but that he was dead from the first ; that the leading kidnapper, Mosher, who alone knew where the child was, had devised a much darker crime than abduction,—a murder which should bring him 20,000 dollars and no detection, which he calculated could never occur unless the child were alive to be discovered. The man obviously was a desperate villain, perfectly ready to commit murder—he tried to kill Mr. Van Brunt-- thoroughly distrustful of his own confederates, yet very confident that no one would betray him. If he had kept the child in confinement, as he says he did, for many months, he must have trusted some one to give him food, and that some one must, one would imagine, have been discovered. Moreover, Mosher insists in every letter that the money must be paid five or ten hours at least before the child is returned, and once orders that the money shall be dropped at a signal from a train going at full speed,—an offer with which Mr. Ross made an attempt to comply, in order to forward a letter instead of a reply by advertise- ment. All that looks like an effort to secure the money without the child being traced ; and frightful as is the wickedness involved, it is not greater than that displayed by Thomassen, with his in- fernal machine. It is clear that the death of the child was con- stantly in Mosher's thoughts, for he not only threatened it in almost every letter, but he is perpetually arguing, as if with his own conscience, that morally he is only a kidnapper, and that the murderer of the child is his own father, who will not pay up the ransom demanded. If this solution is rejected, the only plau- sible one is that the child is atill in confinement near Philadelphia, his custodian, being afraid not of the law, but of the lynching with which all concerned were threatened by the citizens. If that is the case, he may yet be discovered, by some accident or some con.. fession like that of Douglas ; but we confess we think Mr. Christian Rosa has much reason for his very evident want of hope.
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