“Now understand us plainly get the money from the bank in time don’t open your lips to any one and send the money by a trusty man to the place we say at 8:15 a quarter past eight to-night He wants to be sure that no one else sees him put the package there, so there is no possible danger of any one else getting it, then within two hours you shall have word from us where your boy is.
“Every move you make will be known to us and if you attempt any crooked work with us say good-by to your boy and look out for yourself for we will meet you again when you least expect it Do as we tell you and all will be well and we will deal straight with you if you make the least crooked move you will regret it to the day of your death.
“If you want to have your little boy back safe and sound. Keep your lips closed and do exactly as you are told
“If you fail to obey every direction you will have one child less.
“Yours truly
“The Captain of the Gang.”
Mrs. Conway threw down the letter before she had got past the first few sentences and ran into the street, screaming for her boy. He did not answer. None of the neighbors had seen him since eight o’clock, when he had been let out to play in the sun. It was true.
The distracted mother, clutching the strange epistle in her hand, ran to summon her husband. He read the letter, set his jaw, and sent for the police. No one was going to extort three thousand dollars from him without a fight.
Two of the Albany detectives were detailed to ask questions in the neighborhood and see whether there had been any witnesses to the abduction. The others began an examination of the strange letter in the hope of recognizing the handwriting. This attempt yielded nothing and the letter was temporarily cast aside. Here the first blunder was made, for I have yet to examine a kidnapper’s letter more revealingly written.
The letter is remarkable in many ways. It is long, prolix, and anxiously repetitive. It is without punctuation in part, wrongly punctuated at other points, miscapitalized or not capitalized at all, strangely underlined, curiously paragraphed, often without even the use of a capital letter, wholly illiterate in its structure and yet contradictory on this very point. The facsimile copy which I have before me shows that in spite of all the solecisms and blunders, there is not a misspelled word in the long missive, a thing not always to be said in favor of the writings of educated and even eminent men. Also, there are several cheap literary echoes in the letter, such as “never look upon your child again” and “leave him to his fate.”
The following deductions should have been made from the letter: