May 6, 2025
Introduction: In this article, James Pylant describes the puzzling kidnapping of a young mother in Hollywood in 1921 that confounded the police. James is an editor at GenealogyMagazine.com and author for JacobusBooks.com, is an award-winning historical true-crime writer, and authorized celebrity biographer.
In mid-December 1920, a trio of masked burglars – two men and a “masculine type” woman – boldly invaded neighborhoods in Los Angeles County, California. They attacked a woman in her home, swiped an expensive violin from a Santa Monica Boulevard residence, and broke into A. J. and Mary Witherell’s Hollywood house. The intruders fled through a back door when the Witherells returned home, leaving behind jewelry and silverware in a large sack.
Intrusions like the attempted robbery of the Witherell’s home were unsettling events which continued weeks into the new year. Whipping into what the Los Angeles Herald called a “frenzy of fear,” the melodrama dominated newspapers in the Golden State with screaming headlines.
On 25 January 1921, things got worse for the Witherell family when their son’s wife, Gladys Witherell, was kidnapped from the Hollywood home she shared with her husband, Otto S. Witherell, and their young son Jackie.
This photo caption reads:
Mrs. Gladys W. Witherell and her baby son, Jack. Mrs. Witherell’s husband believes she was kidnaped.
The article reports:
Mystery Man Lures Woman to Quit Home
False Report of Accident When Stranger in Auto Calls at O. S. Witherell’s House
City-wide Search Starts
Neighbor Called When Mother Leaves Her Baby and Hurries Out of the Family Doorway
Lured, as her husband believes, by a false story of an accident told her by a man who called at the house a little after 6 o’clock last evening, Mrs. Gladys W. Witherell, wife of O. S. Witherell, loan and investment broker with offices in the Hibernian Building, was sought throughout the city and environs last night by police and detectives.
…From an account given by Mrs. Elizabeth Warner, who lives in a house adjoining that of the Witherells at 1843 Whitley Avenue, a man whom she had never seen before rang her doorbell a few minutes after 6 and told her a bad accident had happened and Mrs. Witherell had been sent for.
Mrs. Warner was asked to go to the Witherell house and take care of the child, Jack, eighteen months old, until Mrs. Witherell returned.
…Witherell declared last night he had no idea who could be responsible for the supposed kidnaping. Neither he nor his wife had an enemy, to his knowledge. That their home life had been ideally happy was declared by the husband and confirmed by neighbors.
Here are further details of this strange case.
“For a long time, there have been strange noises on our telephone wire,” said A. J. Witherell, who later concluded that someone had tapped his phone line. On Monday, 24 January 1921, someone made a series of calls to the Witherell home. “I was several times called to the telephone, but when I took the receiver from the hook, no one answered.”
It continued the next day. Tuesday evening, Mary Witherell planned to have dinner at the home of their son and daughter-in-law, Otto and Gladys Witherell.
Shortly after 6 p.m., a rawboned, gray-haired man rang the doorbell of the younger Witherell couple’s neighbor, Elizabeth Warner. He announced that a woman injured in an accident on nearby Hollywood Boulevard was asking for Gladys. The stranger, a suave, “unusually polite” man, asked Mrs. Warner to come to Otto and Gladys’s house and take care of their baby so that Gladys could see if the injured woman was her mother-in-law.
As Elizabeth Warner arrived at the Witherell home, Gladys hurriedly grabbed a hat and coat and left. The neighbor was still there when Otto returned home later that evening from work. He had heard nothing about his mother’s accident until then, and he immediately called the hospital. But no such mishap had been reported.
What happened to Gladys? Was her abduction connected to the earlier burglary at his parents’ home?
“Whoever did that job may have been struck by my father’s fine home, its furnishings and all,” said Otto. “He may have figured our family was a promising prospect from which to extort a ransom.”
Otto’s father held interests in several banks and was the president of a soldering company. Gladys, too, came from an affluent family. Otto, a 24-year-old investment broker, and Gladys, 27, had been married in 1917. (1) Their son, John Allen (“Jackie”), was born in 1919.
“After the baby came Gladys has stayed closer to home than ever before,” Otto explained. A little more than a year before the baby’s birth, a traumatic event profoundly affected Gladys.
Her mother, Pheoba Kratz, accidentally fell from the balcony of her second-story home and crashed through the glass of the conservatory roof, leaving her severely cut. She also suffered broken bones as well as internal injuries. (2) Mrs. Kratz died in the ambulance en route to the hospital. “But it was Gladys who held the mutilated body of her mother in her arms until the end,” said her stepmother. Gladys, never having recovered from the tragedy, feared her mother-in-law was suffering when told about the supposed “accident.” And that made Gladys less cautious when the mysterious gray-haired man approached her.
The gray-haired man reappeared on January 27, two days after the kidnapping. This time, he came to Otto’s office.
“I have important information,” he whispered to Fred Erwing, Otto’s new business partner. The stranger explained that he saw a woman’s hand protruding from a bundle in a dilapidated vehicle. Erwing turned to reach for a phone, causing the grey-haired man to flee.
Earlier that day, someone slipped a torn, typewritten note under the Witherells’ front door.
This note reads:
Mr/Witherell
Your wife is safe, Don’t Worry, until you hear further from me. Have $50,000 cash ready, as you will hear from me again soon. Don’t notify police or detectives or all is lost.
Meanwhile, rewards totaling $2,000 were offered for the arrest of Gladys’s abductor.
Famed private detective Nick Harris took an active role in the investigation. He grew suspicious of Charles Beverly, who had been Otto’s business partner until a disagreement led them to end their alliance. Beverly told friends he would soon leave Los Angeles but continue in the brokerage business elsewhere. Still, the 30-year-old continually visited the office as he was romantically involved with Otto’s 18-year-old stenographer, Leda Tenney.
Charles Beverly was spotted taking a bundle of women’s clothes to a hotel, including a hat similar to one worn by Gladys when she disappeared. Nick Harris ordered his agency’s detectives to monitor Charles and Leda constantly. In the early hours of January 29, as detectives tailed the couple’s drive from a country club, Charles’s car crashed into a streetcar. He and Leda were killed instantly, and two other passengers were seriously injured.
While Leda’s father empathically denied she had any involvement with the kidnapping, Gladys’s family feared the suspects’ sudden deaths had sealed her fate.
“Hope has left me,” said John C. Kratz of his missing daughter. “I never expect to see Gladys alive again!”
Stay tuned for the conclusion of this story in tomorrow’s article.
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Note on the header image: Sherlock Holmes investigates a mystery.
Illustration credit: https://depositphotos.com/home.html
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(1) “Witherell-Kratz Nuptials,” Los Angeles Evening Citizen, 18 May 1917, p. 5
(2) “Woman Dies After Balcony Collapses,” Los Angeles Times, 19 July 1918, p. 1
