Chapter IV: Part 4

The return of Roger Tichborne was, to be sure, an exciting topic of the newspapers of the time, with the result that the romantic story of his voyage, the shipwreck of the _Bella_, his rescue, his wanderings, his final discovery at Wagga Wagga, and his happy return to his mother’s arms became known to millions of people, many of whom accepted the legend for its charm and color alone, without reference to its probability. Indeed, the tale had all the elements that make for popularity and credibility. The opening incident of unrequited love, the journey in quest of forgetfulness, the crossing of the Andes, the ordeal of shipwreck, the adventures in the Australian bush, and the intervention of the hand of Providence to drag him back to his native land, his title and his inheritance! Was there lacking any element of pathetic grace?

For those who saw in his ignorance of Tichborne family affairs and his sad illiteracy sober objections to the pretensions of the claimant, there was triple evidence of identification. Not only had Lady Tichborne recognized this wanderer as her son, but two old Tichborne servants had preceded her in their approval. It happened that one Bogle, an old negro servant, who had been intimate with Roger Tichborne as a boy, was living in New South Wales when the first claim was put forward by the man at Wagga Wagga. At the request of the dowager this man went to see the pretender and talked with him at length, first in the presence of those who were pressing the claim and later alone. The servant and the claimant reviewed a number of incidents in Roger Tichborne’s early life, and Bogle reported that he was satisfied. He became “Sir Roger’s” body servant and subsequently accompanied him to England. Later a former Tichborne gardener, Grillefoyle by name, who also had gone out to Australia, was sent to interview the Wagga Wagga butcher. The result was the same. He reported favorably to his former mistress, and it seems to have been mainly on the opinion of these two men that Lady Tichborne based her decision to disregard the difficulties inherent in the letters and to finance the return of the man to England. Their testimony, backed by the enduring hunger of her own heart, no doubt swayed her to credence when she finally stood face to face with the improbable apparition that pretended to be her son.

The claimant, though he had arrived in England in December, 1866, made various claims and went to court once or twice but did not make the definitive legal move to establish his position or to retrieve the baronetcy and estates until more than three years later. Suit was finally entered toward the end of 1870, and the trial came on before the court of common pleas in London on the eleventh of May, 1871. This was the beginning of one of the most intricate and remarkable law-trial dramas to be found in the records of modern nations.

The Tichborne pretender had used the years of delay for the purpose of gathering evidence and consolidating his case. He had sought out and won over to his side the trusted servants of the house, the family solicitor, students at Stonyhurst, officers of the carabineers and many others. The school, the officers’ mess, the Tichborne seat, and many other localities connected with the youth and young manhood of Roger Tichborne had all been visited. In addition, the obese claimant had further cultivated Lady Tichborne, who came to have more and more faith in him. Originally she had written:

“He confuses everything as if in a dream, but it will not prevent me from recognizing him, though his statements differ from mine.”

Before the suit was filed, and the case came to be tried, his memory improved remarkably; he corrected the many errors in his earlier statements, and his recollection quickly assimilated itself to that of Lady Tichborne. After he had been in England for a time even his handwriting grew to be unmistakably like that revealed in the letters written by Roger Tichborne before his disappearance.

There was, accordingly, a very palpable stuff of evidence in favor of the man from Australia. I have already said that the public accepted the stranger. It needs to be recorded that every new shred of similarity or circumstance that could be brought out only added to the conviction of the people. This was unquestionably Roger Tichborne and none other. Some elements asserted their opinion with a passion that was not far from violence, and the public generally regarded the hostile attitude of the Tichborne family as based on selfish motives. Naturally the other Tichbornes did not want to be dispossessed in favor of a man who had been confidently and perhaps jubilantly counted among the dead for more than fifteen years. The man in the street regarded the family position as natural, but reprehensible. How, it was asked, could there be any doubt when the boy’s mother was so certain? Was there anything surer than a mother’s instinct? To doubt seemed almost monstrous. Accordingly, the butcher of Wagga Wagga became a public idol, and the Tichborne family an object of aversion.

Nor is this in the least exaggerated. When it became known that the claimant had no funds with which to prosecute his case, the suggestion of a public bond issue was made and promptly approved. Bonds, with no other backing than the promise to refund the advanced money when the claimant should come into possession of his property, were issued, and so extreme was the public confidence in the validity of the claim that they were bought up greedily. In addition, a number of wealthy individuals became so interested in the affair and so convinced of the rights of the stranger, that they made him large personal advances. One man, Mr. Guilford Onslow, M. P., is said to have lent as much as 75,000 pounds, while two ladies of the Onslow family advanced 30,000 pounds and Earl Rivers is believed to have wasted as much as 150,000 pounds on the impostor.

Finally the civil trial of the suit took place. The proceedings began on the eleventh of May, 1871, and were not concluded until March, 1872. Sir John Coleridge, who defended for the Tichborne family and later became lord chief justice, cross-questioned the claimant for twenty-two days, and his speech in summing up is said to have been the longest ever delivered before a court in England. The actual taking of evidence required more than one hundred court days, and at least a hundred witnesses identified the claimant as Roger Tichborne. To quote from Major Arthur Griffiths’ account:

“These witnesses included Lady Tichborne,[6] Roger’s mother, the family solicitor, one baronet, six magistrates, one general, three colonels, one major, thirty non-commissioned officers and men, four clergymen, seven Tichborne tenants, and sixteen servants of the family.”

