Disappearance of Charley Ross

On July 1, 1874, four-year-old Charles Brewster "Charley" Ross and his five-year-old brother, Walter Lewis Ross, were playing in the front yard of their family's home in Germantown, a well-to-do section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Two men in a horse-drawn carriage, who had visited the boys with candy in the preceding days, offered candy and fireworks in exchange for a ride, and the boys agreed. After being driven through the city, Walter was sent into a store to buy fireworks with twenty-five cents; when he came out, the carriage had left without him. Charley was taken away and never seen again.

In the days that followed, the boys' father, Christian K. Ross, began receiving ransom notes mailed from post offices in Philadelphia and elsewhere. Written in a coarse, semi-literate style with many misspellings, the notes generally demanded $20,000, warned against involving the authorities, and threatened Charley's life. The senders assumed the family was wealthy because of its large house and Christian's dry-goods store, but the Rosses were in fact heavily in debt after the 1873 stock market crash. Unable to pay, Christian went to the police, and the case became national news. Prominent Philadelphians enlisted the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which printed posters bearing Charley's likeness, and a popular song, "Bring Back Our Darling," was written about the crime. Several attempts to deliver ransom money failed when no one arrived to collect it, and communication eventually stopped.

On the night of December 13, 1874, two burglars were shot by armed residents during a break-in at a house in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York. One died at the scene; the other, mortally wounded, lived about two hours. Accounts of his dying words differ, but he was understood by some of those present to have admitted that he and an accomplice had abducted Charley Ross. He gave no clue to the boy's location. Charley's brother Walter was brought to New York and identified the two dead men as those who had lured the brothers into the carriage; for many this settled who had taken the boys, but Charley was still missing.

A former Philadelphia police officer connected to one of the dead men was tried in 1875. He was acquitted of the kidnapping but convicted of a lesser conspiracy charge and served six years in prison, always maintaining his innocence and denying any knowledge of Charley's whereabouts.

Christian K. Ross and his wife searched for their son for the rest of their lives (Christian until his death in 1897 and his wife until hers in 1912), following leads and interviewing more than 570 people who claimed to be Charley, all of whom proved to be imposters. In 1934, a carpenter in Phoenix, Arizona, petitioned a court to be recognized as Charley Ross; the uncontested petition was granted in 1939, but the Ross family rejected the claim, and a 2011 DNA study disproved it. Charley Ross's fate remains unknown.