would surely be possible to find the house in which the boy had been
held captive, for Omaha was not so large that there were many empty
houses to suit the description furnished by the boy. Besides, the time
at which any such house had been rented would offer evidence. It might
be possible to get a clew to the identity of the kidnappers through the
description of the person or persons who had done the renting.
Second, the kidnappers must have got the horse and buggy somewhere;
most likely from a local livery stable. If its source could be found,
the liveryman also would be able to describe the persons with whom he
had done business.
So the police set to work, searching the town again for house and for
stable. They found several deserted two-story cottages that fitted the
picture well enough, and in each instance there were circumstances
which seemed to indicate that the kidnappers had been there. Finally,
however, all were eliminated, except a crude two-story cabin at 3604
Grover Street. This turned out to be the place, situated near the
outskirts, on the top of a hill, with the nearest neighbors a block
away. Cigarette ends, burned matches, empty whisky bottles, and windows
covered with newspapers gave silent, but conclusive, testimony.
The matter of the horse proved more difficult. It had not been hired
at any stable in Omaha or in Council Bluffs, across the Missouri
River. Advertising and police calls brought out no private owner who
had rented such a rig. Finally, however, the officers found a farmer
living about twenty miles out of town who had sold a bay pony to a
tall stranger several weeks before. Another man was found who had sold
a second-hand buggy to a man of the same general description. At last
the police began to realize that they were dealing with a criminal of
genuine resourcefulness and foresight. The man had not blundered in any
of the usual ways, and he had made the trail so confused that more than
a week had passed before there were any positive indications as to his
possible identity.
In the end several indications pointed in the same direction. It
seemed highly probable that the kidnapper chieftain had been some one
acquainted with the packing business and probably with the Cudahys.
He was also familiar with the town. He was tall, had a commanding
voice, was accompanied by a shorter man, who seemed to be older, but
was still dominated by his companion. More important still, this chief
of abductors was an experienced and clever criminal. He gave every
evidence of knowing all the ropes. These specifications seemed to fit
just one man whose name now began to be used on all sides--the thrice
perilous and ill-reputed Pat Crowe.
It was recalled that this man had begun life as a butcher, been
a trusted employee of the Cudahys ten years before, and had been
dismissed for dishonesty. Subsequently he had turned his hand to crime,
and achieved a startling reputation in the western United States as
an intrepid bandit, train robber, and jail breaker, a handy man with
a gun, a sure shot, and a desperate fellow in a corner. He had been
in prison more than once, had lately made what seemed an effort at
reform, knew Edward A. Cudahy well, and had sometimes received favors
and gratuities from the rich man. He was, in short, exactly the man
to fit all the requirements, and succeeding weeks and evidence only
strengthened the suspicion against him. Crowe, though he had been seen
in Omaha the day before the kidnapping, was nowhere to be discovered.
Even this fact added to the general belief that he and none other had
done the deed. In a short time the Cudahy kidnapping mystery resolved
itself into a quest for this notorious fellow.
The alarm was spread throughout the United States and Canada, to
the British Isles, and the Continental ports, and to Mexico and the
Central American border and port cities, where it was believed the
fugitive might make his appearance. But Crowe was not apprehended,
and the quest soon settled down to its routine phases, with occasional
lapses back into exciting alarms. Every little while the capture of
Pat Crowe was reported, and on at least a dozen occasions men turned
up with confessions and detailed descriptions of the kidnapping.
These apparitions and alleged captures took place in such diffused
spots as London, Singapore, Manila, Guayaquil, San Francisco, and
various obscure towns in the United States and Canada. The genuine
and authentic Pat Crowe, however, stoutly declined to be one of the
captives or confessors, and so the hunt went on.
[Illustration:
_Wide World_
~~ PAT CROWE ~~]
Meantime Crowe’s confederate, an ex-brakeman on the Union Pacific
Railroad, had been taken and brought to trial. His name was James
Callahan, and there was then and is now no question about his
connection with the affair. Nevertheless, at the end of his trial on
April 29, 1901, Callahan was acquitted, and Judge Baker, the presiding
tribune, excoriated the jury for neglect of duty, saying that never had
evidence more clearly indicated guilt. Attempts to convict Callahan on
other counts were no better starred, and he had finally to be released.
