TOWARD THE END OF AUGUST, 1875, THE ROSS CASE BEGAN TO dominate the headlines again. By then, Philadelphia’s district attorney had to either try Westervelt on conspiracy charges or allow him to walk. Believing there was sufficient evidence to link Mary Westervelt to her husband’s activities, Captain Heins also wanted her to stand trial for conspiracy. Superintendent Walling came to her defense. Even though Mary had admitted to housing Bill Mosher’s family and to periodically meeting with the kidnappers, Walling said she was ignorant of her husband’s behavior.
Christian Ross and his family hoped that after six months in prison, Westervelt would tire of responding to the same questions and contradict his previous answers. More than once, Sarah Ross had visited him at the Moyamensing Prison in South Philadelphia. Through tired tears, she had begged him to tell her where Charley was hiding, but Westervelt insisted on his innocence. Once, he even began crying with her, kneeling to pray with her as she asked God to return her little boy.
The trial began on August 31, 1875, in a courthouse behind Independence Hall. On the first day, there was room for all of the onlookers inside of the courtroom. Sitting on benches behind the docks holding the defendant, the defense lawyers, and the prosecutors, they saw Westervelt turn as his wife, their eight-year-old daughter and their six-year-old son rushed up the aisle to join him in the docks. When he kissed his family, he cried. As the case continued, spectators also filled the aisles and the back of the courtroom. Those who stood could see Westervelt’s large frame sitting next to Joseph Ford and Newton Brown, two respected Philadelphia attorneys.
Every day but Sundays, the crowd sat or stood in oppressive heat, leaning forward to hear testimonies full of details that the police and the city advisers had kept from them over the past fourteenth months— months in which they had searched for Charley, suspected their neighbors of taking him, prayed for the Ross family, and restricted their own children’s outdoor play. They watched Westervelt take notes and exchange smiles with his wife during the testimonies of Walter and Christian Ross. They then watched this confidence wear away as Westervelt listened to colleagues testify against his character, and as he heard eyewitnesses tell of his walks and conversations around Germantown. What thrilled the audience most, though, was the reading of the twenty-three ransom letters that they had begged to see for more than a year.
During the fourth and final week of Westervelt’s trial, a reporter from the Inquirer visited the Ross family at their home in Germantown. After Christian finished his dinner, he walked into his library, lit the gas, and sat in a chair. His children stood around him.
“What I want from Westervelt is for him to give me a clue if he has the knowledge,” he said. “I want him to tell me if he knows my child is alive or dead. I want that question settled. If he is dead, I want him to tell me how and when he died, and where I can go to get the body.”
Since the start of the trial in August, the Ross family had received twenty additional ransom letters doctored to resemble the descriptions of the original twenty-three. Christian handed two of the fakes to the reporter. One author identified himself as a West Philadelphia detective. He had printed neatly in pencil, “I knew Mosher and Douglas and also Westervelt and have seen them together. I have seen your boy.” The handwriting on the other letter was messy, and ink blots marked the page around the words, “ros your boy is alive and is nearer your home than you have any idea.” Both letters had misspelled words, and the trained eye could see that the same hand composed both.
The reporter asked Christian if he blamed Captain Heins and the Philadelphia Police for prolonging the family’s torture by failing to arrest the kidnappers before they died. Ross refused to speak badly of Heins. Instead, he placed the blame on New York’s police department.
“If Superintendent Walling had followed the ideas of Captain Heins there would have been different results. He wanted Walling to put another man on the case, but the latter desired to detail the officer who had given the first information of the Douglas and Mosher clue, and did it, yet this man was incompetent to handle a case like this that required brains. I believe Walling committed fatal errors and bungled the case in many particulars.”
Philadelphia’s District Attorney Furman Sheppard began his final argument to the jury on Thursday, September 16. In it, he recalled the testimonies of Westervelt’s former police colleague Henry Hartman and the defendant’s bartender Charles Stromberg, men who had witnessed Westervelt in the company of the kidnappers and heard him boast of his intimate knowledge of the crime. Sheppard also reviewed the testimonies of eyewitnesses who saw the kidnappers and Westervelt in Germantown, pointed to contradictions in Mrs. Westervelt’s alibi for her husband, and charged the jurors with considering how important an accomplice like Westervelt was to the kidnappers.
“What relations of perfect conduct subsisted between this man and the abductors?” Sheppard asked. “They took him to see the horse and wagon with which they were to commit the crime. He was entrusted with the care of Mosher’s family, because Mosher knew his visits to them would be covered up. Constantly they furnished him with money, trusted him, conferred with him, and put themselves completely within his family: there was such trust and companionship as was utterly inconsistent with any other theory than that of a common purpose and a common interest among them. His part in the business was to control the police while the other two kept up their batteries upon the distressed family. This was the heart of the mystery, the true nature of the prisoner’s connection with it.”
