Chapter V: Part 5

At noon, half an hour after she had left her home, Miss Arnold went into a shop at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, where she bought a box of candy and had it charged on her father’s account. At about half past one she was at Brentano’s bookshop, Twenty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue. Here she bought a volume of fiction, also charging the item to her father.

Whether she was recognized again at a later hour is in doubt. She met a girl chum and her mother in the street some time during the early part of the afternoon and stopped to gossip for a few moments; but whether this incident occurred just before or after her visit to the bookstore could not be made certain. At any rate, she was not seen later than two o’clock.

When the young woman failed to appear at home for dinner, there was a little irritation, but no concern. Her family decided that she had probably come across friends and forgotten to telephone her intention of dining out. But when midnight came, and there was still no word from the young woman, her father began to feel uneasy and communicated by telephone with the homes of various friends, where his daughter might have been visiting. When he failed to discover her in this way, Mr. Arnold consulted with his personal attorney, and a search was begun.

The reader is asked to note that there was no public announcement of the young woman’s absence for more than six weeks. Just why it was considered wise to proceed discreetly and privately cannot be more than surmised. This action on the part of her family has always been considered suggestive of a well-defined suspicion and a determination to prevent its publication. At any rate, it was not until January 26, that revelation was made to the newspapers, at the strong urging of W. J. Flynn, then in charge of the New York detectives.

In those six weeks, however, there had been no idleness. As soon as it was apparent that the girl could not be merely visiting, private detectives were summoned, and a formal quest begun. Her room and its contents revealed nothing of a positive character. She had left the house in a dark-blue tailored suit, small velvet hat and street shoes, carrying a silver-fox muff and satin bag, probably containing less than thirty dollars in money. Her checkbook had been left behind; nor had there been any recent withdrawals of uncommon amounts. No part of the girl’s clothing had been packed or taken along; none of her more valuable jewelry was missing; no letter had been left, and nothing pointed to preparation of any sort.

A search of her correspondence revealed, however, a packet of letters from a man of a well-known family in another city. When, somewhat later, Mr. Arnold was summoned by the district attorney and asked to produce the letters, he swore that they had been destroyed, but added that they contained nothing of significance.

It developed, too, that, while her parents were in Maine in the preceding autumn, Dorothy Arnold had gone to Boston on the pretext of visiting a school chum, resident in the university suburb of Cambridge; whereas she had actually stopped at a Boston hotel and had pawned about five hundred dollars’ worth of personal jewelry with a local lender, taking no trouble, however to conceal her name or home address. It was shown that the man of the letters was registered at another Boston hotel on the day of Dorothy’s visit; but he denied having seen her or been with her on this occasion, and there was no way of proving to the contrary. The date of this Boston visit was September 23, about two and a half months before Miss Arnold’s disappearance. The police were never able to establish any connection between the Boston visit, the pawning of the jewels, and the subsequent events, so that the reader must rely at this point upon his own conjecture.

Before the public was made acquainted with the vanishment of the young heiress, both her mother and brother and the man of the letters had returned from Europe, and the latter took part in the search for her. He disclaimed, from the beginning, all knowledge of Miss Arnold’s plans, proclaimed that he knew of no reason why she should have left home, announced that he had considered himself engaged to marry her, and he pretended, at least, to believe that she would shortly appear. Needless to say, a close watch was secretly maintained over the young man and all his movements for many months. In the end, however, the police seemed satisfied that he knew no more than any one else of Dorothy Arnold’s possible movements. He dropped out of the case almost as suddenly as he had entered it.

In the six weeks before the public was acquainted with the facts, private detectives, and later the public police, had worked unremittingly on the several possible theories covering the case. There were naturally a number of possibilities: First, that the girl had met with a traffic accident and been taken unconscious to a hospital; second, that she had been run down by some reckless motorist, killed, and carried off by the frightened driver and secretly buried; third, that she had been kidnapped; fourth, that she had eloped; fifth, that she had been seized by an attack of amnesia and was wandering about the country, unable to give any clew to her identity; sixth, that she had quarreled with her parents and chosen this method of bringing them to terms by the pangs of anxiety; seventh, that she had been arrested as a shoplifter and was concealing her identity for shame.

As the weeks went by, all these ideas were exploded. The hospitals and morgues were searched in vain; the records of traffic accidents were scanned with the utmost care; the roadhouses and resorts in all directions from the city were visited, and their owners closely questioned. Cemeteries and lonely farms were inspected, the passenger lists of all departing ships examined, and later sailings observed. The authorities in European and other ports were notified by cable, and the captains of ships at sea were informed by wireless, now for the first time employed in such a quest. The city jails and prisons were visited and every female prisoner noted. Similar precautions were taken in other American cities, where the hospitals, infirmaries, and morgues were also subjected to search. Marriage-license bureaus, offices of physicians, sanitariums, cloisters, boarding schools, and all manner of possible and impossible retreats were made the objects of detective attention--all without result.

