What do you think?
Rate this book
Little Charley Ross: The Shocking Story of America's First Kidnapping for Ransom
The “fascinating, hair-raising, suspenseful” account of a little boy abducted in broad daylight and the desperate manhunt to find him ( The New York Times Book Review ).
On July 1, 1874, four-year-old Charley Ross and his older brother, Walter, were playing in front of their stately Philadelphia home when a horse-drawn carriage pulled up with two men who offered candy and fireworks if the boys would ride with them.
Hours later, Walter came back, stating that they had ridden through the city until the men abandoned him in the street but kept Charley. Soon after, their father, Christian K. Ross, received a demand for $20,000 in return for his son.
Ross went to the police for help—and before long, the case became a national phenomenon. A popular song pleaded for the boy’s safe return. The Philadelphia police searched every home in the city, and thousands of people falsely reported that they had seen Charley or knew his whereabouts. Meanwhile, the kidnappers’ ransom letters were becoming more threatening and bizarre. The press, eager to fan the flames of hysteria, printed wholly fabricated stories and even accused Christian Ross of orchestrating the whole thing in order to hide the fact that Charley was illegitimate.
And then the men who took Charley went silent . . .
This is the chilling true story of a crime that transfixed a still-growing America, the unlikely series of events that produced the case’s most tantalizing clues, and the tragic twist of fate that plunged the Ross family back into darkness and haunted them for decades to come.
On July 1, 1874, four-year-old Charley Ross and his older brother, Walter, were playing in front of their stately Philadelphia home when a horse-drawn carriage pulled up with two men who offered candy and fireworks if the boys would ride with them.
Hours later, Walter came back, stating that they had ridden through the city until the men abandoned him in the street but kept Charley. Soon after, their father, Christian K. Ross, received a demand for $20,000 in return for his son.
Ross went to the police for help—and before long, the case became a national phenomenon. A popular song pleaded for the boy’s safe return. The Philadelphia police searched every home in the city, and thousands of people falsely reported that they had seen Charley or knew his whereabouts. Meanwhile, the kidnappers’ ransom letters were becoming more threatening and bizarre. The press, eager to fan the flames of hysteria, printed wholly fabricated stories and even accused Christian Ross of orchestrating the whole thing in order to hide the fact that Charley was illegitimate.
And then the men who took Charley went silent . . .
This is the chilling true story of a crime that transfixed a still-growing America, the unlikely series of events that produced the case’s most tantalizing clues, and the tragic twist of fate that plunged the Ross family back into darkness and haunted them for decades to come.
304 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1967
47 people are currently reading
150 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
September 6, 2011
I ran into this book entirely by chance in the musty stacks of used bookstore and naturally became very excited, as my missing persons website is named after Charley. As far as I know it's the only book-length account of Charley's abduction, excepting Christian Ross's memoirs. [Update: not anymore.]
While the historian in me would have liked Zierold to footnote his sources, Little Charley Ross seems to be an accurate and unbiased book, with many details I had not previously known and a centerfold of pictures. My only wish is that Zierold could have included his own theory as to Charley's fate in the afterword. However, this is a minor quibble and the book is well worth reading without it.
While the historian in me would have liked Zierold to footnote his sources, Little Charley Ross seems to be an accurate and unbiased book, with many details I had not previously known and a centerfold of pictures. My only wish is that Zierold could have included his own theory as to Charley's fate in the afterword. However, this is a minor quibble and the book is well worth reading without it.
January 2, 2016
Charley Ross was kidnapped from outside his Philadelphia home in July 1874. His kidnappers wrote to his father, and wrote some of the longest and most bizarre letters in the history of crime. Negotiations about paying the ransom went on for months, and at least twice the kidnappers failed to show up to take payment. And then the two men believed to be the kidnappers were killed trying to rob a house in Bay Ridge, New York.
