away voluntarily. He was, they said, far too timid for adventuring,
much too beloved and pampered at home to seek other environment, and
too young to be troubled with the dromomania that attacks adolescents.
To these objections one of the police officials responded with the
charge that the McCormicks were not telling all they knew, and that he
was satisfied they had an idea what had happened to the runaway, as he
insisted on terming him.
At this point two interventions brought the McCormick case out of
obscurity. Father Mullin, having been appealed to by the McCormicks,
pointed out to the police in an interview that Willie McCormick had
vanished with one cent in his pocket, that he could have taken a sum
which must have seemed sufficient for long wanderings to a childish
mind from his mother’s purse, which lay at hand; that he had started
to church with his sisters and returned for his overcoat, and that
the departure was wholly unprepared and assuredly unpremeditated. The
astute priest said that every runaway made preparations for flight, and
that, no matter how carefully the plans might be laid, there always
remained behind the evidence of intent to disappear. A child, he said,
could not have planned more cunningly than many clever men, and he
insisted that there must be another explanation for the absence of the
boy.
Naturally the newspapers paid more attention to the priest, and they
began printing pictures of the boy, with scare headlines. Father Mullin
had just taken in hand the affair when Oscar Willgerodt, the man of the
stone wall and iron fences, came forward with an offer of a thousand
dollars’ reward for information leading to the discovery of the missing
boy. He said that he felt sure kidnappers had been at work, and that
they had taken the McCormick boy in mistake for his own son. He added
that he had received threats of abduction at intervals for more than a
year.
A few days later, the boy’s uncle appeared in the press with an offer
of five thousand dollars for the safe return of the child and the
production of his abductors. By this time the newspapers were flaming
with accounts of the disappearance in every edition. Their reporters
and detectives swarmed over Highbridge, and that quiet district was
immediately thrown into the wildest excitement, which rose as the days
succeeded.
Father Mullin next offered ten thousand dollars for the apprehension
of the kidnappers and return of the boy. Then a restaurant keeper
of the neighborhood, whose nephew had been threatened by anonymous
letter writers, offered two thousand dollars more for the return of
the McCormick boy, and he said he would pay an additional thousand
for evidence against kidnappers. Thus the total of fees offered was
nineteen thousand dollars. Still no word came from the absent lad, and
the efforts of a thousand officers failed to disclose any abductors.
The constant appearance of these articles in the newspapers and the
offers of such high rewards succeeded, however, in throwing a city of
five or six million people into general hysteria. Parents refused to
allow their children out of doors without escort; rich men called up
at all hours of the day and night, demanding special police to protect
their homes; excited women throughout the city and later throughout the
State and surrounding communities proceeded to interpret the apparition
of every stranger as evidence of kidnappers and to bombard the police
of a hundred towns and cities with frantic appeals. The absence of this
obscure child had become a public catastrophe.
Developments in the investigation came not at all. The police, the
reporters, and numberless private officers, who were attracted to the
case by the possibility of achieving celebrity and rich reward, all
bogged down precisely where they started. Willie McCormick had vanished
within a hundred feet of his father’s door. The night had simply
swallowed him up, and all efforts failed to penetrate a step into the
gloom.
Only two suggestive bits of information could be got from the
McCormicks and the missing boy’s friends. The father, being closely
interrogated as to possible enemies, could recall only one person
who might have had a grievance. This was a mechanic, who lived a few
squares away, and with whom there had been a disagreement as to pay.
But this man was at home and going steadily about his work; he was
vouched for by neighbors and his employers, and he came out of a police
grilling completely absolved.
Launcelot Tierney, the playmate for whom Willie McCormick had blown his
whistle a minute or two before he vanished, supplied the information
that Willie had tormented an Italian laborer on the morning before
the disappearance, and that this man had nursed his grudge until
the afternoon, when the boys were returning home from school. Then,
said the Tierney boy, this workman had lain in wait behind a pile of
lumber and dashed out after Willie, as the children passed. Willie had
run for safety and proved fleeter than his pursuer, who gave up the
attempt after running a few rods. Investigation showed that none of the
laborers employed at the indicated building was absent. However the
Tierney boy was unable to identify the man he had accused, when the
workmen were lined up for his inspection. A good deal was made of this
circumstance.
