by Carrie Hagen
Since the start of the trial in August, the Ross family had received twenty additional ransom letters doctored to resemble the descriptions of the original twenty-three. Christian handed two of the fakes to the reporter. One author identified himself as a West Philadelphia detective. He had printed neatly in pencil, “I knew Mosher and Douglas and also Westervelt and have seen them together. I have seen your boy.” The handwriting on the other letter was messy, and ink blots marked the page around the words, “ros your boy is alive and is nearer your home than you have any idea.” Both letters had misspelled words, and the trained eye could see that the same hand composed both.
The reporter asked Christian if he blamed Captain Heins and the Philadelphia Police for prolonging the family’s torture by failing to arrest the kidnappers before they died. Ross refused to speak badly of Heins. Instead, he placed the blame on New York’s police department.
“If Superintendent Walling had followed the ideas of Captain Heins there would have been different results. He wanted Walling to put another man on the case, but the latter desired to detail the officer who had given the first information of the Douglas and Mosher clue, and did it, yet this man was incompetent to handle a case like this that required brains. I believe Walling committed fatal errors and bungled the case in many particulars.”
Philadelphia’s District Attorney Furman Sheppard began his final argument to the jury on Thursday, September 16. In it, he recalled the testimonies of Westervelt’s former police colleague Henry Hartman and the defendant’s bartender Charles Stromberg, men who had witnessed Westervelt in the company of the kidnappers and heard him boast of his intimate knowledge of the crime. Sheppard also reviewed the testimonies of eyewitnesses who saw the kidnappers and Westervelt in Germantown, pointed to contradictions in Mrs. Westervelt’s alibi for her husband, and charged the jurors with considering how important an accomplice like Westervelt was to the kidnappers.
“What relations of perfect conduct subsisted between this man and the abductors?” Sheppard asked. “They took him to see the horse and wagon with which they were to commit the crime. He was entrusted with the care of Mosher’s family, because Mosher knew his visits to them would be covered up. Constantly they furnished him with money, trusted him, conferred with him, and put themselves completely within his family: there was such trust and companionship as was utterly inconsistent with any other theory than that of a common purpose and a common interest among them. His part in the business was to control the police while the other two kept up their batteries upon the distressed family. This was the heart of the mystery, the true nature of the prisoner’s connection with it.”
The attorney for the defense began his closing statement at about 10:00 A.M. the following morning. He defended Westervelt against conspiracy charges, insisting that the kidnappers had contacted him only after the kidnapping occurred. He blamed the prosecutors for building a case on inferences and for trusting eyewitnesses whose testimonies contradicted one another in time and place. Finally, he criticized the treatment his client received from the police and blamed the continued disappearance of Charley Ross on corrupt police officers seeking reward money.
“The Commonwealth asks you to convict this man upon a statement made to unauthorized parties, and in an unauthorized manner. Now what was the nature of the defendant’s agreement with Walling? It was as he states it, only to report to Walling himself. He could not arrest these men, or have them arrested, on account of the agreement, for if he did he and the policemen who made the arrest would get the glory of the twenty thousand dollars, not Walling, who desired to secure them himself.”
Westervelt looked down, and the judge turned to address the jury.
“Review the testimony with calm judgment, and fear not to apply every test to its accuracy. You are to decide by the testimony; if to find the prisoner guilty, it must be beyond a reasonable doubt or he goes free. Give him that doubt if it be an honest, manly doubt, derived from the whole testimony; but do not manufacture it from weakness or sympathy, either for himself or his family, for this is no hour for sympathy. Whilst you have gazed upon that scene of misery surrounding that prisoner’s dock for three weeks, you must recollect that if there be guilt upon that brow, that for one year and two months the voice of Charley Ross has been lost to his home, and that, while the prisoner has his children in life around him, another father mourns his son through this terrible crime.”
The judge ended his charge at 7:15 P.M. and announced a recess. Westervelt raised his head to look at the jury members. His fate rested with two manufacturers, five artisans, a grocer, a merchant, a gentleman, a tobacconist, and a clerk. Westervelt’s children stopped playing quietly behind him and hugged their mother. While the jurors filed out of the courtroom, lawyers and the foreman gathered the ransom letters and indictment papers for the jury’s perusal, and spectators stretched and spoke loudly. Exiting the building for the courtyard, they left Westervelt and his family alone.
The jurors’ debates continued throughout the weekend and into the early hours of Monday morning. Journalists waiting inside the Public Ledger building across the street could look down from their offices and see jurors pacing in the deliberation room after 2:00 A.M. Several hours later, a large crowd gathered in Independence Square to hear the verdict. For more than the past one hundred years of Philadelphia’s history, the square had been a constant scene of meetings, rallies, and demonstrations; most recently, it had served as the grounds for Civil War recruiters working out of tents. Men, women, and children entered the square through one of several gates and walked down gravel walkways that weaved through one hundred young elm trees. By the time the State House bell tolled at 9:00 A.M., the jurors had reached a decision, and the crowd huddled against the courthouse doors had begun to sweat under the sunlight.