The notion that the girl might have been abducted and held for ransom was discarded at the end of a few weeks, when no word had come from possible kidnappers. The thought of a disagreement was dismissed, with the most emphatic denials coming from all the near and distant members of Miss Arnold’s family. The idea of an elopement also had to be discarded after a time, and so also the theory of an aphasic or amnesic attack.

After the police finally insisted on the publication of the facts and the summoning of public aid, and after the various early hypotheses had one and all failed to stand the test of scrutiny and time, various more and more fantastic or improbable conjectures came into currency. One was that the girl might have been carried off to some distant American town or foreign port. Another was that some secret enemy, whose name and grievance her parents were loath to reveal, had made away with the young woman, or was holding her to satisfy his spite. The public excitement was nigh boundless, and ingenious fabulations or diseased imaginings came pouring in upon the harried police and the distracted parents with every mail.

Rumors and false alarms multiplied enormously. As the story of the young woman’s disappearance continued to occupy the leading columns of the daily papers, day upon day, the disordered fancy of the unstable elements of the population came into vigorous play. Dorothy Arnold was reported from all parts of the country, and both the members of her family and numberless detectives were kept on the jump, running down the most absurd reports on the meager possibility that there might be a grain of truth in one of them. Soon there appeared the pathological liars and self-accusers, with whose peculiarities neither the police nor the public were then sufficiently acquainted. In more than a hundred cities--judging from a tabulation of the newspaper reports of that day--women of the most diverse ages and types came forward with the suggestion that they concealed within themselves the person of the missing heiress. Girls of fourteen made the claim and women of fifty. Such absurdities soon had the police in a state of weary skepticism, but the Arnold family and the newspaper-reading public were still upset by every fresh report.

Naturally enough, the fact that a prominent young woman, enjoying the full protection of wealth and social distinction, could apparently be snatched away from the most populous quarter of a world city, struck terror to the hearts of many. If a Dorothy Arnold could be ravished from the familiar sidewalks of her home city, what fate waited for the obscure stranger? Was it not possible that some new and strange kind of criminal, equipped with diabolic cunning and actuated by impenetrable motives, was launched upon a campaign of woman stealing? Who was safe?

One of the popular beliefs of the time was that Miss Arnold might have gone into some small and obscure shop at a time when there was no other customer in the place and been there seized, bound, gagged, and made ready for abduction. The notion was widely accepted for the dual reason that it provided a set of circumstances under which it was possible to explain the totally unwitnessed snatching of the young woman and, at the same time, set a likely locale, since there are thousands of such little shops in New York. As a result of the currency of this story, many women hesitated to enter the establishments of cobblers, bootblacks, stationers, confectioners, tobacconists, and other petty tradesmen, especially in the more outlying parts of the city. Many bankruptcies of these minor business people resulted, as one may read from the court records.

A similar fabulation, to the effect that the girl might have entered a cruising taxicab, operated by a sinister ex-convict, and been whisked off to some secret den of crime and vice, was almost as popular, with the result that cabs did a poor business with women clients for more than a year afterward. An old hackman, who was arrested in that feverish time because of the hysteria of a woman passenger, tells me that even to-day he encounters women who grow suspicious and excited, if he happens to drive by some unaccustomed route, a thing often done in these days to avoid the congestion on the main streets.

While all this popular burning and sweating was going on, the police and many thousands of private investigators, professional and amateur, were busy with the problem of elucidating some motive to fit the case. Reducing the facts to their essentials and then trying to reason, the possibilities became a very general preoccupation. The deductive steps may be briefly set down. First, there were the alternative propositions of voluntary or involuntary absence, of hiding or abduction. Second, if the theory of forced absence was to be entertained, there were only two general possibilities--abduction for ransom or kidnapping by some maniac. The ideas of murder, detention for revenge, and the like, come under the latter head. The notion of a fatal accident had been eliminated.

The proposition of voluntary absence presented a more complex picture. Suicide, elopement, amnesia, personal rebellion, an unrevealed family situation, a forbidden love affair, the desire to hide some social lapse--any of these might be the basis of a self-willed absence of a permanent or temporary kind.

The failure, after months of quest, to find any trace of a body, seemed to have rendered the propositions of murder and of suicide alike improbable. Elopement and amnesia were likewise rendered untenable theories by time, nor was it long before the conceit of a disagreement was relegated to the improbabilities.

Justly or unjustly, a good many practical detectives came after a time to the opinion that the case demanded a masculinizing of the familiar adage into _cherchez l’homme_. More seasoned officers inclined to the idea that there must have been some man, possibly one whose identity had been successfully concealed by the distraught girl. Again, as is common in such cases, there was the very general feeling that Miss Arnold’s family knew a good deal more than had been revealed either to the police or the public, and there was something about the long delay in reporting the case and the subsequent guarded attitude of the girl’s relatives that seemed to confirm this perhaps idle suspicion.

The trouble with a great many of the theories evolved in the first months following the disappearance of Dorothy Arnold, was that they fitted only a part of the facts and probabilities. After all, here was an intricate and baffling situation, involving a person who, because of position, antecedents, and social situation, might be expected to act in a conventional manner. Accordingly, any explanation that fitted the physical facts and was still characterized by extraordinary details might reasonably be discarded.