The public police, however, always came back to their original
attitude. Kidnappers were actuated by the hope of extorting money, they
said. Since William McCormick was a poor man, there could have been no
motive for the abduction of his son. Consequently it was almost certain
that the boy had gone away.
Mr. McCormick replied that while he was now poor, he had formerly been
well to do. He reasoned that the kidnapper might very well have been
ignorant of his decline in fortune and taken the boy in the belief that
his parent was still wealthy. Others joined the controversy by pointing
out in the newspapers that abductions were sometimes motivated by
revenge or spite on the part of persons quite unknown or unsuspected by
the parents; that children were often stolen by irrational or demented
men or women, and that there was at least some basis for faith in the
abduction theory, but no evidence to support the idea of a runaway.
Meantime events had added their spice of immediate drama. A few nights
after the disappearance of Willie McCormick, Doctor D. A. McLeod,
a surgeon occupying the next house but one to the McCormick’s, had
found a masked man skulking about the rear of his property just after
nightfall, and tried to grapple with the intruder. A week later, from
a house two blocks away, another neighbor reported that he, too, had
found the masked man prowling about his place and had followed him
into the woods, where he had been lost. This informant said that the
mysterious stranger was a negro. Detectives were posted in hiding
throughout the district, but the visitant did not appear again.
Next two Gypsy girls visited a photographer in Washington, and one of
them showed the camera man a slip of paper with some childish scrawl.
Somehow this bit of writing came to be identified as that of one of
Willie McCormick’s sisters. It was said the scrap of paper must have
been taken from the McCormick house. The two Gypsy children were seized
and held in jail, while detectives hurried off to interrogate their
elders and search through the Romany camps up and down the Atlantic
seaboard. No trace of the missing boy was found, and the girls were
quickly released.
Finally the expected note from the kidnapper reached William McCormick.
It was scrawled awkwardly on a piece of nondescript paper by some
illiterate person who was apparently trying to conceal his normal
handwriting. It said that Willie was being held for ransom; that he was
well; that he would be safe so long as no attempt was made to bring the
police into the negotiations, and that disaster would follow if the
father played false. The writer then demanded the absurdly small sum of
two hundred dollars for the release of the boy and directed that the
money be taken at night to the corner of Third Avenue and One Hundred
and Thirty-fifth Street, and there placed in an old tin bucket which
would be found inside an abandoned steam boiler. The missive bore the
signature “Kid.”
The police immediately denounced the letter as the work of some mental
defective, but instructed the father to go to the rendezvous at the
appointed time and deposit a bundle of paper which might look like the
demanded sum in bank notes.
McCormick did as commanded. He found the corner of Third Avenue and One
Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street to be a half-abandoned spot near the
east bank of the Harlem, at its juncture with the East River. A low
barroom, a disused manufacturing plant, and some rookeries of dubious
tenantry ornamented the place, while coarsely dressed men, the dregs
of the river quarter, lounged about and robbed the stranger of any
gathered reassurance. The old boiler was there, standing in the center
of open, flat ground that sloped down to the railroad tracks and the
river under the Third Avenue bridge. Plainly the writer of the letter
had chosen a likely spot, which might be kept under observation from a
considerable distance and could not be surrounded or approached without
the certain knowledge of a watcher posted in any one of a hundred
windows commanding the view. McCormick deposited the package and went
his way, while disguised detectives lay in various vantages and watched
the boiler for days. No one went near it, and the game was abandoned.
