by Gregg Olsen
The next morning a pal of Gordon’s, also a teenager, came over to shoot the breeze. Among the topics the pair discussed was how the friend had seen a rabbit jump across the trampled brush alongside the Morrows’ house. After playing cards, reading magazines, and jawing about nothing in peculiar, the friend left and Gordon put on his boots, a heavy, black woolen coat, grabbed the rifle his father had given him for his birthday, and went outside to hunt. The rabbit was on his mind. The air snapped with the January chill of a Puget Sound winter. The snow that had fallen on the previous Friday and Saturday had thawed and re-frozen leaving distinct, almost sedimentary-like layers that broke with a crunch under the weight of the young man’s hurried gait.
In times such as these, there is always a moment where a tragedy takes over; where reality in all of its unforgiving and grim detail converges with hope and hope loses out. For a family 50 miles away behind the gates of a sumptuous Tacoma mansion, it was about to converge on a roadway next to a chicken ranch outside of Everett. Gordon Morrow’s discovery that Monday morning would shock the nation, fuel obsessions, and confound scores of G-men who had descended to the Pacific Northwest to solve the case of a doctor’s kidnapped boy.
Toting his rifle and moving swiftly over the icy terrain, Morrow’s wiry frame slipped between a thicket of bare alders two hundred yards from his front door. His eyes stayed fixed on the rabbit’s meandering tracks as they cut around dromedaries of ferns and knots of brambles as the animal bolted for protective cover. Morrow’s cheeks were red; plumes of warm breath pulsed from his mouth and nose. And just as he’d stepped into a shallow pocket in the snowy earth, the teenager stumbled and fell over something soft in the snow. He’d later say he didn’t recall getting up, horror stricken as he was.
When discovering a human body, some remark how it doesn’t quite look real; that the still form of a dead body is more akin to a child’s doll or even a garden statue in quiet repose. Some don’t allow themselves to accept what their eyes project onto the screens of their minds —the lifeless figure, the brain knows, had once been a person. Gordon Morrow, however, wasn’t one of the people who allowed tricks to vanquish the horror of such a discovery. In fact, he was quite the opposite. He knew what and, remarkably, who it was almost the split-second his mind registered what he’d tripped over.
The nude, battered figure of a brown-haired and brown-eyed little boy was stretched out on his back in the shallow pocket, the place where Gordon Morrow had been sure he’d shoot an elusive rabbit. He hoisted himself up, spun around and tried to catch his quickening breath. His eyes moved from the ghastly figure and all around it. Stumps topped with snow and the frosty fans of Oregon Grape and the lime-shaped leaves of salal formed the bones of a natural fence along a roadway traversed with tire tracks. Footprints crunched clearly into the white field of the newest snowfall. Some of the footprints led to the body. A pattern, visible even to the young rabbit-hunter, revealed how the body had been dragged. A Douglas fir stump left from a years-ago logging effort rose from the soil adjacent to the boy.
In two minutes time, or so it seemed, Gordon was back in his little house calling for his father. The young man had seen a ghost and his fear and the cold weather had turned his face as white as the wintry landscape. Charles Morrow, part-time chicken rancher, full-time mill worker, knew instantly something had gone awry.
“I found a kid out there dead,” the younger Morrow blurted in an excited staccato caused by the horror of what he’d seen and the fact that he was out of breath from the sprint across the snowy terrain. His long face and youthfully handsome features were a clean slate for his shock. “The body looks like he’s about ten years old —it might be the kidnapped boy. The boy is naked. It looks like him.”
Instinctively, Charles Morrow looked at the wall clock to note the time of day because he knew such information would be important. It was 10 a.m. A few moments later, on the edge of the thicket of blackberries and burned out stumps, the older man, his pulse quickening, confirmed what his son had seen. It was the naked body of a child that he’d know anywhere, even in the terrible, brutalized condition in which his son had found him. He, too, thought it was probably the Mattson boy. The Morrows got into their new Chevrolet truck and sped to the nearest telephone —at Westerberg’s General Oil Filling Station on the Everett-Seattle Highway— to notify the Snohomish County Sheriff. Owner C.A. Westerberg dialed the number. The sheriff and a deputy were about to report the tragic conclusion of the FBI search for a little boy, a case called “Mattnap.”
