HELD FOR RANSOM

Greymouth Evening Star, 27 October 1931, Page 10

HELD FOR RANSOM

KIDNAPPER’S DEATH THREAT. NEW YORK, September 1. Judge Hazelton, of North Portland, whose son has been missing for a week, has received a message threat ening his boy’s death unless he immediately sends a ransom of £5,000 The police had been scouring the district in search of the boy, and today the judge received by post a

carrier pigeon with a demand that the bird should be released immediately with the sum of £5,000 tied to its leg. Failing this, the message stated, the judge would never see his son alive again.

He at once communicated with the police, and it was decided to release the bird without the money. By good foi tune, police aeroplanes which set out in an attempt to trace the flight of the pigeon succeeded in following it to a house at Flushings. When questioned by the police the owner »f the property said he knew nothing about it, and that he had let the pigeon coops to a young stranger with a green car. blackmailers CONFESS. Police activity in New York and New Jersey resulted in the arrest yesterday and to-day of five men and a girl in connection with the alleged kidnapping of Charles Rosenthal, the American “boy broker,” who disappeared on August 11. _ On Friday a man declaring himself to be Rosenthal walked into a police station and said he had been decoyed by a. pretty girl, seized, and carried off io an apartment in the city, where he had been kept for a week. This information gave the police sufficient clues to make the arrests. Two of the arrested men, it is stated, have confessed. Acting on the information they divulged,, the police hurried to Atlantic City and captured a man known a's “Big Shot,” who holds the bulk of the ransom of £lO,OOO alleged to have been paid by Rosenthal to his kidnappers. Soon after Rosenthal’s disappearance letters demanding £20,000 were received by his aged mother, a wealthy widows who had paid £40,000 for a seat on the Stock Exchange for her son. She declared her willingness to pay anything to recover him, but, in spite of her efforts to communicate with the kidnappers, she failed to do so.