It was several years before the girl’s father finally declared his belief in her death, and it is a fact that a sum of not less than a hundred thousand dollars was expended, first and last, in running down all sorts of rumors and clews. The search extended to England, Italy, France, Switzerland, Canada--even to the Far East and Australia. But all trails led to vacancy, and all speculations were at length empty. No dimmest trace of the girl was ever found, and no genuinely satisfactory explanation of the strange story has ever been put forward.

It is true there have been, at times in the intervening dozen or more years, rumors of a solution. Persons more or less closely connected with the official investigation have on several occasions been reported as voicing the opinion that the Arnold family was in possession of the facts, but denials have followed every such declaration. On April 8, 1921, for instance, Captain John H. Ayers, in charge of the Missing Persons Bureau of the New York Police Department, told an audience at the High School of Commerce that the fate of Miss Arnold had at that time been known to the police for many months, and that the case was regarded as closed. This pronouncement received the widest publicity in the New York and other American newspapers, but Captain Ayers’ statement was immediately and vigorously controverted by John S. Keith, the personal attorney of the girl’s father, who declared that the police official had told a “damned lie,” and that the mystery was as deep as ever it had been. The police chiefs later issued interviews full of dubiety and qualifications, the general tenor being that Captain Ayers had spoken without sufficient knowledge of the facts.

Just a year later the father of this woman of mysterious tragedy died, the last decade of his life beclouded by the sorrowful story and painful doubt. In his will was this pathetic clause:

“I make no provision in this will for my beloved daughter, H. C. Dorothy Arnold, as I am satisfied that she is dead.”

The death of Miss Arnold’s father once more set the rumor mongers to work and a variety of tales, bolder than had been uttered before, were circulated through the demi-world of New York and hinted in the newspapers. These rumors have not been printed directly and there has thus been no need of denial on part of the family. It must be said at once that they are mere bruits, mere attempts on the part of the cynical town to invent a set of circumstances to fit what few facts and alleged facts are known.

On the other hand, the newspapers have been only too ready to take seriously the most absurd fabulations. In 1916, for instance, a thief arrested at Providence, R. I., for motives best known to himself, declared that he had helped to bury Dorothy Arnold’s body in the cellar of a house about ten miles below West Point, near the J. P. Morgan estate. Commissioner Joseph A. Faurot, Captain Grant Williams and a number of detectives provided with digging tools set out for the place in motor cars, closely pursued by other cars containing the newspaper reporters. The police managed to shake off the newspaper men and reached the house. There they dug till they ached and found nothing whatever.

Returning to New York, the detectives left their shovels, some of which were rusty or covered with a red clay, at a station house and there the reporters caught a glimpse of them. The result was that a bit of rust or ferrous earth translated itself into blood and thence into headlines in the morning papers, declaring that Dorothy Arnold’s body had been found. Denials followed within hours, to be sure.

So the case rests.

Perhaps, in some year to come, approaching death will open the lips of one or another who knows the secret and has been sealed to silence by the fears and needs of life. But it is just as likely that the words of her dying parent contain as much as can be known of the truth about the missing Dorothy Arnold.

VIII

EDDIE CUDAHY AND PAT CROWE

At seven o’clock on the bright winter evening of December 18, 1900, Edward A. Cudahy, the multimillionaire meat packer, sent his fifteen-year-old son to the home of a friend, with a pile of periodicals. The boy, Edward A., junior, but shortly to be known over two continents as Eddie Cudahy, left his father’s elaborate house at No. 518 South Thirty-seventh Street, Omaha, walked three blocks to the home of Doctor Fred Rustin, also in South Thirty-seventh Street, delivered the magazines, turned on his heel and disappeared.

Shortly before nine o’clock the rich packer noticed that his son had not returned, and he observed to his wife that the Rustins must have invited the boy to stay. Mrs. Cudahy felt a little nervous and urged her husband to make sure. He telephoned to the Rustin home and was promptly told that Eddie had been there, left the papers and departed immediately, almost two hours before.

The Cudahys were instantly alarmed and convinced that something out of the ordinary had befallen the boy. He had promised to return immediately to consult with his father over a Christmas list. He was known to have no more than a few cents in his pockets, and unexplained absences from home at night were unprecedented with him.

The beef magnate notified the Omaha police without long hesitation, and the quest for the missing rich boy was on. All that night detectives, patrolmen, servants, and friends of the family went up and down the streets and alleys of the overgrown Nebraska packing town, with its strange snortings from the cattle pens, its grunting railroad engines, its colonies of white and black laborers from distant lands, its brawling night life and its pretentious new avenues where the brash and sudden rich resided. At dawn the searchers congregated, sleepless, at the police headquarters or the Cudahy mansion, baffled and affrighted. Not the first clew to the boy had been found, and no one dared to whisper the clearest suspicions.

By noon all Omaha was in turmoil. The great packing houses had practically stopped their activity; the police had been called in from their usual assignments and put to searching the city, district by district; the resorts and gambling houses were combed by the detectives; the anxious father had telegraphed to Chicago for twenty Pinkerton men, and the usual flight of mad rumors was in the air.

