The Ross Correspondence

Christian Kryder Ross was a wholesale grocer in Germantown, Pennsylvania — a prosperous man of modest reputation who had built a careful life on the quiet streets of that well-ordered Philadelphia suburb. He had a wife, five children, and a house fronted by a wide yard on Washington Lane where his boys played in the afternoons while the hired girl watched from the porch. Of his children, the youngest to be outdoors that summer was Charles Brewster Ross, four years old, called Charley by everyone who knew him. He had fair hair. He was shy of strangers but not afraid of them. Those two facts would matter.

Through June of 1874, a buggy with two men inside had appeared several times on Washington Lane. The men offered the Ross boys candy and small coins. They spoke kindly. They came back. By the time the boys had begun to look for the buggy in the afternoons, the men had become unremarkable — familiar enough that the older boy, Walter, aged six, felt no alarm when they stopped again on the afternoon of July 1st and offered to take the boys for a drive to buy firecrackers. It was three days before the national holiday. The offer was the kind that six-year-olds accept.

Near the edge of Germantown, one of the men stopped the buggy, handed Walter twenty-five cents, and told him to go into the shop and buy the firecrackers himself. Walter went. When he came back out, the buggy was gone. He walked home alone. Charley was not with him and was not found that night, or the following morning, or in any search conducted in the days that followed. The first letter arrived four days after the taking.

Twenty-three letters arrived in total, spread over five months. They were assembled from cut newspaper type and handwritten passages mixed together, the spelling deliberately corrupted throughout — "yu" for you, "tho" for the, consonants dropped, vowels transposed. The Philadelphia police and later the Pinkerton National Detective Agency determined that the corruptions were intentional rather than ignorant; the underlying construction of the sentences was careful and occasionally precise. Whoever wrote them was not uneducated. They were disguising something. The misspellings were a costume.

Christian Ross did what the first letter warned him not to do. He went to the police. He also went public, placing notices in newspapers across the eastern states, posting a $20,000 reward of his own, and traveling personally to investigate reported sightings from Philadelphia to the Gulf Coast. The letters continued to arrive and continued to warn him that his publicity would cost the boy. He received them and kept searching. He spent the greater part of his fortune on the effort and never stopped. Later in life he would say that the not-knowing was a different kind of grief than grief — that grief had a bottom, and the not-knowing did not.

The men who sent the letters were identified, in the end, not by the investigation but by accident. On the night of December 13th, 1874, two men broke into the home of a merchant named Holmes Van Brunt in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Van Brunt was armed. In the exchange that followed, both men were shot. One died at the scene. The other, a man named Joseph Douglas, was carried to a nearby house and lingered for several hours. Before he died, he spoke. He said that he knew about the Ross boy. He said the boy was alive and safe. He said his companion — a former burglar named William Mosher, dead on the floor of the Van Brunt house — knew where the boy was being kept. Then Douglas died too.

Walter Ross, now seven years old, was brought to view the bodies. He identified both men as the ones who had driven the buggy on Washington Lane. The identification held. The case was, in a legal sense, closed. Both perpetrators were dead. No recovery of the child was possible.

Charley Ross was never found. His father continued searching for the remaining years of his life. In 1876, Christian Ross published a full account of the case, a document both meticulous and suffused with a quality that is difficult to describe — the prose of a man who has become expert in something he would rather not know. Reported sightings of Charley Ross arrived at the Ross household for the next twenty years, each one investigated, none confirmed. He would have been twenty-four years old at the turn of the century.

The case established, for the first time in the American record, the formal architecture of ransom correspondence: the cut type, the deliberate corruption of spelling, the impossible demand, the warning against involving authorities who were already involved. Every similar letter that followed, in the decades after 1874, bore some inheritance from the Ross correspondence. The men who wrote it had, in their way, invented a form. It was the only thing they left behind.