by Carrie Hagen
Meanwhile, Police Chief Jones was angry with reporters. He had of course reached out to the community for help. After authorizing public citizens to form search parties, he had also called upon clergy to release approved information—on July 12, pastors read police statements that described the kidnappers, the wagon, and the horse. But by now, the Rosses’ Germantown neighbors had repeated numerous versions of the kidnapping story and the eyewitness accounts. These stories, along with the increasing presence of the “LOST” flyers, attracted the interest of reporters from the city’s numerous dailies—some of whom began paying special attention to the Public Ledger. Without knowing about the ransom letters, close readers had noticed odd statements in the classifieds: “Ros we be redy to negociate”; “Ros wil com to terms to the extent of his ability”; “Ros is willing. Have not got it; am doing my best to raise it.” This third message alerted the press and the public to the possibility that the kidnappers wanted money, and it assured them that the kidnappers read the Ledger. After contacting sources within the police department, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that authorities were constantly watching the Ledger building.
Realizing the media was informing the kidnappers of police surveillance, Jones wrote to the city’s weekly and daily papers, asking each to withhold any information pertaining to the Ross case. The Inquirer ignored his request and ran a story about the police chief’s letter on Monday, July 13. The city was outraged. Handbills all over the city had been asking them to help find Charley, and in their minds, they were as much a part of the investigation as their incompetent police force.
And this frustrated the kidnappers. Their continued request for Christian to communicate through a newspaper other than the Ledger revealed their nerves. Various dailies had given them a sense of police procedure by reviewing things like the frequency of Christian’s visits to headquarters and which mailboxes the police monitored; however, the press had also informed them about the magnitude of the investigation and angry public opinion. Any plans they may have had to keep Charley a short while or to repeat their crime in Philadelphia were frustrated. And on July 14, they learned of a greater problem. That day, the Inquirer ran an article that reviewed Christian’s business and personal financial losses following the Panic of 1873. The kidnappers must have realized Christian Ross did not have the $20,000 that the Ledger ad had promised them. They had kidnapped a child from a wrong family.
the danger lies intirely with yuself
PHILADELPHIA, July 16—Ros: The reason we did not respond to yu answer was we had to go a bit out in the country an the blasted old orse give out so we could not get back in time. We went as much as anything to se how Charley was. Yu have our word that he is yet safe—in health an no harm done him thoug he is uneasy to get home with Walter. he is afraid he won’t get home in time to go to Atlantic City with his mother when Saly comes back. —as we said befor after we gits the mony we have no further use for the child but we have a big object in restoring him to yu safe and sound. We shall be redy we think by Saturday to efect a change with yu (the child for the mony). we wil give you this much incite into our bisiness—that if any arest is made it wil be an inocent person who wil be ignorant of the part he is actin. but it is imaterial with us wether it be an inocent person or one of our own party the moment any arest is made or any clandestine movements in transmiting this mony to us it will be conclusive evidence with us that yu have broken yu faith with us. we want yu to nail this mony up in a smal strong ruf box an have it were yu can git it at a minutes notice. mark on it (Drugs for H H H.
IN MID-JULY, A YOUNG WOMAN SETTLED INTO HER NEW APARTMENT in a working-class neighborhood of South Philadelphia. A family named Henderson rented a house on Monroe Street, and they sublet rooms to a few different tenants. In addition to being a landlord, Mr. Henderson worked as a handyman, a peddler, and a salesman; often, his neighbors noticed he would return home from auction houses with used furniture to refurbish, and sometimes, they saw packages of dresses and shawls delivered to the house. After receiving a shipment or finishing a wood-working project, Henderson would load up a wagon and leave home for days to sell his wares in the country.
The new renter was introduced to the Hendersons’ three sons: Willie was about seven, Charley about four, and Georgie younger still. Her landlord wasn’t home when she moved in, but just as she arrived, the landlady was preparing to give birth. The night before the baby was born, Mr. Henderson showed up with a much younger male friend. The friend was also taller, and he had red hair.