One man reported that he had seen two boys, one of them with a broken arm, leave a street car at the city limits on the preceding night. The fact that the car line passed near the Cudahy home was enough to lead people to think one of the boys must have been Eddie Cudahy. As a result, his known young friends were sought out and questioned; the schools were gone over for the boy with a broken arm, and all the street-car crews in town were examined by the police.

By the middle of the afternoon, the newspapers issued special editions, which bore the news that a letter had been received from kidnappers. According to this account, a man on horseback had ridden swiftly past the Cudahy home at nine o’clock that morning and tossed a letter to the lawn. This had been picked up by one of the servants, and it read as follows:

“We have your son. He is safe. We will take good care of him and return him for a consideration of twenty-five thousand dollars. We mean business.

“Jack.”

With the publication of this alleged communication, even more fantastic reports began to reach the police and the parents. One young intimate of the family came in and reported in all seriousness that he had seen a horse and trap standing in Thirty-seventh Street, near the Cudahy home on several occasions in the course of the preceding week. The fact that it looked like any one of a hundred smart rigs then in common use did not seem to detract from its fancied significance.

Another neighbor reported that three days before the kidnapping he had seen a covered light wagon standing at the curb in the street, a block to the rear of the Cudahy home. One man on the seat was talking with another, who was standing on the walk, and, as the narrator passed, they had lowered their voices to a whisper. He had not thought the incident suggestive until after the report of the kidnapping. And the police, quite forgetting the instinctive universal habit of lowering the voice when strangers pass, sent out squads of men to find the wagon and the whisperers!

In short, the town was excited out of all sanity, and the very forces which should have maintained calmness and acted with all possible self-possession seemed the most headless. All the officials accomplished was the brief detention of several innocent persons, the theatrical raiding of a few gambling houses, and the further excitation of the citizenry, always ready to respond to police histrionism.

To add an amusing exhibit to the already heavy store of evidence on this last point, it may be noted with amusement, not to say amazement, that the kidnapping letter, which had so agitated the public, was itself a police fake, and the rider who had thrown it on the lawn was a clumsy invention.

Meantime, however, a genuine kidnapping letter had reached the hands of Mr. Cudahy. A little before nine o’clock on the morning of the nineteenth, after he too had been up all night, the family coachman was walking across the front lawn when he saw a piece of red cloth tied to a stout wooden stick about two feet long. He approached it, looked at it suspiciously, and finally picked it up, to find that an envelope was wrapped about the stick and addressed in pencil to Mr. Cudahy. Evidently some one had thrown this curiously prepared missive into the yard in the course of the preceding night, for there had been numbers of policemen, detectives, and neighbors on the lawn and on the walks in front of the property since dawn.

The letter, with its staff and red cloth, was immediately carried to the packer, who read with affrighted eyes this remarkable and characteristic communication:

“OMAHA, December 19, 1900.

“Mr. Cudahy:

“We have kidnapped your child and demand twenty-five thousand dollars for his safe return. If you give us the money, the child will be returned as safe as when you last saw him; but if you refuse, we will put acid in his eyes and blind him. Then we will immediately kidnap another millionaire’s child that we have spotted, and we will demand one hundred thousand dollars, and we will get it, for he will see the condition of your child and realize the fact that we mean business and will not be monkeyed with or captured.

“Get the money all in gold--five, ten, and twenty-dollar pieces--put it in a grip in a white wheat sack, get in your buggy alone on the night of December 19, at seven o’clock p.m., and drive south from your house to Center Street; turn west on Center Street and drive back to Ruser’s Park and follow the paved road toward Fremont.

“When you come to a lantern that is lighted by the side of the road, place your money by the lantern and immediately turn your horse around and return home. You will know our lantern, for it will have two ribbons, black and white, tied on the handle. You must place a red lantern on your buggy where it can be plainly seen, so we will know you a mile away.

“This letter and every part of it must be returned with the money, and any attempt at capture will be the saddest thing you ever done. _Caution! For Here Lies Danger._

“If you remember, some twenty years ago Charley Ross was kidnapped in New York City, and twenty thousand dollars ransom asked. Old man Ross was willing to give up the money, but Byrnes[8] the great detective, with others, persuaded the old man not to give up the money, assuring him that the thieves would be captured. Ross died of a broken heart, sorry that he allowed the detectives to dictate to him.

[8] Mr. Crowe had his criminal history somewhat vaguely in mind.

“This letter must not be seen by any one but you. If the police or some stranger knew its contents, they might attempt to capture us, although entirely against your wish; or some one might use a lantern and represent us, thus the wrong party would secure the money, and this would be as fatal to you as if you refused to give up the money. So you see the danger if you let the letter be seen.

“Mr. Cudahy, you are up against it, and there is only one way out. Give up the coin. Money we want, and money we will get. If you don’t give it up, the next man will, for he will see that we mean business, and you can lead your boy around blind the rest of your days, and all you will have is the damn copper’s sympathy.

