thousand dollars to Mrs. Hendricks, and was given a note in return.
This missive instructed him to go forthwith to the Hollenden Hotel,
where he was to wait for his boy. The promise was made that the child
would be returned within three hours.
It was about five o’clock when this exchange was made. The tortured
father turned and went immediately to the Hollenden, one of the chief
hostelries of Cleveland, engaged a room and waited. An hour passed.
His anxiety became intolerable. He went down to the lobby and began
walking back and forth, in and out of the doors, up and down the walk,
back into the hotel, up to his room and back to the office. Several
noticed his nervousness and preoccupation, but only a lone newspaper
man identified him and kept him under watch.
Seven o’clock came and passed. At half past seven the worn lawyer’s
agitation increased to the point of frenzy. He could do no more than
retire to a quiet corner of the lobby, huddle himself into a big chair,
and sink into the half stupor of exhaustion.
A few minutes before eight o’clock the motorman of a Payne Avenue
street car saw a man and a small boy come out of the gloom at a street
corner in East Cleveland and motion him to stop. The man put the child
aboard and gave the conductor some instructions, paying its fare, and
immediately vanished in the darkness. The little boy, wearing a pair of
dark goggles and a large yellow cap that was pulled far down over his
ears, sat quietly in the back seat and made not a sound.
A few squares further along the line two boys of seventeen or eighteen
years boarded the car and were immediately intrigued by the glum little
figure. The newcomers, whose names were Edward Mahoney and Thomas W.
Ramsey, spoke to the child, vaguely suspicious that this might be the
much-sought Willie Whitla. When they asked his name the lad said he was
Willie Jones. In response to other questions he told that he was on his
way to meet his father at the Hollenden.
The two young men said no more till the hotel was reached. Here they
insisted on leaving the car with the boy and at once called a policeman
to whom they voiced their suspicions. The officer, the two youths, and
the child thus entered the hotel and approached the desk. In response
to further interrogation, the little fellow still insisted that he
was Jones, but, being deprived of his big cap and goggles and called
Willie Whitla, he asked:
“How did you know me? Where is my daddy?”
The gloomy man in the corner chair got one tinkle of the childish
voice, ran across the big room, caught up the child and rushed
hysterically to his own apartment, where he telephoned at once to the
boy’s mother. By the time the attorney could be persuaded to come
back down stairs, a crowd was gathered, and the father and child were
welcomed with cheers.
The boy shortly gave his father and the police his story. The man who
had taken him from school in the buggy had told him that he was being
taken out of town to the country at his father’s request, because
there was an epidemic of smallpox, and it was feared the doctors would
lock him up in a dirty pest house. He had accordingly gone willingly
to Cleveland, where he had been taken to what he believed to be a
hospital. A man and woman had taken care of him and treated him well.
They were Mr. and Mrs. Jones. They had not abused him in any way. In
fact, he liked them, except for the fact that they made him hide under
the kitchen sink when any one knocked at the door, and they gave him
candy which made him sleepy. Mr. Jones himself, the boy said, had put
him aboard the street car, paid his fare, instructed him to tell any
inquirers that his name was Jones, and warned him to go immediately to
the hotel and join his father. The only additional information got from
the boy, besides fairly valuable descriptions of the abductors, was to
the effect that he had been taken to the “hospital” the night following
his abduction and had not left the place till he was led out to be sent
to the hotel.
The child returned to Sharon in triumph, was welcomed with music and a
salute from the local militia company, displayed before the serenading
citizens, and photographed for the American and foreign press.
Meantime the search for the kidnappers was under way. The private
detectives in the employ of the Whitlas were immediately withdrawn when
the boy was recovered, but the police of Cleveland and other cities
plunged in with notable energy. The druggist, with whom the note had
been left, and the woman confectioner, who had received the package
of ransom money, were immediately questioned. Neither knew that the
transaction they had aided was concerned with the Whitla case, and both
were frightened and astonished. They could give little information that
has not already been indicated. Mrs. Hendricks, the keeper of the candy
store, however, was able to particularize the description of the man
who had come to her place, left the note for Mr. Whitla, and returned
later for the package of money. He was, she said, about thirty years
old, with dark hair, a smoothly shaved, but pock-marked face, weighed
about one hundred and sixty pounds, and seemed to be Irish.
