~~ MARION CLARKE ~~
In these various ways the Marion Clarke case came to be a national and even an international sensation in the brief course of a week. Sympathy with the parents was instant and widespread, and passion against the abductors filled the newspaper correspondence columns with suggestions in favor of more stringent laws, plans for cruel vengeance on the kidnappers, complaints against the police, fulminations directed at quite every one connected with the unfortunate affair—all the usual expressions of helplessness and bafflement.
On the morning of Thursday, June 1st, eleven days after the disappearance, a woman with a little girl entered the general store at the little hamlet of St. John, N. Y., where Mrs. Ada B. Corey presided as postmistress to the community. The child was a little petulant and noisy; the woman very annoyed and nervous. Both were strangers. The woman gave her name as Beauregard and took one or two letters which had come for her. With these and the little girl she made a quick departure.
Because of the great excitement and wide publicity of the Clarke case, nothing of the sort could happen so near the city of New York without one inevitable result. The postmistress immediately notified Deputy Sheriff William Charleston of Rockland County, who had his office in St. John. Charleston was able to locate the woman and child before they could leave town, and he covertly followed them to the farmhouse of Frank Oakley, in the heart of the Ramapo Mountain region, near Sloatsburg, about nineteen miles from Haverstraw, on the Hudson River.
The rural officer discovered, by making a few inquiries, that this Mrs. Beauregard had been known in the vicinity for some months, and she had been occupying the Oakley house with her husband. Ten days previously, however, she had appeared with another woman and the little girl.
The dates tallied; the town was Sloatsburg; there were, or had been, two women; the place was ideal for hiding, and the child was of the proper age and description. Sheriff Charleston quickly summoned some other officers, descended on the place, seized the woman, the child, and the husband, locked them into the nearest jail, and sent word to Captain McClusky.
New York detectives and reporters arrived by the next train, and Mr. Clarke came a short time later. As soon as he was on the ground, the party proceeded to the jail, and the weeping father caught his wandering girl into happy arms. She was indeed Marion Clarke. Within ten minutes every available telephone and telegraph wire was humming the triumphant message back to New York.
But, in the recovery of the child, the inner mystery of the case only began to unfold itself. The woman seized at Sloatsburg was not Carrie Jones. Neither had the Clarkes ever seen her before. She gave the name of Mrs. George Beauregard, and, when questioned about this matter, later “admitted” that she was really Mrs. Jennie Wilson. Her story was that a couple had brought the child to her, saying that it needed to remain in the mountains for the summer. They had paid her for the little girl’s board and care. She declared she did not know their address, but they would certainly be on hand in the fall to reclaim their baby.
The man arrested at the farmhouse said that he was James Wilson; that he had no employment at the time, except working on the farm, and that he knew nothing of the baby beyond what his wife had revealed. He didn’t interfere in such affairs.
Both were returned to New York after some slight delay. The detectives and the newspapers at once went to work on the problem of discovering who they were, and what had become of Carrie Jones.