[6] A mistake, for the dowager Lady Tichborne died on March 12, 1868. Her damage had been done before the trial.

On the other hand, the defense produced only seventeen witnesses against the claimant, but it piled up a great deal of dark-looking evidence, and, in the course of his long and terrible interrogation of the plaintiff, Coleridge was able to bring out so many contradictions, such appalling blanks of memory, and such an accumulation of ignorances and blunders that the jury gave evidence of its inclination. Thereupon Serjeant Ballantine, the claimant’s leading counsel, abandoned the case.

On the order of the judge the claimant was immediately seized, charged with three counts of perjury, and remanded for criminal trial. This case was not called until April, 1873, and it proved a more formidable legal contest than the unprecedented civil action. The proceedings lasted more than a year, and it took the judge eighteen days to charge the jury; this in spite of the usual despatch of British trials. How long such a case might have hung on in the notoriously slow American courts is a matter for painful speculation.

This long and dramatic trial, full of emotional scenes and stirring incidents, moving slowly along to the accompaniment of popular unrest and violent partisanship in the newspapers, ended as did the civil action. The claimant was convicted of having impersonated Roger Tichborne, of having sullied the name of Miss Kate Doughty, and of having denied his true identity as Arthur Orton, the son of a Wapping butcher. The infant nephew of the real Roger Tichborne was, by this verdict, confirmed in his rights, and the claimant was sentenced to fourteen years imprisonment. Thus ended one of the most magnificent impostures ever attempted. Lady Tichborne did not live to witness this collapse of the fraud, or the humiliation of the man she had so freely accepted as her own son. The poor lady was shown to be a monomaniac, whose judgment had been unseated by the shipwreck of her beloved eldest boy.

I have purposely reserved the story, as brought out in the two trials, for direct narration, since it embraces the major romance connected with this celebrated case and needs to be told with regard to chronology and climax.

Arthur Orton, the true name of the claimant, was born to a Wapping butcher, at 69 High Street, in June, 1834, and was thus nearly five years younger than Roger Tichborne. He had been afflicted with St. Vitus’ dance as a boy and had been delinquent. As a result of this, he had been sent from home when fourteen years old, and he had taken a sea voyage which landed him, by a strange coincidence, at Valparaiso, Chile, in 1848, five years before Tichborne reached that port. Orton remained in Chile for several years, living with a family named Castro, at the small inland city of Melipillo, until 1851, when he returned to England and visited his parents at Wapping. In the following year he sailed for Tasmania and settled at Hobart Town.

_Copyright, Maull & Fox_

~~ ARTHUR ORTON ~~]

He operated a butcher shop in that place for some years, but made a failure of business and “disappeared into the brush,” owing every one. Trace of his movements then grew vague, but it is known that he was suspected of complicity in several highway robberies, which were staged in New South Wales a few years afterward, and he was certainly charged with horse stealing on one occasion. Later he appeared in Wagga Wagga and opened a small butcher shop under the name of Thomas Castro, which he had adopted from the family in Chile.

In a confession which Orton wrote and sold to a London newspaper[7] years after his release from prison in 1884, he gives an account of the origin of the fraud. He says that some time before Cubitt, of the missing-friends bureau, found him and induced him to write to Lady Tichborne, he and his chum at Wagga Wagga, one Slade, had seen some of the advertisements which the distraught lady was having published in antipodean newspapers. Orton soon adopted the pose of superior station, told Slade that he was, in fact, a nobleman incognito, and finally let his friends understand that he was Roger Tichborne. The whole thing had been begun in a spirit of innocent acting, for the purpose of noting the effect of such a revelation upon his friend. In view of what followed we cannot escape the conclusion that the swinishly fat butcher undertook this adventure because he was mentally disturbed, in the sense of being a pathological liar. A talent for impersonation and imposture is one of the marked characteristics displayed by this common type of mental defective, and Orton certainly possessed it, almost to the point of genius.

[7] _The People_, 1898.

Whatever the explanation of Orton’s original motive, the fact remains that his friend Slade was impressed by the butcher’s tale and thus encouraged Orton to proceed with the fraud, as did a lawyer to whom Orton-Castro was in debt. He soon went swaggering about, trying to talk like a gentleman and giving what must have been a most painful imitation of the manners of a lord. His rude neighbors can have had no better discrimination in such matters than the British public and Lady Tichborne herself, so it was not a difficult feat to play upon local credulity.

In the last month of 1865, when Cubitt sent an agent to Wagga Wagga, as a result of his correspondence with Lady Tichborne, the legend of Orton’s identity as Roger Tichborne was already firmly established in the minds of his townspeople, and the rumor thus gained its initial confirmation. The reader is asked to remember that Orton was known as Castro, and that his identification as Orton was a difficult feat, which remained unperformed until the final trial, more than eight years later.