Outside of the Henderson home, searchers walked through alleys and into the bars advertising oyster sales. They moved farther into South Philadelphia, peeping around the shanties and shacks of the increasingly black neighborhoods. Throughout the city, the streets were cleaner than normal—July’s frequent storms had washed them. Hunters marched through the indoor markets where farmers leased space to sell their crops. They snuck behind row homes and flats and walked quickly through alley tenements. In the wealthy Rittenhouse square district in Center City, colonial townhomes with faux Victorian fronts did not harbor many hiding spaces, but further east, a few blocks closer to the river, ghosts whispered through the old, squeaky wooden frames of clapboard houses.
Back in Kensington, a stable keeper named C. M. Foulke responded to the flyers posted around the city. Two men who resembled descriptions of the kidnappers had rented a wagon from his livery stable in the days preceding the kidnapping. Foulke didn’t like the men—he didn’t like how they looked. As someone had recently stolen a wagon from him, Foulke told police, he asked the men for a reference, and they provided one from a nearby restaurant owner. He let them take it out for a few days toward the end of June but didn’t like the hours they kept: 8:00 A.M. through 3:00 P.M. didn’t seem like a proper workday, and the men didn’t seem the type to rent a wagon for reasons other than business. So when they asked at the end of the month if they could rent it for a week straight, he told them only if they made a deposit for the full value of the wagon. They couldn’t, and Foulke didn’t see them again.
yu child shal die
UNLIKE THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, THE PUBLIC LEDGER followed Chief Jones’s instructions not to publish interviews, stories, or speculation about the Ross case. The paper wasn’t always known for its code of integrity; during its first year, 1836, the Ledger had had a reputation for favoring drama over fact. Most of Philadelphia’s papers printed gossip as truth then, largely because the city’s dailies shared reporters who exchanged information and inflated details to create cohesive stories. To gain an audience, the Ledger exaggerated more than other papers, attracting libel suits that made the penny paper instantly popular. Its sensationalist journalism began to change in 1837. Having established a readership, the Ledger’s editors began to more aggressively compete with their rivals: they hired their own writers, demanded their loyalty, and forced them to find their own stories on the streets. The Ledger staff was the first in Philadelphia to enlist newsboys, the first to experiment with a rotary press for quicker printing, and one of the first to use carrier pigeons and a pony express to collect national information quickly. And never had prompt reporting been more in demand than during the Civil War.
Between 1861 and 1865, battlegrounds changed the face of news-rooms. Nearly 3 million men fought in the war, and an estimated 620,000 died. Nobody had expected such large numbers of fatalities. As the war years dragged on, the newspaper went from being the mouthpiece of political parties to the strongest link between families at home and soldiers on the front. This rabid readership elevated journalistic standards: the public’s appetite for eyewitness reports, tolerance for graphic details and demand for prompt coverage became insatiable. In an attempt to scoop the competition, every major American city had correspondents on the battlefields; the New York Herald alone sent forty. This golden period of print journalism continued after the war ended, when both journalists and readers multiplied around the country.
During the 1860s, the ambi
tion of the Philadelphia Public Ledger’s editors attracted a new owner—George W. Childs, a successful businessman and friend to Ulysses S. Grant. It was Childs who constructed the Ledger building, considered one of the biggest news offices in the country, across from Independence Hall. Under Childs’s leadership, the Ledger developed the second-largest circulation in America, boasting a readership of 400,000. In 1874, Childs’s chief editor was a man named William V. McKean. McKean wrote a code of reportorial ethics that he insisted his reporters follow, and so, while papers like the Inquirer ignored Chief Jones’s request, McKean honored his wishes. McKean also obeyed because the details surrounding the abduction were not quite clear, and Childs had told his staff to withhold any story until its facts could be corroborated. There was a third reason why he kept the Ross story out of his paper. McKean was one of the Republican advisers. As an editor, he did not want to print speculation and as a city leader, he wanted to minimize the amount of public attention given to the investigation.