“Do the right thing by us, and we will do the same by you. If you refuse you will soon see the saddest sight you ever seen.

“Wednesday, December 19th. This night or never. Follow these instructions, or harm will befall you or yours.”

There was no signature. I have quoted the letter exactly, with the lapses in grammar and spelling preserved. It was written in pencil on five separate pieces of cheap note paper and in a small, but firm, masculine hand. It was read to the chief police authorities soon after its receipt. Just why they felt compelled to announce that it had come, and to invent the absurd draft they issued, remains for every man’s own intuitions.

In this case, as in other abduction affairs, the police advised the father not to comply with the demand of the criminals, but to rely upon their efforts. No doubt their sense of duty to the public is as much responsible for this invariable position as any confidence in their own powers. An officer must feel, after all, that he cannot counsel bargaining with dangerous criminals, and that to pay them is only to encourage other kidnappers and further kidnappings.

In spite of the menacing terms of the rather garrulous letter, which betrayed by its very length the fervor of its persuasive threats, and the darkness of its reminders, the nervousness of its composer, Mr. Cudahy was minded to listen to the advice of the officers and defy the abductors of his son. In this frame of mind he delayed action until toward the close of the afternoon, meantime sitting by the telephone and hearing reports from police headquarters and his own private officers every half hour. By four o’clock he and his attorney began to realize that there was no clew of any kind; that the whole Omaha police force and all the men his wealth had been able to supply in addition, had been able to make not even the first promising step, and that the hour for a decision that might be fatal was fast approaching. Still, he hesitated to take a step in direct violation of official policy and counsel.

In this dilemma Mrs. Cudahy came forward with a demand for action to meet the immediate emergency and protect her only son. She refused to listen to talk of remoter considerations, declared that the amount of ransom was a trifle to a man of her husband’s fortune, and weepingly insisted that she would not sacrifice her boy to any mad plans of outsiders, who felt no such poignant concern as her own.

Shortly before five o’clock Mr. Cudahy telephoned the First National Bank, which had, of course, closed for the day, and asked the cashier to make ready the twenty-five thousand dollars in gold. A little later the Cudahy attorney called at the bank and received the specie in five bags and in the denominations asked by the abductors. The money was taken at once to the Cudahy house and deposited inside, without the knowledge of the servants or outsiders.

At half past six Mr. Cudahy ordered his driving mare hitched to the buggy in which he made the rounds of his yards and plants. At seven o’clock he slipped quietly out of his house, without letting his wife, the servants, or any one but his attorney know his errand. He carried a satchel containing the five bags of gold, which weighed more than one hundred pounds, to the stable, put the precious stuff into the bottom of his vehicle, took up the reins, and set out on his perilous and ill-boding adventure.

Mr. Cudahy had not been allowed to leave home without warnings from the police and his attorney. They had told him that he might readily expect to find himself trapped by the kidnappers, who would then hold both him and his son for still higher ransom. So he drove toward the appointed place along the dim, night-hidden roads, with more than ordinary misgiving. Once or twice, after he had proceeded six or seven miles into the blackness of the open prairie, without seeing any signs from the abductors, he came near turning back; but the danger to his son and the thought that the criminals could have no object in sending him on a fruitless expedition, held him to his course.

About ten miles out of town, still jogging anxiously along behind his horse, Mr. Cudahy saw a passenger train on one of the two transcontinental lines that converge at that point, coiling away into the infinite blackness, like some vast phosphorescent serpent. The beauty and mystery of the spectacle meant nothing to him, but it served to raise his hopes. No doubt the kidnappers would soon appear now. They had probably chosen this locality, with the swift trains running by, for their rendezvous. Once possessed of the gold, they would catch the next flyer for either coast and be gone out of the reach of local police. Perhaps they would even have the missing boy with them and surrender him as soon as they had been paid the ransom.

Thus buoyed and heartened, the father drove on. Suddenly the road entered a cleft between two abrupt hills or butts. A sense of impendency oppressed the lonely driver. He took up a revolver beside him on the seat, clutching it near him, with some protective instinct. At the same moment he turned higher the flame in his red lantern, which swung from the whip socket of his buggy, and peered out into the gulch. Everything was pit-black and grave-silent. He lay back disappointed and spoke to the horse, debating whether to turn back. Once more he decided to go on. The cleft between the two eminences grew narrower. The horse turned a swift sharp corner. Cudahy sat up with startled alertness.

There in the road before him, not ten rods away, was a smoky lantern, throwing but a pallid radiance about it in the thick darkness, but lighting a great hope in the father’s heart. He approached directly, drew up his horse a few yards away, found that the lantern, tied to a twig by the roadside, was decorated with the specified ribbons of black and white, returned to his buggy, carried the bags of gold to the lantern, put them down in the roadside, waited a few moments for any sign that might be given, turned his horse about, and started for home, driving slowly and listening intently for any sound from his expected son.