“It was a horrible sight,” Gordon Morrow told reporters later that afternoon as more than a dozen of them circled him and called out questions. Photographers’ flashbulbs popped like cross-wired Christmas lights in front of the Morrow place, and inside the family’s tiny front room, and finally, at the site where Gordon found the frozen body.
“I was so frightened I guess I nearly fainted… He looked awful,” the teenager recounted. “I didn’t stay to look any further. I just ran right home and shouted at my father.”
The Boy Who Haunted America
Every author seeks a story, a neat package of truth, tragedy, redemption —all things that make a tale worth telling. But things are not so easy. The stories worth writing are almost always more complicated, messier, than that. A clipping sent to me about a little boy lost from his family forever spurred my interest years ago. It was about an enduring mystery, a tale of a doctor’s son, just ten years old, taken from his Tacoma home just after Christmas of 1936. I made a trip to the Tacoma Public Library’s Northwest Room and found a folder on the case. Tear-sheets from newspapers inside told me there was an incredible and untold story, though one without an ending —at least one that had yet to be discovered. I studied a photograph pulled from the yellowed and brittle files. It was the smiling image of Charles Fletcher Mattson. He sits on a pony with a gap-toothed grin so wide that if it weren’t for his cheeks, bulging with joy, there’d be no end to his smile. A cowboy hat rests like a crown on his head, a vest, chaps and cowboy boots make the ensemble storybook complete.
The boy is telling me: Don’t forget me. By all rights, in a better world, the smile in the photograph, I knew, would belong to someone’s grandpa by now.
But, of course, it didn’t.
Not long after I first looked into the Mattson kidnapping tragedy, my father, a Depression era kid who grew up in Nebraska at the time Charlie posed so charmingly on that little horse, asked me what I was working on. My dad, at 79, is about the age Charlie would be if he hadn’t been snatched and murdered.
“Several things,” I answered, “one involving a doctor’s kidnapped and murdered son from Tacoma in the 1930s.”
My father didn’t miss a beat. “You mean the Mattson case?”
The mention of the name brought a jolt to my spine. I wondered how my father, who didn’t read much, didn’t study history (unless it was related to World War II), didn’t really care about much beyond a good game of golf and my mother, knew the boy’s surname. I hadn’t mentioned it. How was it that he knew? I asked.
“Everyone knew about that kid and what happened to him. It was in the newspapers for years. It was second only to Lindbergh’s son. Everyone,” he said, “knew about that boy.”
The next day, I telephoned Charlie’s older brother, Bill Mattson, to see if he’d talk about the case so many years ago. I found his number in the Tacoma phone book.
An old man got on the line and gruffly told me to let sleeping dogs lie. “Leave it alone,” Bill Mattson said curtly. “I don’t want to talk about it. Some things shouldn’t be revisited.”
“What about your sister?” I asked, trying to keep him on the line.
“I hear I have a sister,” he said.
The remark was odd, and begged a second question, but the line was dead. Mattson had hung up. But it didn’t matter. I was hooked. By not saying anything to sell me on the story, on the telling of the Mattson story, Bill Mattson had made me want to know more at that moment
than if he’d spilled his guts. I needed to know everything.
* * *
Before delving into some of the details of the haunting tragedy that was the Charles Mattson abduction and murder case, keep in mind that the 1930s was the decade of infamous American kidnappings. Eras are defined by their crimes and a historical perspective is warranted at this point. The 1970s were the time of airplane hijackings or “skyjackings”; the 1980s were the decade of financial scammers; the decade after, terrorism. Nothing, without exception, characterizes the 1930s better than the rash of high-profile kidnappings that seized the attention of the media (radio and newspapers, mostly) and made the wealthiest Americans targets by have-nots determined to steal a child and trade his or her young life for money. The most infamous case, of course, occurred on March 1, 1932 when Charles Lindbergh, Jr., the twenty-month-old son of the famed aviator, was abducted from the second-floor nursery of the family home near Hopewell, New Jersey. He was found later, as surely everyone knows, murdered. There were others, too. St. Louis, Los Angeles, New York had their celebrated “snatching” cases.
