by Carrie Hagen
Albert said he left with a pistol, saw a light in his uncle’s window, and awoke his father’s gardener, William Scott, who lived in an adjoining cottage. Both men saw shadows against the window curtain. Soon after, Albert alerted his father and their hired man, Herman Frank; the four men held guns and hid behind trees between the properties. According to Albert, his father directed the men to “capture” the thieves without killing them unless they needed to defend themselves. He said his father had divided them into groups of two, sending one pair to the front door and one to the back. “Whichever way they come,” he remembered hearing, “let the two who meet them take care of them as best they can. If they come out and scatter both ways, then we’ll all have a chance to work.”
Herman Frank said that he and the elder Van Brunt had walked through the rear door and lifted the trapdoor into the pantry. Holmes Van Brunt claimed in an earlier police report that he could have shot both men early in the discovery, but he restrained himself until he was sure that violence was needed. Both he and Herman Frank swore that the burglars shot several times before they defended themselves with their pistols. Albert Van Brunt said Joseph Douglas shot so close to his face that powder blew against his cheeks.
No bullet from either kidnapper’s gun harmed any of the men. However, at the end of the shooting, two bullets had pierced Mosher’s back and so many had entered Douglas that the morgue keeper refused to let females and Walter Ross view his body below his face.
The coroner’s jury agreed with the men’s interpretation of events. “We, the jury, find that the killing of the deceased in the manner set forth was perfectly justifiable, and we commend the act of their defending their lives and property in such a courageous manner under such trying circumstances.” The coroner agreed. New York’s Evening Telegram joined the Herald in complimenting the Van Brunts on succeeding where Walling had failed. It also blamed police negligence for allowing the criminals to be shot before they were interrogated.
Martha Mosher arrived at the Brooklyn morgue on the day of the inquest. A male companion walked to her husband’s coffin. Martha knelt down, held her husband’s neck, and kissed his face until Patrick McGuire, the morgue keeper, pulled her up.
“I am his wife,” Martha cried to McGuire. “I have come to him, and will go wherever he is, no matter what the consequences to me.” McGuire began asking her questions about her husband’s body, but the male companion interrupted him.
“Look here, look here, you can’t find out anything from her. You must ask her through me.”
“I want to ask her a question you can’t answer,” McGuire retorted. “I want to know if she is going to bury her husband or leave him here?”
“Yes, I will bury him,” Martha replied through her tears. “He shall have a decent burial. I will take him away.” Ignoring reporters’ questions, Martha asked McGuire if she could visit her husband’s body again. He said she could return as many times as she wanted.
Martha had written the coroner, asking him to release Mosher’s body into her care, and a young woman identifying herself as Mary Douglas wrote for permission to bury her “husband,” Joseph. The coroner approved both requests. A man named Munn, an undertaker and friend of the Mosher and Douglas families, washed the bodies and dressed them for burial. He knew them so well, he said later, that he didn’t charge them for his services. Munn told McGuire that he would bury them in Cypress Hills cemetery, a place where several of their friends rested. He also told McGuire that a source had told him “that boy Charley will be found before sundown today.”
“How do you know?” McGuire asked.
“Well, that is my business; but I will tell you this, that I’ll stake my honor on this, that Charley Ross, if he isn’t found tonight, will be on his way to Philadelphia tomorrow.”
I thought the boy was dead, McGuire told Munn.
“Not a bit of it,” retorted Munn, “or I wouldn’t say what I do. I know better.”
When Munn finished dressing the bodies, he placed them in imitation rosewood coffins with silver clasps.
Martha Mosher agreed to an interview after her husband’s funeral. On Monday, December 21, her story appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The writer described Martha as “good-looking and genteel in appearance.”
Throughout her adolescence, Martha said, her family had known the Moshers very well—at one point, the two families even shared a house. When she was fifteen, Martha married Bill, who was forty. “No girl could get a kinder husband than I did,” she told the reporter, “and from the day he married me up to the one when I saw him last he never changed to me.”
