“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 door. 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.
Through the 1870s, police officers could claim part or all of any reward offered for resolving an unsolved crime. So if that police detective also worked as a private detective, he could earn two rewards for one case: as a thief catcher, he could track down a thief, negotiate a price for stolen merchandise, and collect his “finder’s fee” from the victim; he could then put on his uniform as a police officer, provide details about the criminal, and collect any reward that may have been offered to the public for information leading to an arrest. The arrangement, well known to the public, caused plenty of ethical dilemmas by fueling competition between investigators both on the force and off. Editorials complained about compromised officers, but authorities turned a blind eye to the practice, and in so doing, condoned it.
In order to be a good thief catcher, Taggart had to protect certain informants—otherwise, they would fear arrest and refuse him information. Yet in order to claim reward money and maintain a relationship with the police, he had to assist in making arrests. For a number of years, Taggart had balanced his relationships with cops and criminals very, very well.
For the last two weeks, Taggart had moved from tavern to clapboard house, picking up undertones of gossip. Somewhere along these muddy streets lurked a man whom he believed could identify the kidnappers. The police trusted the detective’s instincts and gave him access to the ransom letters already delivered to Christian Ross. On July 17, Taggart approached a known hangout for crooks—the southwest corner of Fifth and Spruce Streets—without drawing any attention. And then he arrested Christopher Wooster.
For the past twenty years, the authorities had known Wooster, sometimes as Christopher Wooster, sometimes as “Frank Wistar,” and sometimes as “Christian Worcester.” They knew him most, however, as a con artist. With his criminal pal “Button Joe,” he had operated brothels, swindled banks, blackmailed businessmen, and robbed a reverend. Wooster’s tall, thin silhouette blended in with the other nighttime shadows that haunted the streets. At the time of his arrest, he had a black eye and a thick, rough beard that failed to fill his sunken cheeks or detract from his oddly shaped nose. Recently, he had been released from Moyamensing Prison in South Philadelphia, for blackmail.
The Inquirer asked the assistant city solicitor what punishment awaited Christopher Wooster if he was guilty of complicity. According to an act of 1860, kidnapping was a misdemeanor, not a felony. The penalty for taking a person under the age of ten was a maximum fine of $2,000 and a maximum prison sentence of seven years. The reporter wanted to know if the kidnappers would get away with a light sentence.
“Oh no,” responded the solicitor. “The punishment can be piled up on them by utilizing what I may call the elasticity of the law. For instance, they can be convicted of having engaged in a conspiracy to extort money, which will add several years to the original sentence. Then again, I do not know but they could be given three years for the robbing of the jacket on the boy, three years for stealing his hat, three years for stealing his shoes, and so on, giving three years for the theft of each individual article of clothing on the lad at the time he was stolen.”
“That would be tantamount to an imprisonment for life?”
“Practically, yes.”
“When caught, I suppose, the guilty parties will be arraigned speedily?”
“That you may safely depend upon. Let the guilty parties be once taken into custody, and if any criminals ever took the short route to the penitentiary they will be the man.”
The assistant solicitor’s desire to “pile” punishment through “the elasticity of the law” pointed to a need for new state legislation with greater consequences for kidnappers. But even if his office succeeded in identifying Charley Ross’s kidnappers and applying “elasticity” to their charges, the average convict served less time in Pennsylvania prisons than his sentence stipulated.
Christian Ross didn’t think Wooster was guilty. His family had already suffered through too many rumors and too much advice to believe an easily accessible criminal like Christopher Wooster was responsible. Nevertheless, he agreed to let Walter attempt identification. The five-year-old didn’t recognize him. The Evening Bulletin also questioned Wooster’s involvement. They called him “a man of considerable education, clever, a well-known con artist,” but doubted a petty thief who had served time in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia prisons would involve himself in such a high-stakes crime.
The public had tired of waiting for an arrest by the time Taggart nabbed Wooster. Inspired by editorials asking the mayor to offer reward money for new information, parents demanded that Stokley protect their children as much as they searched for Charley. They had read the criticism of the investigation in the papers. Speculation over the kidnappers’ motives rattled their nerves even more. They wanted Charley, but they also wanted the kidnappers behind bars before another child went missing.
Two more almost did.
A man in West Philadelphia approached a group of children at play and grabbed a four-year-old named William Painter. A little girl immediately ran to tell an adult, who contacted the police as others chased the man through the neighborhood. Reaching a footbridge, the assailant saw an adult who called William by name. The kidnapper then dropped the boy on the ground and ran away.
Two miles away from the Ross home on East Washington Lane, ten-year-old Elizabeth Coffin played inside her home with her sister May. The family’s colonial house sat twenty feet away from Main Street, and maple trees obstructed their view of people walking by their property. One morning, when May left Elizabeth to play alone on the first floor, a man appeared at a window next to her. He told Elizabeth he would give her “candy and other nice things” if she would step through the window and walk with him. Elizabeth called for May. The man told her not to tell anybody he was there. Elizabeth said she needed permission to leave, and she called for May again. The man turned and ran through the yard. Elizabeth’s father entered the room in time to see him jump into a buggy and drive off with another man. Germantown’s parents, now panic-stricken, told their children to keep away from walking, fishing, and playing in the woods.