Lady Tichborne herself supplied Castro and his backers in Australia with their first vital information. In seeking to identify her son she quite guilelessly wrote to Cubitt and others many details of her son’s appearance, history, education, and peculiarities. She also mentioned a number of intimate happenings. All these were seized upon by the butcher and used in framing his letters to the dowager. In spite of this fact, he made the many stupid blunders already referred to. Lady Tichborne saw the discrepancies, as has been remarked, but her monomania urged her to credence, and she sent the ex-servants, Bogle and Grillefoyle to investigate. How Orton-Castro managed to win them over is not easy to determine. For a time it was suspected that perhaps these men had been corrupted by those interested in having the claimant recognized; but the facts seem to discountenance any such belief. One of the outstanding characteristics of Orton was his ability to make friends and gain their confidence, of which fact there can be no more eloquent testimony than the long list of witnesses who appeared for him at his trials. The man who was able to persuade a mother, a sharp-witted solicitor, half a dozen higher army officers, six magistrates, and numberless soldiers and tenants who had known Roger Tichborne well, to accept and support him in his preposterous claim, did not need money to befool an old gardener and a negro valet.

Indeed, it was this personal gift, backed by the man’s abnormal histrionic bent and capacity for mimicry, that carried him so far and won him the support of so many individuals and almost the solid public. How far he was able to carry things has been suggested, but the details are so remarkable as to demand recounting.

Orton had almost no schooling. He quite naturally misspelled the commonest words and was normally guilty of the most appalling grammatical and rhetorical solecisms. He knew not a word of French, Latin, or of any other language, save a smattering of Spanish, picked up from the Castros while at Melipillo. He had never associated with any one who remotely approached the position of a gentleman, and the best imitation he can have contrived, must have been patterned after performances witnessed on the stages of cheap variety houses. Moreover he knew absolutely nothing about the Tichbornes, not even the fact that they were Catholics. He did not know where their estates were, nor where Roger had gone to school; yet he carried his imposture within an inch of success. Indeed, it was the opinion of disinterested observers at the trial of his civil action that he must have won the case had he stayed off the stand himself.

The feat of substitution this man almost succeeded in accomplishing was palpably an enormous one. He went to England, familiarized himself with the places Roger Tichborne had visited, studied French without managing to learn it, practiced the handwriting of the young Tichborne heir till it deceived even the experts, and likewise learned, in spite of his own lack of schooling, to imitate the English of Tichborne, and to misspell just those words on which the original Roger was weak. He crammed his memory with incidents and details picked up at every hand. He learned to talk almost like a gentleman. He worked with his voice until he got out of it most of the earthy harshness that belonged to it by nature. He cultivated good manners, courtly behavior, gentle ways, and a certain charming deference which went far toward convincing those who took him seriously and gave him their support. In short, he was able to perform an absolute prodigy of adaptiveness, but he could not, with all his talent, quite project himself into the personality and mentality of another and very different man. That, perhaps, is a simulation beyond human capacity.

So Arthur Orton, after all, the hero of this magnificent impersonation, went to prison for fourteen years, having made quite too grand a gesture and much too sad a failure. He served nearly eleven years and was then released in view of good conduct. Thereafter he wrote several confessions and retracted them all in turn. Finally, toward the end of his life, he changed his mind once more and prepared a final and fairly complete account of his life and misdeeds, from which some of the facts here used have been taken. He died in April, 1898.

The extent to which he had moved the public may be judged from an incident the year following Orton’s conviction and imprisonment. His chief counsel at the criminal trial had been Doctor Edward Kenealy, who was himself scathingly denounced by the court in connection with a misdirected attempt to have Orton identified as a castaway from the _Bella_ by a seaman who swore he had performed the rescue, but was shown to be a perjurer. After the trial Doctor Kenealy was elected to Parliament, so great was his popularity and that of his client. When Kenealy, soon after taking his seat, moved that the Tichborne case be referred to a royal commission, the House of Commons rejected the motion unanimously. This action inflamed the populace. There were angry street meetings, inflammatory speeches, and symptoms of a general riot. The troops had to be called and kept in readiness for instant action. Fortunately the sight of the soldiers sobered the mob, and the matter passed off with only minor bloodshed.

But ten years later, when Orton emerged from prison, there was almost no one to greet him. The fickle public, that had once been ready to storm the Houses of Parliament for him, had utterly forgotten the man. Nor was there any sign of public interest, when he died in obscurity and poverty fourteen years later. A few of his persistent followers gave him honorable burial as “Sir Roger Tichborne.”

The original enigma of the fate of Roger Tichborne, upon which this colossal structure of fraud and legal intricacy was founded, received, to be sure, not the slightest clarification from all the pother and feverish investigating. If ever there had been any good reason to doubt that the young Hampshire aristocrat went helplessly down with the stricken _Bella_ and her fated crew, none remained after the trials and the stupendous publicity they invoked.

VI

THE KIDNAPPERS OF CENTRAL PARK

On the afternoon of Sunday, May 14, 1899, Mrs. Arthur W. Clarke, the young wife of a British publisher’s agent residing at 159 East Sixty-fifth Street, New York, found this advertisement in the _New York Herald_, under the heading, “Employment Wanted:”

GIRL (20) as child’s nurse; no experience in city. Nurse, 274 _Herald_, Twenty-third Street.