Considering the car line which had brought the boy to the Hollenden
Hotel, the point at which he had boarded the car, and the description
he gave of the place he termed a hospital, the Cleveland police were
certain Willie had been detained in an apartment house somewhere in the
southeast quarter of the city, and detectives were accordingly sent to
comb that part of the city in quest of a furnished suite in which the
kidnappers might still be hiding.
Willie Whitla had returned to his father on Monday night. Tuesday
evening, about twenty-two hours after the boy had made his dramatic
entry into the Hollenden, the detectives went through a three-story
flat building at 2022 Prospect Avenue and found that a couple answering
the general descriptions furnished by Willie Whitla and Mrs. Hendricks
had rented a furnished apartment there on the night following the
kidnapping and had departed only a few hours ahead of the detectives.
They had conducted themselves very quietly while in the place, and the
woman who had sublet the rooms to them was not even sure there had been
a child with them. Willie Whitla afterward identified this place as the
scene of his captivity.
The discovery of this apartment might have been less significant for
the moment, had the building not been but a few squares from the point
at which Willie had been put aboard the street car for his trip to join
his father. As it was, the detectives felt they were hot on the trail.
Reserves were rushed to that part of town, patrolmen were not relieved
at the end of their tours of duty, and the extra men were stationed at
the exits from the city, with instructions to stop and question all
suspicious persons. The pack was in full cry, but the quarry was by no
means in sight.
At this tense and climactic moment of the drama far broader forces than
the police were thrown upon the stage. The governor of Pennsylvania
signed a proclamation in the course of the afternoon, offering to
continue the reward of fifteen thousand dollars which had been posted
by the State for the recovery of the boy and the arrest and conviction
of his abductors. Since the boy had been returned, the money was to
go to those who brought his kidnappers to justice. Accordingly, the
people of several States were watching with no perfunctory alertness.
High hopes of immediate capture were thus based on more than one
consideration; but the night was aging without result.
At a few minutes past nine o’clock a man and woman of the most
inconspicuous kind entered the saloon of Patrick O’Reilly on Ontario
Street, Cleveland, sat down at a table in the rear room, and ordered
drink. The liquor was served, and the man offered a new five-dollar
bill in payment. He immediately reordered, telling the proprietor
to include the other patrons then in the place. Again he offered a
new bill of the same denomination, and once again he commanded that
all present accept his hospitality. Both the man and the woman drank
rapidly and heavily, quickly showing the effects of the liquor and
becoming more and more loquacious, spendthrift and effusive.
There was, of course, nothing extraordinary in such conduct. Men came
in often enough who drank heavily, spent freely, and insisted on
“buying for the house.” But it was a little unusual for a man to let go
of thirty dollars in little more than an hour, and it was still more
unusual for a customer to peel off one new five-dollar note after the
other.
O’Reilly had been reading the newspapers. He knew that there had been
a kidnapping; that there was a reward of fifteen thousand dollars
outstanding; that a man and woman were supposed to have held the boy
captive in Cleveland, and not too far from the saloon. Also he had read
about the package of five, ten, and twenty dollar bills. His brows
lifted. O’Reilly waited for an opportune moment and went to his cash
drawer. The bills this pair of strangers had given him were all new;
that was certain. Perhaps they would prove to be all of the same issue,
even of the same series and in consequent numbers. If so----
The saloonkeeper had to move with caution. When his suspect callers had
their attention on something else, he slipped the money from the till
and moved to the end of the bar near the window, where he was out of
their visional range. He laid the bills out on the cigar case, adjusted
his glasses, and stared.