Initially, Bill had supported her by building boats and shaping wire into objects like birdcages. “I have seen few men in my life that were more industrious or attentive when everything went well with him, but sometimes bad luck would come, and then he was subject to fits of melancholy. They would not last long, because he was a good-natured, easy-dispositioned man naturally, and his dullness soon wore off.” Despite her husband’s mood swings, Martha said, he “would be the last man I should expect to hear of interfering with another man’s child.”
A reporter asked if Martha remembered the first time she had heard of the Ross kidnapping.
“I first heard of the Ross case from outside parties,” she answered. “But from what I learned since and what I know now, I am sorry to be obliged to confess I think he was one of the men who took that child. Where the boy is, I don’t know; I wish I did. His mother should soon have him. If I lost one of my own little ones I could not suffer more than I have since I believed my husband took that one. I would willingly give one of mine to restore Mrs. Ross her child, if that would do it. I never knew anything about it, until some suspicions of late, and what I heard since I have communicated to Superintendent Walling. He knows all I ever heard or suspected, and I only hope any information I can get for him will enable him to find the child.”
By the time Martha’s interview appeared in the papers, the press learned that she had fled Philadelphia months before the “suspicions of late,” which she said had informed her of Mosher’s complicity. Even though Walling had repeatedly defended Martha against charges of complicity throughout the fall, he did bring her to headquarters for questioning one week after the shootings. Afterward, he again defended her innocence.
The day after Martha’s interview appeared in the Inquirer, the New York Herald asked Gil Mosher about his sister-in-law. “If Martha Mosher don’t know where Charley Ross is, she knows those who do know,” alleged Gil. “I guess Superintendent Walling knows all about them. There’s been somebody behind them all along. That child will be found one of these days, and then it will all come out.”
Did Bill know that the police suspected him of the kidnapping? The reporter asked.
“What! Know what the police were doing? Yes. Every move,” Gil answered. “They did not stir but he knew it. Why, of course they were after him. I can’t tell you what started them now, but you come to me when the boy is discovered, and I’ll tell you such a history as never was written. Take you a week to write it.” Gil returned to his thoughts about Martha. “She is a good woman, no better, a kind mother and as true a wife as ever a man had, but she’s not so innocent of Bill Mosher’s doings as she pretends. Time will prove that. Let Superintendent Walling alone: he’ll bring all of that out. That woman would do anything Bill Mosher told her; yes, and lots of things he didn’t tell her, to please him. She was all bound up in him, from first to last, and she thought of nothing else in the world but him.”
When asked about the coroner’s inquest, Gil scoffed. He accused the authorities of dismissing the fact that the victims had been needlessly shot. If the shooters were honestly defending themselves, Gil asked, then why did Mosher and Douglas have bullet holes in their backs? “Now, there’s that coroner,” Gil continued. “He didn’t see the bodies? No. Well, you might have read how [Van Brunt and his men] told [Mosher and Douglas] to surrender, and then how the shooting began. N
ow, will you tell me, or can anyone explain, how, if he was fighting them, he came to have a shot in the back of his head and another in his back? Why wasn’t that brought out at the inquest?”
Gil was right about the shooters. According to forensic evidence, the men were trigger-happy. The authorities should have questioned their behavior more thoroughly. But they didn’t—and not because the Van Brunts were rich and powerful; status hadn’t kept the shooters from testifying at the inquest. Their actions were excused because less than thirty years before, the “neighborhood watch” had preceded the police department. Citizens were allowed—encouraged, even—to treat their neighborhoods as jurisdictions that they supervised. Even if Van Brunt and his men hadn’t justified their actions as self-defense, the implicit laws of the old guard probably would have protected them.
Still, Gil Mosher’s criticism showed sufficient sibling loyalty. When Gil had put the police on his brother’s path back in July, he had his eyes on the reward money, not another death in his family.
