It’s starting to bug that every true crime book now has to be the “crime of the century” or, in this case, “the kidnapping that changed America”. Want to know what big change this historic kidnapping caused? The crime of kidnapping was changed from a misdemeanor to a felony. That’s it! That was pretty much its only legacy; no one that bungled this case even learned their lesson. A bunch of people failed spectacularly here and the only outcome was that kidnapping now had a harsher sentence (if, you know, you did manage to arrest someone and successfully prosecute…all things that didn’t really happen here.)
Even without the hyperbolic title, the kidnapping is historic in that it was the first (recorded) kidnapping in America. Little Charley Ross was playing outside with his brother on July afternoon when two men lured them into a cart and took off. Charley’s brother was abandoned by the kidnappers a few blocks away. Mr. Ross went to the police later that night after the brother made it home. Their professional opinion? No one steals kids. It must be some drunk idiots being drunk idiots and they’ll bring the kid home in the morning when they sober up. The next day, the ransom letters begin. Seriously, these kidnappers and Mr. Ross probably had more correspondence then I did with my high school boyfriend and I wrote him a note twice a day. Eventually, the police settle on two suspects. And while you may think the next logical step would be to bring them in for questioning, you would be wrong. No, the correct way to proceed is hire criminal informants (people you basically made their money by selling information to the police AND to criminals about the police) and follow around your suspects, even though the kidnappers threaten the kidnapped child’s life in each letter. Eventually, the two suspects get killed in a burglary gone wrong and the kid is never found. But hey, they got that crime changed to a felony! (And by they, I definitely mean not the police, but Congress.)
While the crime, and its mishandling, are very interesting moments in history, the writing in the book is just plain boring. The narrative jumps back and forth between locations and perspectives and it’s hard to keep track of who is doing what when. Also, the suspects had several aliases between them, which Hagen seems to use interchangeably; several times I had to flip back to figure out whom she was referring to. Hagen seems to have relied on the formula used in The Devil in the White City, where a crime is laid out next to a city’s transformation. Philly was planning its own World’s Fair/Centennial when Charley went missing, but Philly’s convention just doesn’t have the drama of Chicago’s, or, at least, it was not presented as such.
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