Chapter VI: Part 6

When Willie Whitla failed to appear at home for luncheon at the noon recess, there was no special apprehension. Probably he had gone to a chum’s house and would be along at the close of the afternoon session. His mother was vexed, but not worried.

At four o’clock the postman stopped on the Whitla veranda, blew his whistle, and left a note which had been posted in the town some hours before. It was addressed to the lawyer’s wife in the childish scrawl of the little boy. Its contents, written by another hand, read:

“We have your boy, and no harm will come to him if you comply with our instructions. If you give this letter to the newspapers, or divulge any of its contents, you will never see your boy again. We demand ten thousand dollars in twenty-dollar, ten-dollar, and five-dollar bills. If you attempt to mark the money, or place counterfeit money, you will be sorry. Dead men tell no tales. Neither do dead boys. You may answer at the following addresses: _Cleveland Press_, _Youngstown Vindicator_, _Indianapolis News_, and _Pittsburgh Dispatch_ in the personal columns. Answer: 'A. A. Will do as you requested. J. P. W.’”

A few minutes later the whole town was searching, and the alarm had been broadcast by telegraph and telephone. Before nightfall a hundred thousand officers were on the lookout in a thousand cities and towns through the eastern United States.

At four thirty o’clock, when Sharon first heard of the abduction, a boy named Morris was found, who had seen Willie Whitla get out of a buggy at the edge of the town, drop a letter into the mail box, and get back into the vehicle, which was driven away.

This discovery had hardly been made when it was also learned that a stranger had rented a horse and buggy, fitting the description of those used by the kidnapper, in South Sharon early in the morning. At five o’clock, the jaded horse, still hitched to the rented buggy, was found tied to a post in Warren, Ohio, twenty-five miles from Sharon.

The search immediately began in the northern or lake cities and towns of Ohio, the trend of the search running strongly toward Cleveland, where it was believed the abductor or abductors would try the hiding properties of urban crowds.

The Whitla and Buhl families acted with sense and caution. They were sufficiently well informed to know that the police are doubtful agencies for the safe recovery of snatched children. They were rich to the point of embarrassment. Ten thousand dollars meant nothing. The safety and speedy return of the child were the only considerations that could have swayed them. Accordingly, they did not reveal the contents of the note, as I have quoted it. Neither did they confide to the police any other details, or the direction of their intentions. The fact of the kidnapping could, of course, not be concealed, but all else was guarded from official or public intrusion.

On the advice of friends the parents did employ private detectives, but even their advice was disregarded, and Mr. Whitla without delay signified his willingness to capitulate by inserting the dictated notice into all the four mentioned newspapers.

The answer of the abductors came very promptly through the mails, reaching Whitla on the morning of the twentieth, less than forty-eight hours after the boy had been taken.

Again following instructions, Whitla did not communicate to the police the contents of this note or his plans. Instead, he set off quietly for Cleveland, evidently to mislead the public officers, who seemed to take delight in their efforts to seize control of the case. At eight o’clock in the night Whitla left Cleveland, accompanied by one private detective, and went to the neighboring city of Ashtabula. Here the detective was left at the White Hotel, and the father of the missing boy set out to meet the demands of the kidnappers.

They, it appears, had written him that he must go at ten o’clock at night to Flatiron Park, a lonely strip of land on the outskirts of Ashtabula, and there deposit under a certain stone the package of bills. He was told what route to follow, commanded to go alone, and warned not to communicate with the police. Having left the money as commanded, Whitla was to return to the hotel and wait there for the coming of his son, who would be restored as soon as the abductors were safely in possession of the money.

So the father set out in the dark of the night, followed the route given him by the abductors, deposited the money in the park, and returned forthwith to the hotel, reaching it before eleven o’clock. Here he sat with his bodyguard, waiting for the all-desired apparition of his little son. The hours went wearily by, while the father’s nervousness mounted. Finally, at three o’clock in the morning, some local officers appeared and notified the frenzied lawyer that they had been watching the park all night, and that no one had appeared to claim the package of money.

Police interference had ruined the plan.

The local officers naturally assumed that, as the kidnappers were to call for the money in the park, they must be in Ashtabula. They accordingly set out, searched all night, invaded the houses of sleeping citizens, turned the hotels and rooming houses inside out, prowled their way through cars in the railroad yards and boats in the harbor, watched the roads leading in and out of the city, searched the street cars and generally played the devil. But all in vain. There were no suspicious strangers to be found in or about the community.

The following morning the father of the boy visited the mayor and requested that the police cease their activities. He pointed out that there were no clews of definite promise, and the peril in which the child stood ought to command official coöperation instead of dangerous interference. Whitla finally managed to convince the officers that they stood no worse chance of catching the criminals after the recovery of the boy, and the Ashtabula officers were immediately called off.

The disappointed and harried father was forced to return to Sharon in defeat and bring the disappointing news to his prostrated wife. The little steel town had got the definite impression that news of the child had been got, and preparations for the boy’s return had been made. Many citizens were up all night, ready to receive the little wanderer with rockets, bands, and jubilation. Crowds besieged the Whitla home, and policemen had to be kept on guard to turn away a stream of well-meaning friends and curious persons, who would have kept the breaking mother from such little sleep as was possible under the circumstances.