In the same year, 1901, word was received from Crowe through an
attorney he had employed in an earlier difficulty. Crowe had sent
this barrister a draft from Capetown, South Africa, in payment of
an old debt. The much sought desperado had got through the lines to
the Transvaal, joined the Boer forces, and had been fighting against
the British. He had been twice wounded, decorated for distinguished
courage, and was, according to his own statement, done with crime and
living a different life--adventurous, but honest. So many canards had
been exploded that Omaha refused to believe the story, albeit time
proved it to be true.
At the height of the excitement, rewards of fifty-five thousand dollars
had been offered for the capture and conviction of Pat Crowe, thirty
thousand by Cudahy and twenty-five thousand by the city of Omaha.
This huge price on the head of this wandering bad man had, of course,
contributed to the feverish and half-worldwide interest in the case.
Yet even these fat inducements accomplished nothing.
Finally, in 1906, when Crowe had been hunted in vain for more than five
years, he suddenly opened negotiations with Omaha’s chief of police
through an attorney, offering to come in and surrender, in case all the
rewards were immediately and honestly withdrawn, so that there would be
no money inducement which might cause officers or others to manufacture
a case against him. After some preliminaries, these terms were met, but
not until an attempt to capture the desperado had been made and failed,
with the net result of three badly wounded officers.
In February, 1906, Crowe was at last brought to trial and, to the utter
astoundment and chagrin of the entire country, promptly acquitted,
though he offered no defense and tacitly admitted that he had taken
the boy. One bit of conclusive evidence that had been offered by the
prosecution and admitted by the court, was a letter written by Crowe to
his parish priest in the little Iowa town of his boyhood. In the course
of this letter, which had been written to the priest in the hope that
he might make peace with Cudahy, the desperado admitted that “I am
solely responsible for the Cudahy kidnapping. No one else is to blame.”
No matter. The jury would not consider the evidence and brought in the
verdict already indicated. Crowe, after six years of being hunted with
a price of fifty-five thousand dollars on his head, was a free man.
The acquittals of Crowe and Callahan have furnished material for a good
deal of amused and some angry speculation. The local situation in Omaha
at the time furnishes the key to the puzzle. First of all, there was
the bitter anti-beef trust agitation, founded on the fact that many
small independent butchers had been put out of business by the great
packing-house combination, of which Cudahy was a member; and that meat
prices had everywhere been rapidly advanced to almost double their
earlier prices. Next, there was the circumstance of Cudahy’s abundant
and flaunting wealth. The common man considered that these millions
had been gouged out of his pocket and cut from off his dinner plate.
Cudahy had also begun the introduction of cheap negro labor into Omaha
to break a strike of his packing-house employees, and the city was
bitterly angry at him. Also, Crowe was himself popular and well known.
Many considered him a hero. But there was still another strange cause
of the state of the public mind.
In the very beginning a not inconsiderable part of Omaha’s people had
somehow come to the curious conclusion that there had been no Cudahy
kidnapping. One story said that Eddie Cudahy was a wild youth, and that
he himself had conspired with Crowe and Callahan to abduct him and get
the ransom, since he needed a share of it for his own purpose, and
he saw in this plan an easy method to mulct his unsuspecting father.
A later version denied the boy’s guilt, but still insisted that the
whole story, as told by the father and confirmed by the police, was a
piece of fiction. What motive the rich packer could have had for such
a fraud, no one could say. The best explanation given was that he saw
in it a plan to get worldwide advertising for the Cudahy name. How
this could have sold any additional hams or beeves, is a bit hard to
imagine, but the story was so generally believed that two jurors at
one of the trials voiced it in the jury room and scoffed at all the
evidence. All this rumor is, of course, absurd.