In that moment the visitors got up to go. O’Reilly urged them to stay,
insisted on supplying them with a free drink, did what he could,
without arousing suspicion, to detain them, hoping that an officer
would saunter in. At last they could be held no longer. With an
exchange of unsteady compliments, they were out of the door and gone
into the night, whose shadows had yielded them up an hour before.
O’Reilly noted the direction they took and flew to a telephone. In
response to his urgings, Captain Shattuck and Detective Woods were
hurried to the place and set out with O’Reilly’s instructions and
description. They had no more than moved from the saloon when the
rollicking pair was seen returning.
The officers hailed these sinister celebrants with a remark about the
weather and the lateness of the hour. Instantly the man took to his
heels, with Captain Shattuck in pursuit. As they turned a corner, the
officer drew and fired high.
The fleeing man collapsed in a heap, and the policeman ran to him,
marveling that his aim had been so unintentionally good. He found,
however, that the fugitive had merely stumbled in his sodden attempt at
flight.
Both prisoners were taken forthwith to the nearest police station
and subjected to questioning. They were inarticulately drunk, or
determinedly reticent and pretending. Tiring of the maneuvers and half
assured that he was probably face to face with the kidnappers, Captain
Shattuck ordered them searched.
At various places in the linings of the woman’s clothing, still in
the neat packages in which it had been taken from the bank, were nine
thousand, seven hundred and ninety dollars.
The prisoners turned out to be James H. Boyle and Helen McDermott
Boyle--he a floating adventurer known to the cities of Pennsylvania and
Ohio, she the daughter of respectable Chicago parents, whom she had
quit several years before to go venturing on her own account.
From the beginning both the police and the public held the opinion that
these two people had not been alone in the kidnapping. When exhaustive
investigation failed to reveal the presence of others at any stage of
the abduction, flight, hiding and attempted removal in Cleveland, it
was concluded that the prisoners had possibly been the sole active
agents, but the opinion was retained that some one else must have
plotted the crime.
Why had these strangers singled out Sharon, an obscure little town? Why
had they chosen Willie Whitla, when there were tens of thousands of
boys with wealthier parents and many with even richer relatives? Who
had acquainted them with the particularities of the Whitlas’ lives,
the probable attitude at the school, the child’s fear of smallpox and
pest houses? Was it not obvious that some one close to the family had
supplied the information and laid the plans?
James H. Boyle was led into court on the sixth of May, faced with his
accusers, and swiftly encircled with the accusing evidence, which was
complete and unequivocal. He accepted it without display of emotion and
offered no defense. After brief argument the case went to the jury,
which reached an affirmative verdict within a few minutes.
Mrs. Boyle was placed on trial immediately afterward and also presented
no defense. A verdict was found against her with equal expedition on
May 10, and she was remanded for sentence.
On the following day both defendants were called before the court. The
judge imposed the life sentence on Boyle and a term of twenty-five
years on his wife. A few hours afterward Boyle called the newspaper
reporters to his cell in the jail at Mercer and handed them a written
statement.
Boyle’s writing went back fourteen years to 1895, when the body of
Dan Reeble, Jr., had been found lying on the sidewalk on East Federal
Street, Youngstown, Ohio, before the house where Reeble lived. There
had been some mysterious circumstances or rumors attached to Reeble’s
end.
Boyle did not attempt to explain the death of Reeble, but he said in
his statement that he and one Daniel Shay, a Youngstown saloonkeeper,
who had died in 1907, had caught Harry Forker, the brother of Mrs.
James P. Whitla and uncle of the kidnapped boy, taking a number of
letters from the pockets of the dead man, as his body lay on the walk.
Boyle recited that not only had he and Shay found Forker in this
compromising position, but they had picked up two envelopes overlooked
by Forker, in which were found four letters from women, two from a
girl in New York State and the other two from a Cleveland woman. The
contents were intimate, he said, and they proved beyond peradventure
that Forker had been present at Reeble’s death.
Boyle’s statement went on to recite that he had subsequently written
Forker, told him about the letters, and suggested that they were
for sale. Forker had immediately replied and made various efforts
to recover the incriminating missives, but Boyle had held them and
continued to extort money from Forker for years, threatening to reveal
the letters unless paid.
