Mysteries of the missing

by Edward H. Smith

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.