When the doors opened, arms and elbows pushed forward. Children, storekeepers, reporters, and drunks shoved their way to seats or spots in the aisles. At 1:00 A.M., the judge arrived, and Westervelt walked to the dock. Reporters read despair in his posture, walk, and pale face. He barely kissed his wife and shook his children’s hands. The foreman read the verdict. Guilty on all charges of conspiracy. Westervelt pushed his head into his hands and cried.
On October 9, he appeared one last time before Judge Thomas Robert Elcock. The judge explained the delay between the verdict and the sentencing.
“I had hoped ere this I should have been appealed to for a light sentence by some merciful cry revealing something of the fate of Charley Ross,” the judge told him, “but I have heard not even a whisper, nor held a ray of hope, and if the knowledge of his fate rests with you, then you become your own executioner. Justice calls loudly for your severe punishment, and it remains but for me to announce its sentence. By an act of Assembly on the 25th of February, 1875, the kidnapping of a child under ten years of age is made a felony, and punishable by a fine not exceeding ten thousand dollars and an imprisonment of not less than twenty-five years. Harboring and concealing a child is likewise made a felony, and punishable by a fine not exceeding five thousand dollars and an imprisonment not exceeding fifteen years. This act was passed since the commission of your offense, and there was no evidence in the cause which would justify a punishment to you of harboring and concealing the child, or of conspiring to do so since the passage of the act. The sentence of the Court is that you pay a fine of one dollar, the costs of prosecution, and that you undergo an imprisonment at solitary confinement, at labor, in the Eastern Penitentiary for the term of seven years, and that you stand committed until that sentence be complied with.”
Westervelt breathed deeply and sat down. Leaning forward, he put his head down and pulled at his beard.
we fear being traped in our own game
THE SCHUYLKILL RIVER TWISTED PAST THE GROUNDS OF THE Centennial construction sites, flowing east through the WaterWorks falls before continuing past Center City toward the Delaware River. On the river’s east bank, walkers straying from the footpath cam
e to the bottom of a small hill that peaked past the grounds of a fortress. From the riverside, the building resembled a castle at the edge of the industrial town. Thirty-foot stone walls surrounded eleven acres of land, and notched parapets crowned five octagonal towers along the front wall. Spaced evenly between the towers, fourteen narrow, vertical embrasures angled toward the inner grounds, inspiring thoughts of archers defending a king. But the protectors of this building held guns, not bows, and instead of keeping the enemy from entering the fortress, they kept him from leaving it.
Philadelphia’s Quaker fathers had planned this building as an alternative to the city’s Walnut Street Jail; like the Revolutionary-era jailhouses before it, the Walnut Street penitentiary had served as a holding tank more than a prison. Inside of it, male and female inmates intermingled and the warden tended bar. Disgusted with these conditions, a group of Quakers met in the late eighteenth century to discuss penal reform. The group took their ideas to the Pennsylvania state legislature, and for the next forty years, they petitioned the government to fund an experiment that centered on rehabilitation through meditation and hard labor. In 1821, after receiving a $100,000 grant from the state, the Quakers purchased a cherry orchard on farmland north of Center City for $11,500. They then solicited plans for the world’s first prison entirely given to solitary confinement. Architects competed to provide the template that most successfully coordinated the twenty-four-hour surveillance of 250 inmates with the prisoners’ exercise, food, labor, plumbing, and ventilation needs. The winning proposal belonged to a British architect named John Haviland.
Haviland envisioned seven one-story cell blocks that radiated around a circular hub. Standing at the hub’s center, prison guards could see down the corridor of each cell block, which held two rows of eighteen cells; each cell had a stone floor, one bed, a toilet, a water tap, a desk, and a small skylight. To ensure anonymity and enforce silence, authorities planned on blindfolding the men as soon as they entered the prison walls, disorienting their sense of direction and discouraging them from communicating with guards. Meal servers would also minimize noise: before serving food and water through slots in the cell doors, they would pull wool socks over their shoes and attach leather straps to wagon wheels. Even exercise would be conducted quietly— Haviland planned for each cell to have a small yard behind it, enclosed by ten-foot walls. Guards arranged exercise so that prisoners in adjoining cells were not in their yards at the same time. And to frustrate prisoners from tapping codes against the pipes, Haviland looped hot water cyclinders from each cell into the corridor.
Although the Quakers believed their system offered mercy, many people disagreed. No prison had ever fully practiced solitary confinement, and prison reformers in America and Europe called the Philadelphia experiment cruel—accusations that started a pamphlet war between officials in Philadelphia and reformers in New York, New England, and Europe. Despite the controversy, however, tourists praised Haviland’s work in 1830. Although the first three cell blocks were occupied and operating as the Quakers had intended, it was the front entrance building, an expensive exercise in Gothic detail, which earned these rave reviews. Because of its initial success, the Eastern State Penitentiary, or the “prison at Cherry Hill” as the locals said, would influence more than three hundred prisons worldwide, becoming the most imitated American building in Europe and in Asia in the nineteenth century.
But by the time of William Westervelt’s trial, Haviland’s plans had failed. At the end of 1875, there were 1056 inmates sharing 585 cells.