Nowhere in the country was a kidnapper’s paradise more so than Tacoma, Wash. In the space of 18 months five abductions and/or attempted snatchings were made in the lumber and shipping city on Commencement Bay in Washington State’s Puget Sound. Sadly, two Tacoma kidnappings ended in murder.
On May 24, 1935, George Weyerhaeuser, the nine-year old son of lumber baron J.P. Weyerhaeuser, was kidnapped on his way home from Tacoma’s prestigious Charles Wright Academy, where he attended school. Within a week a $200,000 ransom was paid and the boy was released, unharmed. The Weyerhaeuser kidnappers were apprehended, convicted and sent to prison. In November 1936, two attempts were made to kidnap a wealthy grocer’s son, George Griggs Franklin, 6, from his family’s mansion (Haddaway Hall, formerly the Weyerhaeuser mansion and two blocks from the five-acre estate that was the Mattson home.) The following month, Mildred Hook was kidnapped by her estranged husband, Douglas Van Vlack. Mildred’s body later was found in a culvert in a remote area of northern Idaho.
Just a few weeks after the Hook case made headlines and the Franklins had departed for the sunshine and safety of California (where the family had a villa and tickets for the Rose Bowl football game), the kidnapping of a little boy from another enormous Tacoma house became the story that would never go away.
On December 27, 1936, Charles Fletcher Mattson, the 10-year-old son of a prominent doctor and his wife, stood in the kitchen of the family’s Point Defiance mansion and caught sight of a man in the bushes. The boy ran to tell his older brother, Billy, 16, and sister, Muriel, 14, what he’d seen. In addition to the Mattson children, a girlfriend from Seattle, 16-year-old named Virginia Chatfield, was visiting at the time. Dr. and Mrs. Mattson were away at a party. The Mattsons’ longtime maid had the night off. A few minutes after Charlie spotted him, the stranger smashed one of the panes of a French door with the butt of his .38 revolver and forced his way inside. The girls screamed. The man grabbed Charlie, dropped a ransom note demanding $28,000 and disappeared into the night.
It was the beginning of a case that would make headlines from Tacoma to New York to London. Newspaper reporters converged on the scene. President Roosevelt and Mrs. Roosevelt called for prayer for Charlie Mattson.
Acting under the jurisdiction mandated by the so-called Lindbergh Law of 1932, FBI agents took immediate control, while law enforcement agencies from across the Northwest played active, though minor, roles in the investigation. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had a private telephone line installed in the Mattson residence so he could speak directly to the family and the cadre of Special Agents he personally summoned for the job.
Evidence was scant, but no effort was spared. In the 1930s, science and technology were the “new” tools of crime fighting that promised no one could escape punishment. The Mattson case, for example, was the first in which plaster casts of footprints and tire tracks were collected to help identify a potential perpetrator. (Decades from now, one can only wonder if we will see fingerprinting or even DNA typing, charmingly archaic?)
Fingerprints found at the scene were compared with 7 million others on cards in the FBI offices in Washington, D. C.
Throughout the ordeal, each day brought some horrific detail. Classified ads directed to “Ann” and “Mable” were published in the Seattle Times to facilitate ransom drop plans: “Mable: We have received your communications. Police have not intercepted them. Channels are entirely clear. Your instructions will be followed.”
Ransom missives were written in the handwriting of the boy to his father: “If you don’t obey the notes after phone call connections will be off for keeps and remember an army of police can kill a couple of kidnappers but they will not be able to find the kid until after he is dead.”
Dr. Mattson begged reporters to keep their attempts to retrieve the boy secret, but the reporters ignore him and continue to pursue Dr. Mattson, the FBI, and any others associated with the case, under the guise of the public’s “right to know.”
The doctor made every effort to contact the kidnappers but was unable to do so. The ransom was never paid. On January 11, 1937 a teenager hunting rabbits north of Seattle in Everett found the Mattson boy’s nude and lifeless body in a snow bank. He had been dead for as many as ten days. Over the course of the weeks and years that followed, the FBI investigated some 25,740 suspects, among them were dozens of persons who confessed either to get attention or because mental disorders made them admit to the most hideous of crimes. One of those red herrings took the form of a 35-year-old escapee from Medical Lake Hospital, a state-run insane asylum near Spokane on the eastern part of the state. Later, it was learned that the escapee was in the hospital at the time of the snatching.