The excitement of the vicinity had by this time spread to all the country. As is always the case, arrests on suspicion were made of the most unlikely persons in the most impossible situations. Men, women, and children were stopped in the streets, dragged from their rooms, questioned, harried, taken to police stations, and even locked into jails for investigation, while the missing boy and his abductors succeeded in eluding completely the large army of pursuers now in the field.

Nothing further was heard from the kidnappers on the twenty-first, and the hearts of the bewildered parents and relatives sank with apprehension, but the morning mail of the twenty-second again contained a note which, properly interpreted, seems to indicate that the business of leaving the money in the park at Ashtabula may have been a test maneuver, to find out whether Whitla would keep the faith and act without the police. This note read:

“A mistake was made at Ashtabula Saturday night. You come to Cleveland on the Erie train leaving Youngstown at 11:10 a. m. Leave the train at Wilson Avenue. Take a car to Wilson and St. Clair. At Dunbar’s drug store you will find a letter addressed to William Williams.

“We will not write you again in this matter. If you attempt to catch us you will never see your boy again.”

This time Whitla decided to be rid of the police. He accordingly had his representatives announce that all activities would cease for the time being, in the hope that the kidnappers would regain their confidence and reopen communications. At the same time he told the Ashtabula police to resume their activities. With these two false leads given out, Whitla slipped away from his home, caught the train, and went straight to Cleveland.

Late that afternoon, having satisfied himself that he had eluded the overzealous officers, Whitla went to Dunbar’s drug store and found the note waiting, as promised. It contained nothing but further directions. He was to proceed to a confectionery conducted by a Mrs. Hendricks at 1386 East Fifty-third Street, deliver the ransom, carefully done into a package, to the woman in charge. He was to tell her the package should be held for Mr. Hayes, who would call.

Whitla went at once to the candy store, turned over the package of ten thousand dollars to Mrs. Hendricks, and was given a note in return. This missive instructed him to go forthwith to the Hollenden Hotel, where he was to wait for his boy. The promise was made that the child would be returned within three hours.

It was about five o’clock when this exchange was made. The tortured father turned and went immediately to the Hollenden, one of the chief hostelries of Cleveland, engaged a room and waited. An hour passed. His anxiety became intolerable. He went down to the lobby and began walking back and forth, in and out of the doors, up and down the walk, back into the hotel, up to his room and back to the office. Several noticed his nervousness and preoccupation, but only a lone newspaper man identified him and kept him under watch.

Seven o’clock came and passed. At half past seven the worn lawyer’s agitation increased to the point of frenzy. He could do no more than retire to a quiet corner of the lobby, huddle himself into a big chair, and sink into the half stupor of exhaustion.

A few minutes before eight o’clock the motorman of a Payne Avenue street car saw a man and a small boy come out of the gloom at a street corner in East Cleveland and motion him to stop. The man put the child aboard and gave the conductor some instructions, paying its fare, and immediately vanished in the darkness. The little boy, wearing a pair of dark goggles and a large yellow cap that was pulled far down over his ears, sat quietly in the back seat and made not a sound.

A few squares further along the line two boys of seventeen or eighteen years boarded the car and were immediately intrigued by the glum little figure. The newcomers, whose names were Edward Mahoney and Thomas W. Ramsey, spoke to the child, vaguely suspicious that this might be the much-sought Willie Whitla. When they asked his name the lad said he was Willie Jones. In response to other questions he told that he was on his way to meet his father at the Hollenden.

The two young men said no more till the hotel was reached. Here they insisted on leaving the car with the boy and at once called a policeman to whom they voiced their suspicions. The officer, the two youths, and the child thus entered the hotel and approached the desk. In response to further interrogation, the little fellow still insisted that he was Jones, but, being deprived of his big cap and goggles and called Willie Whitla, he asked:

“How did you know me? Where is my daddy?”

The gloomy man in the corner chair got one tinkle of the childish voice, ran across the big room, caught up the child and rushed hysterically to his own apartment, where he telephoned at once to the boy’s mother. By the time the attorney could be persuaded to come back down stairs, a crowd was gathered, and the father and child were welcomed with cheers.

The boy shortly gave his father and the police his story. The man who had taken him from school in the buggy had told him that he was being taken out of town to the country at his father’s request, because there was an epidemic of smallpox, and it was feared the doctors would lock him up in a dirty pest house. He had accordingly gone willingly to Cleveland, where he had been taken to what he believed to be a hospital. A man and woman had taken care of him and treated him well. They were Mr. and Mrs. Jones. They had not abused him in any way. In fact, he liked them, except for the fact that they made him hide under the kitchen sink when any one knocked at the door, and they gave him candy which made him sleepy. Mr. Jones himself, the boy said, had put him aboard the street car, paid his fare, instructed him to tell any inquirers that his name was Jones, and warned him to go immediately to the hotel and join his father. The only additional information got from the boy, besides fairly valuable descriptions of the abductors, was to the effect that he had been taken to the “hospital” the night following his abduction and had not left the place till he was led out to be sent to the hotel.