The attorney for the defense began his closing statement at about 10:00 A.M. the following morning. He defended Westervelt against conspiracy charges, insisting that the kidnappers had contacted him only after the kidnapping occurred. He blamed the prosecutors for building a case on inferences and for trusting eyewitnesses whose testimonies contradicted one another in time and place. Finally, he criticized the treatment his client received from the police and blamed the continued disappearance of Charley Ross on corrupt police officers seeking reward money.
“The Commonwealth asks you to convict this man upon a statement made to unauthorized parties, and in an unauthorized manner. Now what was the nature of the defendant’s agreement with Walling? It was as he states it, only to report to Walling himself. He could not arrest these men, or have them arrested, on account of the agreement, for if he did he and the policemen who made the arrest would get the glory of the twenty thousand dollars, not Walling, who desired to secure them himself.”
Westervelt looked down, and the judge turned to address the jury.
“Review the testimony with calm judgment, and fear not to apply every test to its accuracy. You are to decide by the testimony; if to find the prisoner guilty, it must be beyond a reasonable doubt or he goes free. Give him that doubt if it be an honest, manly doubt, derived from the whole testimony; but do not manufacture it from weakness or sympathy, either for himself or his family, for this is no hour for sympathy. Whilst you have gazed upon that scene of misery surrounding that prisoner’s dock for three weeks, you must recollect that if there be guilt upon that brow, that for one year and two months the voice of Charley Ross has been lost to his home, and that, while the prisoner has his children in life around him, another father mourns his son through this terrible crime.”
The judge ended his charge at 7:15 P.M. and announced a recess. Westervelt raised his head to look at the jury members. His fate rested with two manufacturers, five artisans, a grocer, a merchant, a gentleman, a tobacconist, and a clerk. Westervelt’s children stopped playing quietly behind him and hugged their mother. While the jurors filed out of the courtroom, lawyers and the foreman gathered the ransom letters and indictment papers for the jury’s perusal, and spectators stretched and spoke loudly. Exiting the building for the courtyard, they left Westervelt and his family alone.
The jurors’ debates continued throughout the weekend and into the early hours of Monday morning. Journalists waiting inside the Public Ledger building across the street could look down from their offices and see jurors pacing in the deliberation room after 2:00 A.M. Several hours later, a large crowd gathered in Independence Square to hear the verdict. For more than the past one hundred years of Philadelphia’s history, the square had been a constant scene of meetings, rallies, and demonstrations; most recently, it had served as the grounds for Civil War recruiters working out of tents. Men, women, and children entered the square through one of several gates and walked down gravel walkways that weaved through one hundred young elm trees. By the time the State House bell tolled at 9:00 A.M., the jurors had reached a decision, and the crowd huddled against the courthouse doors had begun to sweat under the sunlight.
When the doors opened, arms and elbows pushed forward. Children, storekeepers, reporters, and drunks shoved their way to seats or spots in the aisles. At 1:00 A.M., the judge arrived, and Westervelt walked to the dock. Reporters read despair in his posture, walk, and pale face. He barely kissed his wife and shook his children’s hands. The foreman read the verdict. Guilty on all charges of conspiracy. Westervelt pushed his head into his hands and cried.
On October 9, he appeared one last time before Judge Thomas Robert Elcock. The judge explained the delay between the verdict and the sentencing.
“I had hoped ere this I should have been appealed to for a light sentence by some merciful cry revealing something of the fate of Charley Ross,” the judge told him, “but I have heard not even a whisper, nor held a ray of hope, and if the knowledge of his fate rests with you, then you become your own executioner. Justice calls loudly for your severe punishment, and it remains but for me to announce its sentence. By an act of Assembly on the 25th of February, 1875, the kidnapping of a child under ten years of age is made a felony, and punishable by a fine not exceeding ten thousand dollars and an imprisonment of not less than twenty-five years. Harboring and concealing a child is likewise made a felony, and punishable by a fine not exceeding five thousand dollars and an imprisonment not exceeding fifteen years. This act was passed since the commission of your offense, and there was no evidence in the cause which would justify a punishment to you of harboring and concealing the child, or of conspiring to do so since the passage of the act. The sentence of the Court is that you pay a fine of one dollar, the costs of prosecution, and that you undergo an imprisonment at solitary confinement, at labor, in the Eastern Penitentiary for the term of seven years, and that you stand committed until that sentence be complied with.”
Westervelt breathed deeply and sat down. Leaning forward, he put his head down and pulled at his beard.