Charley Ross was never found, although his father, mother, and siblings investigated quite literally thousands of possible Charley Rosses. (One of the very few bright spots in the story is the number of boys, either orphans or kidnap victims themselves, who were rescued from abusive situations--one of whom was reunited with his father in exactly the way Charley Ross never was.) No one knows what happened to him.
Zierold's is pretty much the only book on the subject. It's fine, although I wouldn't go farther than that. He doesn't footnote, and there's no sign that his research dug very deeply beyond the obvious sources (although he gets massive props for sorting out the newspaper coverage). And whereas many true crime books suffer from excessive authorial intrusion in the form of whacked out theories, this book could actually have used a little bit of meta discussion. What happened to Charley Ross?
I can see four basic possibilities:
1. Like the Lindbergh baby, Charley Ross was dead before his kidnappers first communicated with his father.
2. The kidnappers kept Charley alive for a while, but he died (whether of neglect or murder) before Mosher and Douglas were killed.
3. Charley was still alive when Mosher and Douglas died, but was then killed by the (unknown) people who had been holding him.
4. Charley survived, but for some reason was never found.
Given the national obsession with Charley Ross (which Zierold does do a very good job of demonstrating), I find #4, sadly, the least plausible of the bunch. If he had been alive after December 1874, someone would have put him forward as a candidate for his own identity. #3 has nothing either pro or con (although I would like to believe it implausible based on common human decency, the rest of the story of the kidnapping indicates strongly otherwise). My personal feeling is that it's either #1 or #2, as this explains the excruciatingly drawn out correspondence and the kidnappers' failure ever to follow through on their plans, even though, since they died in committing a burglary, they obviously needed/wanted money.
Mosher and Douglas were clearly amateurs (the rest of their criminal career was based on burglary, and mostly burglary of opportunity). They worked out a quite good plan for the actual kidnapping (they made friends with Charley and his older brother Walter over the course of a week before kidnapping Charley), but they failed: (1) to confirm that they were kidnapping the son of a wealthy man (they weren't), (2) to work out an equally good plan for collecting the ransom, and (3) to keep control of Charley's father. Also, as their own letters demonstrate, they had no more sense than to believe the things they saw in the newspapers. Their persistent refusal to offer any tokens of Charley's continued survival, and the fact that the things they reported him saying (worried that he wouldn't get home in time to be taken to visit his mother in Atlantic City) were always things that he would have said in the first twenty-four hours, plus their obsessive, repetitive anxiety that Charley's father, Christian Ross, would not keep faith with them and their equally obsessive insistence that though they were bad men, he could trust them, suggests to me that Charley didn't survive very long in their custody.
But I don't know. It seems unlikely anyone ever will.
Charley Ross was never found, although his father, mother, and siblings investigated quite literally thousands of possible Charley Rosses. (One of the very few bright spots in the story is the number of boys, either orphans or kidnap victims themselves, who were rescued from abusive situations--one of whom was reunited with his father in exactly the way Charley Ross never was.) No one knows what happened to him.
Zierold's is pretty much the only book on the subject. It's fine, although I wouldn't go farther than that. He doesn't footnote, and there's no sign that his research dug very deeply beyond the obvious sources (although he gets massive props for sorting out the newspaper coverage). And whereas many true crime books suffer from excessive authorial intrusion in the form of whacked out theories, this book could actually have used a little bit of meta discussion. What happened to Charley Ross?
I can see four basic possibilities:
1. Like the Lindbergh baby, Charley Ross was dead before his kidnappers first communicated with his father.
2. The kidnappers kept Charley alive for a while, but he died (whether of neglect or murder) before Mosher and Douglas were killed.
3. Charley was still alive when Mosher and Douglas died, but was then killed by the (unknown) people who had been holding him.
