Mercy Kidnapper

Until the Lindbergh case, most famed U. S. kidnapping was that of 4-year-old Charlie Ross who disappeared from his father's Germantown, Pa. home July 1, 1874 and has not appeared since. Last September memories of the original Charlie Ross were ironically revived when an elderly, well-to-do Chicago greeting card manufacturer was kidnapped on his way home from a dinner party, held for a $50,000 ransom which his wife promptly paid. The greeting card manufacturer's name was Charles Ross.

Second Charlie Ross kidnapping was chiefly significant as an interesting coincidence until its solution made it a major crime in its own right. This was when, at Santa Anita race track last January, Federal agents arrested a 27-year-oldex-lumber-jack named John Henry Seadlund, alias Peter Anders, whose pockets were stuffed with $14,000 in ransom bills. The lumberjack confessed kidnapping Mr. Ross, corroborated his confession by guiding his captors to a cave in the Wisconsin woods northwest of Spooner where were found the frozen corpses of Ross and one James Atwood Gray. Lumberjack Seadlund jauntily explained that Gray had been his accomplice, that he had killed both men in a three-cornered scuffle a fortnight after the abduction.

In Chicago last week, on trial for his life, Lumberjack Seadlund gave a fascinated jury the details of the whole extraordinary story. He and Gray had taken Ross first to a wooden dugout near Emily, Wis., where they kept their aged victim manacled for 13 chill autumn days, then to Spooner. By this time, the jurors gathered from the defendant's story, the affair had taken on the atmosphere of a camping trip in which his principal concern had been the comfort and convenience of the captive. Trouble between Seadlund and his less considerate accomplice apparently developed on this score. When Seadlund went to get gasoline for their car from a cache in the woods he turned around to see Gray pointing a gun at him. From this point the witness explained how the mercy kidnapping suddenly turned into a mercy killing:

"Ross grabbed his [Gray's] arm. . . . I . . . tried to get the gun. We struggled around . . . but I got my finger on the trigger and pulled it. . . . I knew Gray was hurt. He was calling to me to give him a gun so he could kill himself. Ross wasn't making a sound. . . . I went back to the car for some blankets. I put one under Gray. Then I tied two others around Ross. . . . I couldn't tell whether his skull was fractured or not.

"I looked at Gray. There was no sign of life and he was bleeding from the mouth. I couldn't get him to talk to me. So I took the gun and turned my head and emptied it. I went back and looked at Ross again . . . and I thought he was dead. I shot him."

Death sentence for kidnappers, according to the "Lindbergh Law" is left to the discretion of the jury. Faced with a case which, factually at least, seemed as complete as the kidnapping of the first Charles Ross was the reverse, the jury took only an hour and 30 minutes to decide that Lumberjack Seadlund had earned it.

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