The child returned to Sharon in triumph, was welcomed with music and a salute from the local militia company, displayed before the serenading citizens, and photographed for the American and foreign press.

Meantime the search for the kidnappers was under way. The private detectives in the employ of the Whitlas were immediately withdrawn when the boy was recovered, but the police of Cleveland and other cities plunged in with notable energy. The druggist, with whom the note had been left, and the woman confectioner, who had received the package of ransom money, were immediately questioned. Neither knew that the transaction they had aided was concerned with the Whitla case, and both were frightened and astonished. They could give little information that has not already been indicated. Mrs. Hendricks, the keeper of the candy store, however, was able to particularize the description of the man who had come to her place, left the note for Mr. Whitla, and returned later for the package of money. He was, she said, about thirty years old, with dark hair, a smoothly shaved, but pock-marked face, weighed about one hundred and sixty pounds, and seemed to be Irish.

Considering the car line which had brought the boy to the Hollenden Hotel, the point at which he had boarded the car, and the description he gave of the place he termed a hospital, the Cleveland police were certain Willie had been detained in an apartment house somewhere in the southeast quarter of the city, and detectives were accordingly sent to comb that part of the city in quest of a furnished suite in which the kidnappers might still be hiding.

Willie Whitla had returned to his father on Monday night. Tuesday evening, about twenty-two hours after the boy had made his dramatic entry into the Hollenden, the detectives went through a three-story flat building at 2022 Prospect Avenue and found that a couple answering the general descriptions furnished by Willie Whitla and Mrs. Hendricks had rented a furnished apartment there on the night following the kidnapping and had departed only a few hours ahead of the detectives. They had conducted themselves very quietly while in the place, and the woman who had sublet the rooms to them was not even sure there had been a child with them. Willie Whitla afterward identified this place as the scene of his captivity.

The discovery of this apartment might have been less significant for the moment, had the building not been but a few squares from the point at which Willie had been put aboard the street car for his trip to join his father. As it was, the detectives felt they were hot on the trail. Reserves were rushed to that part of town, patrolmen were not relieved at the end of their tours of duty, and the extra men were stationed at the exits from the city, with instructions to stop and question all suspicious persons. The pack was in full cry, but the quarry was by no means in sight.

At this tense and climactic moment of the drama far broader forces than the police were thrown upon the stage. The governor of Pennsylvania signed a proclamation in the course of the afternoon, offering to continue the reward of fifteen thousand dollars which had been posted by the State for the recovery of the boy and the arrest and conviction of his abductors. Since the boy had been returned, the money was to go to those who brought his kidnappers to justice. Accordingly, the people of several States were watching with no perfunctory alertness. High hopes of immediate capture were thus based on more than one consideration; but the night was aging without result.

At a few minutes past nine o’clock a man and woman of the most inconspicuous kind entered the saloon of Patrick O’Reilly on Ontario Street, Cleveland, sat down at a table in the rear room, and ordered drink. The liquor was served, and the man offered a new five-dollar bill in payment. He immediately reordered, telling the proprietor to include the other patrons then in the place. Again he offered a new bill of the same denomination, and once again he commanded that all present accept his hospitality. Both the man and the woman drank rapidly and heavily, quickly showing the effects of the liquor and becoming more and more loquacious, spendthrift and effusive.

There was, of course, nothing extraordinary in such conduct. Men came in often enough who drank heavily, spent freely, and insisted on “buying for the house.” But it was a little unusual for a man to let go of thirty dollars in little more than an hour, and it was still more unusual for a customer to peel off one new five-dollar note after the other.

O’Reilly had been reading the newspapers. He knew that there had been a kidnapping; that there was a reward of fifteen thousand dollars outstanding; that a man and woman were supposed to have held the boy captive in Cleveland, and not too far from the saloon. Also he had read about the package of five, ten, and twenty dollar bills. His brows lifted. O’Reilly waited for an opportune moment and went to his cash drawer. The bills this pair of strangers had given him were all new; that was certain. Perhaps they would prove to be all of the same issue, even of the same series and in consequent numbers. If so----

The saloonkeeper had to move with caution. When his suspect callers had their attention on something else, he slipped the money from the till and moved to the end of the bar near the window, where he was out of their visional range. He laid the bills out on the cigar case, adjusted his glasses, and stared.

In that moment the visitors got up to go. O’Reilly urged them to stay, insisted on supplying them with a free drink, did what he could, without arousing suspicion, to detain them, hoping that an officer would saunter in. At last they could be held no longer. With an exchange of unsteady compliments, they were out of the door and gone into the night, whose shadows had yielded them up an hour before.

O’Reilly noted the direction they took and flew to a telephone. In response to his urgings, Captain Shattuck and Detective Woods were hurried to the place and set out with O’Reilly’s instructions and description. They had no more than moved from the saloon when the rollicking pair was seen returning.

The officers hailed these sinister celebrants with a remark about the weather and the lateness of the hour. Instantly the man took to his heels, with Captain Shattuck in pursuit. As they turned a corner, the officer drew and fired high.