When Charlie’s battered body was found, the G-men turn their attention from a kidnapping to a kidnapping/murder case. The coroner determined the boy had been bound with cord, beaten with a hammer and stabbed. Under the dead boy’s fingernails were traces of blue-gray-colored clay and abrasions on his limbs indicated that he had tried to claw himself from somewhere. A pit? A cellar? A basement? The coroner determined that the boy had been dead for several days, maybe as long as a week. He also supposed that the body had been kept in a meat locker and frozen. And, he added, perhaps the boy’s body had been moved from another resting place. FBI soil samples confirmed the possible scenario —though no one knew why.
In the spring of 1937, Thomas Dewey, then special racketeering prosecutor, sought extradition from Mexico a man named Alexander Pompez —and tried to tie him to the Mattson case.
On December 27, 1942, the FBI issued a statement six years after the kidnapping: “The case hasn’t been closed and never will be closed until it is solved.” They were still working, still looking for the one who had done the unspeakable.
Suspects over the years included a Seattle man, a former asylum inmate who had once plotted a similar kidnapping, and one of Dr. Mattson’s patients. Jack Nathan, under direct orders from Hoover, flew to Los Angeles to interrogate a suspect there. By most accounts, the Mattson case is considered the largest manhunt in FBI history. It was also one of the most frustrating. Clues were meager. Footprints that were left in the snow were cast in plaster, revealing that the kidnapper wore socks over his shoes as had Bruno Hauptmann in the Lindbergh kidnapping. And, as was the case with the Lindbergh case, a ladder left by the kidnapper who attempted to snatch another Tacoma boy was sent to the FBI lab (it was believed that the Mattson and the other case were related). The ransom note had been written with a child’s typewriter toy.
Legislation to halt the scourge of kidnapping was proposed in Congress, and at various state legislatures throughout the country. Many lawmakers, outraged over the Mattson tragedy, called for the death penalty for the perpetrators. Others sought to make paying a ransom a federal crime.
The Mattson case has never been solved, but the FBI has kept it in its active files for decades. Archivists at the FBI rev
eal that the Mattson file is among the bureau’s largest with more than 240,000 pages of documents. To understand the mammoth size and importance and scope of this case, consider the Charles Lindbergh kidnapping case file. The Lindbergh file contains 22,000 pages of documentation.
More than solving the case for the sake of the devastated Mattson family, Hoover and the FBI wanted to capture the kidnapper for their own purposes —the preservation of a perfect record of solving all kidnapping cases under federal jurisdiction. In fact, as the record indicates even now, of the hundreds of cases handled by the FBI, only two remain outstanding: Tacoma’s Charlie Mattson and Peter Levin, a 12-year-old who was kidnapped and murdered in New Rochelle, New York, in February 1938.
The Mattson case remains open today.
THE PLAYERS IN THE MATTSON SAGA
THE G-MEN, THE PRESIDENT AND MRS. ROOSEVELT
The G-men, “Ace Kidnapper Trackers ”, as the press dubbed them, arrived from all points of the country, FBI credentials in tow and a perceptible swagger that was the result of a 100-percent-solved-cases success rate. Mattson was FDR’s priority Number One. In fact, it was reported in 1946 that it was likely that not a single FBI agent working at that time who hadn’t worked on an aspect of the Mattson case at one time or another. No case, before or since, comes close to that kind of total involvement. Not even 9/11.
J. Edgar Hoover —Director of the FBI for almost a half century. In 1924 Hoover was named head of the Bureau of Investigation of the Justice Department, which in 1935 became the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Following World War II, Hoover led the bureau in a series of major investigations designed to curb subversive activities. Throughout his tenure, Hoover was a controversial figure, often accused of abusing his power and exceeding the jurisdiction of the FBI. 1936, the year of the Mattson case, was a heady year for Hoover and his G-men. Pulp magazines and comic strips with names like “War on Crime,” “The Feds,” and “G-men” glorified the bureau. All of the hype, the promotion of invincibility, made Hoover a national hero. It also went to his head. Hoover was delighted at the publicity and the dashing image of himself and the bureau. The FBI as a crime-fighting machine, whose effectiveness verged on omnipotence, was completely the result of J. Edgar Hoover’s leadership.