New York papers blamed the Ledger and other dailies for endangering the lives of Charley and Philadelphia’s other children with their silence. “For what may be done in one instance, and in one place,” wrote the New York Tribune, “may be done in another instance and in another place.” On July 17, the Ledger responded to the accusations.
“We have abstained until now, because it was the expressed wish of the proper public authorities that as little as possible should be published about the matter, and so we have published nothing.” The Evening Bulletin, another target of New York’s criticism, defended itself by pledging its faith to Philadelphia’s police force. “The journalists of this city are well aware that from the day of the perpetration of the crime to the present moment there has been a ceaseless, vigilant and well organized movement on the part of the detective force against the kidnappers.” Three days before New York’s attack on Philadelphia’s press, however, the same Evening Bulletin had called police detectives “a particularly useless and expansive body” that “cannot detect” unless it “recovers stolen property by arranging the matter comfortably with the criminals.”
Both the Ledger and the Evening Bulletin cited jealousy, not concern for Charley, as motive for New York’s criticism. The Philadelphia press assumed that America, particularly the city of New York, envied the attention their city would likely get during the upcoming Centennial. The planning commission had already expressed surprise with the nation’s hesitancy to offer financial support, assistance, and displays, and there was no part of the country Philadelphia liked to blame more than New York City. By the mid-nineteenth century, Philadelphians had felt a shadow fall as New York surpassed their city as the cultural capital of the States. They were only too pleased when the federal government chose Philadelphia over New York as the Centennial location.
New York had tried, and failed, to host such an exhibition before. Inspired by the success of London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851, a Massachusetts auctioneer named Edward Riddle had convinced the city government to replicate the European expo—the first world’s fair—on the grounds of Bryant Park. Riddle’s efforts were doomed from the start. The centerpiece of London’s Crystal Palace was a 900,000-square-foot structure made of iron and nineteen acres of glass. There was no way the U.S. government would finance such a creation: the Southern states were moving toward secession, and their representatives weren’t looking to pour money into a fair in New York. Poor funding led to limited advertising and an unimpressive result; even though the city had approved a five-year lease on the land, the exhibition closed after three. Riddle’s risk cost the city $340,000, and in 1858, the building burned to the ground. By 1874, Europe had hosted six successful world’s fairs—two in London, two in Paris, and another in Vienna. The American Centennial in Philadelphia would be the world’s seventh party, and the first for the Americas.
But even the excitement over the Centennial didn’t keep the criticism of the New York press from aggravating Philadelphia’s inferiority complex. Almost daily, it suggested that Charley would die because of Philadelphia’s impotent police force and unethical parents. City authorities feared this image would prevail. The only way to uphold Philadelphia’s honor was to find the little boy and arrest the criminals without paying ransom.
“There must be no compromise with thieves,” the Philadelphia Inquirer said.
In response, the New York Herald asked why any parent would refuse payment if he or she knew the ransom would return a beloved child. It attacked Christian’s integrity and accused him of participating in the kidnapping.
“No man with any soul in him could have done such a thing,” responded Christian.
His friends loudly defended his innocence. They decried the New York Herald article and blamed the paper for further impairing Christian’s health. They encouraged Christian to defend himself by divulging the ransom letters and explaining the potential copycat consequences of appeasing the kidnappers. Christian refused. He said he didn’t want Sarah to read the letters at all—not at home, and not in the press. Friends pleaded with him to release a photograph of Charley so his critics could see he was trying to further the investigation.
“No possible good could result by their being read,” the advisers told Christian.
