We Is Got Him

by Carrie Hagen

  When he awoke on December 14, Captain Heins had two new leads on Charley Ross’s kidnappers. The previous Thursday, a buggy had pulled alongside two boys playing in Hoboken, New Jersey. A man inside of it asked eight-year-old John Neville and his friend if they wanted to take a ride with him. The friend declined, but John stepped into the wagon. His family hadn’t heard from him since. Heins also waited on news from a member of the Ross family who had traveled to Chester, Illinois, to investigate a Charley look-alike named Levi Scott, a child who had arrived in town with two poorly dressed, bearded men. The boy gave vague answers to the prepared Pinkerton questions but did tell police that his name was Charles Brewster. Heins did not brief Philadelphia’s force on all of the communications that he received from Superintendent Walling. Mayor Stokley knew of the captain’s quiet demeanor, but if he questioned Heins’s loyalties or protested the withholding of information from his office—which Stokley would share with the advisers—Heins’s methods did not change. And then, he received another telegram from Walling at 10:00 A.M. on December 14.

  “Mosher and Clark were both killed last night while committing a burglary. Clark, when dying, said Mosher knew where Charley Ross was.”

  Heins immediately contacted his superiors. He also told Joseph Ross to ready Walter and Peter Callahan (the Rosses’ gardener) for a possible trip to identify the bodies in New York; he said he would send a telegram with further information, but Walter was not to know the purpose of the trip. Joseph immediately telegraphed Middletown, Pennsylvania, where Walter and Sarah Ross were visiting Christian at his mother’s house.

  “Tell C. K. R. quietly that Mosher and Douglas were killed last night, while committing a burglary, near New York. Douglas confessed that they stole Charley.”

  Within two hours of receiving Walling’s telegram, Heins and William McKean, city adviser and editor of the Ledger, left to meet Walling at the Metropolitan Hotel in New York.

  As soon as the Ledger posted a dispatch on its press board at Sixth and Chestnut Streets, news of the kidnappers’ confession and deaths spread among Christmas shoppers and storekeepers. Once again, crowds gathered at the news boards. The Inquirer asked Detective Charles Wood, a Philadelphia officer who had been a member of the search party in Long Island Sound, about his role in the investigation. Wood’s testimonial offered the public their first look at police intelligence since they had learned of the kidnapping and the kidnappers’ descriptions five months before.

  “For a long time,” Wood relayed, “we knew that the men who committed this act were in and about New York, and during that time, together with the officers of New York who gallantly entered into the work, we have together been hunting down these men. We were cruising about Long Island for a long time.”

  When Wood was asked how the deaths would affect the search for Charley, his answers reflected information given in the ransom notes.

  “Are you nearer the child now than before?’

  “I don’t think they can keep it out of the way. Either the ‘two other men’ have got it or Mosher’s wife has it. I don’t think she can keep it out of the road. She has no means—neither have the other two men— for we know that the whole gang were reduced so low that they had to make forays into the town and commit house robberies. It was while upon such an errand that last night Mosher and Clark were killed. They had to steal to live, and to steal to be able to hide the child.”

  “Is there any likelihood that they will kill the child?”

  “No, no; I don’t think that. They may ‘drop it.’”

  “By that do you mean set it down in some place where it may be picked up?”

  “Yes, something of that kind.”

  The kidnappers had mentioned that they were four in number in earlier ransom notes. The police never were sure what to think of this statement. Only two kidnappers were described by Walter and eyewitnesses, and once Gil Mosher identified his brother and Joseph Douglas as suspects, the police operated on the theory that the duo—longtime partners in crime—were the only ones responsible. Certainly Mosher and Douglas had been connected to a larger criminal community, so they could have enlisted the help of others to watch Charley or protect their identities, or they could have brought their own family members into the operation … or they could have been lying. If there were two others involved, the police assumed they would have been two people that worked well with Mosher and Douglas.