The fleeing man collapsed in a heap, and the policeman ran to him, marveling that his aim had been so unintentionally good. He found, however, that the fugitive had merely stumbled in his sodden attempt at flight.

Both prisoners were taken forthwith to the nearest police station and subjected to questioning. They were inarticulately drunk, or determinedly reticent and pretending. Tiring of the maneuvers and half assured that he was probably face to face with the kidnappers, Captain Shattuck ordered them searched.

At various places in the linings of the woman’s clothing, still in the neat packages in which it had been taken from the bank, were nine thousand, seven hundred and ninety dollars.

The prisoners turned out to be James H. Boyle and Helen McDermott Boyle--he a floating adventurer known to the cities of Pennsylvania and Ohio, she the daughter of respectable Chicago parents, whom she had quit several years before to go venturing on her own account.

From the beginning both the police and the public held the opinion that these two people had not been alone in the kidnapping. When exhaustive investigation failed to reveal the presence of others at any stage of the abduction, flight, hiding and attempted removal in Cleveland, it was concluded that the prisoners had possibly been the sole active agents, but the opinion was retained that some one else must have plotted the crime.

Why had these strangers singled out Sharon, an obscure little town? Why had they chosen Willie Whitla, when there were tens of thousands of boys with wealthier parents and many with even richer relatives? Who had acquainted them with the particularities of the Whitlas’ lives, the probable attitude at the school, the child’s fear of smallpox and pest houses? Was it not obvious that some one close to the family had supplied the information and laid the plans?

James H. Boyle was led into court on the sixth of May, faced with his accusers, and swiftly encircled with the accusing evidence, which was complete and unequivocal. He accepted it without display of emotion and offered no defense. After brief argument the case went to the jury, which reached an affirmative verdict within a few minutes.

Mrs. Boyle was placed on trial immediately afterward and also presented no defense. A verdict was found against her with equal expedition on May 10, and she was remanded for sentence.

On the following day both defendants were called before the court. The judge imposed the life sentence on Boyle and a term of twenty-five years on his wife. A few hours afterward Boyle called the newspaper reporters to his cell in the jail at Mercer and handed them a written statement.

Boyle’s writing went back fourteen years to 1895, when the body of Dan Reeble, Jr., had been found lying on the sidewalk on East Federal Street, Youngstown, Ohio, before the house where Reeble lived. There had been some mysterious circumstances or rumors attached to Reeble’s end.

Boyle did not attempt to explain the death of Reeble, but he said in his statement that he and one Daniel Shay, a Youngstown saloonkeeper, who had died in 1907, had caught Harry Forker, the brother of Mrs. James P. Whitla and uncle of the kidnapped boy, taking a number of letters from the pockets of the dead man, as his body lay on the walk. Boyle recited that not only had he and Shay found Forker in this compromising position, but they had picked up two envelopes overlooked by Forker, in which were found four letters from women, two from a girl in New York State and the other two from a Cleveland woman. The contents were intimate, he said, and they proved beyond peradventure that Forker had been present at Reeble’s death.

Boyle’s statement went on to recite that he had subsequently written Forker, told him about the letters, and suggested that they were for sale. Forker had immediately replied and made various efforts to recover the incriminating missives, but Boyle had held them and continued to extort money from Forker for years, threatening to reveal the letters unless paid.

Finally, in March, 1908, Boyle’s statement went on to recite, a demand for five thousand dollars had been made on Forker, who said he could not raise the money, but would come into an inheritance later and would then pay and recover the dangerous evidence. When Forker failed in this undertaking, fresh threats were made, with the result that Forker suggested the kidnapping of his nephew, the demand for ten thousand dollars’ ransom, and the division of this spoil as a way to get the five thousand dollars Boyle was demanding.

Boyle also recited that Forker had planned the kidnapping and attended to the matter of having the boy taken from the school. He said that some one else had done this work and delivered the child to him, Boyle, in Warren, Ohio, where the exhausted horse was found.

This statement, filling the gap in the motive reasoning as it did, created a turmoil. Forker and Whitla immediately and indignantly denied the accusation and brought to their support a Youngstown police officer, Michael Donnelly, who said he had found the body of Dan Reeble. Donnelly recited that he had been talking to Reeble on the walk before the building in which Reeble resided, early in the morning of June 8, 1895. Reeble had gone upstairs, and Donnelly was walking slowly down the street when he heard a thump and groans behind him. Returning to the spot where he had left Reeble, he found his companion of a few minutes before, dying on the walk.

Donnelly said that Reeble had had the habit of sitting on his window sill, and that the man had apparently fallen out to his death. He swore that neither Forker, Boyle, nor Daniel Shay had been present when Reeble died.

There are, to be sure, some elements which verge upon improbability in this account, but the denials of Forker and Whitla were strongly reinforced by the testimony of Janitor Sloss and the keeper of the livery where the horse and buggy had been hired. Both firmly identified Boyle as the man they had seen and dealt with, thus refuting the latter part of Boyle’s accusative statement.