In their monthly reports, wardens over the years had complained of odors, overcrowded conditions, and carbon monoxide poisoning. The walls surrounding each exercise yard had blocked air circulation, and heating stoves in tunnels underneath the cells had warmed sewer pipes, releasing sewage odors. Frustrated with Haviland’s spending, state commissioners had demanded that the architect alter his plans for the last four cell blocks so that the prison could house more prisoners. As a result, these four blocks had two floors, exercise yards disappeared, and prisoners shared cells. The warden was charged with pairing inmates who would not be tempted to talk, which sometimes meant placing the sane with the insane.
After Judge Elcock sentenced Westervelt on October 9, he returned to Moyamensing Prison in South Philadelphia. On April 20, 1875, a wagon delivered the prisoner to the doors of Eastern State Penitentiary. Guards escorted him underneath the tall arch and through the vestibule, two oak doors, and a gate. At the physician’s office, Westervelt took a bath and had a haircut and shave. He met with the doctor and the warden, and he received his summer clothes: cotton pants, two handkerchiefs, two pairs of socks, leather shoes, and a shirt with the number 8082 sewn into it. For the next seven years, 8082 would also be his name. Placing a hood over Westervelt’s head, a guard led him through the prison yard to his cell block, put his number on his cell door and reviewed the rules posted by a sign on the wall. The whale-oil lamp attached to the wall would stay lit until 9:00 P.M. After a few days of good behavior, he could ask for a Bible. Until then, he was left with his thoughts.
TESTIMONY OF MARY WESTERVELT, COURT OF QUARTER SESSIONS
Philadelphia, September 9, 1875
I think that I again saw Mosher and Douglass after Mrs. Mosher came to our house. It was on the morning of the 20th of August. She and her four children came […] It was three or four days after Mrs. Mosher came when Mosher and Douglass came together. It was very early in
the morning. I could not say positively whether they came both together or not. Mosher came to see his wife, I suppose. He was never invited by me to come and see us. I could not say when I next saw either Mosher or Douglass. I do not think that I have any recollection of either Mosher or Douglass coming to the house after that. Mrs. Mosher and her four children occupied the same room I did. Their names are Willie, Charley [Lovey Dove], Georgie, and the baby. The latter was five weeks old then. Georgie has since died. With the exception of the baby, they were the same children that she had that I saw in Monroe Street when I was living there. Charley [Lovey Dove] had blue eyes, light hair, a round full face, very rough, coarse skin. The hair was very light.
INTERVIEWS WITH MRS. ALBERT MOSHER
New York, December 16, 1874
“I am a sister-in-law of William Mosher, the dead man whom I have just seen in the coffin […] He has left a wife and four children—he had six children, the oldest boy is eight years, and his name is William. Then there is George and another boy, whose name I forget, and a little girl.”
“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.”
INTERVIEW WITH OFFICER CHARLES WOOD,
THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
Philadelphia, December 15, 1874
“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.”
the whole gang
FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE INVESTIGATION, POLICE HAD believed that by tracing the kidnappers’ horse and buggy, they could recreate whatever pieces of the journey occurred after the kidnappers released Walter and left Philadelphia. However, the only evidence stating the kidnappers left Philadelphia with Charley the night of the kidnapping (July 1, 1874) came from the ransom notes.
Within a month of the search, Chief Jones of the Philadelphia Police had ordered his men and concerned citizens to search every building within the city. To the authorities, it made sense that Charley could be hidden within Philadelphia, but at th
e same time, they believed that he had been taken from the city through Trenton on July 1. For their theory to be true, the kidnappers would have risked a return to the city with Charley Ross after the kidnapping.
Mosher and Douglas were seasoned criminals. They knew that Mosher had recognizable features, and they knew from Walter’s questions that he was a smart little boy. Their ransom letters also revealed their avid interest in the Philadelphia papers, and since they closely read the reports beginning on July 6 that detailed the crime and their descriptions, they surely would have understood the danger of returning Charley to Philadelphia.
On July 9 or 10, Kate Morgan, the boarder, moved in with Martha Mosher on Monroe Street in South Philadelphia. Later, Kate told authorities that the Moshers had four children: Willy, Charley, Georgie, and Mary. Martha, Kate said, called Charley “Lovey.” Kate told police that Martha and the four children left for New York on a Saturday in August. Just prior to Martha’s departure, police announced their intentions to search every home in the city; she left the city one week before this search began.
As Joseph Douglas bled to death on the lawn outside of Judge Van Brunt’s house, he told the sailor who gave him water that Bill Mosher had “five or six” children. And during the viewing, Al Mosher’s wife told the New York Herald that Bill and Martha had four children. She said she couldn’t remember their names and ages, but in a separate article, a Herald reporter wrote that she identified the older two as Willy and Georgie and said the oldest was four. Another time, she said the oldest was eight. Even though Al’s wife claimed that she and her husband hadn’t spoken to Bill’s family in a while, she knew about the newborn baby girl, and she knew about the recent death of their third son. According to Kate Morgan, Mary Westervelt, and Martha Mosher, three women who lived with the children, Charley was the name of the second oldest son, and Georgie, the boy who died, was the third son.