Finally, in March, 1908, Boyle’s statement went on to recite, a demand
for five thousand dollars had been made on Forker, who said he could
not raise the money, but would come into an inheritance later and would
then pay and recover the dangerous evidence. When Forker failed in
this undertaking, fresh threats were made, with the result that Forker
suggested the kidnapping of his nephew, the demand for ten thousand
dollars’ ransom, and the division of this spoil as a way to get the
five thousand dollars Boyle was demanding.
Boyle also recited that Forker had planned the kidnapping and attended
to the matter of having the boy taken from the school. He said that
some one else had done this work and delivered the child to him, Boyle,
in Warren, Ohio, where the exhausted horse was found.
This statement, filling the gap in the motive reasoning as it did,
created a turmoil. Forker and Whitla immediately and indignantly
denied the accusation and brought to their support a Youngstown police
officer, Michael Donnelly, who said he had found the body of Dan
Reeble. Donnelly recited that he had been talking to Reeble on the walk
before the building in which Reeble resided, early in the morning of
June 8, 1895. Reeble had gone upstairs, and Donnelly was walking slowly
down the street when he heard a thump and groans behind him. Returning
to the spot where he had left Reeble, he found his companion of a few
minutes before, dying on the walk.
Donnelly said that Reeble had had the habit of sitting on his window
sill, and that the man had apparently fallen out to his death. He swore
that neither Forker, Boyle, nor Daniel Shay had been present when
Reeble died.
There are, to be sure, some elements which verge upon improbability
in this account, but the denials of Forker and Whitla were strongly
reinforced by the testimony of Janitor Sloss and the keeper of the
livery where the horse and buggy had been hired. Both firmly identified
Boyle as the man they had seen and dealt with, thus refuting the latter
part of Boyle’s accusative statement.
Mrs. Boyle was released after having served ten years of her long term.
Her husband, on the other hand, continued his servitude and died of
pneumonia in Riverside Penitentiary on January 23, 1920.
X
THE MYSTERY AT HIGHBRIDGE
A few minutes past seven o’clock, on the evening of March 27, 1901,
Willie McCormick, a ten-year-old schoolboy, started to attend vespers
in the little Church of the Sacred Heart, in the Highbridge section of
New York City. His mother gave him a copper cent for the collection
plate, and he ran out of the door, struggling into his short brown
overcoat, in great haste to overtake two of his elder sisters who had
started ahead of him. Three doors down the street he stopped and blew a
toy whistle to attract the attention of a playmate. This boy’s mother
called from the porch that her son was to take a music lesson and could
not go to church. So Willie McCormick lifted his cap and went his way.
It was a cold spring evening, and cutting winds were piping through the
woods and across the open spaces of that then sparsely settled district
of the American metropolis. Dusk had fallen, and the thinly planted
electric lights along Ogden Avenue threw the shadows of the curbside
trees across the walks in moving arabesques. The boy buttoned his coat
closely about him, running away into the gloom, while the neighbor
woman watched him disappear. In that moment the profounder darkness
enveloped him, swallowed him into a void from which he never emerged
alive, and made him the chief figure of another of the abiding problems
of vanishment.
Highbridge is an outlying section of New York, fringing the eastern
bank of the Harlem River and centering about one approach to the old
and beautiful stone bridge from which it takes its name. The tracks of
the New York Central Railroad skirt the edge of the river on their way
up-state. Further back from the stream the ground rises, and along the
ridge, paralleling the river, is Ogden Avenue. Near the southern foot
of this thoroughfare, at One Hundred and Sixty-first Street, the steel
skeleton of the McComb’s Dam bridge thrust itself across the Harlem,
with its eastern arch spanning high above the muddy mouth of Cromwell
Creek,[9] which empties into the Harlem at this point. At the shore
level, under the great bridge approach, a hinged steel platform span,
raised and lowered by means of balance weights to permit the passage
of minor shipping up and down the creek, carried the tracks across the
lesser stream. Three blocks to the north of this confluence, which
plays an important part in the mystery, stood the McCormick home, a
comfortable brick and frame house of the villa type, set back from the
highest point of Ogden Avenue in a lawn.