But, at the end of ten days, McCormick received a second letter from
Kid, in which he was reproached for having enlisted the police; he
was told that such crude tactics would not work, and he was ordered
to place two thousand dollars in cash under a certain stone, which he
was directed to find under the approach of the McComb’s Dam bridge, a
few rods from the mouth of Cromwell Creek. He was told that the amount
of the ransom had been increased because of his association with the
police, and the letter closed with the solemn warning that the demand
must be met if McCormick hoped to see his son again. A postscript said
that if the police appeared again the boy’s ears would be thrown upon
his father’s porch.
Relatives, friends, and neighbors were at hand to furnish the demanded
money, and the father was more than willing to deposit it according to
the stipulation, but the police again intervened and had McCormick
leave another dummy packet. Once more he saw, and the police should
have noted, that the spot selected by the letter writer was most suited
to the purpose. Once more it was an open area in the formidable shadow
of a great bridge, freely observable from all sides and impossible to
surround effectively.
No one was baited to the trap, but McCormick got a third letter from
Kid, in which he was told that his silly tactics would avail him
nothing; that his boy had been taken out to sea, and that he would not
hear again until he reached England. He was told to blame his own folly
if he never beheld his child alive.
It must be said in favor of the police point of view that these were
not the only letters from supposed kidnappers which reached the
distraught parents. Indeed, there was a steady accumulation of all
sorts of missives of this type, most of them quite obviously the work
of lunatics. These were easily distinguishable, however. An experienced
officer ought to be able to choose between such vaporings of disjointed
intelligences and letters which bore some evidence of reason, some mark
of plausibility. The police who handled this case committed the common
blunder of lumping them all together. They had determined that the boy
was a runaway and were naturally inhospitable to contrary evidences.
But others were as firmly convinced on the other side. The father now
became genuinely alarmed and feared that further activity by the police
might indeed lead to the murder of the child. Accordingly Father Mullin
withdrew his ten-thousand-dollar offer for the apprehension of the
criminals, and Michael McCormick, the lost boy’s uncle, moved swiftly
to change the terms of his five-thousand-dollar reward. In seeking
for a way to make an appeal directly to the abductors and assure them
of their personal safety, he brought into the case at this point the
redoubtable Pat Sheedy.
Sheedy had just achieved worldwide notoriety by recovering from the
thieves’ fence, Adam Worth, the famous Gainsborough painting of
Elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire, which had been stolen from Agnew’s
Art Rooms in London in 1876, and which had been hunted over half the
earth for twenty-five years. This successful intermediacy between
the police and the underworld gave the New York and Buffalo “honest
gambler” a tremendous reputation for confidential dealing, and the
McCormicks counted on Sheedy’s trusted position among criminals to
convince the kidnappers that they could deliver the boy, collect five
thousand dollars, and be safe from arrest or betrayal. So Sheedy came
forward, announced that he was prepared to pay over the money on
the spot and without question, the moment the boy was delivered and
identified.
The public, hysterical with sympathy and apprehension, disgusted by the
police failures and thrilled by Sheedy’s performance in the matter of
the stolen painting, received the news of his intervention in the case
with signs of thanksgiving. Willie McCormick’s return was breathlessly
expected, and many believed the feat as good as accomplished. But this
time the task was beyond the powers of even the man who enjoyed the
confidence of the foremost professional criminals of the day, counted
the Moroccan freebooter and rebel, Raisuli, as an intimate, forced the
celebrated international fence and generalissimo of thieves, Adam
Worth, to leave London and follow him across the ocean after the lost
Gainsborough, rescued Eddie Guerin, the burglar of the American Express
office in Paris, from Devil’s Island,[10] and seemed able to compel the
most abandoned lawbreakers to his wishes. Days and weeks passed, but
Sheedy got no word and could find no trace.
[10] Or so says one of the most persistent of underworld legends.
On the rain-drenched afternoon of May 10, John Garfield, bridge tender
for the New York Central Railroad at Cromwell Creek, worked the levers
and lifted the steel span to allow the passage of a steam lighter bound
up the muddy estuary for a load of bricks. After he had lowered the
platform again he observed that a large floating object had worked its
way to the shore and threatened to get caught in the machinery which
operated his bridge. He crawled out on the bulkhead with a boat hook,
intending to dislodge it. At the extreme end he leaned over and bent
down, prodding the object with his pole. The thing turned in the stream
and swam into better view. It was the body of a boy.