The ten miles back to Omaha were covered in this slow and tense way, with eyes and ears open, and a mind fluctuating between hope and despair. But no lost boy came out of the darkness, and Cudahy reached his house without the least further encouragement. It was then past eleven o’clock. His attorney and his wife were still in the drawing-room, sleepless, tense, and terrified. They greeted the boy’s father with swift questions and relapsed into hopelessness when he related what he had done. An hour passed, while Cudahy tried to keep up the courage of his wife by argument and reasoning. Then came one o’clock. Now half past one. Surely there was no longer any need of waiting now. Either the kidnappers had hoaxed the suffering parents, or that note had not come from kidnappers at all, but from impostors--or--something far worse. At best, nothing would be heard till morning.

“It’s no use, Mrs. Cudahy,” said the lawyer. “You’d better get what sleep you can, and----”

“Hs-s-sh!” said the mother, laying her finger on her lips and listening like a hunted doe.

In an instant she sprang out of her chair, ran into the hall, out of the door, down the walk to the street, and out of the gate. The two men sprang up and followed in time to see her catch the missing boy into her arms. She had heard his footfall.

The news of the boy’s return was flashed to police headquarters within a few minutes, and the detective chief went at once to the Cudahy home to hear the returning boy’s story. It was simple and brief enough.

Eddie Cudahy had left Doctor Rustin’s house the night before, and gone directly homeward. Three or four doors from his parents’ house Eddie Cudahy was suddenly confronted by two men who faced him with revolvers, called him Eddie McGee, declared that he was wanted for theft, that they were officers, and that he must come to the police station. He protested that he was not Eddie McGee, and that he could be identified in the house yonder; but his captors forced him into their buggy and drove off, warning him to make no outcry. They had gone only a few blocks when they changed their tone, tied the lad’s arms behind him, and put a bandage over his eyes and another over his mouth, so that he could not cry out. He understood that he had been kidnapped.

Thus trussed up and prevented from either seeing where he was being taken, or making any outcry, the young fellow was driven about for an hour, and finally delivered to an old house, which he believed to be unfurnished, judging from the hollow sound of the footsteps, as he and his captors were going up the stairs. He was taken into a room on the second floor, seated in a chair, and handcuffed to it. His gag was removed, but not the bandage on his eyes. He was supplied with cigarettes and offered food, but he could not eat. One of the two men stood guard, the other departing at once, but returning later on.

All that night and the next day the boy was unable to sleep. But he sensed that his captor seemed to be imbibing whisky with great regularity. Finally, about an hour before he had been set free, Eddie heard the other man return and hold a whispered conversation with his guard. The boy was then taken from the house, put back into the same buggy, driven to within a quarter of a mile of his father’s home, and released. He ran for home, and his captors drove off.

Eddie Cudahy could not give any working description of the criminals. He had not got a good look at them in the street when they seized him, because it was dark, and they had the brims of their large hats pulled down over their eyes. Immediately afterward he had been bandaged and deprived of all further chance of observation. One man was tall, and the other short. The tall man seemed to be in command. The short man had been his guard. He thought there was a third man who was bringing in reports.

There were just two dimly promising lines of investigation. First, it would surely be possible to find the house in which the boy had been held captive, for Omaha was not so large that there were many empty houses to suit the description furnished by the boy. Besides, the time at which any such house had been rented would offer evidence. It might be possible to get a clew to the identity of the kidnappers through the description of the person or persons who had done the renting.

Second, the kidnappers must have got the horse and buggy somewhere; most likely from a local livery stable. If its source could be found, the liveryman also would be able to describe the persons with whom he had done business.

So the police set to work, searching the town again for house and for stable. They found several deserted two-story cottages that fitted the picture well enough, and in each instance there were circumstances which seemed to indicate that the kidnappers had been there. Finally, however, all were eliminated, except a crude two-story cabin at 3604 Grover Street. This turned out to be the place, situated near the outskirts, on the top of a hill, with the nearest neighbors a block away. Cigarette ends, burned matches, empty whisky bottles, and windows covered with newspapers gave silent, but conclusive, testimony.

The matter of the horse proved more difficult. It had not been hired at any stable in Omaha or in Council Bluffs, across the Missouri River. Advertising and police calls brought out no private owner who had rented such a rig. Finally, however, the officers found a farmer living about twenty miles out of town who had sold a bay pony to a tall stranger several weeks before. Another man was found who had sold a second-hand buggy to a man of the same general description. At last the police began to realize that they were dealing with a criminal of genuine resourcefulness and foresight. The man had not blundered in any of the usual ways, and he had made the trail so confused that more than a week had passed before there were any positive indications as to his possible identity.

In the end several indications pointed in the same direction. It seemed highly probable that the kidnapper chieftain had been some one acquainted with the packing business and probably with the Cudahys. He was also familiar with the town. He was tall, had a commanding voice, was accompanied by a shorter man, who seemed to be older, but was still dominated by his companion. More important still, this chief of abductors was an experienced and clever criminal. He gave every evidence of knowing all the ropes. These specifications seemed to fit just one man whose name now began to be used on all sides--the thrice perilous and ill-reputed Pat Crowe.