Mrs. Boyle was released after having served ten years of her long term. Her husband, on the other hand, continued his servitude and died of pneumonia in Riverside Penitentiary on January 23, 1920.

X

THE MYSTERY AT HIGHBRIDGE

A few minutes past seven o’clock, on the evening of March 27, 1901, Willie McCormick, a ten-year-old schoolboy, started to attend vespers in the little Church of the Sacred Heart, in the Highbridge section of New York City. His mother gave him a copper cent for the collection plate, and he ran out of the door, struggling into his short brown overcoat, in great haste to overtake two of his elder sisters who had started ahead of him. Three doors down the street he stopped and blew a toy whistle to attract the attention of a playmate. This boy’s mother called from the porch that her son was to take a music lesson and could not go to church. So Willie McCormick lifted his cap and went his way.

It was a cold spring evening, and cutting winds were piping through the woods and across the open spaces of that then sparsely settled district of the American metropolis. Dusk had fallen, and the thinly planted electric lights along Ogden Avenue threw the shadows of the curbside trees across the walks in moving arabesques. The boy buttoned his coat closely about him, running away into the gloom, while the neighbor woman watched him disappear. In that moment the profounder darkness enveloped him, swallowed him into a void from which he never emerged alive, and made him the chief figure of another of the abiding problems of vanishment.

Highbridge is an outlying section of New York, fringing the eastern bank of the Harlem River and centering about one approach to the old and beautiful stone bridge from which it takes its name. The tracks of the New York Central Railroad skirt the edge of the river on their way up-state. Further back from the stream the ground rises, and along the ridge, paralleling the river, is Ogden Avenue. Near the southern foot of this thoroughfare, at One Hundred and Sixty-first Street, the steel skeleton of the McComb’s Dam bridge thrust itself across the Harlem, with its eastern arch spanning high above the muddy mouth of Cromwell Creek,[9] which empties into the Harlem at this point. At the shore level, under the great bridge approach, a hinged steel platform span, raised and lowered by means of balance weights to permit the passage of minor shipping up and down the creek, carried the tracks across the lesser stream. Three blocks to the north of this confluence, which plays an important part in the mystery, stood the McCormick home, a comfortable brick and frame house of the villa type, set back from the highest point of Ogden Avenue in a lawn.

[9] This creek has since been filled in and a playground marks its site.

Twenty-five and more years ago, when Willie McCormick disappeared, the vicinity bore, as it still bears to a lesser degree, the air of suburbia. Then houses were few and rather far apart. Some of the side streets were unpaved, and all about were patches of unimproved land, where clumps of trees, that once were part of the Bronx Woods, still flourished in dense order. The first apartment houses of the district were building, and gangs of Italian laborers, with a sprinkling of native mechanics, were employed in the excavations and erections.

Kilns and a brick yard disfigured one bank of Cromwell Creek, while a factory, a coal dump, and two lumber yards sprawled along the other. Five squares to the north of the creek’s mouth and two squares to the west is the Highbridge police station. The Church of the Sacred Heart, then in charge of the wealthy and venerable Father J. A. Mullin, stands two blocks to the east of Ogden Avenue and practically on the same cross street with the police building. Neither of these places is more than a third of a mile from the McCormick home.

Shortly after nine o’clock on the important evening already noted, the two young daughters of William McCormick returned from church without their brother. He had not overtaken them on the way, or joined them at the services. They had not seen him and supposed he had either remained at home, or played truant from church and gone to romp with other boys. The father was immediately alarmed. It was not like Willie to stay out in the dark. He was the eleventh of twelve children, all the others being girls, and he was accordingly petted, overindulged, and feminine. He had an especially strong dread of the dark and had never been known to venture out in the night without his older sisters or other boys. Besides, there had been kidnapping rumors in the neighborhood. It was not long after the notorious abduction of Eddie Cudahy, and parents in all parts of the United States were still nervous and watchful.

Whether because of threats, local suspicions, or because of the general alarm, the richest man in the neighborhood had gone to almost ludicrous extremes in his precautions. This man, a cloak manufacturer named Oscar Willgerodt, occupied a large house about a hundred yards from that of the McCormicks. He had a young son, also ten years old. His apprehensions for the safety of this lad, who was a playmate of Willie McCormick, resulted in a ten-foot stone wall across the front of his property, with an ornamental iron gate that was kept padlocked at night, though this step invalidated the fire insurance, an eight-foot iron fence about the sides and rear of the property, topped with strands of barbed wire, and several formidable dogs that ran at large day and night.

The fears of the neighborhood rich man had naturally communicated themselves to other parents, and they seethed in William McCormick’s mind, as he hurried from his home to seek the absent boy. Willie was not to be found at the home of any of his chums; he was not playing at a near-by street corner, where some older boys were congregated, and apparently no one had seen him since the neighbor woman, Mrs. Tierney, had told him that her son could not go to church. The father, growing more and more excited, stormed about the Highbridge district half the night and then set out to visit relatives, to whose homes the boy might have gone. But Willie McCormick was not to be traced anywhere. On the following morning, when he did not appear, his father summoned the police.

