Books: Charley Who?

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LITTLE CHARLEY ROSS by Norman Zierold. 304 pages. Little, Brown. $5.95.

Any connoisseur of mysteries knows that the unsolved ones are best. They command the imagination far more powerfully than the most neatly solved crimes. "What ever happened to Judge Crater?" provoked a number of literary discussions without drawing the judge into the open. In this well-documented addition to the annals of crime, a New York freelance writer now asks, "What ever happened to Charley Ross?"

The first question should be, "Who was Charley Ross anyway?" In 1874, Charley was the fetching four-year-old son of a Philadelphia dry-goods merchant. On a drowsy July afternoon of that year, he (or so the author claims) became America's first known victim of a kidnaping for ransom.

Two days after the abduction, the kidnapers sent Charley's father the first of 23 notes demanding $20,000 for the child's return. The father tried to pay, but the police protested that this would encourage further kidnapings—and so, for that matter, did the" press and the outraged nation.

Five months later, Joseph Douglas and William Mosher, a couple of smalltime burglars, were shot while robbing a house on Long Island. As Douglas lay dying, he told a witness: "It's no use lying now. Mosher and I stole Charley Ross." Where was the boy? "Mosher knows," replied Douglas. "Ask him." But Mosher was dead. "Then God help his poor wife and family," said Douglas.

For the next 60 years or so, the hunt for Charley Ross continued all over the country, while young boys, then mature men, then greying old folks—5,000 people in all—turned up to claim the honor. But none of them proved it, and to this day nobody, the author included, knows what happened to Charley. He has either gone the way of Judge Crater, or, at 96, is alive and well in Argentina.