The Moshers’ rivalries had led to bad feelings and at least one prison sentence. At the same time, they weren’t so hardened that they rejected their sibling bond. Both brothers had lived through the deaths of their parents and twelve of their siblings. Gil Mosher had mentored his younger brother into thieving and a shipbuilding career, and Gil had tracked him down to let him know when their estranged mother died. When Westervelt told Bill Mosher that his older brother was acting as a police informant, the kidnapper’s intense emotional response revealed the sting of betrayal, among other things. The men may not have liked each other, but they were emotionally connected. Had one wanted the other dead, there would have been plenty of opportunities earlier in their lives to make that happen.
Any allegiance Gil felt for his dead brother didn’t cover his brother’s widow. Martha Mosher now retracted earlier statements defending her husband against kidnapping charges. She still claimed she was ignorant of the crime, and although Gil called her “a good woman,” he had also said she was “not so innocent” of her husband’s activities. Believing Martha could lead to Charley, Gil implied that Walling shared whatever knowledge she had. Like Joseph Douglas, he used the words “Superintendent Walling knows.”
The person most familiar with Walling’s knowledge was somebody connected to both Douglas and Gil Mosher: William Westervelt. Walling had insisted that Westervelt communicate only with him, and at times, only in private. Any information that Walling told his fellow officers could have put them in closer contact with the reward, so he wouldn’t have shared everything. Westervelt would have been the only person who knew what he told Walling.
Westervelt had spent the evening before Douglas’s death with the kidnapper. He had been in touch with Gil Mosher early in the investigation, and later, as the two men were related by marriage, they remained in close physical proximity to Martha in the days surrounding her husband’s funeral.
Whatever Westervelt had told Walling, he could have easily told Joseph Douglas, and Gil Mosher, and Martha Mosher.
By calling and relying upon Westervelt, Walling had given third parties an opportunity to incriminate him. As much as Mayor Stokley needed to distance himself from the case to ensure his political future, Walling needed to claim leadership of it to protect his reputation.
serve the public
THE NEW YORK HERALD WAS THE FIRST NEWSPAPER TO RAISE suspicions of Christian’s involvement in Charley’s kidnapping during the summer of 1874. Since then, Sarah Ross and her brothers had blamed the flurry of sensational journalism and the libel trial for Christian’s deteriorating health. In late December, the Herald issued an apology.
“While [the Herald’s] investigations of the matter carried on at a distance were meant simply to serve the public, they were in certain particulars erroneous in theory and facts. Our correspondent, acting upon false information, believed by him to be true, did the character of Mr. Ross a gross injustice.”
Christian remained at his mother’s home in central Pennsylvania through the holidays. Daily, he waited for a telegram saying the police had found Charley, or that a stranger had led him home to Germantown just as the Kensington man had aided Walter five months before.
On December 20, Sarah’s brothers met again to discuss their frustration with slow police progress. Recent interviews with Mosher family members and friends contradicted initial police intelligence. Although Walling had repeated to the press that he could prove the kidnappers sold their horse and buggy en route to New York from Germantown on July 2, friends and members of the Mosher family placed the men in Philadelphia on July 3, and a Philadelphia bartender remembered talking to Mosher on the 4th. On that day, he told the Inquirer, he had allowed Mosher to pay his bar tab with small wooden carvings of miniature schooners.
The police also wasted time and resources allowing average citizens to contribute to the investigation. Along with one of Christian’s nephews, Detective Heins agreed to meet a spiritualist who claimed she had seen Charley’s spirit since September. Her latest trance, she said, revealed Charley sitting in bed while reading a book. And on December 17, Walling spent a large part of his day inside of his office, receiving any New Yorker who had a suggestion about how to proceed with the search. It was a smart public-relations move. Walling appeared to be exhausting every opportunity to learn more information. That day, one reporter counted sixteen “drop-in” advisers, most of whom were “gentlemen” of the town. When one of these men asked Walling why the police couldn’t offer immunity to whoever returned the boy, the superintendent praised the idea but said he couldn’t make such a promise if Charley were held across state lines. Walling did not, however, pursue this “good idea” in New York.