  Douglas was subservient to Mosher, and from what he said in his final breaths, he wasn’t in touch with his family. Mosher had two brothers living, but according to Gil, they weren’t close and often quarreled. Mosher was, however, on good terms with his wife Martha, William Westervelt’s sister. Although Detective Wood and others speculated over Martha’s involvement in hiding Charley, Walling defended her from the moment her husband was killed.

  Two of Walter’s uncles took the boy and Peter Callahan, the gardener who saw Mosher and Douglas kidnap the Ross children, to police headquarters in New York the next day. Walling had emphasized to Heins and his own men that Walter was neither to learn about the Bay Ridge shootings nor speak to anybody before he identified the bodies. Walling himself met with Walter in his office before a detective took him and his uncles to the Brooklyn morgue.

  Detective Dusenbury escorted Callahan, the uncles, and Walter inside. The night before, the bodies of both men had been lifted from Van Brunt’s lawn into rough boxes and then taken to the coroner, who placed them in a vault. The coroner walked Walter to Mosher’s body first. He uncovered the entire corpse. The little boy looked at the body, riddled with bullets. He became too upset to immediately identify Mosher.

  “That’s the man,” he eventually said, “who gave me candy in the buggy.”

  “I remember him by his nose,” Walter continued. “I never saw a nose like that before.”

  Callahan also recognized Mosher. “I am certain that he was one of the men from his general appearance; but whenever I attempted to look at him when I met him last July he put a handkerchief up to his face. This partly hid it.”

  The coroner walked Walter over to Douglas’s corpse. He uncovered only Douglas’s face, protecting Walter from this shattered torso.

  “Oh, that’s awful like him; he’s the driver.” Walter remembered Douglas as the one who gave him money to buy firecrackers at the Kensington store. He pointed to Mosher.

  “He sometimes had candy too.”

  After Walter and his uncles left, a large crowd gathered around the entrance to the morgue. At 2:30 P.M., a police officer entered with two women. Patrick McGuire, the morgue keeper, met them. They asked to see the bodies.

  One woman wore a green dress and a dark felt hat with a blue velvet tip. Her dark eyes looked around the room, and she pulled a red shawl around her shoulders. The older woman next to her was identified as Gil Mosher’s wife, Liz. She wore a black dress. McGuire led the women into the back room, where Mosher’s open coffin lay in an icebox. The younger woman shook and turned toward Liz, who held her composure. They whispered together and asked to see Douglas. McGuire walked to a vault in the ground, accessible by a fifteen-foot stepladder. Liz refused to climb down the ladder, but a police officer accompanied the younger woman underground. Five minutes later, she ascended, shaking from the cold and visibly angry. McGuire took the ladies into his office and sat them by a stove. They removed their gloves, warming their hands. Both left without talking to reporters.

  A half hour later, a woman in her late twenties entered. She asked McGuire, who stood next to his ten-year-old son, if any women had arrived that day.

  He said no.

  “Yes, Father, there were two ladies here a little while ago,” McGuire’s boy said. “Don’t you recollect them?”

  “Oh, yes. I do; but those women wanted to see someone in the hospital,” McGuire lied.

  The woman asked to see the bodies. By the mid-afternoon, a small crowd stood around the icebox holding Mosher. She worked her way to the front and said, “That’s the old
est one.” A reporter from the New York Herald heard her and followed the woman into McGuire’s office, where she sat by the stove. She agreed to an interview.

  “I am a sister-in-law of William Mosher,” the woman said. She identified herself as the wife of Alfred, one of three Mosher brothers still living, and the mother of five children. She said twelve of Mosher’s other brothers were deceased, and that her husband, Alfred, had not allowed William in their home for the past several years.

  The reporter asked why she wanted to know about the two women who entered earlier.

  “I was afraid I might meet anybody belonging to Will Mosher. I don’t mean his wife. I am waiting to see her, but any of his companions, women, or any of his brother’s connections. I do not want to see any of them. When I read all about this thing in the evening papers last night I resolved to come to see poor Will, but that’s all. I don’t want to know the others. I went down to Bay Ridge this morning, and there heard that two other women were looking after the bodies, and that was why I hesitated to come in here, for fear I should meet them. So, it seems, they weren’t here after all.”

