After the return of Verner Alexanderson, kidnapped son of Schenectady radio scientist Dr. E.F.W. Alexanderson, it appeared that the kidnappers had vanished into Canada. Apparently, police never stopped looking for them, because in 1924, almost exactly a year after the boy was snatched from his home in the GE Realty Plot, police arrested a man they thought was Harry Fairbanks in far-off Assiniboia, Saskatchewan. He claimed, of course, that police had the wrong man, and that he was in fact Jack Freedman of Winnipeg. Apparently he was telling the truth. It would be another year, in July of 1925, before Fairbanks would be found, arrested on a bad check charge in Fall River, Massachusetts. He was tried and convicted, and served until he was paroled in 1939.
In 1927, the law finally caught up with the other kidnapper, Stanley Crandall, in Aberdeen, Washington. In Crandall’s mind, the kidnapping was all Fairbanks’s doing, and he just happened to be in the car at the time. And just happened to be with him when they drove the boy up to the vicinity of Alexandria Bay. And just happened to be with him when they escaped across the river into Canada. He was quoted as saying that Fairbanks had hypnotised him, but denied he had said that. He served time for the crime, but somehow the stigma of being a kidnapper stuck with him. When the son of Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped in 1932, the Alexanderson kidnapping was still fresh in many minds, and police paid a visit to Crandall, but were satisfied he had nothing to do with the case.
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