4. Charley survived, but for some reason was never found.
Given the national obsession with Charley Ross (which Zierold does do a very good job of demonstrating), I find #4, sadly, the least plausible of the bunch. If he had been alive after December 1874, someone would have put him forward as a candidate for his own identity. #3 has nothing either pro or con (although I would like to believe it implausible based on common human decency, the rest of the story of the kidnapping indicates strongly otherwise). My personal feeling is that it's either #1 or #2, as this explains the excruciatingly drawn out correspondence and the kidnappers' failure ever to follow through on their plans, even though, since they died in committing a burglary, they obviously needed/wanted money.
Mosher and Douglas were clearly amateurs (the rest of their criminal career was based on burglary, and mostly burglary of opportunity). They worked out a quite good plan for the actual kidnapping (they made friends with Charley and his older brother Walter over the course of a week before kidnapping Charley), but they failed: (1) to confirm that they were kidnapping the son of a wealthy man (they weren't), (2) to work out an equally good plan for collecting the ransom, and (3) to keep control of Charley's father. Also, as their own letters demonstrate, they had no more sense than to believe the things they saw in the newspapers. Their persistent refusal to offer any tokens of Charley's continued survival, and the fact that the things they reported him saying (worried that he wouldn't get home in time to be taken to visit his mother in Atlantic City) were always things that he would have said in the first twenty-four hours, plus their obsessive, repetitive anxiety that Charley's father, Christian Ross, would not keep faith with them and their equally obsessive insistence that though they were bad men, he could trust them, suggests to me that Charley didn't survive very long in their custody.
But I don't know. It seems unlikely anyone ever will.
February 23, 2017
This obscurity was in my parents' library when I was a kid (I was born in 1967, the year the book was published, which implies that my parent were entertaining some fairly dark notions about child safety). I was an early, precocious reader, and some of my earliest memories of reading involve flipping through this book: It contained a generous set of period photos, which held my attention until I was old enough to pick through the chilling text. In the interest of full disclosure I'll note that I haven't encountered this book in over 3 decades, so this comment is based on the observations of a child.
Nevertheless--or, perhaps, "because"--my encounter with the story of the kidnapped Charley Ross resonates to this day. I suspect that it informs my preference for horror fiction, still burning unabated after 30+ years. It's a deeply disturbing recitation of the facts and suppositions surrounding America's (apparently) first kidnap-for-ransom, and it's rich with terrifying intimations of random violence and the sudden, irreversible erasure of a child's life.
Based on my recollections I would HIGHLY recommend it to fans of true-crime procedurals, Philly-history buffs, and horror-fans sensitive to subtext.
Nevertheless--or, perhaps, "because"--my encounter with the story of the kidnapped Charley Ross resonates to this day. I suspect that it informs my preference for horror fiction, still burning unabated after 30+ years. It's a deeply disturbing recitation of the facts and suppositions surrounding America's (apparently) first kidnap-for-ransom, and it's rich with terrifying intimations of random violence and the sudden, irreversible erasure of a child's life.
Based on my recollections I would HIGHLY recommend it to fans of true-crime procedurals, Philly-history buffs, and horror-fans sensitive to subtext.
December 17, 2007
This is a book I read when I was formulating my novel BREATHING OUT THE GHOST. I was interested in the history of missing children and when I came across Charley's story I realized I had discovered the proto-Etan Patz. I ended up using a passage from Christian K. Ross's book about his son's disappearance as an epigraph. Although obscure, LITTLE CHARLEY ROSS is an eminently readable overview of the case. It may feel a little dated by today's standards in terms of its objective (ie non-tabloid) tone, but it follows its story through it tragic lack of resolution---Christian K. Ross spent most of the rest of his life after Charley's disappearance following up on supposed sightings of his son.
August 16, 2025
3 stars from me is a good, solid read.
This was an interesting case I'd never heard about with a lot of very pecululiar details! I found Moser's notes to be a bizarre mixture of wordy and verbose with semi-illiterate word uses and spellings--I'm certain he was one of the kidnappers and the ransom notes he wrote are singularly over verbose, long and over complex.
The press and police essentially competed in the search for the boy and both completely botched things. Poor Charley's father was essentially right in not paying the ranson--I'm sure it would have set off a craze for kidnapping kids if it had proved easy to do. However, this doomed Charley.
