Mysteries of the missing

by Edward H. Smith

But, at the end of ten days, McCormick received a second letter from Kid, in which he was reproached for having enlisted the police; he was told that such crude tactics would not work, and he was ordered to place two thousand dollars in cash under a certain stone, which he was directed to find under the approach of the McComb’s Dam bridge, a few rods from the mouth of Cromwell Creek. He was told that the amount of the ransom had been increased because of his association with the police, and the letter closed with the solemn warning that the demand must be met if McCormick hoped to see his son again. A postscript said that if the police appeared again the boy’s ears would be thrown upon his father’s porch.

Relatives, friends, and neighbors were at hand to furnish the demanded money, and the father was more than willing to deposit it according to the stipulation, but the police again intervened and had McCormick leave another dummy packet. Once more he saw, and the police should have noted, that the spot selected by the letter writer was most suited to the purpose. Once more it was an open area in the formidable shadow of a great bridge, freely observable from all sides and impossible to surround effectively.

No one was baited to the trap, but McCormick got a third letter from Kid, in which he was told that his silly tactics would avail him nothing; that his boy had been taken out to sea, and that he would not hear again until he reached England. He was told to blame his own folly if he never beheld his child alive.

It must be said in favor of the police point of view that these were not the only letters from supposed kidnappers which reached the distraught parents. Indeed, there was a steady accumulation of all sorts of missives of this type, most of them quite obviously the work of lunatics. These were easily distinguishable, however. An experienced officer ought to be able to choose between such vaporings of disjointed intelligences and letters which bore some evidence of reason, some mark of plausibility. The police who handled this case committed the common blunder of lumping them all together. They had determined that the boy was a runaway and were naturally inhospitable to contrary evidences.

But others were as firmly convinced on the other side. The father now became genuinely alarmed and feared that further activity by the police might indeed lead to the murder of the child. Accordingly Father Mullin withdrew his ten-thousand-dollar offer for the apprehension of the criminals, and Michael McCormick, the lost boy’s uncle, moved swiftly to change the terms of his five-thousand-dollar reward. In seeking for a way to make an appeal directly to the abductors and assure them of their personal safety, he brought into the case at this point the redoubtable Pat Sheedy.

Sheedy had just achieved worldwide notoriety by recovering from the thieves’ fence, Adam Worth, the famous Gainsborough painting of Elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire, which had been stolen from Agnew’s Art Rooms in London in 1876, and which had been hunted over half the earth for twenty-five years. This successful intermediacy between the police and the underworld gave the New York and Buffalo “honest gambler” a tremendous reputation for confidential dealing, and the McCormicks counted on Sheedy’s trusted position among criminals to convince the kidnappers that they could deliver the boy, collect five thousand dollars, and be safe from arrest or betrayal. So Sheedy came forward, announced that he was prepared to pay over the money on the spot and without question, the moment the boy was delivered and identified.

The public, hysterical with sympathy and apprehension, disgusted by the police failures and thrilled by Sheedy’s performance in the matter of the stolen painting, received the news of his intervention in the case with signs of thanksgiving. Willie McCormick’s return was breathlessly expected, and many believed the feat as good as accomplished. But this time the task was beyond the powers of even the man who enjoyed the confidence of the foremost professional criminals of the day, counted the Moroccan freebooter and rebel, Raisuli, as an intimate, forced the celebrated international fence and generalissimo of thieves, Adam Worth, to leave London and follow him across the ocean after the lost Gainsborough, rescued Eddie Guerin, the burglar of the American Express office in Paris, from Devil’s Island,[10] and seemed able to compel the most abandoned lawbreakers to his wishes. Days and weeks passed, but Sheedy got no word and could find no trace.

[10] Or so says one of the most persistent of underworld legends.

On the rain-drenched afternoon of May 10, John Garfield, bridge tender for the New York Central Railroad at Cromwell Creek, worked the levers and lifted the steel span to allow the passage of a steam lighter bound up the muddy estuary for a load of bricks. After he had lowered the platform again he observed that a large floating object had worked its way to the shore and threatened to get caught in the machinery which operated his bridge. He crawled out on the bulkhead with a boat hook, intending to dislodge it. At the extreme end he leaned over and bent down, prodding the object with his pole. The thing turned in the stream and swam into better view. It was the body of a boy.

Garfield drew back in surprise and horror, crawled back to the bridge, called to two boys and a man, who were angling near by, and soon put out with them in a rowboat. In five minutes the body had been brought to shore and tied. Before the end of half an hour it had been identified as that of Willie McCormick. While detectives had been seeking him thousands of miles away, and European port authorities had been watching the in-coming ships for the lad or his abductors, he had lain dead in the ooze of the creek bottom, three squares from his home. The churning propeller of the steam lighter had brought the body to the surface.