Learn about the real-life tragedy that inspired the phrase “Don’t take candy sweets from strangers.


Each year in the United States, upwards of 800,000 children under the age of 18 disappear — and that’s just counting reported missing persons cases.

While these cases often make fine fodder for evening news, for most of history they did not garner popular attention. Indeed, it wasn’t until the disappearance of Etan Patz and later, Adam Walsh, that mass media became a tool to crack the cases as well as pass legislation meant to curb the number of them that end in death. But almost 200 years before Etan Patz and Adam Walsh inspired the concern of millions came a little boy named Charley Ross, who would become the first missing child in American history to make headlines.


The Kidnapping of Charley Ross


It was mid-summer of 1874 in Philadelphia. Charles Brewster Ross and his older brother, Walter, were playing in the front yard of their home in the city’s well-to-do Germantown neighborhood. In spite of their neighborhood’s reputation, the Ross’s were not particularly affluent: the previous year’s stock market crash had sent the family into financial hardship, but four year old Charley and Walter, age five, were blissfully unaware. At the time, they concerned themselves most with seeing their mother, who had gone to Atlantic City with the Ross’s eldest daughter to recuperate from an illness.

One day in late June, Walter told Ross that two men in a horse-drawn carriage had approached the boys when they were playing and offered them some candy. A bit unnerved by this encounter, Ross told his son that should the men return, the boys were not to take candy from them — or any other stranger, for that matter.

The boys agreed.

Over the next few days leading up to the 4th of July, Ross heard nothing more of the strangers; instead, he had to tend to the cries of his sons, who wanted to buy firecrackers before the holiday. Ross explained that he would accompany them to the store and buy them firecrackers on the 4th — but not before — as he feared they’d burn the house down playing with them unsupervised. The boys persisted, and he relented, coming home from work early on the evening of July 1st to surprise them.

When he arrived home, he did not see the boys and asked the servants where they were. The servants replied that the children had been out front on the sidewalk playing with the neighborhood children. Not seeing them in the front yard, Ross soon dispatched his help into the neighborhood to knock on doors, inquiring on the boys’ whereabouts. He was not yet terribly concerned, thinking they had just gone to a friend’s house. But as he passed through the neighborhood, a neighbor asked him if he thought the boys would have taken a ride with strangers.

It seemed that several hours earlier, Ross’s neighbor had seen the boys take off in a horse-drawn carriage with two men she did not recognize. Ross, thinking about the men who offered his sons candy, went immediately to the police.



Ross Finds One Son — And Frustration With The Police

On his way, he encountered Walter. Relieved, he asked the boy where he had been — and where his brother was. Walter was so frightened that he couldn’t respond. When pressed, Walter told his father that the men promised the boys that they would get firecrackers if they entered the wagon. When they arrived, Charley began to cry and asked to go home. The men sent Walter into the store, and when he left the wagon had gone. Afraid and unsure how to get home, Walter began to cry, at which time a neighbor picked him up and brought him back to the neighborhood.

Several people corroborated Walter’s story.

Ross gave a description of his son to the police, who sent it out via wire to all the precincts around the city. The police were not altogether worried, thinking that perhaps Charley had been picked up by some “drunkards” who would soon tire of him, and leave him on a sidewalk for retrieval.

Ross grew increasingly impatient with the police and interviewed people on his own. The more the community heard of the missing boy, the more invested they became in his safe return — so much so that the news of the missing boy hit the front pages of newspapers across the country. That unprecedented event was also how Mrs. Ross found out her son had likely been kidnapped.


While his wife scrambled to get home, Ross received the first of several ransom notes, indicating that this was an intentional kidnapping, not a drunken mistake. The poorly penned note demanded $20,000 (about $420,000 today), which Ross could simply not pay, both physically and morally. Ross was in no position to offer that kind of money in exchange for his son, nor did he want to incentivize others to kidnap children for financial gain.

Instead, Ross — now reunited with his distraught wife — employed the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency, hoping that their expertise would make up for local police’ lackadaisical response. The detectives searched everywhere to no avail: Charley Ross could not be found.

The Ross’s continued to receive ransom letters, and once they had come up with the $20,000, made several attempts to pay the kidnappers. But every time they went to the agreed upon meet-up place to make the exchange, the kidnappers never showed.

A few more weeks went by, and eventually the ransom letters just stopped coming.

to be cont`d


source(s): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charley_Ross
http://www.ushistory.org/germantown/upper/charley.htm
https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/history/famous-cases/charles-ross-kidnapping

No Resolution


The case’s sole break came almost a year later, when two men were shot while trying to break into the home of a judge in Bay Ridge, New York. The men, Bill Mosher and Joe Douglas, were career criminals who had just been released from prison and decided to celebrate by robbing the home of a well-known judge. What they had not anticipated was that the judge’s neighbors would hear them break in and come to the judge’s defense armed with rifles, which they used immediately to shoot down the intruders.

Douglas died immediately, but Mosher stayed alive for a short time after being shot. He knew, however, that he would die from his wounds and told witnesses in the room that he had abducted Charley Ross. What he told them exactly has always been up for debate: he either said that the pair had killed the child or that he at the very least knew where the child was. He gave no further clues and died minutes later.

Upon news of Mosher’s death-bed confession, then six-year-old Walter Ross was brought to the New York City morgue to view the bodies of Douglas and Mosher, and possibly identify them as the men in the carriage. Walter said they were. He specifically remembered Mosher, who had a peculiar nose (either from syphilis or cancer) which the child had remarked a year earlier as being “a monkey nose.”

While Walter may have identified the abductors, the whereabouts of Charley Ross remained unknown. Since both suspects were dead, the only other arrest made was that of a Philadelphia police officer who had apparently been a confidant of Mosher. Authorities believed that he had known about Charley Ross’ abduction and insisted otherwise. The officer was tried and convicted of a lesser conspiracy charge, not kidnapping, and spent six years in prison.

The Ross’s search for their son did not end. Over the course of their lives, they spent more than $60,000 (what would be equal to $1.2 million today) trying to find their son. Mr. Ross published a book, The Father’s Story of Charley Ross, and often spoke about the case, even after the media’s interest dwindled.

More than a century later, the name Charley Ross has not been entirely forgotten. An online database for missing children, The Charley Project, was named in his honor. And in the years that would follow, many high-profile child abductions were brought into light through the media’s interest in the case. The faces of missing children were put on milk cartons, circulated through PR wires and, later, on television screens. Perhaps most of all, Charley Ross’s legacy lives on through the lesson we instill in our children from a very young age: don’t take candy from strangers.

Lovely piece. Never tired of reading this.

I know that the sayingn was against kidnappers but I thought the source will be from naija

Very educative

As far as i am concerned.in naija,it is to guide against juju..lol..

Poor boy, pity he was never found.

Janet101:
Very educative

Sure, but it won't get much audience cos I didn't include snake pic or story in it. If you know what I mean

Cc: lalasticlala