One modern analysist of the case thinks Charley didn't see Christmas, and I agree. Had he lived, I think he'd have turned up at some point. The kidnapper's resistance to provide "proofs of life" may argue he was killed by Moser and Douglas at some point, but it's also likely that Charley was murdered after the deaths of Douglas and Moser by whoever the boy had been entrusted to.
A very sad and interesting case--oddly Leopold and Loeb studied it! This case also had a lot of similarities to the later Lindbergh case. In that instance though, the cause of death seems to have been death from the child being accidentally dropped as the toddler was abuducted, not active murder.
I feel terribly sorry for the parents and family who spent their lives searching for this boy and never learned a single bit of what became of him.
This was an interesting case I'd never heard about with a lot of very pecululiar details! I found Moser's notes to be a bizarre mixture of wordy and verbose with semi-illiterate word uses and spellings--I'm certain he was one of the kidnappers and the ransom notes he wrote are singularly over verbose, long and over complex.
The press and police essentially competed in the search for the boy and both completely botched things. Poor Charley's father was essentially right in not paying the ranson--I'm sure it would have set off a craze for kidnapping kids if it had proved easy to do. However, this doomed Charley.
One modern analysist of the case thinks Charley didn't see Christmas, and I agree. Had he lived, I think he'd have turned up at some point. The kidnapper's resistance to provide "proofs of life" may argue he was killed by Moser and Douglas at some point, but it's also likely that Charley was murdered after the deaths of Douglas and Moser by whoever the boy had been entrusted to.
A very sad and interesting case--oddly Leopold and Loeb studied it! This case also had a lot of similarities to the later Lindbergh case. In that instance though, the cause of death seems to have been death from the child being accidentally dropped as the toddler was abuducted, not active murder.
I feel terribly sorry for the parents and family who spent their lives searching for this boy and never learned a single bit of what became of him.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 10, 2018
Slow Going
While I can appreciate the author's attention to detail, I question his need to print in their entirety each of the letters penned by the kidnappers. Consequently the middle of the book slowed to an irritating crawl. I only managed to finish the work by skipping over later correspondence, as so many of the letters expressed the same message written in a slightly different way. The final third redeemed the story so it was not entirely awful.
While I can appreciate the author's attention to detail, I question his need to print in their entirety each of the letters penned by the kidnappers. Consequently the middle of the book slowed to an irritating crawl. I only managed to finish the work by skipping over later correspondence, as so many of the letters expressed the same message written in a slightly different way. The final third redeemed the story so it was not entirely awful.
June 22, 2019
Sad tale!
This book recounted the true story of the kidnapping of four year old Charley Ross of Germantown, Pennsylvania in July of 1874 . Unfortunately, Charley was never found. This story is another cautionary tale for parents to keep their children under close supervision. I highly recommend this book to other true crime readers.
This book recounted the true story of the kidnapping of four year old Charley Ross of Germantown, Pennsylvania in July of 1874 . Unfortunately, Charley was never found. This story is another cautionary tale for parents to keep their children under close supervision. I highly recommend this book to other true crime readers.
July 19, 2022
Pretty good but sadly no resolution so who knows what really happened?
March 10, 2020
Honestly, I don't know that I would recommend this book. Understandably there are difficulties when researching a kidnapping that took place in the 1870s, but this could have been better written. I listed to it on audio book, which may have been part of the issue, but it just felt very repetitive. You could have cut out the entire middle of the book, gone from the kidnapping to the end, and not have missed a bit. I was hoping for more...
August 31, 2010
Such a sad but interesting true story.
August 23, 2018
I’ve never heard of this case but I feel like I should have. How terrible to not know where your child is.
March 7, 2021
A riveting and historically important true crime tale written at a truly literary level.
September 26, 2019
Wow, the amount of work that the author had to do to track down so much information. And still a little frustrating in the end.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews