Mr. Ross: be not uneasy, your son, Charley Bruster, ..
.we got him and no powers on earth can deliver out of our hand.” This was one of the letters sent to a distraught father, Christian Ross, whose son, Charley Ross, was kidnapped on July 1, 1874, in Philadelphia, United States of America, by two unknown fellas.
The felons were said to have written about 23 different letters of ransom demands to the Ross family. The kidnappers, according to the Pennsylvania Center for the Book, demanded the sum of $20,000 for the release of Charley, an amount of money the family could not afford. The father of the victim detailed the agony of the family over the kidnap of Charley in a book titled: “The Father’s Story of Charley Ross, the Kidnapped Child.
” The US security agencies did all they could to get Charley released from captivity all to no avail. The closest clue they got was the match of Charley’s ransom-demand letter with another letter written for ransom in another kidnapping case. The police were able to link the two letters to one ex-convict, William Mosher, who was killed earlier in a police shoot-out.
Mosher’s accomplice, Joseph Douglas, who was arrested during the encounter, was said to have confessed to the kidnapping of Charley, but regrettably announced that only Mosher knew where he was kept. Charley’s father, Christian, died in 1897, and the mother in 1912. His older brother, Walter Ross, who was present when Charley was kidnapped, equally passed on in 1943.
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