  The reporter asked Mrs. Mosher to describe the women she feared. He then told her that McGuire’s boy was right: two women fitting her description had been there earlier.

  “Yes, I know them,” she continued. She referred first to Liz Mosher and her husband Gil. “She and he and all their connections are bad, and I don’t want to know them. The other is the one that calls herself Douglas’s sister. Her name is Mary, but that is all anybody knows about her. She is not his sister, and she is not his wife—that’s all I need say. [Gil] lives in Delancey Street, New York, with his wife, and is fifty-seven years of age. Douglas used to live with Mary, who calls herself his sister, in Columbia Street.”

  “William was married, was he not?” the reporter asked.

  “Oh, yes. I am only surprised his wife has not come here yet. They have four children living and two they buried. The two eldest of the living ones are William and Georgie; Willie only four years old. She is a tall woman like me but stout.”

  “What does your husband think about William’s abduction of Charley Ross?”

  “Oh, he doesn’t believe a word of it, nor neither do I. William was always too fond of his own children, and of everybody else’s. He wouldn’t harm a child, though he might kill a man. The life of thieving was his only vice. He never drank a drop of liquor in his life, never took a chew of tobacco, and never smoked a cigar nor a pipe. I never heard him use even a foul word. He never had a fault but the one of wishing to acquire sudden riches and he had a beautiful education.” Mrs. Mosher said she had known William Mosher prior to his arrest six years before. “He was just making his living the best he could, until just after that time when he lost his child and fell into bad company with thieves and detectives.”

  “Did you see what Detective Silleck said: ‘That Mosher was always a river thief’?”

  “Yes, I know those Sillecks.”

  “Oh, you do? You know Detective Silleck?”

  “Yes. I know him once, and if he and the other Sillecks put their hands over their mouths they might find more at home than they would want everybody to know. Oh, I know him. Oh dear! How many people hold office to take care of others that ought to be watched themselves.”

  the resemblance is most striking

  CHRISTIAN’S BROTHER JAMES ARRIVED IN CHESTER, ILLINOIS, during the week of the shootings. The family had sent him to identify a little boy whose presence made the town uncomfortable. Recently, a heavyset man with a lame leg named Thomas Scott had arrived in Chester with the child and another male companion. The second man’s name was Henry Ship. Ship wore a thin black suit and had gray spots in his black whiskers. The townspeople noticed that both men looked about fifty years old, and they both had very soft hands. The men said the child’s name was Levi Scott, but the town thought the nervous little boy resembled the picture of Charley Ross on the Pinkerton flyers. The police arrested the men and took the boy to a safe house.

  James Ross’s train arrived in stormy weather. At 1:30 P.M., police met him at the station. As soon as the child’s caregivers introduced James to “Levi Scott,” he saw that while the boy was not Charley, his natural appearance had been changed. Somebody had thrown acid in the child’s face, and his hair had obviously been dyed. When those in the room heard Levi was not Charley, they begged James to reconsider. They blamed the child’s posture for confusing James. His back had been whipped so many times, they told him, ripples of scars now marred its curvature.

  The boy’s scars make him unrecognizable, they said.

  Please, Mr. Ross, they pleaded. Wait until tomorrow to make your decision.

  In spite of the weather, townspeople gathered in the rain outside the house where James and Levi talked through the evening. James telegraphed Philadelphia with word that the child could very well be Charley, although he hadn’t recognized his Uncle James. The child gave some incorrect answers to the questions, James telegraphed, but the men who accompanied him agreed to travel to Philadelphia to provide more information. Sarah Ross and her brothers told James to bring the men and the boy immediately. Knowing of the town’s distress, and concerned for the boy, James agreed to talk to Levi again in the morning. By the end of their second conversation, Levi shared what he could remember of his story. James sent another telegram to Philadelphia before noon. “I do not think it is Charley, although the resemblance is most striking.”