Crowe, after his acquittal, went straight, as the word goes. He has
committed no more crimes, unless one wants to rate under this heading
a book of highly romantic confessions, which he had published the
following year. In this book he set forth the circumstances of the
crime in great, but unreliable, detail. He made it very plain, however,
that he and Callahan alone planned the crime and carried it out.
Crowe personally conceived the whole plan and took Callahan into the
conspiracy only because he needed help. The two held up the boy, as
already related. As soon as they had him safe in the old house, Crowe
drove back to the Cudahy home in his buggy and threw the note, wrapped
about the stick and decorated with the red cloth, upon the lawn, where
it was found the next morning by the coachman. Of the twenty-five
thousand dollars in gold, Crowe gave his assistant only three thousand
dollars, used one thousand for expenses, and buried the rest,
recovering it later when the coast was clear. He selected Cudahy for a
victim because he knew that the packer was a fond father, had a nervous
wife, and would be strong enough to resist any mad police advice.
A few years later I first encountered Crowe in New York, when he came
to see me with a petty favor to ask and an article of his reminiscences
to sell. He had meantime become a kind of peregrine reformer, lecturer,
pamphlet seller and semi-mendicant, now blessed with a little
evanescent prosperity, again sleeping in Bowery flops and eking out
a miserable living by any device short of lawbreaking. And he has
called upon me or crossed my wanderings repeatedly in the intervening
years, always voluble, plausible and a trifle pathetic. Now he is off
to call upon the President, to memorialize a governor or to address a
provincial legislature. He is bent on abolishing prisons, has a florid
set-speech, which he delivers in a big sententious voice, and perhaps
he impresses his rural hearers, though the tongue in the cheek and the
twinkle in the eye never escape those who know him of old.
This grand rascal is no longer young--rising sixty, I should say--and
life has treated him shabbily in the last twenty years. Yet neither
poverty nor age has quite taken from him a certain leonine robustness,
a kind of ruined strength and power that shines a little sadly through
his charlatanry.
Only once or twice, when he has lost himself in the excited recounting
of his adventures, of his hardy old crimes, of the Cudahy kidnapping,
have I ever caught in him the quality that must once have been
his--the force, the fire that made his name shudder around the world.
Convention has beaten him as it beats them all, these brave and baneful
men. It has made a sidling apologist of a great rogue in Crowe’s
case--and what a sad declension!
IX
THE WHITLA KIDNAPPING
Abduction is always a puzzling crime. The risks are so great, the
punishment, of late years, so severe, and the chances of profit so
slight that logic seems to demand some special and extraordinary motive
on the part of the criminal. It is true that kidnapping is one of the
easiest crimes to commit. It is also a fact that it seems to offer
a quick and promising way of extorting large sums of money without
physical risk. But every offender must know that the chances of success
are of the most meager.
A study of past cases shows that child stealing arouses the public
as nothing else can, not even murder. This state of general alarm,
indignation, and alertness is the first peril of the kidnapper.
Again, the problem of getting the ransom from even the most willing
victim without exposing the criminal to capture, is a most intricate
and unpromising one. It is well known that child snatchers almost
never succeed with this part of the business. The cases in which the
kidnapper has actually got the ransom and made off without being
caught and punished are so thinly strewn upon the long record that any
criminal who ever takes the trouble to peruse it must shrink with fear
from such offenses. Finally, it is familiar knowledge among police
officers that professional criminals usually are aware of this fact
and consequently both dread and abhor abductions.
The fact that kidnapping persists in spite of these recognized
discouragements probably accounts for the proneness of policemen and
citizens to interpret into every abduction case some moving force other
than mere hope of gain. Obscurer impulsions and springs of action,
whether real or surmised, are often the inner penetralia of child
stealing mysteries. So with the famous Whitla case.
At half past nine on the morning of March 18, 1909, a short, stocky
man drove up to the East Ward Schoolhouse, in the little steel town of
Sharon, in western Pennsylvania, in an old covered buggy and beckoned
to Wesley Sloss, the janitor.
“Mr. Whitla wants Willie to come to his office right away,” said the
stranger.
