It must be said in favor of the police point of view that these were not the only letters from supposed kidnappers which reached the distraught parents. Indeed, there was a steady accumulation of all sorts of missives of this type, most of them quite obviously the work of lunatics. These were easily distinguishable, however. An experienced officer ought to be able to choose between such vaporings of disjointed intelligences and letters which bore some evidence of reason, some mark of plausibility. The police who handled this case committed the common blunder of lumping them all together. They had determined that the boy was a runaway and were naturally inhospitable to contrary evidences. But others were as firmly convinced on the other side. The father now became genuinely alarmed and feared that further activity by the police might indeed lead to the murder of the child. Accordingly Father Mullin withdrew his ten-thousand-dollar offer for the apprehension of the criminals, and Michael McCormick, the lost boy’s uncle, moved swiftly to change the terms of his five-thousand-dollar reward. In seeking for a way to make an appeal directly to the abductors and assure them of their personal safety, he brought into the case at this point the redoubtable Pat Sheedy. Sheedy had just achieved worldwide notoriety by recovering from the thieves’ fence, Adam Worth, the famous Gainsborough painting of Elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire, which had been stolen from Agnew’s Art Rooms in London in 1876, and which had been hunted over half the earth for twenty-five years. This successful intermediacy between the police and the underworld gave the New York and Buffalo “honest gambler” a tremendous reputation for confidential dealing, and the McCormicks counted on Sheedy’s trusted position among criminals to convince the kidnappers that they could deliver the boy, collect five thousand dollars, and be safe from arrest or betrayal. So Sheedy came forward, announced that he was prepared to pay over the money on the spot and without question, the moment the boy was delivered and identified.