Such a large crowd arrived at the coroner’s inquest in Brooklyn on December 17, 1874, that the coroner delayed the morning proceedings by half an hour.
At 11:30 A.M., he charged the jury overseeing the inquest to deduce how Mosher and Douglas had died. Four men remained under police supervision: Mr. J. Holmes Van Brunt, the brother and next door neighbor of the burglarized home owner; Albert Van Brunt, Holmes Van Brunt’s son; William Scott, their gardener; and Herman Frank, a hired man.
Due to an illness, Mr. Holmes Van Brunt had been allowed to go home and await the inquest’s verdict from his bed. The other three men remained in police custody until the trial, that Thursday morning. The Herald defined them as honest men who did what the police could not—confront Mosher and Douglas without waiting for the opportune time. “And scarcely have we time to wonder over this chance before the inevitable policeman pops a stupid visage out of nothing, like a clown in a pantomime, and says, ‘We were just going to do it, Sir.’”
Albert Van Brunt testified that his neighbor and uncle, Judge Van Brunt of the New York Supreme Court, had installed a telegraph burglar system in his summer cottage. Should an element trigger the alarm, it would sound in the bedroom of his brother Holmes next door. At 2:00 A.M. on Monday, December 14, J. Holmes Van Brunt heard the alarm from his bedroom. Albert’s mother and sister were awake, aiding an ill child in a separate room, while Albert slept upstairs. Albert recalled his father summoning him to his bedroom and saying, “Albert, go over and see what has sounded that alarm. I guess the wind has blown open one of those blinds again.”
Albert said he left with a pistol, saw a light in his uncle’s window, and awoke his father’s gardener, William Scott, who lived in an adjoining cottage. Both men saw shadows against the window curtain. Soon after, Albert alerted his father and their hired man, Herman Frank; the four men held guns and hid behind trees between the properties. According to Albert, his father directed the men to “capture” the thieves without killing them unless they needed to defend themselves. He said his father had divided them into groups of two, sending one pair to the front door and one to the back. “Whichever way they come,” he remembered hearing, “let the two who meet them take care of them as best they can. If they come out and scatter both ways, then we’ll all have a chance to work.”
Herman Frank said that he and the elder Van Brunt had walked through the rear door and lifted the trapdoor into the pantry. Holmes Van Brunt claimed in an earlier police report that he could have shot both men early in the discovery, but he restrained himself until he was sure that violence was needed. Both he and Herman Frank swore that the burglars shot several times before they defended themselves with their pistols. Albert Van Brunt said Joseph Douglas shot so close to his face that powder blew against his cheeks.
No bullet from either kidnapper’s gun harmed any of the men. However, at the end of the shooting, two bullets had pierced Mosher’s back and so many had entered Douglas that the morgue keeper refused to let females and Walter Ross view his body below his face.
The coroner’s jury agreed with the men’s interpretation of events. “We, the jury, find that the killing of the deceased in the manner set forth was perfectly justifiable, and we commend the act of their defending their lives and property in such a courageous manner under such trying circumstances.” The coroner agreed. New York’s Evening Telegram joined the Herald in complimenting the Van Brunts on succeeding where Walling had failed. It also blamed police negligence for allowing the criminals to be shot before they were interrogated.
Martha Mosher arrived at the Brooklyn morgue on the day of the inquest. A male companion walked to her husband’s coffin. Martha knelt down, held her husband’s neck, and kissed his face until Patrick McGuire, the morgue keeper, pulled her up.
“I am his wife,” Martha cried to McGuire. “I have come to him, and will go wherever he is, no matter what the consequences to me.” McGuire began asking her questions about her husband’s body, but the male companion interrupted him.
“Look here, look here, you can’t find out anything from her. You must ask her through me.”
“I want to ask her a question you can’t answer,” McGuire retorted. “I want to know if she is going to bury her husband or leave him here?”
“Yes, I will bury him,” Martha replied through her tears. “He shall have a decent burial. I will take him away.” Ignoring reporters’ questions, Martha asked McGuire if she could visit her husband’s body again. He said she could return as many times as she wanted.
Martha had written the coroner, asking him to release Mosher’s body into her care, and a young woman identifying herself as Mary Douglas wrote for permission to bury her “husband,” Joseph. The coroner approved both requests. A man named Munn, an undertaker and friend of the Mosher and Douglas families, washed the bodies and dressed them for burial. He knew them so well, he said later, that he didn’t charge them for his services. Munn told McGuire that he would bury them in Cypress Hills cemetery, a place where several of their friends rested. He also told McGuire that a source had told him “that boy Charley will be found before sundown today.”
“How do you know?” McGuire asked.
“Well, that is my business; but I will tell you this, that I’ll stake my honor on this, that Charley Ross, if he isn’t found tonight, will be on his way to Philadelphia tomorrow.”
I thought the boy was dead, McGuire told Munn.
“Not a bit of it,” retorted Munn, “or I wouldn’t say what I do. I know better.”
When Munn finished dressing the bodies, he placed them in imitation rosewood coffins with silver clasps.
Martha Mosher agreed to an interview after her husband’s funeral. On Monday, December 21, her story appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The writer described Martha as “good-looking and genteel in appearance.”
Throughout her adolescence, Martha said, her family had known the Moshers very well—at one point, the two families even shared a house. When she was fifteen, Martha married Bill, who was forty. “No girl could get a kinder husband than I did,” she told the reporter, “and from the day he married me up to the one when I saw him last he never changed to me.”