The following Tuesday Mrs. Clarke took into her employment, as attendant for her little daughter, Marion, twenty months old, a pretty young woman, who gave the name of Carrie Jones and said she had come only two weeks before from the little town of Deposit, in upper New York State. The fact explained her lack of references. Mrs. Clarke, far from being suspicious because of the absence of employment papers, was impressed with the new child’s maid. She seemed to be a well-schooled, even-tempered young woman, considerably above her station, devoted to children, and, what was particularly noted, gentle in voice and demeanor--a jewel among servants.

Five days later pretty Carrie Jones and Baby Marion Clarke had become the center of one of the celebrated abduction cases and, for a little while, the nucleus of a dark and appalling mystery. To-day, after the lapse of twenty-five years, the effects of this striking affair are still to be read in the precautions hedging the employment of nursemaids in American cities and in the timidity of parents everywhere. It was one of those occasional and impressive crimes which leave their mark on social habits and public behavior long after the details or the incidents themselves have been forgotten.

The home of Marion Clarke’s parents in East Sixty-fifth Street is about two squares from the city’s great playground, Central Park, a veritable warren of children and their maids on every sunny day. Here Marion Clarke went almost every afternoon with her new nurse, and here the first scene of the ensuing drama was played.

At about ten thirty o’clock on the morning of the next Sunday, May 21, Carrie Jones went to Mrs. Clarke and asked if she might not take the little girl to the Park then, as the day was warm, and the sunshine inviting. In the afternoon it might be too hot. Mrs. Clarke and her husband consented, and the maid set off a little before eleven o’clock with Baby Marion tucked into a wicker carriage. She was told to return by one o’clock, so that the child might have her luncheon at the usual hour.

At twelve o’clock Mr. Clarke set off for a walk in the Park, also tempted from his home by the enchantments of the day. Mrs. Clarke did not accompany him, since she had borne a second baby only two or three months before, and she was still confined to the house.

Mr. Clarke entered the Park at the Sixty-sixth Street entrance and followed the paths idly along toward the old arsenal. Without especially seeking his daughter and her nurse, he nevertheless kept an eye out. A short distance from the arsenal he saw his child’s cart standing in front of the rest room; he approached, expecting to see the child. Both baby and nurse were gone, and the attendant explained that the child’s vehicle had been left in her care, while the nurse bore the baby to the menagerie.

“She said she’d be back in about an hour. Ought to be here any minute now,” prattled the public employee.

The father sat down to wait. Then he grew impatient and went off to wander through the animal gardens. In half an hour he was back at the rest room to find the attendant about to move the cart indoors and make her departure, her tour of duty being over.

Beginning to feel alarmed, Mr. Clarke resorted to the nearest policeman, who smiled, with the confidence of long experience, and advised him to go home. It was a common thing for a green country girl to get lost among the winding drives and walks of Central Park. No doubt the nurse would find her way home with the child in a little while.

Clarke went back to his house and waited. At two o’clock he went excitedly back to the Park and consulted the captain of police, with the same results. The officers were ordered to look for the nurse and child, but the alarm of the parent was not shared. He was once more told to go home and wait. At the same time he was rather pointedly told not to return with his annoying inquiries. Such temporary disappearances of children happened every day.

The harried father went home and paced the floor. His enervated wife wept and trembled with apprehension. At four o’clock the doorbell rang, and the father rushed excitedly to answer.

A bright-eyed, grinning boy stood in the vestibule and asked if Mr. Clarke lived here. Then he handed over a letter in a plain white envelope, lingering a moment, as if expecting a tip.

Clarke naturally tore the letter open with quaking fingers and read:

“MRS CLARK: Do not look for your nurse and baby. They are safe in our possession, where they will remain for the present. If the matter is kept out of the hands of the police and newspapers, you will get your baby back, safe and sound.

“If, instead, you make a big time about it and publish it all over, we will see to it that you never see her alive again. We are driven to this by the fact that we cannot get work, and one of us has a child dying through want of proper treatment and nourishment.

“Your baby is safe and in good hands. The nurse girl is still with her. If everything is quiet, you will hear from us Monday or Tuesday.

“THREE.”

The letter was correctly done, properly paragraphed, punctuated, and printed with a fine pen in a somewhat laborious simulation of writing-machine type. It also bore several markings characteristic of the journalist or publisher’s copy reader, especially three parallel lines drawn under the signature, “Three,” evidently to indicate capitals. The envelope was the common plain white kind, but the sheet of paper on which the note had been penned was of the white unglazed and uncalendared kind known as newsprint and used in all newspaper offices as copy paper. Accordingly it was at once suspected that the kidnapper must have been a newspaper man, printer, reader, or some one connected with a publishing house.

The Clarkes recalled that the nurse had been alone the preceding Friday evening and had been writing. Evidently she had prepared the note at that time and had been planning the abduction with foresight and care. People at once reached the conclusion that she was one of the agents of a great band of professional kidnappers. Accordingly every child and every mother in the city stood in peril.

To indicate the nature of the official search, we may as well reproduce Chief of Police Devery’s proclamation:

“Arrest for abduction--Carrie Jones, twenty-one years of age, five feet two inches tall, dark hair and eyes, pale face, high check bones, teeth prominent in lower jaw, American by birth; wore a white straw sailor hat with black band, military pin on side, blue-check shirt waist, black brilliantine skirt, black lace bicycle boots, white collar and black tie.

