Charlie Ross
Mentioned in “The Little Colonel’s Holidays”
From Chapter 13, “The Little Colonel’s Holidays”
Presently, Kitty, leaving her mother at the telephone, and Allison and Lloyd on the stairs, strolled down to the kitchen, where Milly and the cook were talking about Charlie Ross and all the children they had ever heard of who had mysteriously disappeared from home.
Charley Ross (born 1870) was a four-year-old child in Germantown, Philadelphia, when he was kidnapped on July 1, 1874. The story was a media sensation of its time. The abductors mailed the Ross family twenty-three ransom letters over the course of the first four months of Charlie’s absence, but despite a willingness to meet the demands of the abductors, the Ross family never saw their son again. In November 1874 two men were shot while burglarizing a house on Long Island. Although both men died that night, one confessed to police that he and his partner were responsible for kidnapping Charlie Ross. He claimed that only his partner knew the boy’s whereabouts. A third man, later picked up, was charged and tried with being an accomplice and sentenced to seven years in jail. For years following the incident people turned up either claiming to know something about Charlie or of actually being Charlie Ross, but the boy was never found.
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