SUPERINTENDENT WALLING’S FIRST STATEMENTS TO THE public attempted to clarify the role his name played in Douglas’s dying confession. In response to a question about Charley’s location, the kidnapper had said, “Inspector Walling knows, and the boy will get home all right.”
Walling addressed neither Douglas’s specific words nor his reference to the rank “Inspector.” Instead, he emphasized the obvious, ethical distance between his position and the kidnappers’ criminal intent.
“I knew of these two men only as two thieves,” he told the press. “I cannot refer you to any conviction of either of them, but they are well-known characters among the police force of this city.”
The new headlines revived interest in Charley’s disappearance. Writers repeated the circumstances of the botched burglary and speculations over Charley’s hiding place. Readers consumed story after story, seeking further clues. The unexpected identification of the kidnappers reminded them of their initial fears over copycat crimes, their empathy for Christian and Sarah Ross, and their anger with the police for refusing to release details. The sensational deaths of Mosher and Douglas reinforced their instinct for retributive justice, allowing them to feel more reassured about their own children’s safety.
Walling claimed responsibility for the relief spreading across America. The more he talked about the case, the more he turned himself into a hero by emphasizing his role in the investigation. The Evening Bulletin wrote, “To Captain Walling belongs the credit of originating the theory that these were the guilty parties.” Walling did not publicly recognize Detective Silleck and Captain Hedden, the officers who first told him about Gil Mosher and facilitated the meeting between the criminal and the superintendent. He also did not acknowledge his predecessor, Superintendent George Matsell, who had first heard of Hedden’s connection with Gil Mosher and encouraged the officer to take the career criminal’s story seriously.
Instead, George W. Walling stood like a general in his uniform and took credit for catching the kidnappers of Charley Ross. “Soon after I received the description as given by the boy Walter and others who had seen the two men in the buggy who took little Charley away, after a conference with Captain Hedden, and the obtaining of other information, I knew my men,” he said in a statement to reporters. “You will remember that that description said one of the men wore goggles and had a ‘monkey nose,’ as the children called it. Despite the goggles, the detailed description of the man’s deformity of nose and the description given of the other man told us who the men were. Let me show you how quickly Mosher was recognized. I called in Detective Silleck one day, and after describing Mosher and the peculiarity of his nose, mentioning him by his alias of Henderson, I told him I wanted to get hold of him, but did not tell him for what. Silleck at once exclaimed, ‘Why, I know him; that’s Bill Mosher.’”
A reporter for the New York Herald asked Walling how he had led the investigation.
“We arranged our plans very secretly, and no one knew anything about them, with the exception of the officers engaged in the hunt and some of the members of the Ross family, with whom I have been in communication about the men for four or five months by mail and telegraph.”
“Was the search made in this city?”
“‘In this city?’ I should say it was. There was never made in my experience so thorough a search for anything as has been made by us in this case. Officers have been secretly detailed everywhere—at the ferries, at the depots, wherever, in fact, we had an idea we could get a clue to the men.”
Within forty-eight hours of Mosher and Douglas’s deaths, Walling had so manipulated the sequence of events over the past six months that it seemed as if the police, under his leadership, had planned and orchestrated the murders at Bay Ridge. Many newspapers, including the Bulletin, accepted Walling’s statements as justification for controversial police secrecy early in the case. “One satisfactory result comes from this sudden turn of affairs. It gives the police an opportunity to vindicate themselves from the unjust aspersions under which they have been placed by the necessary ignorance of the public regarding these operations.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer, however, used Walling’s words to criticize the police. “That they did not find them at all until they were shot down in the commission of [a] crime by a private citizen, does not greatly indicate their skill or earnestness in the pursuit. There was awful bungling somewhere.”
Walling blamed his men for the length of the chase. “Every officer in the city was on the lookout for them,” he told the Herald. “We would have had them a month ago but for the stupidity of one man whom I put on the track. I sent him to see if they were in a certain place which I thought they frequented. An officer was sent with him, and wafted outside some distance from the place. The men were not there, and my man foolishly asked for them. The result was that he was followed from the place and seen meeting the officer. Of course Mosher and Douglas were notified, and they haven’t been near the place since. We sent an expedition on a steam launch to try and find them on the water. Every bay and inlet of the Sound, the bay and the rivers, were explored, but we failed to find our men. The expedition was searching for ten days.”
“Mr. Walling,” the reporter asked, “what effect will the death of Mosher and Douglas have on the Ross case? If the boy was in their care may he not have been concealed in some place unknown to any other persons, and thus starve?”
“It is a rather hard question to answer, whether the death of these men will have a good or a bad effect upon the case; whether it will facilitate Charley Ross’s discovery if in the hands of other persons or not. My opinion is that it will be all right now.”
He spoke much too soon, of course. The truth was, he and the police needed the public to believe everything would be “all right.” The new superintendent was a gifted speaker. He knew how to spin information. In the days following the kidnapping, Walling had reviewed the facts in such a way that it appeared he had anticipated the murder of the kidnappers, therefore creating the illusion that the police had been in control. Some journalists saw through his rhetoric. Others did not. Instead of seeing the murders as further evidence of incompetent forces hesitating to act for personal and political reasons, they believed Walling’s delusion. He convinced the public to take comfort in the death of the kidnappers, not to worry about the lost child. Deftly, Walling had changed the story. It was now primarily about Mosher and Douglas, and finding the people who had helped them— not saving Charley Ross, whose case was subject to whether the kidnappers’ deaths had “a good or a bad effect upon it.”
The change was significant. Of course journalists would continue to mention the Ross family and people would keep looking for Charley, if for no other reason than somebody could still earn Mayor Stokley’s $20,000 reward should another abductor be tried and found. By acting like everything was “all right” now that the kidnappers were dead, Walling concentrated the public’s interest on the power the thieves had possessed. In so doing, he allowed Mosher and Douglas to have something they had predicted all along: future notoriety. The kidnappers lost their lives, but they did get away with the abduction on their terms: the Rosses had refused to give them money, so they had refused to return Charley. They had outwitted the police and avoided prison.
Others would study and emulate their kidnapping model.