-It was from this mansion in the affluent Germantown section of Philadelphia that 4-year-old Charley Ross was abducted in 1874, the first sensational kidnapping to arouse and anger the American public.

Kidnappers blaze horror trail

Continued from Page 1 saw a signal from trackside, he was to throw a bag containing the $20.000 overboard.

Ross followed instructions and squinted at the darkness of the roadbed as his train shuttled northward. There was no signal, perhaps because the kidnappers had learned the train was loaded with Philadelphia detectives.

Publicity on the case skyrocketed, and newspaper readers went into shock; across the land, mothers and fathers locked up their children. Parents patrolled their homes at night carrying all manner of weapons, ready to repel any would-be kidnappers.

Christian K. Ross waited and worried. He next heard from the kidnappers in a letter postmarkedfrom New York City.

The city's police chief. George Walling, met with Ross and identified the ransom notes as those of a cheap crook named William Mosher.

The crook's brother-in-law, william Westervelt, who had been discharged from the force for “improprieties," was called in and met several times with Walling and Ross, telling them he might be able to negotiate the return of little Charley.

Before dawn on Dec. 15, however, Mosher and a fellow burglar, Joseph Douglass, were killed by police as they emerged from the cellar of a house that they had robbed in Brooklyn.

Before dying. Mosher admitted that he and Douglass had taken the boy: "We killed Charley Ross," he croaked with several bullets in him. "We did it for money." They were identified as the kidnappers by Walter Ross.

The more-than-helpful Westervelt, suspected of masterminding the kidnapping, was arrested and placed on trial. Several Germantown witnesses identified him as being at various sites in the company of a small boy who looked exactly like little Charley. (Westervelt had no children of his own.)

Though he shouted his innocence. Westervelt was given seven years in solitary confinement. He never muttered one word about Charley Ross' fate, though underworld sources insisted that the ex-cop had drowned the boy in New York's East River. When released, Westervelt vanished asthoroughly as his celebrated vietim.

In the 1920s, missing children later discovered to have been kidnapped met incredibly savage ends, their captors as psychotic and maniacal as the Jazz Age was confused.

Two wealth-pampered Chicago youths, Nathan F. Leopold Jr. and Richard A. Loeb, teen-aged scions of rich families, abducted 14-year-old Bobby Franks in May 1924, stabbing him to death and stuffing his mutilated body into a culvert.

Franks was taken haphazardly from a schoolyard. The abduction was conducted as an experiment in crime. conceived as "the perfect crime" in the warped intellects of two idle rich brats.

Both were caught through their own mistakes and fears and sentenced to life imprisonment. Had it

Parker rushed up and threw back the blanket wrapped around his daughter. He let

out a scream. She was dead.

not been for their stupendous lawyer, Clarence Darrow, Leopold and Loeb no doubt would have gone to the electric chair.

(Loeb was murdered by a fellow inmate in Stateville Penitentiary in 1936 after pressing homosexual attentions on him. Leopold was paroled in 1958 and died of a heart attack in Puerto Rico in 1971.)

Albert Fish confessed to having abducted 400 children and murdered them without demanding ransom. In 1928, he kidnapped 12-year-old Grace Budd from her Manhattan home, murdering her in a lonely cottage in White Plains, N.Y., and carving up her body, which he ate piecemeal.

This horrendous cannibal and extraordinary pervert was executed in Sing Sing's electric chair on Jan. 16, 1936, an event Fish looked forward to with great glee as "the supreme thrill ... The only one I haven't tried."

A year before. William Edward Hickman abducted 12-year-old Marion Parker. Her father, Perry H. Parker, was a wealthy banker, and his twin daughters, Marion and Marjorie, were his greatest pride.

Hickman merely picked Marion up at school, telling her that her father had sent for her. He demanded $7,500 for her return, and this was eventually paid by Parker.

Hickman, in what must be considered the most brutal delivery of a kidnap victim, met Parker on a lonely road, and as their cars idled next to each other, held up the child, who appeared to be sleeping. He took

the money, drove a short distance, and placed the child alongside the road. Parker rushed up and threw back the blanket wrapped about his daughter. He let out a scream. She was dead.

Hickman had strangled her with a towel and had cut off the child's. legs.

Hickman was found guilty and sentenced to hang in San Quentin. Before he was led to the scaffold, Hickman grinned insanely at his guards and gloated: "I have committed the most atrocious crime in history."

Few disagreed.

There would be more children, too many for normal shock and indignation to absorb: Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., taken on March 1, 1932, and found dead, for which his abductor and murderer, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, was electrocuted on April 3. 1936: the abduction and murder of 6-year-old Suzanne Degnan in Chicago on Jan. 7, 1946, by William Heirens; the kidnapping of 6-yearold Bobby Greenlease Jr. in Kansas City, murdered by the calculating Bonnie B. Heady and Carl A. Hall on Sept. 28, 1956; of 33-day-old Peter Weinberger, who was later found dead along a roadside and whose killer. Angelo John LaMarca, was electrocuted in Sing Sing.

The unending.

record is

agonizingly

TOMORROW: A New York judge disappears.