On September 1, 1874, John Whitford Wilcox placed an announcement in the local newspapers. His brown mare had strayed or been stolen from his barn on Pontiac Avenue and he offered a reward for its recovery. Twenty years later, his family would be offering a reward for his own return.
The son of Cottrell and Mary Wilcox, John grew up working on his father’s Cranston farm and eventually began a produce truck farm of his own. He and his wife, Anna Waterman Paine, whom he married in 1872, resided at 24 Pontiac Avenue and became the parents to four children.
During the early morning hours one day in October of 1893, John alleged he was out working in his barn when he was struck senseless with a big stone and robbed of the $500 he was carrying. The Cranston Town Council offered a reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the attacker but none was ever found.
Just a little over a year later, on the morning of Nov. 10, 1894, John left home with over $700 cash to go and pay off a tax note in the city. When ten days passed and he hadn’t returned, a leaflet containing his picture and description was issued by the Cranston Police. A $50 reward was offered for information leading to his recovery. Some worried that he’d been robbed and murdered. Others believed that he left due to a bout of depression. Samuel LeBurton Blaisdell, the 68-year-old former superintendent of the State Almshouse told police he’d seen John riding on a Pawtuxet car the day after he left home. Another witness claimed to have seen him on Nov. 14, appearing dejected and lost in thought on Dyer Street.
Nearly five months passed and not one clue was uncovered concerning John’s whereabouts. Then, on the morning of April 5, 1895, his family discovered the mailbox in front of their house to contain his personal belongings; the bag he kept his money in, a pouch he owned, a blue checked bag his wife had made for him and his hammerless revolver. But what had happened to the 48-year-old bearded farmer remained a mystery.
Two days later, Mary was upstairs when she heard a knock on the door just before 11:00 p.m. Suddenly she was staring into the face of her missing husband, clad in the clothes he had left in – dirty and disheveled. No one could have been prepared for the bizarre statement he gave police.
“I remember being on Weybosset Street and looking into a cab window to look at some papers which were in the hands of the occupant,” he reported. “I was requested to do so by a well-dressed man who wore a large diamond in his shirt front and one on his finger. When I looked into the cab, all that I remember of seeing is what I thought was a huge rainbow. The next thing I remember is my being sick in a canvas bunk on some large steamer and that a German man was caring for me. The boat was crowded and I went with the crowd. The next thing I remember is of making an effort to get work in an orange packing house at Sanford, Florida but was unsuccessful.”
According to John, he was enticed into a cab, drugged and placed on a steamer headed for Florida. Once there, he claimed to have wandered around seeking whatever work he could find to earn enough money to get back home. He said he ended up in Jacksonville where he was given a job by a contractor named Chester Warford who sent him to live in a camp and cut ties on the Florida Central & Peninsula Railroad, a 208-mile rail stretching from Jacksonville to Tampa. John said he worked on the railway from Nov. 24 to March 17. He wasn’t paid in cash, he relayed, but compensated with goods from the store. He told how he and some others remained in Jacksonville another ten days in order to collect the money owed to them.
He and one of the men then walked 28 miles to Sanford, he went on, where it had been arranged for them to purchase tickets to New York at a reduced rate. At that time, he had in his possession 17 dollars he said. He claimed to remember little about his arrival in New York other than the trip having been made aboard a boat called the Seminole and that it was dark when they reached their destination.
“We spent the day in New York and I remember that we went to the art museum where we stayed the greater part of the day,” John told police. He said he later went to the dock of the Stonington Line Steamers and bought his ticket for home. Because there was time to spare before boarding the boat, he allegedly walked down the street in search of somewhere to eat. When he returned to the boat, he said, he discovered that someone had stolen his ticket.
“I was brokenhearted and did not know what to do,” his report continued. “I walked around the street all night and the next day.”
John then somehow managed to purchase another ticket and boarded the boat. He said he was later the first one to disembark and began walking down the railroad track from Stonington to Auburn before he decided to run the rest of the way home. He claimed to know nothing about how his property ended up in the mailbox.
When asked why he did not return home immediately, after being abducted, he stated that he believed everyone he knew wanted to kill him and that he felt peaceful in Florida where he would see the strange rainbow each night before he went to sleep.
John lived another 22 years. Many never stopped wondering whether he suffered from derangement or was simply a very creative liar.
Kelly Sullivan is a Rhode Island columnist, lecturer and author.