“Abducted on Sunday May 21, 1899, Marion Clarke, daughter of Arthur W. Clarke, of this city, and described as follows: twenty months old, light complexion, blue eyes, light hair, had twelve teeth, four in upper jaw, four in lower jaw, and four in back. There is a space between two upper front teeth, and red birthmark on back. Wore rose-colored dress, white silk cap, black stockings, and black buttoned shoes.

“Make careful inquiry and distribute these circulars in all institutions, foundling asylums, and places where children of the above age are received.”

A photograph of the missing child accompanied the description.

So the quest began. It was, however, by no means confined to Carrie Jones and the child. The New York newspaper reporters were early convinced that some one else stood behind the transaction, and they sought night and day for a man or woman connected either directly or distantly with their own profession. It was the day when the reporter prided himself especially on his superior acumen as a sleuth, with the result that every effort was made to give a fresh demonstration of journalistic enterprise and shrewdness.

Several days of the most feverish hunting, accompanied by a sharp rise in public emotionalism and the incipience of panic among parents, failed, however, to produce even the most shadowy results. Rumors and suspicions were, as usual, numerous and fatuous, but there came forth nothing that had the earmarks of the genuine clew. The arrests of innocent young women were many, and numerous little girls were dragged to police stations by the usual crop of fanatics.

Similarly, little Marion Clarke was reported from all parts of the surrounding country and even from the most distant places. One report had her on her way to England, another showed her as having sailed for Sweden, a third report was that she had been taken to Australia by a childless couple. All the other common hypotheses were, of course, entertained. A bereaved mother had taken little Marion to fill the void of her own loss. A childless woman had stolen the little girl and was using her to present as her own offspring, probably to comply with the provisions of some freak will.

But the hard fact remained that a letter had come within four hours after the abduction of the child, and before there had been the first note of alarm or publicity. Such an epistle could only have been written by the actual kidnapper, since no one else was privy to the fact that the girl was gone. In that communication the writer had stated his or her case very definitely and, while not actually demanding ransom or naming a sum, had clearly indicated the intention of making such a subsequent demand.

Theorizing was thus a bit sterile. The police, be it said to their credit, bothered themselves with no fine-spun hypotheses, but clung to the main track and sought the kidnappers. The _New York World_ offered a reward of a thousand dollars and put its most efficient reportorial workers into the search. The other newspapers also kept their men going in shifts. Every possible trail was followed to its end, every promising part of the city searched. Even the most inane reports were investigated with diligence.

Hundreds of persons had gone to the police with bits of information which they, no doubt, considered suggestive or important. The well-known Captain McClusky, then chief of detectives, received these often wearisome callers, read their mail, directed the investigation of their reports, and often remained at his desk late into the night.

Among a large number of women who reported to the detective chief was a Mrs. Cosgriff, a sharp and voluble Irishwoman, who maintained a rooming house in Twenty-seventh street, Brooklyn. Mrs. Cosgriff asserted that two women with a little girl of Marion Clarke’s age and general appearance had rented a room from her on the evening of the eventful Sunday and spent the night there. The next morning one of them had got the newspapers, gone to her room, remained secluded with the other woman and child for a time, and had then come out to announce that they would not remain another day. Mrs. Cosgriff thought she detected excitement in the manner of both women, but she had to admit that the child had made no complaint or outcry. Nevertheless, she felt that these were the wanted people.

Had she noted anything of special interest about the child, any peculiarity by which the parents might recognize her? Or had she heard the women mention any town or place to which they might have gone?

The lodging-house keeper considered a moment, confessed that her curiosity had led her to do a little spying, and recalled that she had heard one of the women mention a town. Either she had not heard the name distinctly, or she had forgotten part of it, but it was a name ending in berg or burg. She was certain of that. Fitchburg, Pittsburg, Williamsburg, Plattsburg--something like that. She did not know the reason for her feeling, but she was sure it was a place not very far from New York.

As to a peculiarity of the child, she had noted nothing except that it seemed good-humored, healthy, and clever. She had heard one of the women say: “Come on, baby! Show us how Mrs. Blank does.” Evidently the little girl had done some sort of impersonation.

Captain McClusky was inclined to place some credence in Mrs. Cosgriff’s account, but he saw no special promise in her revelations till he repeated the details to the agonized parents. At the mention of the childish impersonation, Mrs. Clarke leaped up in excitement.

“That was Marion!” she cried. “That’s one of her little tricks!”

It developed that the nurse, Carrie Jones, had spent hours playing with the child, teaching it to walk and pose like a certain affected woman friend of its mother. Undoubtedly then, Marion Clarke, Carrie Jones, and another woman had been in South Brooklyn the evening after the abduction and spent the night and part of the next day at Mrs. Cosgriff’s, leaving in the afternoon for a town whose name ended in burg or berg.

Now the chase began in earnest. The detectives made a list of towns with the burg termination, and one or two men were sent to each, with instructions to make a quiet, but thorough, search. Information of a confidential kind was also forwarded to the police departments of other cities, near and far. As a result a number of suspected young women were picked up. Indeed, the mystery was believed solved for a short time when a girl answering to the description of Carrie Jones was seized in Connecticut and held for the arrival of the New York detectives, when she began to act mysteriously and failed to give a clear account of herself. It was found, however, that she had other substantial reasons for being cryptic, and that she was, moreover, enjoying her little joke on the officials.