It may have been more than irregular for a pupil to be summoned from
his classes in this way, but in Sharon no one questioned vagaries
having to do with this particular child. Willie Whitla was the
eight-year-old son of the chief lawyer of the place, James P. Whitla,
who was wealthy and politically influential. The boy was also, and
more spectacularly, the nephew by marriage of Frank M. Buhl, the
multimillionaire iron master and industrial overlord of the region.
Janitor Sloss bandied no compliments. He hurried inside to Room 2,
told the teacher, Mrs. Anna Lewis, that the boy was wanted, helped
bundle him into his coat, and led him out to the buggy. The man in the
conveyance tucked the boy under the lap robe, muttered his thanks, and
drove off in the direction of the town’s center, where the father’s
office was situated.
When Willie Whitla failed to appear at home for luncheon at the noon
recess, there was no special apprehension. Probably he had gone to a
chum’s house and would be along at the close of the afternoon session.
His mother was vexed, but not worried.
At four o’clock the postman stopped on the Whitla veranda, blew his
whistle, and left a note which had been posted in the town some hours
before. It was addressed to the lawyer’s wife in the childish scrawl of
the little boy. Its contents, written by another hand, read:
“We have your boy, and no harm will come to him if you comply with our
instructions. If you give this letter to the newspapers, or divulge
any of its contents, you will never see your boy again. We demand
ten thousand dollars in twenty-dollar, ten-dollar, and five-dollar
bills. If you attempt to mark the money, or place counterfeit money,
you will be sorry. Dead men tell no tales. Neither do dead boys. You
may answer at the following addresses: _Cleveland Press_, _Youngstown
Vindicator_, _Indianapolis News_, and _Pittsburgh Dispatch_ in the
personal columns. Answer: 'A. A. Will do as you requested. J. P. W.’”
A few minutes later the whole town was searching, and the alarm had
been broadcast by telegraph and telephone. Before nightfall a hundred
thousand officers were on the lookout in a thousand cities and towns
through the eastern United States.
At four thirty o’clock, when Sharon first heard of the abduction, a
boy named Morris was found, who had seen Willie Whitla get out of a
buggy at the edge of the town, drop a letter into the mail box, and get
back into the vehicle, which was driven away.
This discovery had hardly been made when it was also learned that a
stranger had rented a horse and buggy, fitting the description of those
used by the kidnapper, in South Sharon early in the morning. At five
o’clock, the jaded horse, still hitched to the rented buggy, was found
tied to a post in Warren, Ohio, twenty-five miles from Sharon.
The search immediately began in the northern or lake cities and towns
of Ohio, the trend of the search running strongly toward Cleveland,
where it was believed the abductor or abductors would try the hiding
properties of urban crowds.
The Whitla and Buhl families acted with sense and caution. They were
sufficiently well informed to know that the police are doubtful
agencies for the safe recovery of snatched children. They were rich to
the point of embarrassment. Ten thousand dollars meant nothing. The
safety and speedy return of the child were the only considerations that
could have swayed them. Accordingly, they did not reveal the contents
of the note, as I have quoted it. Neither did they confide to the
police any other details, or the direction of their intentions. The
fact of the kidnapping could, of course, not be concealed, but all else
was guarded from official or public intrusion.
On the advice of friends the parents did employ private detectives,
but even their advice was disregarded, and Mr. Whitla without delay
signified his willingness to capitulate by inserting the dictated
notice into all the four mentioned newspapers.
The answer of the abductors came very promptly through the mails,
reaching Whitla on the morning of the twentieth, less than forty-eight
hours after the boy had been taken.
Again following instructions, Whitla did not communicate to the police
the contents of this note or his plans. Instead, he set off quietly
for Cleveland, evidently to mislead the public officers, who seemed to
take delight in their efforts to seize control of the case. At eight
o’clock in the night Whitla left Cleveland, accompanied by one private
detective, and went to the neighboring city of Ashtabula. Here the
detective was left at the White Hotel, and the father of the missing
boy set out to meet the demands of the kidnappers.