What followed provides an excellent exposition of the phenomenon of public unconcern being gradually rallied to excitement and finally driven to hysteria. The police listened to the statements of the missing boy’s parents and sisters, made some perfunctory investigations, and said that Willie McCormick had evidently run away from home. Many boys did that. Moreover, it was spring, and such vagaries were to be expected in youngsters. The newspapers noted the case with short routine paragraphs. A street-car conductor brought in the information that he had carried a boy, whom he was willing to identify as Willie McCormick, judging from nothing better than photographs, to a site in South Brooklyn, where Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show was encamped. Another conductor reported that he had taken a boy answering the description of Willie McCormick to the Gravesend race course, where the horses were tuning up for the spring meeting. But the police found no trace of the wanderer at either place, nor at several others that were suggested.

The McCormicks took the attitude at once that their son had not gone away voluntarily. He was, they said, far too timid for adventuring, much too beloved and pampered at home to seek other environment, and too young to be troubled with the dromomania that attacks adolescents. To these objections one of the police officials responded with the charge that the McCormicks were not telling all they knew, and that he was satisfied they had an idea what had happened to the runaway, as he insisted on terming him.

At this point two interventions brought the McCormick case out of obscurity. Father Mullin, having been appealed to by the McCormicks, pointed out to the police in an interview that Willie McCormick had vanished with one cent in his pocket, that he could have taken a sum which must have seemed sufficient for long wanderings to a childish mind from his mother’s purse, which lay at hand; that he had started to church with his sisters and returned for his overcoat, and that the departure was wholly unprepared and assuredly unpremeditated. The astute priest said that every runaway made preparations for flight, and that, no matter how carefully the plans might be laid, there always remained behind the evidence of intent to disappear. A child, he said, could not have planned more cunningly than many clever men, and he insisted that there must be another explanation for the absence of the boy.

Naturally the newspapers paid more attention to the priest, and they began printing pictures of the boy, with scare headlines. Father Mullin had just taken in hand the affair when Oscar Willgerodt, the man of the stone wall and iron fences, came forward with an offer of a thousand dollars’ reward for information leading to the discovery of the missing boy. He said that he felt sure kidnappers had been at work, and that they had taken the McCormick boy in mistake for his own son. He added that he had received threats of abduction at intervals for more than a year.

A few days later, the boy’s uncle appeared in the press with an offer of five thousand dollars for the safe return of the child and the production of his abductors. By this time the newspapers were flaming with accounts of the disappearance in every edition. Their reporters and detectives swarmed over Highbridge, and that quiet district was immediately thrown into the wildest excitement, which rose as the days succeeded.

Father Mullin next offered ten thousand dollars for the apprehension of the kidnappers and return of the boy. Then a restaurant keeper of the neighborhood, whose nephew had been threatened by anonymous letter writers, offered two thousand dollars more for the return of the McCormick boy, and he said he would pay an additional thousand for evidence against kidnappers. Thus the total of fees offered was nineteen thousand dollars. Still no word came from the absent lad, and the efforts of a thousand officers failed to disclose any abductors.

The constant appearance of these articles in the newspapers and the offers of such high rewards succeeded, however, in throwing a city of five or six million people into general hysteria. Parents refused to allow their children out of doors without escort; rich men called up at all hours of the day and night, demanding special police to protect their homes; excited women throughout the city and later throughout the State and surrounding communities proceeded to interpret the apparition of every stranger as evidence of kidnappers and to bombard the police of a hundred towns and cities with frantic appeals. The absence of this obscure child had become a public catastrophe.

Developments in the investigation came not at all. The police, the reporters, and numberless private officers, who were attracted to the case by the possibility of achieving celebrity and rich reward, all bogged down precisely where they started. Willie McCormick had vanished within a hundred feet of his father’s door. The night had simply swallowed him up, and all efforts failed to penetrate a step into the gloom.

Only two suggestive bits of information could be got from the McCormicks and the missing boy’s friends. The father, being closely interrogated as to possible enemies, could recall only one person who might have had a grievance. This was a mechanic, who lived a few squares away, and with whom there had been a disagreement as to pay. But this man was at home and going steadily about his work; he was vouched for by neighbors and his employers, and he came out of a police grilling completely absolved.

Launcelot Tierney, the playmate for whom Willie McCormick had blown his whistle a minute or two before he vanished, supplied the information that Willie had tormented an Italian laborer on the morning before the disappearance, and that this man had nursed his grudge until the afternoon, when the boys were returning home from school. Then, said the Tierney boy, this workman had lain in wait behind a pile of lumber and dashed out after Willie, as the children passed. Willie had run for safety and proved fleeter than his pursuer, who gave up the attempt after running a few rods. Investigation showed that none of the laborers employed at the indicated building was absent. However the Tierney boy was unable to identify the man he had accused, when the workmen were lined up for his inspection. A good deal was made of this circumstance.

The public police, however, always came back to their original attitude. Kidnappers were actuated by the hope of extorting money, they said. Since William McCormick was a poor man, there could have been no motive for the abduction of his son. Consequently it was almost certain that the boy had gone away.

