Dellinger Definitely Starts for the North. . . Sure He Will Be Able to Establish His Identity as the Long-Missing Charlie Ross
By International News Service
Greensboro, N.C., May 22—Charlie Ross, the Philadelphia lad whose disappearance in 1874 went down in crime annals as the unsolved mystery of the century, today left here for the North.
For no longer is his name Dellinger. Identification of the 56-year-old contractor as the flaxen-haired cherub who was kidnapped and brought to Gaffney, S.C., in the same year has been made by J. Frank Gaffney, formerly of the South Carolina town which bears his name.
When the 4-year-old boy was recognized at once by Gaffney, then 24 years old, from photographs which were widely distributed at the time. He asserted then that the boy was the figure in the sensational Ross case, and Gaffney’s father, now dead, also insisted that he was the missing Charlie Ross.
All this was brought to light here when Gaffney voluntarily penned an affidavit in which he narrated a series of collateral facts which, it is believed, will dissolve every doubt that Dellinger is not the kidnapped child.
According to Gaffney’s spontaneously written story of Dellinger, a man named McHale came to Gaffney with a woman and a boy in September, 1874. Their conduct toward the child, Gaffney said, aroused suspicion and Gaffney and his father were planning to start an investigation. This was foiled, however, partly because McHale spirited the boy away under cover of night, and a few days later he and the woman disappeared.
Gaffney declared he noticed a picture of the missing Charlie Ross in a newspaper along about this time, and he was convinced that the “McHale” child and Charlie Ross were the same. “I am positive today that it was,” Gaffney declared.
Gaffney never saw the boy again, he said, “until a few weeks ago, when he found him in the little town of Denver. “He remembered me,” Gaffney said, “and I recognized him as the little boy I knew 52 years ago.”
From the front page of the Concord Daily Tribune, May 22, 1926
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073201/1926-05-22/ed-1/seq-1/