Garfield drew back in surprise and horror, crawled back to the bridge,
called to two boys and a man, who were angling near by, and soon
put out with them in a rowboat. In five minutes the body had been
brought to shore and tied. Before the end of half an hour it had been
identified as that of Willie McCormick. While detectives had been
seeking him thousands of miles away, and European port authorities had
been watching the in-coming ships for the lad or his abductors, he had
lain dead in the ooze of the creek bottom, three squares from his
home. The churning propeller of the steam lighter had brought the body
to the surface.
A coroner’s autopsy revealed that the body had been in the water for
a period which could not be fixed with any degree of precision. It
might have been two weeks, but the coroner felt unable to state that
the body had not been in the creek for six weeks, the full length of
time since the disappearance. There was no way to make sure. Again,
it was not possible to determine if the boy had been choked to death
before being cast into the waters. There was no skull fracture, no
breakage of bones, and no discernible wound. There was also no evidence
of poison--no abnormal condition of the lungs. The official physicians
were inclined to believe that death had been caused by drowning, but
they would not make a definite declaration.
The police dismissed the case with the assertion that they had been
vindicated. It was clear that the boy had played truant from church,
wandered away, fallen into the river, probably on the night of his
disappearance, and lain under the water for six weeks.
But to this conclusion the McCormicks and many others, among them
several distinguished private officers, took exception, and it must
be said that the police explanation leaves some important questions
suspended. Why did the boy turn and go three blocks to the south of his
home, when he had last been seen hurrying northward toward church? What
could have led this timid and dark-frightened boy to go voluntarily
down to the sinister and gloomy river bank on the edge of night? How
did it happen that the Kid directed William McCormick to deposit the
two-thousand-dollar ransom within a few score yards of the spot where
the body was recovered? Who was the mysterious masked man?
We shall never know, and neither shall we be able to answer whether
accident or foul design lurks in the shadow of this mystery.
XI
A NUN IN VIVISEPULTURE
Whoever is familiar with Central European popular literature has
tucked away in his memory some part or parcel of the story of Barbara
Ubrik. The romance of her life and parentage has furnished material
for countless novels, plays, short stories, tales and poems of
the imaginative kind. Bits of her history appear in more serious
literature, in religious and social polemics, even in the memoirs of
personages. And more than one of the tragic incidents of opera may
be, if diligence and intuition are not lacking, traced back to this
forgotten Polish woman and her exorbitant adventures. Time and creative
interpretation have fashioned her case into one of the classic legends
of disappearance.
In the Polish insurrection of 1830-31, a certain Alexander Ubrik played
a part sufficiently noteworthy to get himself exiled to Siberia for
life, leaving behind him a wife and four young daughters, the third
of whom, Barbara, was the chief figure of the subsequent affair. But
the Ubrik family had already known the feel of the romantic fabric and
there had already been a remarkable disappearance mystery involving
a relative no more remote than the mother of Barbara and wife of the
banished Alexander. It is with this part of the family history that
much of the literary offspring deals.
About the year 1800, according to the account of the celebrated Polish
detective Masilewski, extensively quoted by his American friend and
compeer, the late George S. McWatters of the United States Secret
Service, the first of the series of astonishing scenes involving
the Ubrik family was played in Warsaw. There was then resident in
the Polish capital one Jaromir Ubrik, the profligate son of an old
and noble Polish house who had wasted his substance in gambling and
roistering. Ubrik, though fallen into disrepute among his former
friends, was still intimate with a few of the aristocratic families,
among them that of Count Michael Satorin.
