The Kidnapping of Charley Ross

The case

On the afternoon of 1 July 1874, two small boys playing outside their house in Germantown, then a prosperous suburb of Philadelphia, climbed into a horse-drawn buggy with two men who had been chatting to them and handing out sweets for several days. The men promised fireworks for the Fourth of July. They drove the boys across the city, stopped at a shop, and gave five-year-old Walter Ross a quarter to go in and buy firecrackers. When Walter came out, the buggy had gone. His brother Charley, aged four, was never seen by his family again.

Within two days their father, Christian Ross, received the first of a long series of letters. They came from post offices in Philadelphia and elsewhere, in a crude hand with words misspelled in ways that seemed almost deliberate, and they soon set the price at $20,000. They warned him against the police and threatened the boy's life if anyone came near his hiding place. The kidnappers had read the large house as a sign of wealth, but Ross, a dry-goods merchant, had been badly hurt by the financial panic of 1873. His wife's family offered to help with the money, and the police were brought in.

Kidnapping a child for ransom was almost unknown in the United States, and the case became a national sensation. Leading citizens offered rewards, the Pinkerton agency circulated vast numbers of posters and handbills with Charley's portrait, and a sentimental song, 'Bring Back Our Darling', sold widely. The letters went on through the summer and autumn, setting up handovers at which no one ever appeared to take the money. Then they stopped.

The break came by accident in the early hours of 14 December 1874, at Bay Ridge in Brooklyn. Two burglars broke into the summer house of Judge Charles Van Brunt, setting off an alarm in the house next door, where his brother Holmes lived. Holmes gathered armed men from his household and surprised them inside. William Mosher was killed at once. Joseph Douglas, mortally wounded, lived for a short time and told the men standing over him that there was no use lying now: he had helped to steal Charley Ross. What else he said is less certain. By some accounts he added that only Mosher knew where the boy was, or that the child would be returned within days. He gave no location.

Walter was taken to New York to see the bodies and identified both men as the strangers from the buggy. Mosher, whose nose had been eaten away by disease, matched the description Walter had given months earlier. But the only people who knew where Charley had been taken were dead.

Police then arrested William Westervelt, a former New York policeman who was Mosher's brother-in-law and had been in contact with the investigators and with Christian Ross during the long negotiations. His trial in Philadelphia lasted three weeks, from 30 August to 21 September 1875. Walter said Westervelt was not one of the men in the buggy, and he was not convicted of the abduction itself, but the jury found him guilty on three counts that accounts describe as conspiracy, and he was sentenced to seven years in solitary confinement at labour. He always denied knowing where the boy was.

No trace of Charley Ross was ever found. His parents spent the rest of their lives and a great part of their money following leads, and they interviewed hundreds of boys and later grown men who claimed to be their son. None was.