  Levi didn’t remember who he really was or where exactly he had originally come from. He just knew the men were not family members. Levi had forgotten that his real name was Henry Lachmueller. Two years before Charley was kidnapped, “Thomas Scott” and “Henry Ship” had taken five-year-old Henry from his home in St. Louis. Henry’s father, also named Henry, had worked at a stone quarry. Every day, his children brought dinner to the workers. One evening, the children stopped at a store on their way back home, and little Henry ran barefoot into the store’s backyard. When he did not reappear, the children told their mother. That night, a search party ran into two men who said they watched the boy fall into the river and drown. Authorities searched the river.

  Hours after they had grabbed Henry, his captors walked him to the river and rowed him to the opposite shore. They forced him to walk through the woods and lashed his back with tree branches when he fell down. They stopped at a small cabin and a woman joined their party. Over the next two years, the three adult drifters traveled the Midwest with Henry. They forced him to beg for money, and if he received less than one dollar a day, they beat him. Right before the party arrived in Chester, the woman had died.

  When James Ross’s decision spread through Chester, townspeople demanded that the police refuse to return the boy to Thomas Scott and Henry Ship. One man applied for a restraining order to keep the men from the boy and to place him in the custody of a guardian. Citizens began writing letters to other towns and cities with a description of Levi.

  In St. Louis, Henry Lachmueller Sr. read about the unfortunate child in Illinois. He asked the police to obtain a better description. The morning after his son’s disappearance in 1872, while workmen dragged the river, an eyewitness had told him that two men had crossed the river the night before with a child resembling Henry. Over the past two and a half years, he had purchased “LOST” advertisements in European and North American newspapers, and he had traveled through both continents following false leads. During this time, his little boy had been panhandling through the Midwest, but nobody had recognized the child scarred with acid until the Charley Ross case created a national hysteria, sharpening Americans’ observations and paranoia.

  Henry Lachmueller Sr. and his wife traveled to Chester. As soon as young Henry saw his father, he remembered his family.

  At his mother’s home in Pennsylvania, Christian Ross received word of his brother James’s latest telegram.

  “It is not him.”

  Detective Silleck knew that

 
; SUPERINTENDENT WALLING’S FIRST STATEMENTS TO THE public attempted to clarify the role his name played in Douglas’s dying confession. In response to a question about Charley’s location, the kidnapper had said, “Inspector Walling knows, and the boy will get home all right.”

  Walling addressed neither Douglas’s specific words nor his reference to the rank “Inspector.” Instead, he emphasized the obvious, ethical distance between his position and the kidnappers’ criminal intent.

  “I knew of these two men only as two thieves,” he told the press. “I cannot refer you to any conviction of either of them, but they are well-known characters among the police force of this city.”

  The new headlines revived interest in Charley’s disappearance. Writers repeated the circumstances of the botched burglary and speculations over Charley’s hiding place. Readers consumed story after story, seeking further clues. The unexpected identification of the kidnappers reminded them of their initial fears over copycat crimes, their empathy for Christian and Sarah Ross, and their anger with the police for refusing to release details. The sensational deaths of Mosher and Douglas reinforced their instinct for retributive justice, allowing them to feel more reassured about their own children’s safety.

  Walling claimed responsibility for the relief spreading across America. The more he talked about the case, the more he turned himself into a hero by emphasizing his role in the investigation. The Evening Bulletin wrote, “To Captain Walling belongs the credit of originating the theory that these were the guilty parties.” Walling did not publicly recognize Detective Silleck and Captain Hedden, the officers who first told him about Gil Mosher and facilitated the meeting between the criminal and the superintendent. He also did not acknowledge his predecessor, Superintendent George Matsell, who had first heard of Hedden’s connection with Gil Mosher and encouraged the officer to take the career criminal’s story seriously.