Mysteries of the missing

by Edward H. Smith

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.

The McCormicks took the attitude at once that their son had not gone 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.