According to the Evening Bulletin, investors in Mayor Stokley’s initial reward encouraged the idea of immunity. “It is stated that the contributors to the fund for the reward of $20,000 for the arrest and conviction of the abductors and the return of the child, are now considering the propriety of setting aside a portion of the amount for the recovery of the child, with ‘no questions asked.’”
The Lewis brothers were the first to step forward with such an unconditional offer. Although Christian had no knowledge of the advertisement, his in-laws signed his name to the notice. Readers across the country saw it in papers on December 23.
FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS will be paid for the return, within ten days from this date, to any one of the addresses named below, of my son, CHARLES BREWSTER ROSS aged four years and seven months, who was taken from Germantown on July 1, 1874.
Being entirely satisfied that his abductors were killed at Bay Ridge, L.I. on the 14th inst., I now offer the above sum for his return, or for information which shall lead thereto, promising to ask no questions.
The brothers instructed interested parties to leave Charley at one of seven different addresses between Washington, D.C., and Boston: two belonged to the businesses of family friends in Baltimore and Washington, one to Christian’s business on Market Street in Philadelphia, one to the Ross home in Germantown, and three to the businesses of the Lewis brothers in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.
A response arrived at the Ross home after Christmas. It came in the form of another ransom note.
St. Louis, December 25, 1874
Mr. Ross—Dear Sir—You offer a reward for information that will lead to the recovery of Charley Ross. I know where he is and will tel you. I would have told you before but was afraid to, but since Douglass is dead I can tell you without fear. Last September I became acquainted accidentally with Joe Douglas and Bill Morris or Mosher (he called himself Morris then) and found out that they had Charley Ross hidden away, and they threatened to kill me if I betrayed them, but promised to pay me well to keep quiet. Now if you will give me $500 I will promise to deliver charley into your hands within three days from the time that I receive the money, or if you doubt me or my ability to do so, I will go to Philadelphia and take you to the place where he is now hidden, if you will send me mon
ey enough to pay my expenses and take me there, say bout one hundred dollars; then after you get the boy you can pay the rest. I will pledge you my life that I can do this, and would have done so before only I was in fear of my life, and it was only yesterday that I learned that Douglass was dead. If you will send the money I will do all that I have promised. Address James Cannon, care W.S. Wylie, No. 1743 North Ninth street, St Louis, Mo.
P.S. I am living six miles in the country, and Mr. Wylie is a friend, but knows nothing about this. If you send money by registered letter or money order, send it in Mr. Wylie’s name.
PART FOUR:
“this is very uncertain”
(JANUARY – OCTOBER 1875)
TESTIMONY OF SARAH KERR, COURT OF QUARTER SESSIONS
Philadelphia, September 6, 1875
I was employed in Mr. Ross’s family as a child’s nurse in July of last year. I remember the first day of July, 1874. I dressed the two boys, Walter and Charley, that day. I first dressed Charley and sent him outdoors and then dressed Walter, that was between 3 and 4 o’clock. After that I heard them talking outdoors and looking out of the window saw Walter on the grass, that was a quarter past 4. I neither saw nor heard anything of Charley after that.
beyond the range of possibility
MAYOR WILLIAM S. STOKLEY HAD BECOME WELL KNOWN IN America toward the end of his first term. For the past five months, as newspapers had recorded the nation’s observations and speculations on the Charley Ross case, an international audience had read of Philadelphia’s $20,000 reward and the mayor who offered it.
On January 1, 1875, the city inaugurated Stokley into a second term. The Inquirer called the ceremony “a particularly auspicious beginning of the new year” and lauded Stokley for protecting the city’s streets better than his predecessors had. Ignoring the famous crime that the mayor’s force had not, after five months, solved, writers praised Stokley’s efforts to destroy gambling halls, to prosecute thieves more rigorously, and to pay attention to the appearance, hygiene, and vigilance of his officers.