Mysteries of the missing

by Edward H. Smith

One of the conspirators was thus safely in jail, but at least two others were known, Blake and the man in the mask. Several posses set out at once and surrounded the woods in which the child had been found. After beating the brush timidly all day and spending a creepy night in the black forest, fighting the mosquitoes, the citizenry lost its pallid enthusiasm and returned to Albany only to find that the police of Schenectady had arrested Blake in that city late the preceding evening and that the man was lodged in another precinct house where he could not communicate with Hardy. Another abortive lynching bee was started. Once more the mayor and the police drove off the howling gangs.

The man in the mask, however, was still at large. Both Hardy and Blake at first refused to name him, and the police were at sea. Then a curious thing happened.

William N. Loew, a New York attorney, reading of the kidnapping affair at Albany, which appeared in the metropolitan newspapers under black headlines, went to the office of one of the journals and said he believed he could give valuable information.

On July 15th, a little more than a month earlier, Bernard Myers, a clothing merchant of West Third Street, New York, had flirted on a Broadway car with a handsome young woman, who had given him her name and address as Mrs. Albert Warner, 141 West Thirty-fourth Street, and invited him to write her. Myers, more avid than cautious, wrote the woman a fervid letter, asking for an appointment. A few days later two men appeared in the Myers store. One of them, who carried a heavy cane, said that he was the husband of Mrs. Warner, brandished the guilty letter in one hand, the cane in the other, and demanded that Myers give him a check for three hundred dollars on the spot or take the consequences. Myers, after some argument, gave a check for one hundred dollars, and then, as soon as the men had left his store, rushed to his bank and stopped payment. He then visited the district attorney and caused the arrest of Warner, who was now arraigned and released on bail.

Loew had been summoned to act as attorney for Warner. He now told the newspapers of disclosures his client had made to him in consultation. Warner, who was himself an attorney with an office at 1298 Broadway, had told Loew that he was interested in a plot to organize kidnapping on a commercial scale, and that the first jobs would be attempted in up-State New York. He gave Loew many details and talked plausibly of the ease with which parents could be stripped of considerable sums. Loew, who considered his client and fellow attorney slightly demented, had paid little attention to this sinister talk at the time. Now, however, he felt sure that Warner had told the truth and that he probably was the man in the mask.

Faced with these revelations, in his cell, the pliant Blake admitted that he was a friend of Warner’s, that they had indeed been schoolmates in their youth. He also admitted that he had been in New York a few days before the abduction of Johnny Conway and had then visited Warner. So the chase began.

The police discovered that Warner had been at his office a day ahead of them and slipped out of New York again. They also found that he had been at Albany the three days that Johnny Conway had been detained. Their investigations showed also that Warner, though he had the reputation of being a particularly shrewd and energetic counselor, had never adhered very closely to the law himself, but had again and again been implicated in shady or criminal transactions, though he had always escaped prison, probably through legal acumen.

It was soon apparent that the man had got well away, and an alarm was sent across the country. The police circulars that went out to all parts of America and the chief British and continental ports, described a man between forty and forty-five years old, more than six feet tall, slender, dark, with hair of iron gray over a very high forehead. That Warner was a bicycle enthusiast was the only added detail.

The quest for Warner was one of the most exciting in memory. The first person sought and found was the Mrs. Warner who had given her name and address to Bernard Myers on the Broadway car and figured in the subsequent blackmail charges. She was found living quietly at a boarding house in one of the adjacent New Jersey towns and said that she had not seen Warner for some weeks, a claim which turned out to be very near the truth. He had, in fact, visited her just before he started to Albany, but it is doubtful whether he confided to the girl, who was not in truth his wife, any of his plans or intentions.

It was then discovered that Attorney Warner was married and had a wife, from whom he had long been separated, living in a small town in upper New York. The detectives also visited this woman, but she had not seen her husband in years and could supply no information.