Fearing criminal histories would incriminate them, some former convicts offered to help the police search. Others capitalized on the vulnerability of fearful people. A Philadelphia merchant received a letter threatening to ruin his reputation if he did not pay the author a specific sum, and a father from Northeast Philadelphia opened a letter threatening his son. On yellow paper, small letters spelled “Look after that youngster of yours, Harry. He is watched by English snatchers. He’s been watched at Norris square. Others had better be careful. ONE OF THE GANG BUT FRIENDLY.” Police detectives dismissed both letters as jokes.
A reporter asked Mayor Stokley why he wouldn’t offer a reward for Charley and his kidnappers.
“I would be liable to a criminal prosecution if I did that,” the mayor said. “I could not offer a reward without the direction of the Common Council. They have had one meeting since the kidnapping, but they took no action concerning it. They will not meet again for some time.”
“That is unfortunate, isn’t it?” responded the reporter.
“Yes; but then if I had the power, I wouldn’t offer a reward for the boy. It is his abductors that we want. When I became mayor of Philadelphia I said to my detectives, ‘There is to be no more compounding of felonies. When goods are stolen, I don’t wish them returned so much as I wish those who stole them brought to justice. I must have the thieves. If any one on the force turns up stolen goods without bringing the thief to prison, the officer will be discharged from the force.’ You see?”
The reporter didn’t ask the mayor why he equated a stolen child with other forms of property theft. He did ask if Wooster’s arrest encouraged the investigators.
“I don’t believe it does,” Stokley said. “Many arrests have been made.” The mayor then suggested that perhaps Christian Ross knew some things about the kidnapping that he had not yet shared with the authorities.
City Solicitor Charles Collis publicly disagreed with Stokley’s thoughts on Wooster. After hearing a rumor that the suspect had an alibi, an Inquirer reporter met with Collis during his lunch hour at his office on South Seventh Street.
“Do you think Taggart has the right man?” asked the reporter.
“I have not the slightest doubt of it, and future developments will prove what I say.”
“Of course, he must have had accomplices.”
“Certainly. A man like Wooster would not act alone in such a matter.”
“Why?”
“Because he is too well known to the police, and his haunts, habits and associations are too familiar.”
“His reputation is none of the best, then?”
“No; it is very bad, and he has been in prison on several occasions.”
“Have you an idea as to who assisted him in the present case?”
“That is a question I would not like to answer at this time. A few days at the furthest will, I think, bring the matter to a close. Things are looking very well, and I have great confidence in the ability of the detectives to bring the perpetrators of this crime to justice.”
Unless Collis was quite naïve, he didn’t believe one word of this interview that he gave. It is exactly because Wooster was “too well known” that the police should have hesitated to detain him in the first place. Detective Taggart found Wooster on July 17, one day after Christian Ross received the fifth ransom letter and two weeks after the kidnappers abducted Charley and Walter Ross. In spite of his decades-long record of forgery and blackmail, he was also a clown. Prison guards in South Philadelphia enjoyed his tall tales, and the warden wrote that over the course of his stays at the prison, Wooster entertained other inmates and their visitors. He was a rash thief, a sloppy liar, and a likable crook.
But he was exactly the kind of person that the police could pin the crime on. The city leaders’ fears were beginning to materialize: citizens were reporting copycat threats, the public was growing more paranoid, and instead of commending authorities for their Centennial preparations, the New York press vilified it for mismanaging the Ross case. Christopher Wooster had no family, a lengthy criminal record, a bad reputation, and an interest in swindling funds through the mail. He was the perfect scapegoat. And then, one day after his arrest, another ransom letter arrived.
PHILADELPHIA, July 18—Ros: The blasted editorials have got the city in such a feve bout the child that we can hardly do anything. i tel yu they endanger the child’s life at every stroke of the pen. one editor wants to kno why we dont give yu some prof that we ever had the child by sendin some of his close or a lock of hair we have our reason for not sending them. to satisfy yu we have him yu remember his striped stockins are darned in two or three places were they had holes in. ask Walter if we did not put the blanket up in front of him an Charley in behind to hide them. ask Walter if we did not say we wold go down to aunt Susans befor we went out on the mane street to buy torpedos. we wil notice al yu have to say either in ledger star or herald or sunday dispatch anything you wish to communicate to us head it C R R instead of Ros. This man Woster is innocent he has nothing to do with us, do as yu please with him an make the most out of him yu can. the brokers we se have had a metin an think they can restor yu child an bring us to justice—they mean wel to yu but they be actin under a great delusion—if they be friends to yu let them make the mony up which is the only thing can restor the child—if they will not do that yu drop them unless yu want to cut yu child’s throat.
The Philadelphia Public Ledger. July 21.
“C R R. Mony is ready. How shall I know your agent?”
BURLINGTON, July 21. —Ros. we have seen yu own state-ment that yu would not comply with our terms an yet yu say (the money is redy how shal I no yu agent) the fact of us having yu child and you having paid us every dollar we demanded what further use could we have for him? He has answered the end for which we took him; this is one reason why we should give him up. if these terms suit yu answer the followin in the Ledger personals.
C R R. i will agree to the terms in every particular.
P. S. —have the money ready as we described we wil send prof with him so yu can no him when he comes.
The Philadelphia Public Ledger. July 22.
“C R R. ‘I will agree to the terms in every particular.’”