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.