Mr. McCormick replied that while he was now poor, he had formerly been well to do. He reasoned that the kidnapper might very well have been ignorant of his decline in fortune and taken the boy in the belief that his parent was still wealthy. Others joined the controversy by pointing out in the newspapers that abductions were sometimes motivated by revenge or spite on the part of persons quite unknown or unsuspected by the parents; that children were often stolen by irrational or demented men or women, and that there was at least some basis for faith in the abduction theory, but no evidence to support the idea of a runaway.

Meantime events had added their spice of immediate drama. A few nights after the disappearance of Willie McCormick, Doctor D. A. McLeod, a surgeon occupying the next house but one to the McCormick’s, had found a masked man skulking about the rear of his property just after nightfall, and tried to grapple with the intruder. A week later, from a house two blocks away, another neighbor reported that he, too, had found the masked man prowling about his place and had followed him into the woods, where he had been lost. This informant said that the mysterious stranger was a negro. Detectives were posted in hiding throughout the district, but the visitant did not appear again.

Next two Gypsy girls visited a photographer in Washington, and one of them showed the camera man a slip of paper with some childish scrawl. Somehow this bit of writing came to be identified as that of one of Willie McCormick’s sisters. It was said the scrap of paper must have been taken from the McCormick house. The two Gypsy children were seized and held in jail, while detectives hurried off to interrogate their elders and search through the Romany camps up and down the Atlantic seaboard. No trace of the missing boy was found, and the girls were quickly released.

Finally the expected note from the kidnapper reached William McCormick. It was scrawled awkwardly on a piece of nondescript paper by some illiterate person who was apparently trying to conceal his normal handwriting. It said that Willie was being held for ransom; that he was well; that he would be safe so long as no attempt was made to bring the police into the negotiations, and that disaster would follow if the father played false. The writer then demanded the absurdly small sum of two hundred dollars for the release of the boy and directed that the money be taken at night to the corner of Third Avenue and One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street, and there placed in an old tin bucket which would be found inside an abandoned steam boiler. The missive bore the signature “Kid.”

The police immediately denounced the letter as the work of some mental defective, but instructed the father to go to the rendezvous at the appointed time and deposit a bundle of paper which might look like the demanded sum in bank notes.

McCormick did as commanded. He found the corner of Third Avenue and One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street to be a half-abandoned spot near the east bank of the Harlem, at its juncture with the East River. A low barroom, a disused manufacturing plant, and some rookeries of dubious tenantry ornamented the place, while coarsely dressed men, the dregs of the river quarter, lounged about and robbed the stranger of any gathered reassurance. The old boiler was there, standing in the center of open, flat ground that sloped down to the railroad tracks and the river under the Third Avenue bridge. Plainly the writer of the letter had chosen a likely spot, which might be kept under observation from a considerable distance and could not be surrounded or approached without the certain knowledge of a watcher posted in any one of a hundred windows commanding the view. McCormick deposited the package and went his way, while disguised detectives lay in various vantages and watched the boiler for days. No one went near it, and the game was abandoned.

But, at the end of ten days, McCormick received a second letter from Kid, in which he was reproached for having enlisted the police; he was told that such crude tactics would not work, and he was ordered to place two thousand dollars in cash under a certain stone, which he was directed to find under the approach of the McComb’s Dam bridge, a few rods from the mouth of Cromwell Creek. He was told that the amount of the ransom had been increased because of his association with the police, and the letter closed with the solemn warning that the demand must be met if McCormick hoped to see his son again. A postscript said that if the police appeared again the boy’s ears would be thrown upon his father’s porch.

Relatives, friends, and neighbors were at hand to furnish the demanded money, and the father was more than willing to deposit it according to the stipulation, but the police again intervened and had McCormick leave another dummy packet. Once more he saw, and the police should have noted, that the spot selected by the letter writer was most suited to the purpose. Once more it was an open area in the formidable shadow of a great bridge, freely observable from all sides and impossible to surround effectively.

No one was baited to the trap, but McCormick got a third letter from Kid, in which he was told that his silly tactics would avail him nothing; that his boy had been taken out to sea, and that he would not hear again until he reached England. He was told to blame his own folly if he never beheld his child alive.

It must be said in favor of the police point of view that these were not the only letters from supposed kidnappers which reached the distraught parents. Indeed, there was a steady accumulation of all sorts of missives of this type, most of them quite obviously the work of lunatics. These were easily distinguishable, however. An experienced officer ought to be able to choose between such vaporings of disjointed intelligences and letters which bore some evidence of reason, some mark of plausibility. The police who handled this case committed the common blunder of lumping them all together. They had determined that the boy was a runaway and were naturally inhospitable to contrary evidences.

But others were as firmly convinced on the other side. The father now became genuinely alarmed and feared that further activity by the police might indeed lead to the murder of the child. Accordingly Father Mullin withdrew his ten-thousand-dollar offer for the apprehension of the criminals, and Michael McCormick, the lost boy’s uncle, moved swiftly to change the terms of his five-thousand-dollar reward. In seeking for a way to make an appeal directly to the abductors and assure them of their personal safety, he brought into the case at this point the redoubtable Pat Sheedy.

