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THE MYSTERY AT HIGHBRIDGE
A few minutes past seven o’clock, on the evening of March 27, 1901, Willie McCormick, a ten-year-old schoolboy, started to attend vespers in the little Church of the Sacred Heart, in the Highbridge section of New York City. His mother gave him a copper cent for the collection plate, and he ran out of the door, struggling into his short brown overcoat, in great haste to overtake two of his elder sisters who had started ahead of him. Three doors down the street he stopped and blew a toy whistle to attract the attention of a playmate. This boy’s mother called from the porch that her son was to take a music lesson and could not go to church. So Willie McCormick lifted his cap and went his way.
It was a cold spring evening, and cutting winds were piping through the woods and across the open spaces of that then sparsely settled district of the American metropolis. Dusk had fallen, and the thinly planted electric lights along Ogden Avenue threw the shadows of the curbside trees across the walks in moving arabesques. The boy buttoned his coat closely about him, running away into the gloom, while the neighbor woman watched him disappear. In that moment the profounder darkness enveloped him, swallowed him into a void from which he never emerged alive, and made him the chief figure of another of the abiding problems of vanishment.
Highbridge is an outlying section of New York, fringing the eastern bank of the Harlem River and centering about one approach to the old and beautiful stone bridge from which it takes its name. The tracks of the New York Central Railroad skirt the edge of the river on their way up-state. Further back from the stream the ground rises, and along the ridge, paralleling the river, is Ogden Avenue. Near the southern foot of this thoroughfare, at One Hundred and Sixty-first Street, the steel skeleton of the McComb’s Dam bridge thrust itself across the Harlem, with its eastern arch spanning high above the muddy mouth of Cromwell Creek,[9]which empties into the Harlem at this point. At the shore level, under the great bridge approach, a hinged steel platform span, raised and lowered by means of balance weights to permit the passage of minor shipping up and down the creek, carried the tracks across the lesser stream. Three blocks to the north of this confluence, which plays an important part in the mystery, stood the McCormick home, a comfortable brick and frame house of the villa type, set back from the highest point of Ogden Avenue in a lawn.
[9]This creek has since been filled in and a playground marks its site.
[9]This creek has since been filled in and a playground marks its site.
Twenty-five and more years ago, when Willie McCormick disappeared, the vicinity bore, as it still bears to a lesser degree, the air of suburbia. Then houses were few and rather far apart. Some of the side streets were unpaved, and all about were patches of unimproved land, where clumps of trees, that once were part of the Bronx Woods, still flourished in dense order. The first apartment houses of the district were building, and gangs of Italian laborers, with a sprinkling of native mechanics, were employed in the excavations and erections.
Kilns and a brick yard disfigured one bank of Cromwell Creek, while a factory, a coal dump, and two lumber yards sprawled along the other. Five squares to the north of the creek’s mouth and two squares to the west is the Highbridge police station. The Church of the Sacred Heart, then in charge of the wealthy and venerable Father J. A. Mullin, stands two blocks to the east of Ogden Avenue and practically on the same cross street with the police building. Neither of these places is more than a third of a mile from the McCormick home.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
A coroner’s autopsy revealed that the body had been in the water for a period which could not be fixed with any degree of precision. It might have been two weeks, but the coroner felt unable to state that the body had not been in the creek for six weeks, the full length of time since the disappearance. There was no way to make sure. Again, it was not possible to determine if the boy had been choked to death before being cast into the waters. There was no skull fracture, no breakage of bones, and no discernible wound. There was also no evidence of poison—no abnormal condition of the lungs. The official physicians were inclined to believe that death had been caused by drowning, but they would not make a definite declaration.
The police dismissed the case with the assertion that they had been vindicated. It was clear that the boy had played truant from church, wandered away, fallen into the river, probably on the night of his disappearance, and lain under the water for six weeks.
But to this conclusion the McCormicks and many others, among them several distinguished private officers, took exception, and it must be said that the police explanation leaves some important questions suspended. Why did the boy turn and go three blocks to the south of his home, when he had last been seen hurrying northward toward church? What could have led this timid and dark-frightened boy to go voluntarily down to the sinister and gloomy river bank on the edge of night? How did it happen that the Kid directed William McCormick to deposit the two-thousand-dollar ransom within a few score yards of the spot where the body was recovered? Who was the mysterious masked man?
We shall never know, and neither shall we be able to answer whether accident or foul design lurks in the shadow of this mystery.