Again, in Pennsylvania a girl was held who would neither affirm nor deny that she was Carrie Jones, but let the local police have the very definite impression that they had in hand the much-hunted kidnapper. She turned out to be an unfortunate pathologue of the self-accusatory type. Her one real link with the affair was that her name happened to be Jones, a circumstance which got the members of this large and popular family of citizens no little discomfort during the pendency of the Clarke mystery.

Meantime no further communication had been received from the abductors. They had said, in the single note received from them, that they would communicate Monday or Tuesday, “if everything is quiet.” Everything, far from being quiet, had been in a most plangent uproar, which circumstances alone should have been recognized as the reason for silence. But, as is usual, the clear and patent explanation seemed not to contain enough for popular acceptance. More fanciful interpretations were put forward in the usual variety of forms. The note had been sent merely to misguide, and one might be sure the abductors did not intend to return Baby Marion. If the abductors were looking for ransom, why had no more been heard? Why had they chosen the daughter of a man who had slender means and from whom no large ransom could be expected? No, it was something more sinister still. Probably Little Marion was dead.

As the days dragged by, and there were still no conclusive developments, the public sympathy toward the stricken couple became expressive and dramatic. Crowds besieged the house in East Sixty-fifth Street in hope of catching sight of the bereaved mother. The father was greeted with cheers and sympathetic expressions whenever he came or went. Many offers of aid were received, and some came forward who wanted to pay whatever ransom might be demanded.

In these various ways the Marion Clarke case came to be a national and even an international sensation in the brief course of a week. Sympathy with the parents was instant and widespread, and passion against the abductors filled the newspaper correspondence columns with suggestions in favor of more stringent laws, plans for cruel vengeance on the kidnappers, complaints against the police, fulminations directed at quite every one connected with the unfortunate affair--all the usual expressions of helplessness and bafflement.

On the morning of Thursday, June 1st, eleven days after the disappearance, a woman with a little girl entered the general store at the little hamlet of St. John, N. Y., where Mrs. Ada B. Corey presided as postmistress to the community. The child was a little petulant and noisy; the woman very annoyed and nervous. Both were strangers. The woman gave her name as Beauregard and took one or two letters which had come for her. With these and the little girl she made a quick departure.

Because of the great excitement and wide publicity of the Clarke case, nothing of the sort could happen so near the city of New York without one inevitable result. The postmistress immediately notified Deputy Sheriff William Charleston of Rockland County, who had his office in St. John. Charleston was able to locate the woman and child before they could leave town, and he covertly followed them to the farmhouse of Frank Oakley, in the heart of the Ramapo Mountain region, near Sloatsburg, about nineteen miles from Haverstraw, on the Hudson River.

The rural officer discovered, by making a few inquiries, that this Mrs. Beauregard had been known in the vicinity for some months, and she had been occupying the Oakley house with her husband. Ten days previously, however, she had appeared with another woman and the little girl.

The dates tallied; the town was Sloatsburg; there were, or had been, two women; the place was ideal for hiding, and the child was of the proper age and description. Sheriff Charleston quickly summoned some other officers, descended on the place, seized the woman, the child, and the husband, locked them into the nearest jail, and sent word to Captain McClusky.

New York detectives and reporters arrived by the next train, and Mr. Clarke came a short time later. As soon as he was on the ground, the party proceeded to the jail, and the weeping father caught his wandering girl into happy arms. She was indeed Marion Clarke. Within ten minutes every available telephone and telegraph wire was humming the triumphant message back to New York.

But, in the recovery of the child, the inner mystery of the case only began to unfold itself. The woman seized at Sloatsburg was not Carrie Jones. Neither had the Clarkes ever seen her before. She gave the name of Mrs. George Beauregard, and, when questioned about this matter, later “admitted” that she was really Mrs. Jennie Wilson. Her story was that a couple had brought the child to her, saying that it needed to remain in the mountains for the summer. They had paid her for the little girl’s board and care. She declared she did not know their address, but they would certainly be on hand in the fall to reclaim their baby.

The man arrested at the farmhouse said that he was James Wilson; that he had no employment at the time, except working on the farm, and that he knew nothing of the baby beyond what his wife had revealed. He didn’t interfere in such affairs.

Both were returned to New York after some slight delay. The detectives and the newspapers at once went to work on the problem of discovering who they were, and what had become of Carrie Jones.

Meantime the abducted child was being brought home to her distracted mother. A crowd of several thousand persons had gathered in Sixty-fifth Street, apprised of the little girl’s impending return by the evening newspapers. She was greeted with cheers, loaded with presents, saluted by the public officials, and treated as the heroine that circumstance and good police work had made her. Photographs of her crowded the journals, and she was altogether the most famous youngster of the day. Her parents later removed to Boston with her, and they were heard of in the succeeding years when attempts were made to release the imprisoned kidnappers, or whenever there was another kidnapping or missing-child case. In time they passed back into obscurity, and Marion Clarke disappeared from the glare of notoriety.