They, it appears, had written him that he must go at ten o’clock at
night to Flatiron Park, a lonely strip of land on the outskirts of
Ashtabula, and there deposit under a certain stone the package of
bills. He was told what route to follow, commanded to go alone, and
warned not to communicate with the police. Having left the money as
commanded, Whitla was to return to the hotel and wait there for the
coming of his son, who would be restored as soon as the abductors were
safely in possession of the money.
So the father set out in the dark of the night, followed the route
given him by the abductors, deposited the money in the park, and
returned forthwith to the hotel, reaching it before eleven o’clock.
Here he sat with his bodyguard, waiting for the all-desired apparition
of his little son. The hours went wearily by, while the father’s
nervousness mounted. Finally, at three o’clock in the morning, some
local officers appeared and notified the frenzied lawyer that they had
been watching the park all night, and that no one had appeared to claim
the package of money.
Police interference had ruined the plan.
The local officers naturally assumed that, as the kidnappers were
to call for the money in the park, they must be in Ashtabula. They
accordingly set out, searched all night, invaded the houses of sleeping
citizens, turned the hotels and rooming houses inside out, prowled
their way through cars in the railroad yards and boats in the harbor,
watched the roads leading in and out of the city, searched the street
cars and generally played the devil. But all in vain. There were no
suspicious strangers to be found in or about the community.
The following morning the father of the boy visited the mayor and
requested that the police cease their activities. He pointed out that
there were no clews of definite promise, and the peril in which the
child stood ought to command official coöperation instead of dangerous
interference. Whitla finally managed to convince the officers that they
stood no worse chance of catching the criminals after the recovery of
the boy, and the Ashtabula officers were immediately called off.
The disappointed and harried father was forced to return to Sharon in
defeat and bring the disappointing news to his prostrated wife. The
little steel town had got the definite impression that news of the
child had been got, and preparations for the boy’s return had been
made. Many citizens were up all night, ready to receive the little
wanderer with rockets, bands, and jubilation. Crowds besieged the
Whitla home, and policemen had to be kept on guard to turn away a
stream of well-meaning friends and curious persons, who would have kept
the breaking mother from such little sleep as was possible under the
circumstances.
The excitement of the vicinity had by this time spread to all the
country. As is always the case, arrests on suspicion were made of the
most unlikely persons in the most impossible situations. Men, women,
and children were stopped in the streets, dragged from their rooms,
questioned, harried, taken to police stations, and even locked into
jails for investigation, while the missing boy and his abductors
succeeded in eluding completely the large army of pursuers now in the
field.
Nothing further was heard from the kidnappers on the twenty-first,
and the hearts of the bewildered parents and relatives sank with
apprehension, but the morning mail of the twenty-second again contained
a note which, properly interpreted, seems to indicate that the business
of leaving the money in the park at Ashtabula may have been a test
maneuver, to find out whether Whitla would keep the faith and act
without the police. This note read:
“A mistake was made at Ashtabula Saturday night. You come to Cleveland
on the Erie train leaving Youngstown at 11:10 a. m. Leave the train at
Wilson Avenue. Take a car to Wilson and St. Clair. At Dunbar’s drug
store you will find a letter addressed to William Williams.
“We will not write you again in this matter. If you attempt to catch
us you will never see your boy again.”
This time Whitla decided to be rid of the police. He accordingly had
his representatives announce that all activities would cease for
the time being, in the hope that the kidnappers would regain their
confidence and reopen communications. At the same time he told the
Ashtabula police to resume their activities. With these two false leads
given out, Whitla slipped away from his home, caught the train, and
went straight to Cleveland.
Late that afternoon, having satisfied himself that he had eluded the
overzealous officers, Whitla went to Dunbar’s drug store and found the
note waiting, as promised. It contained nothing but further directions.
He was to proceed to a confectionery conducted by a Mrs. Hendricks at
1386 East Fifty-third Street, deliver the ransom, carefully done into a
package, to the woman in charge. He was to tell her the package should
be held for Mr. Hayes, who would call.