The Countess Satorin had borne her lord several daughters but no son to
succeed to the title. When, in the year mentioned, Mme. Satorin yielded
still another daughter, her husband being then absent in Russia, she
sought to forestall the wrath and disappointment of her spouse by
substituting a male child. It happened that the wife of Jaromir Ubrik
had borne a son only two days earlier and died in childbirth. For the
consideration of ten thousand florins, Ubrik consented to exchange
children with the countess, who said she was additionally persuaded to
the arrangement by the fact that the Ubrik blood was as good as her
own and the boy thus fit to wear a title. The little Ubrik boy was,
accordingly, delivered to the countess and her little daughter turned
over to Jaromir Ubrik, nestled in a down lined basket with a fine gold
chain and cross about her neck.
The elements of a thousand plots will be apparent even at this early
stage of the story. But far more fabulous-seeming things followed
immediately.
Ubrik took the basket containing the little girl and started home. On
the way, following his unhappy weakness, he entered a tavern and began
to spend some of the money he had been paid. He got drunk, staggered
home without the little girl in her basket and returned the following
day to find that a nameless Jew had claimed this strange parcel and
disappeared.
Not long afterwards, it seems, Countess Satorin, plagued by her
natural feelings, came to see her daughter and had to be told the
story. The outraged mother finally exacted an oath that he devote his
worthless life to the quest for the stolen child. Ubrik began his work,
apparently sobered by the death of his wife, the theft of the little
girl and the charge her mother had laid upon him. After several years
he rose in the ranks of the Russian intelligence service and was made
captain of the Warsaw police.
About this time the keeper of the inn where Ubrik had lost the little
girl was seized with a mortal disease and called the police captain to
his bedside, confessing that he had turned the little girl over to a
Jewish adventurer named Aaron Koenigsberger, whose address in Germany
the dying man supplied. Captain Ubrik proceeded to Germany, confronted
Koenigsberger with the confession of his accomplice and dragged the
abductor back to Poland to face the courts. Koenigsberger, to avoid
punishment, assisted in the search for the little girl and guided
Captain Ubrik to Kiev, where he had sold the child to another Jew
named Gerson. The Gersons appeared to be respectable people, who had
taken the little girl to console them in their own childlessness. They
deplored that she had been stolen several years earlier by a band of
Gypsies. Captain Ubrik, at length satisfied that this story was true,
set out on an Odyssean journey in quest of the child. For more than
eleven years he followed Gypsy bands through all parts of western and
southern Russia and into Austria and Germany. At last, in a village not
an hour’s journey from Warsaw, he discovered the missing daughter of
the Countess Satorin and returned her to her mother, as a grown woman
who believed herself to be a Jewess and could now at last explain why
her supposed people had always said she looked like a “Goy.”
The woman recovered as Judith Gerson seems to have been satisfactorily
documented as the missing daughter of the countess. At any rate, she
was taken into the Satorin family and christened Elka Satorin. Her
father had meantime died, leaving the bulk of his fortune and the title
to his supposed son, Alexander. Elka Satorin, however, inherited her
mother’s property and, a few years later, married the boy who had been
substituted for her in the cradle.
This was the strange match from which Barbara Ubrik was spawned into a
life that was to be darkened with more sinister adventures. The year
of her birth is given as 1828, so that she was a tot of three when her
father was dragged away to the marshes and mines of Russia in Asia.
I must confess that I set down so fantastic a tale only after
hesitation and skeptical misgiving. It, and what is to follow, reads
like a piece of motion picture fustian, an old wives’ tale. The meter
of reasonableness and probability is not there. The whole yarn is too
crudely colored. It is sensation; it is melodrama. But it seems also
to be the truth. My sources are old books by reputable chroniclers,
containing long quotations from the story of Masilewski, the detective,
from the testimony of Wolcech Zarski, the lover who appeared in
Barbara Ubrik’s life at a disastrous moment, from the proceedings of
an ecclesiastical trial. Indeed, the whole thing seems to be a matter
of court record in Warsaw and in Cracow, the old Polish capital. This
being so, we must conclude that fiction has been once more detected in
the act of going to life even for its ultimate extravagances.