The work of identifying the man and woman caught in the Sloatsburg farmhouse proceeded rapidly. Freddy Lang, the boy who had brought the note to the Clarke door on that painful Sunday afternoon, immediately recognized Mrs. Beauregard-Wilson as the woman who had handed him the missive and a five-cent piece in Second Avenue and asked him to deliver the note to Mrs. Clarke. Mrs. Cosgriff came from Brooklyn and said that the prisoner was one of the two women who had stayed at her house on that Sunday night. It was apparent then that one of the active kidnappers, and not an innocent tool, had been caught. The woman and her husband, however, denied everything and refused to give any information about themselves.

Meantime the newspapers left no stone unturned in an attempt to make the identification complete, discover just who the prisoners were, and establish their connections with others believed to have financed the kidnapping. Something deeper and more sinister than mere abduction for ransom was suspected, and it seemed to be indicated by certain facts that will appear presently. Accordingly the reporters and journalistic investigators were conducting a fresh search on very broad lines.

On the evening of the second of June this hunt came to an abrupt close, when a reporter traced the mysterious Carrie Jones to the home of an aunt at White Oak Ridge, near Summit, New Jersey, and got from her the admission that she was, in fact, Bella Anderson, a country girl who had been for no long period a waitress in the Mills Hotel, in Bleecker Street, New York. Bella Anderson readily told who the captive man and woman were, and how the kidnapping plot had been concocted and carried out. Her story may be summarized to clear the ground.

Bella Anderson was born in London, the daughter of a retired soldier who had seen service in India and Africa. At the age of fourteen, her parents being dead, she and her brother, Samuel, had set out for America and been received by relatives in the States of New York and New Jersey. The girl had been recently schooled and aided financially both by her brother and other relatives. The year before the kidnapping she had gone to New York to make her own way. At the Mills Hotel, in the course of her duties, she had met Mr. and Mrs. George Beauregard Barrow. They had been kind to her and become her intimates, nursing her through an illness and otherwise befriending a lonely creature.

The Barrows, this being the true name of the arrested pair, had persuaded her that the work of waiting on table in a hotel was too arduous and advised her to seek employment in a private family as nurse to a child. In this way, they told her, she would have an opportunity to seize some rich man’s darling and exact a heavy ransom for its return. All this part of the business they would manage for her. All she needed to do was to seize the child, a very easy matter. For this she was to receive one half of whatever ransom might be collected.

Accordingly, Bella Anderson had advertised for a place as child’s nurse. Several parents answered. At the first two homes she was just too late to procure employment, other applicants having anticipated her. So it was mere chance that took her to the Clarke home and determined Marion Clarke to be the victim.

The girl went on to recite that the Barrows had coached her carefully. They had instructed her in the matter of her lack of references, in the manner of taking the child, in her conduct at her employers’ home, in the details of an inoffensive account of her past, and so on through the list. They had been the mentors and the “master minds.”

After she had been employed at the Clarkes’ a few days and had taken little Marion to the Park the first time, Mrs. Barrow had consulted with the nurse and instructed her to be ready for the abduction on the next excursion. Bella Anderson said she had suffered many qualms and been unable to bring herself to the deed for several visits. Each time Mrs. Barrow met her in the Park and was ready to flee with the little girl. Finally the nurse reached the point of yielding. Sunday noon she found Mrs. Barrow waiting for her, as usual. They left the baby’s cart at the rest room, carried the child to a remote place, changed its coat and cap, and then set out at once for South Brooklyn, where they took the room from Mrs. Cosgriff. This matter attended to, the women exchanged clothes, and Mrs. Barrow returned to Manhattan, gave the note to the boy, and turned back to Brooklyn. The next morning she had seen the headlines in the newspapers, realized that the game was dangerous, and set out quickly for Sloatsburg, where the farmhouse had been rented in advance by Barrow. Two days later Bella Anderson had been sent away because the Barrows felt she was being too hotly sought and might be recognized in the neighborhood.

This story was readily confirmed, though the Barrows naturally sought to shield themselves. It was also discovered that Mrs. Barrow had been an Addie McNally, born and reared in up-State New York, and that she, with her husband, had once owned a small printing establishment, thus explaining the chirographical characteristics of the Clarke abduction note. She was about twenty-five years old, shrewd, capable and not unattractive.

Investigation brought out romantic and pathetic facts concerning the husband. He had apparently had no better employment in New York than that of motorman in the hire of an electric cab company then operating in that city. But this derelict was the son of distinguished parents. His father was Judge John C. Barrow of the superior court of Little Rock, Arkansas, and the descendant of other persons politically well known in the South. George Beauregard Barrow--his middle name being that of the famous Confederate commander at the first battle of Bull Run or Manassas, to whom distant relationship was claimed--had been incorrigible from childhood. In early manhood he had been connected with kidnapping threats and plots in his home city and with assaults on his enemies, with the result that he was finally sent away, cut off and told to make his own berth in the world. Judge Barrow tried to aid his unfortunate son at the trial, but public feeling was too sorely aroused.

George Barrow and Bella Anderson were tried before Judge Fursman and quickly convicted. Barrow was sentenced to fourteen years and ten months, and the Anderson girl to four years, both judge and jury accepting her statement that she had been no more than a pawn in the hands of shrewder and older conspirators. Mrs. Barrow, sensing the direction of the wind, took a plea of guilty before Judge Werner, hoping for clemency. The court, however, said that her crime merited the gravest reprehension and severest punishment. He fixed her term at twelve years and ten months.