[9] This creek has since been filled in and a playground marks its site.
Twenty-five and more years ago, when Willie McCormick disappeared,
the vicinity bore, as it still bears to a lesser degree, the air of
suburbia. Then houses were few and rather far apart. Some of the side
streets were unpaved, and all about were patches of unimproved land,
where clumps of trees, that once were part of the Bronx Woods, still
flourished in dense order. The first apartment houses of the district
were building, and gangs of Italian laborers, with a sprinkling of
native mechanics, were employed in the excavations and erections.
Kilns and a brick yard disfigured one bank of Cromwell Creek, while a
factory, a coal dump, and two lumber yards sprawled along the other.
Five squares to the north of the creek’s mouth and two squares to the
west is the Highbridge police station. The Church of the Sacred Heart,
then in charge of the wealthy and venerable Father J. A. Mullin, stands
two blocks to the east of Ogden Avenue and practically on the same
cross street with the police building. Neither of these places is more
than a third of a mile from the McCormick home.
Shortly after nine o’clock on the important evening already noted, the
two young daughters of William McCormick returned from church without
their brother. He had not overtaken them on the way, or joined them at
the services. They had not seen him and supposed he had either remained
at home, or played truant from church and gone to romp with other boys.
The father was immediately alarmed. It was not like Willie to stay out
in the dark. He was the eleventh of twelve children, all the others
being girls, and he was accordingly petted, overindulged, and feminine.
He had an especially strong dread of the dark and had never been known
to venture out in the night without his older sisters or other boys.
Besides, there had been kidnapping rumors in the neighborhood. It was
not long after the notorious abduction of Eddie Cudahy, and parents in
all parts of the United States were still nervous and watchful.
Whether because of threats, local suspicions, or because of the
general alarm, the richest man in the neighborhood had gone to almost
ludicrous extremes in his precautions. This man, a cloak manufacturer
named Oscar Willgerodt, occupied a large house about a hundred yards
from that of the McCormicks. He had a young son, also ten years old.
His apprehensions for the safety of this lad, who was a playmate of
Willie McCormick, resulted in a ten-foot stone wall across the front of
his property, with an ornamental iron gate that was kept padlocked at
night, though this step invalidated the fire insurance, an eight-foot
iron fence about the sides and rear of the property, topped with
strands of barbed wire, and several formidable dogs that ran at large
day and night.
The fears of the neighborhood rich man had naturally communicated
themselves to other parents, and they seethed in William McCormick’s
mind, as he hurried from his home to seek the absent boy. Willie was
not to be found at the home of any of his chums; he was not playing at
a near-by street corner, where some older boys were congregated, and
apparently no one had seen him since the neighbor woman, Mrs. Tierney,
had told him that her son could not go to church. The father, growing
more and more excited, stormed about the Highbridge district half the
night and then set out to visit relatives, to whose homes the boy might
have gone. But Willie McCormick was not to be traced anywhere. On the
following morning, when he did not appear, his father summoned the
police.
What followed provides an excellent exposition of the phenomenon
of public unconcern being gradually rallied to excitement and
finally driven to hysteria. The police listened to the statements
of the missing boy’s parents and sisters, made some perfunctory
investigations, and said that Willie McCormick had evidently run away
from home. Many boys did that. Moreover, it was spring, and such
vagaries were to be expected in youngsters. The newspapers noted the
case with short routine paragraphs. A street-car conductor brought
in the information that he had carried a boy, whom he was willing
to identify as Willie McCormick, judging from nothing better than
photographs, to a site in South Brooklyn, where Buffalo Bill’s Wild
West Show was encamped. Another conductor reported that he had taken a
boy answering the description of Willie McCormick to the Gravesend race
course, where the horses were tuning up for the spring meeting. But the
police found no trace of the wanderer at either place, nor at several
others that were suggested.