Sheedy had just achieved worldwide notoriety by recovering from the thieves’ fence, Adam Worth, the famous Gainsborough painting of Elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire, which had been stolen from Agnew’s Art Rooms in London in 1876, and which had been hunted over half the earth for twenty-five years. This successful intermediacy between the police and the underworld gave the New York and Buffalo “honest gambler” a tremendous reputation for confidential dealing, and the McCormicks counted on Sheedy’s trusted position among criminals to convince the kidnappers that they could deliver the boy, collect five thousand dollars, and be safe from arrest or betrayal. So Sheedy came forward, announced that he was prepared to pay over the money on the spot and without question, the moment the boy was delivered and identified.

The public, hysterical with sympathy and apprehension, disgusted by the police failures and thrilled by Sheedy’s performance in the matter of the stolen painting, received the news of his intervention in the case with signs of thanksgiving. Willie McCormick’s return was breathlessly expected, and many believed the feat as good as accomplished. But this time the task was beyond the powers of even the man who enjoyed the confidence of the foremost professional criminals of the day, counted the Moroccan freebooter and rebel, Raisuli, as an intimate, forced the celebrated international fence and generalissimo of thieves, Adam Worth, to leave London and follow him across the ocean after the lost Gainsborough, rescued Eddie Guerin, the burglar of the American Express office in Paris, from Devil’s Island,[10] and seemed able to compel the most abandoned lawbreakers to his wishes. Days and weeks passed, but Sheedy got no word and could find no trace.

[10] Or so says one of the most persistent of underworld legends.

On the rain-drenched afternoon of May 10, John Garfield, bridge tender for the New York Central Railroad at Cromwell Creek, worked the levers and lifted the steel span to allow the passage of a steam lighter bound up the muddy estuary for a load of bricks. After he had lowered the platform again he observed that a large floating object had worked its way to the shore and threatened to get caught in the machinery which operated his bridge. He crawled out on the bulkhead with a boat hook, intending to dislodge it. At the extreme end he leaned over and bent down, prodding the object with his pole. The thing turned in the stream and swam into better view. It was the body of a boy.

Garfield drew back in surprise and horror, crawled back to the bridge, called to two boys and a man, who were angling near by, and soon put out with them in a rowboat. In five minutes the body had been brought to shore and tied. Before the end of half an hour it had been identified as that of Willie McCormick. While detectives had been seeking him thousands of miles away, and European port authorities had been watching the in-coming ships for the lad or his abductors, he had lain dead in the ooze of the creek bottom, three squares from his home. The churning propeller of the steam lighter had brought the body to the surface.

A coroner’s autopsy revealed that the body had been in the water for a period which could not be fixed with any degree of precision. It might have been two weeks, but the coroner felt unable to state that the body had not been in the creek for six weeks, the full length of time since the disappearance. There was no way to make sure. Again, it was not possible to determine if the boy had been choked to death before being cast into the waters. There was no skull fracture, no breakage of bones, and no discernible wound. There was also no evidence of poison--no abnormal condition of the lungs. The official physicians were inclined to believe that death had been caused by drowning, but they would not make a definite declaration.

The police dismissed the case with the assertion that they had been vindicated. It was clear that the boy had played truant from church, wandered away, fallen into the river, probably on the night of his disappearance, and lain under the water for six weeks.

But to this conclusion the McCormicks and many others, among them several distinguished private officers, took exception, and it must be said that the police explanation leaves some important questions suspended. Why did the boy turn and go three blocks to the south of his home, when he had last been seen hurrying northward toward church? What could have led this timid and dark-frightened boy to go voluntarily down to the sinister and gloomy river bank on the edge of night? How did it happen that the Kid directed William McCormick to deposit the two-thousand-dollar ransom within a few score yards of the spot where the body was recovered? Who was the mysterious masked man?

We shall never know, and neither shall we be able to answer whether accident or foul design lurks in the shadow of this mystery.

XI

A NUN IN VIVISEPULTURE

Whoever is familiar with Central European popular literature has tucked away in his memory some part or parcel of the story of Barbara Ubrik. The romance of her life and parentage has furnished material for countless novels, plays, short stories, tales and poems of the imaginative kind. Bits of her history appear in more serious literature, in religious and social polemics, even in the memoirs of personages. And more than one of the tragic incidents of opera may be, if diligence and intuition are not lacking, traced back to this forgotten Polish woman and her exorbitant adventures. Time and creative interpretation have fashioned her case into one of the classic legends of disappearance.

In the Polish insurrection of 1830-31, a certain Alexander Ubrik played a part sufficiently noteworthy to get himself exiled to Siberia for life, leaving behind him a wife and four young daughters, the third of whom, Barbara, was the chief figure of the subsequent affair. But the Ubrik family had already known the feel of the romantic fabric and there had already been a remarkable disappearance mystery involving a relative no more remote than the mother of Barbara and wife of the banished Alexander. It is with this part of the family history that much of the literary offspring deals.