These trials were had, and the sentences imposed within six weeks of the kidnapping, the courts having acted with despatch. While the cases were pending, Barrow, Mrs. Barrow, and the Anderson girl had again and again been asked to reveal the names of others who had induced them to their crime or had financed them. All said there had been no other conspirators, but the feeling persisted that Barrow had acted with the support of professional criminals, or of some enemy of the Clarkes, either of whom had supplied him with considerable sums of money.

This belief, which was specially strong with some of the newspapers, was predicated upon two facts.

On the morning of Thursday, May 25, four days after the abduction of Marion Clarke, there had appeared in the _New York Herald_ the following advertisement:

“M. F. two thousand dollars reward will be O. K. in Baby Clarke case. Write again and let me know when and where I can meet you Thursday evening. Don’t fail--strictly confidential.”

Neither the Clarkes, the newspapers, nor any persons acting for them knew anything about a two-thousand-dollar-reward offer or had communicated with any one who had been promised such a sum. Hence there were only two possible explanations of the advertisement. Either it had been inserted by some unbalanced person who wanted to create a stir--the kind of restless neurotic who projects his unwelcome apparition into every sensation--or there was really some dark force moving behind the kidnapping.

A second fact led many to persist in this latter notion. In spite of the fact that George Barrow had been disowned at home and driven from his town, and opposed to the circumstances that he had worked at common and ill-paid jobs, had been unable to pay his rent for eleven months, had been seen in the shabbiest clothes and was known to be in need--the only force that might have prompted him to attempt a kidnapping--he was found to have a considerable sum in his pockets when searched at the jail; he informed his wife that he would get plenty of cash for their defense, and he was shown to have expended a fairly large sum on the planning of the crime, the traveling and other expenses, the rent of the farmhouse, the needs of Bella Anderson, and for his own amusement. Where had this come from?

Not only the public and the newspapers, but Detective Chief McClusky were long occupied with this enigma. Barrow himself gave various specious explanations and finally refused to say more. Hints and bruits of all kinds were current. Many said that Arthur Clarke could furnish the answer if he would, an accusation which the harried father indignantly rejected.

In the end the guilty trio went to prison, the Clarkes removed to Boston, the public interest flagged, and the mystery remained unsolved.

VII

DOROTHY ARNOLD

On the afternoon of Monday, December 12, 1910, a young woman of the upper social world vanished from the pavement of Fifth Avenue. Not only did she disappear from the center of one of the busiest streets on earth, at the sunniest hour of a brilliant winter afternoon, with thousands within sight and reach, with men and women who knew her at every side, and with officers of the law thickly strewn about her path; but she went without discernible motives, without preparation, and, so far as the public has ever been permitted to read, without leaving the dimmest clew to her possible destination.

These are the peculiarities which mark the Dorothy Arnold case as one of the most irritating puzzles of modern police history, a true mystery of the missing.

It is one of the maxims in the administration of absent-persons bureaus that disappearing men and women, no matter how carefully they may plan, regardless of all natural astuteness, invariably leave behind some token of their premeditation. Similarly, it is a truism that, barring purposeful self-occultation, the departure of an adult human being from so crowded a thoroughfare can be set down only to abduction or to mnemonic aberration. Remembering that a crime must have its motivation, and that cases of amnesia almost always are marked by previous symptoms and by fairly early recovery, the recondite and baffling aspects of this affair become manifest; for there was never the least hint of a ransom demand, and the girl who vanished was conspicuous for rugged physical and mental health.

Thus, to sum up the affair, a disappearance which had from the beginning no standing in rationality, being logically both impenetrable and irreconcilable, remains, at the end of nearly a score of years, as obstinate and perplexing as ever--publicly a gall to human curiosity, an impossible problem for reason and analytical power.

Dorothy Arnold was past twenty-five when she walked out of her father’s house into darkness that shining winter’s day. She was at the summit of her youth, rich, socially preferred, blessed with prospects, and to every outer eye, uncloudedly happy. Her father, a wealthy importer of perfumes, occupied a dignified house on East Seventy-ninth Street, in the center of one of the best residential districts, with his wife and four children--two sons and two daughters. Mr. Arnold’s sister was the wife of Justice Peckham of the United States Supreme Court, and the entire family was socially well known in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York. His missing daughter had been educated at Bryn Mawr and figured prominently in the activities of “the younger set” in all these cities. All descriptions set her down as having been active, cheerful, intelligent, and talented.

The accepted story is that Miss Arnold left her father’s home at about half past eleven on the morning of her disappearance, apparently to go shopping for an evening gown. She appears to have had an appointment with a girl friend, which she broke earlier in the morning, saying that she was to go shopping with her mother. A few minutes before she left the house, the young woman went to her mother’s room and said she was going out to look for the dress. Her mother remarked that if her daughter would wait till she might finish dressing, she would go along. The girl demurred quietly, saying that it wasn’t worth the bother, and that she would telephone if she found anything to her liking. So far as her parent could make out, the girl was not anxious to be alone. She was no more than casual and seemed especially happy and well.