It was recalled that this man had begun life as a butcher, been a trusted employee of the Cudahys ten years before, and had been dismissed for dishonesty. Subsequently he had turned his hand to crime, and achieved a startling reputation in the western United States as an intrepid bandit, train robber, and jail breaker, a handy man with a gun, a sure shot, and a desperate fellow in a corner. He had been in prison more than once, had lately made what seemed an effort at reform, knew Edward A. Cudahy well, and had sometimes received favors and gratuities from the rich man. He was, in short, exactly the man to fit all the requirements, and succeeding weeks and evidence only strengthened the suspicion against him. Crowe, though he had been seen in Omaha the day before the kidnapping, was nowhere to be discovered. Even this fact added to the general belief that he and none other had done the deed. In a short time the Cudahy kidnapping mystery resolved itself into a quest for this notorious fellow.

The alarm was spread throughout the United States and Canada, to the British Isles, and the Continental ports, and to Mexico and the Central American border and port cities, where it was believed the fugitive might make his appearance. But Crowe was not apprehended, and the quest soon settled down to its routine phases, with occasional lapses back into exciting alarms. Every little while the capture of Pat Crowe was reported, and on at least a dozen occasions men turned up with confessions and detailed descriptions of the kidnapping. These apparitions and alleged captures took place in such diffused spots as London, Singapore, Manila, Guayaquil, San Francisco, and various obscure towns in the United States and Canada. The genuine and authentic Pat Crowe, however, stoutly declined to be one of the captives or confessors, and so the hunt went on.

_Wide World_

~~ PAT CROWE ~~]

Meantime Crowe’s confederate, an ex-brakeman on the Union Pacific Railroad, had been taken and brought to trial. His name was James Callahan, and there was then and is now no question about his connection with the affair. Nevertheless, at the end of his trial on April 29, 1901, Callahan was acquitted, and Judge Baker, the presiding tribune, excoriated the jury for neglect of duty, saying that never had evidence more clearly indicated guilt. Attempts to convict Callahan on other counts were no better starred, and he had finally to be released.

In the same year, 1901, word was received from Crowe through an attorney he had employed in an earlier difficulty. Crowe had sent this barrister a draft from Capetown, South Africa, in payment of an old debt. The much sought desperado had got through the lines to the Transvaal, joined the Boer forces, and had been fighting against the British. He had been twice wounded, decorated for distinguished courage, and was, according to his own statement, done with crime and living a different life--adventurous, but honest. So many canards had been exploded that Omaha refused to believe the story, albeit time proved it to be true.

At the height of the excitement, rewards of fifty-five thousand dollars had been offered for the capture and conviction of Pat Crowe, thirty thousand by Cudahy and twenty-five thousand by the city of Omaha. This huge price on the head of this wandering bad man had, of course, contributed to the feverish and half-worldwide interest in the case. Yet even these fat inducements accomplished nothing.

Finally, in 1906, when Crowe had been hunted in vain for more than five years, he suddenly opened negotiations with Omaha’s chief of police through an attorney, offering to come in and surrender, in case all the rewards were immediately and honestly withdrawn, so that there would be no money inducement which might cause officers or others to manufacture a case against him. After some preliminaries, these terms were met, but not until an attempt to capture the desperado had been made and failed, with the net result of three badly wounded officers.

In February, 1906, Crowe was at last brought to trial and, to the utter astoundment and chagrin of the entire country, promptly acquitted, though he offered no defense and tacitly admitted that he had taken the boy. One bit of conclusive evidence that had been offered by the prosecution and admitted by the court, was a letter written by Crowe to his parish priest in the little Iowa town of his boyhood. In the course of this letter, which had been written to the priest in the hope that he might make peace with Cudahy, the desperado admitted that “I am solely responsible for the Cudahy kidnapping. No one else is to blame.”

No matter. The jury would not consider the evidence and brought in the verdict already indicated. Crowe, after six years of being hunted with a price of fifty-five thousand dollars on his head, was a free man.

The acquittals of Crowe and Callahan have furnished material for a good deal of amused and some angry speculation. The local situation in Omaha at the time furnishes the key to the puzzle. First of all, there was the bitter anti-beef trust agitation, founded on the fact that many small independent butchers had been put out of business by the great packing-house combination, of which Cudahy was a member; and that meat prices had everywhere been rapidly advanced to almost double their earlier prices. Next, there was the circumstance of Cudahy’s abundant and flaunting wealth. The common man considered that these millions had been gouged out of his pocket and cut from off his dinner plate. Cudahy had also begun the introduction of cheap negro labor into Omaha to break a strike of his packing-house employees, and the city was bitterly angry at him. Also, Crowe was himself popular and well known. Many considered him a hero. But there was still another strange cause of the state of the public mind.