Christian’s friends and neighbors did not understand that the kidnappers were bargaining with Charley’s life. They knew the public demanded to see the letters, and they believed their friend was innocent of the crime, so it made sense to them for Christian to defend himself by publicizing everything he knew about the investigation. If Christian were to release the letters, he would be releasing the kidnappers’ threats against children in the city. In letter five, the kidnappers had said, “it is our interest then to restor him home unharmed, so that others will rely on our word.” Thus, they did reveal the intention that the advisers feared: a desire to repeat the crime after Charley was returned. Not only could these published words create pandemonium, but they could also turn the public’s concerns away from finding Charley—because if he were never returned home “unharmed,” the kidnappers’ word would be compromised and perhaps they wouldn’t take another child. Christian did worry about angering the kidnappers. Also in letter five, he had read, “if they open the dor for yu it wil only revele his (ded body).” Should he release the letters and a photo of Charley, he would be enabling the citizens of Philadelphia to become detectives themselves and risk provoking the kidnappers. The advisers’ decision to pass off counterfeit bills and to ignore the kidnappers’ communication directions had made Christian nervous enough; he didn’t want to endanger his child’s life further by defending himself from petty gossip.
he is yet safe
“ALMOST EVERY MAN HAS BEEN A DETECTIVE IN THE CASE,” wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer on July 17, “and people on the outskirts have scoured the country in wagons, searching gypsy camps and other places where there might be any likelihood of the child being discovered.” Watchers paid close attention to tramps and beggars. “Tramp Acts” were being passed by states during the 1870s, making it illegal for vagrants who didn’t have work to move about the country. The laws didn’t make a provision for veterans or others displaced by the war.
With so many people on the streets looking for a little boy that matched Charley’s description, the papers had many false accounts of the boy’s recovery, some of which they reported. Sarah Ross’s friends responded to erroneous accounts by running to congratulate her. Sarah told them the papers were wrong. She sought the help of a spiritualist, and after a medium told her that Charley was hidden in a boat, search parties conducted extra investigations of the wharves and boats along the rivers.
As newswires spread the story throughout the nation, strangers showed up at the Ross home. Late one night, two men walked around the brick wall at the front of the property. They climbed the porch steps and rang the doorbell. Sarah rushed to the second-floor landing. Christian ran out of his room, and two police officers hid near the front doo
r. Christian opened the door and saw two strangers. The men asked if they stood at the Ross residence. When Christian said yes, one man handed him a card, and the other said he had information about Charley. The story he told Christian offered no new information; it had been pieced together from articles in the newspapers. Christian said good-bye and the family returned to bed.
Religious fundamentalists visited Washington Lane and blamed Charley’s disappearance on Christian’s practice of trimming his beard. Another man walked up to the Rosses’ barn, opened a prayer book, and began to chant in front of the wagon. Charley’s siblings watched him. Walter tried to jump into the carriage, incurring the man’s wrath. “Now you have broken the spell,” the man said to him. “I cannot bring your brother home.” Unsolicited advice arrived by mail from as far away as California. Amateur sleuths offered to help for a nominal fee, and one letter sent to the police advised them to dig up the Ross property in search of Charley’s body.
The advisers waited to answer the instructions that arrived in the latest ransom note. The kidnappers had warned against “any clandestine movements in transmiting this mony to us,” giving the Ross camp reason to reevaluate their strategy of releasing marked bills. The day after they read the letter, a well-known private detective offered them another reason to postpone a response.
On July 17, Joshua Taggart left his office at Taggart, Lukens and Carlin, a private detective agency. He walked slowly through the dirty streets, past brownstone row houses. Taggart was one of the most experienced private detectives in the city, and in 1874, connected through colleagues to the Philadelphia Police Department. Such an arrangement was not uncommon to the young force. Police detectives earned just as much as patrolmen (about $1,000 a year); the nature of their undercover work, however, required them to spend money— usually at bars—and they weren’t reimbursed for expenses. Many of these officers doubled as “thief catchers” to supplement their incomes, negotiating payments for stolen property between victims and thieves. The true “private detective,” a job title that held slightly more respect than “thief catcher,” was usually employed by an agency registered with the city.