Initially, Bill had supported her by building boats and shaping wire into objects like birdcages. “I have seen few men in my life that were more industrious or attentive when everything went well with him, but sometimes bad luck would come, and then he was subject to fits of melancholy. They would not last long, because he was a good-natured, easy-dispositioned man naturally, and his dullness soon wore off.” Despite her husband’s mood swings, Martha said, he “would be the last man I should expect to hear of interfering with another man’s child.”
A reporter asked if Martha remembered the first time she had heard of the Ross kidnapping.
“I first heard of the Ross case from outside parties,” she answered. “But from what I learned since and what I know now, I am sorry to be obliged to confess I think he was one of the men who took that child. Where the boy is, I don’t know; I wish I did. His mother should soon have him. If I lost one of my own little ones I could not suffer more than I have since I believed my husband took that one. I would willingly give one of mine to restore Mrs. Ross her child, if that would do it. I never knew anything about it, until some suspicions of late, and what I heard since I have communicated to Superintendent Walling. He knows all I ever heard or suspected, and I only hope any information I can get for him will enable him to find the child.”
By the time Martha’s interview appeared in the papers, the press learned that she had fled Philadelphia months before the “suspicions of late,” which she said had informed her of Mosher’s complicity. Even though Walling had repeatedly defended Martha against charges of complicity throughout the fall, he did bring her to headquarters for questioning one week after the shootings. Afterward, he again defended her innocence.
The day after Martha’s interview appeared in the Inquirer, the New York Herald asked Gil Mosher about his sister-in-law. “If Martha Mosher don’t know where Charley Ross is, she knows those who do know,” alleged Gil. “I guess Superintendent Walling knows all about them. There’s been somebody behind them all along. That child will be found one of these days, and then it will all come out.”
Did Bill know that the police suspected him of the kidnapping? The reporter asked.
“What! Know what the police were doing? Yes. Every move,” Gil answered. “They did not stir but he knew it. Why, of course they were after him. I can’t tell you what started them now, but you come to me when the boy is discovered, and I’ll tell you such a history as never was written. Take you a week to write it.” Gil returned to his thoughts about Martha. “She is a good woman, no better, a kind mother and as true a wife as ever a man had, but she’s not so innocent of Bill Mosher’s doings as she pretends. Time will prove that. Let Superintendent Walling alone: he’ll bring all of that out. That woman would do anything Bill Mosher told her; yes, and lots of things he didn’t tell her, to please him. She was all bound up in him, from first to last, and she thought of nothing else in the world but him.”
When asked about the coroner’s inquest, Gil scoffed. He accused the authorities of dismissing the fact that the victims had been needlessly shot. If the shooters were honestly defending themselves, Gil asked, then why did Mosher and Douglas have bullet holes in their backs? “Now, there’s that coroner,” Gil continued. “He didn’t see the bodies? No. Well, you might have read how [Van Brunt and his men] told [Mosher and Douglas] to surrender, and then how the shooting began. Now, will you tell me, or can anyone explain, how, if he was fighting them, he came to have a shot in the back of his head and another in his back? Why wasn’t that brought out at the inquest?”
Gil was right about the shooters. According to forensic evidence, the men were trigger-happy. The authorities should have questioned their behavior more thoroughly. But they didn’t—and not because the Van Brunts were rich and powerful; status hadn’t kept the shooters from testifying at the inquest. Their actions were excused because less than thirty years before, the “neighborhood watch” had preceded the police department. Citizens were allowed—encouraged, even—to treat their neighborhoods as jurisdictions that they supervised. Even if Van Brunt and his men hadn’t justified their actions as self-defense, the implicit laws of the old guard probably would have protected them.
Still, Gil Mosher’s criticism showed sufficient sibling loyalty. When Gil had put the police on his brother’s path back in July, he had his eyes on the reward money, not another death in his family.
The Moshers’ rivalries had led to bad feelings and at least one prison sentence. At the same time, they weren’t so hardened that they rejected their sibling bond. Both brothers had lived through the deaths of their parents and twelve of their siblings. Gil Mosher had mentored his younger brother into thieving and a shipbuilding career, and Gil had tracked him down to let him know when their estranged mother died. When Westervelt told Bill Mosher that his older brother was acting as a police informant, the kidnapper’s intense emotional response revealed the sting of betrayal, among other things. The men may not have liked each other, but they were emotionally connected. Had one wanted the other dead, there would have been plenty of opportunities earlier in their lives to make that happen.
Any allegiance Gil felt for his dead brother didn’t cover his brother’s widow. Martha Mosher now retracted earlier statements defending her husband against kidnapping charges. She still claimed she was ignorant of the crime, and although Gil called her “a good woman,” he had also said she was “not so innocent” of her husband’s activities. Believing Martha could lead to Charley, Gil implied that Walling shared whatever knowledge she had. Like Joseph Douglas, he used the words “Superintendent Walling knows.”
The person most familiar with Walling’s knowledge was somebody connected to both Douglas and Gil Mosher: William Westervelt. Walling had insisted that Westervelt communicate only with him, and at times, only in private. Any information that Walling told his fellow officers could have put them in closer contact with the reward, so he wouldn’t have shared everything. Westervelt would have been the only person who knew what he told Walling.
Westervelt had spent the evening before Douglas’s death with the kidnapper. He had been in touch with Gil Mosher early in the investigation, and later, as the two men were related by marriage, they remained in close physical proximity to Martha in the days surrounding her husband’s funeral.
Whatever Westervelt had told Walling, he could have easily told Joseph Douglas, and Gil Mosher, and Martha Mosher.
By calling and relying upon Westervelt, Walling had given third parties an opportunity to incriminate him. As much as Mayor Stokley needed to distance himself from the case to ensure his political future, Walling needed to claim leadership of it to protect his reputation.