In the very beginning a not inconsiderable part of Omaha’s people had somehow come to the curious conclusion that there had been no Cudahy kidnapping. One story said that Eddie Cudahy was a wild youth, and that he himself had conspired with Crowe and Callahan to abduct him and get the ransom, since he needed a share of it for his own purpose, and he saw in this plan an easy method to mulct his unsuspecting father. A later version denied the boy’s guilt, but still insisted that the whole story, as told by the father and confirmed by the police, was a piece of fiction. What motive the rich packer could have had for such a fraud, no one could say. The best explanation given was that he saw in it a plan to get worldwide advertising for the Cudahy name. How this could have sold any additional hams or beeves, is a bit hard to imagine, but the story was so generally believed that two jurors at one of the trials voiced it in the jury room and scoffed at all the evidence. All this rumor is, of course, absurd.

Crowe, after his acquittal, went straight, as the word goes. He has committed no more crimes, unless one wants to rate under this heading a book of highly romantic confessions, which he had published the following year. In this book he set forth the circumstances of the crime in great, but unreliable, detail. He made it very plain, however, that he and Callahan alone planned the crime and carried it out.

Crowe personally conceived the whole plan and took Callahan into the conspiracy only because he needed help. The two held up the boy, as already related. As soon as they had him safe in the old house, Crowe drove back to the Cudahy home in his buggy and threw the note, wrapped about the stick and decorated with the red cloth, upon the lawn, where it was found the next morning by the coachman. Of the twenty-five thousand dollars in gold, Crowe gave his assistant only three thousand dollars, used one thousand for expenses, and buried the rest, recovering it later when the coast was clear. He selected Cudahy for a victim because he knew that the packer was a fond father, had a nervous wife, and would be strong enough to resist any mad police advice.

A few years later I first encountered Crowe in New York, when he came to see me with a petty favor to ask and an article of his reminiscences to sell. He had meantime become a kind of peregrine reformer, lecturer, pamphlet seller and semi-mendicant, now blessed with a little evanescent prosperity, again sleeping in Bowery flops and eking out a miserable living by any device short of lawbreaking. And he has called upon me or crossed my wanderings repeatedly in the intervening years, always voluble, plausible and a trifle pathetic. Now he is off to call upon the President, to memorialize a governor or to address a provincial legislature. He is bent on abolishing prisons, has a florid set-speech, which he delivers in a big sententious voice, and perhaps he impresses his rural hearers, though the tongue in the cheek and the twinkle in the eye never escape those who know him of old.

This grand rascal is no longer young--rising sixty, I should say--and life has treated him shabbily in the last twenty years. Yet neither poverty nor age has quite taken from him a certain leonine robustness, a kind of ruined strength and power that shines a little sadly through his charlatanry.

Only once or twice, when he has lost himself in the excited recounting of his adventures, of his hardy old crimes, of the Cudahy kidnapping, have I ever caught in him the quality that must once have been his--the force, the fire that made his name shudder around the world. Convention has beaten him as it beats them all, these brave and baneful men. It has made a sidling apologist of a great rogue in Crowe’s case--and what a sad declension!

IX

THE WHITLA KIDNAPPING

Abduction is always a puzzling crime. The risks are so great, the punishment, of late years, so severe, and the chances of profit so slight that logic seems to demand some special and extraordinary motive on the part of the criminal. It is true that kidnapping is one of the easiest crimes to commit. It is also a fact that it seems to offer a quick and promising way of extorting large sums of money without physical risk. But every offender must know that the chances of success are of the most meager.

A study of past cases shows that child stealing arouses the public as nothing else can, not even murder. This state of general alarm, indignation, and alertness is the first peril of the kidnapper. Again, the problem of getting the ransom from even the most willing victim without exposing the criminal to capture, is a most intricate and unpromising one. It is well known that child snatchers almost never succeed with this part of the business. The cases in which the kidnapper has actually got the ransom and made off without being caught and punished are so thinly strewn upon the long record that any criminal who ever takes the trouble to peruse it must shrink with fear from such offenses. Finally, it is familiar knowledge among police officers that professional criminals usually are aware of this fact and consequently both dread and abhor abductions.

The fact that kidnapping persists in spite of these recognized discouragements probably accounts for the proneness of policemen and citizens to interpret into every abduction case some moving force other than mere hope of gain. Obscurer impulsions and springs of action, whether real or surmised, are often the inner penetralia of child stealing mysteries. So with the famous Whitla case.

At half past nine on the morning of March 18, 1909, a short, stocky man drove up to the East Ward Schoolhouse, in the little steel town of Sharon, in western Pennsylvania, in an old covered buggy and beckoned to Wesley Sloss, the janitor.

“Mr. Whitla wants Willie to come to his office right away,” said the stranger.

It may have been more than irregular for a pupil to be summoned from his classes in this way, but in Sharon no one questioned vagaries having to do with this particular child. Willie Whitla was the eight-year-old son of the chief lawyer of the place, James P. Whitla, who was wealthy and politically influential. The boy was also, and more spectacularly, the nephew by marriage of Frank M. Buhl, the multimillionaire iron master and industrial overlord of the region.

Janitor Sloss bandied no compliments. He hurried inside to Room 2, told the teacher, Mrs. Anna Lewis, that the boy was wanted, helped bundle him into his coat, and led him out to the buggy. The man in the conveyance tucked the boy under the lap robe, muttered his thanks, and drove off in the direction of the town’s center, where the father’s office was situated.