Chicago has produced some of America’s most notorious criminals, such as Al Capone, Richard Speck, and John Gacy.  One Windy City crime that did not garner the headlines was the 1944 kidnapping of a ten-week-old infant, Laurence Harding, Jr., by two young girls whose identities, as well as Laurence’s fate, remain unknown over three-quarters of a century later.

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While pushing her son’s carriage, Margaret Harding walked the several blocks from her apartment to the local corner market on the afternoon of June 30, 1944. As her groceries were being tallied, she noticed two black females who appeared to be teenagers smiling and making baby talk with her toddler. When the girls complimented Margaret on her beautiful baby, the new mom was appreciative.

As Margaret was walking home, she noticed the two girls were walking behind her, but thought nothing of it. When she arrived at her apartment complex, she saw an upstairs neighbor on her balcony shaking rugs. Margaret also lived in an upstairs apartment; unable to carry her baby and the groceries at the same time, she asked her neighbor to watch Laurence while she carried the items to her apartment. The neighbor agreed.

While Margaret was inside, the neighbor briefly turned her back; in that instant, one of the girls had grabbed the infant from his carriage and ran with the other girl from the scene. Hearing her neighbor’s screams, Margaret bolted out of the complex and chased after the girls, but soon lost track of them.

Three days later, the Hardings received a phone call from a woman saying she was one of the girls who had taken Laurence. She said she would return him, but hung up after Margaret asked when and never called again.

The Chicago Police and the FBI failed to find Laurence Harding, Jr.

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Geoffrey Harding was born several years after Laurence Jr.’s abduction. He gained access to the FBI files of the investigation into his brother’s kidnapping through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in August 1986.

Geoffrey Harding

Laurence’s Brother

The files showed that that on July 4, four days after the kidnapping, a black teenage girl arrived at a Chicago train station with a baby believed to be Laurence. The young girl asked an older black woman to hold the baby while she went to the washroom. The woman’s train to St. Louis was leaving soon and she told the girl to hurry. The girl assured her she would not be long, and said she was traveling to St. Louis as well.

When the conductor made the last call to board the train, the girl had not returned. The woman bordered with the baby, expecting to find the girl already aboard, but she was not.

When the woman arrived with the baby at St. Louis’ Union Station, she explained the situation to two porters, George Hill and Charlie McCall. They had not received any inquiries about a baby. The woman mentioned she had nine children of her own and said she was traveling to Magnolia, Arkansas, four-hundred-eighty-five miles south of St. Louis. She told the porters that if the young girl contacted them regarding her baby, he could be retrieved there. No contact was ever made.         *****************************************************************************************************

Geoffrey Harding hired private investigator Paul Rigsby in an effort to locate the brother he never knew. Rigsby traveled to Magnolia, Arkansas, where he spoke with multiple people and combed through the town’s records but failed to find anyone who could have been the woman from the train station over forty years earlier. Because no one could recall an area black woman of the 1940s with nine children,

Rigsby theorizes she was only visiting Magnolia over the July 4 weekend; he believes she resided in either Chicago or Detroit. He is certain the woman was a Good Samaritan who did not know of Laurence’s kidnapping. After not hearing from the porters, he believes the woman may have assumed the young girl she had encountered at the Chicago train station was an unwed mother who had abandoned her baby.

Rigsby believes that after not being contacted by the porters, the woman may have raised Laurence Harding Jr. and that he grew up not knowing anything of his past.

Paul Rigsby

Private Investigator

Laurence Harding, Jr. was abducted on June 30, 1944, when he was ten-weeks-old. He would today be eighty-one-years-old. I could not find any photographs of him; it is possible that none exist. The picture is that of a baby used as Laurence in the Unsolved Mysteries re-enactment of his kidnapping.

If they are still alive, the two black girls who kidnapped Laurence Harding, Jr. would now likely be in their nineties. The woman to whom he may have been given is almost certainly now deceased. The best hope of locating Laurence likely lies in identifying any of the nine children the woman said she had.

A viewer commented on the Unsolved Mysteries Facebook page that Margaret Harding died in 1993 at age seventy-nine and that Laurence Harding, Sr. passed away in 2013 at age ninety-eight. I could find any sources corroborating that information, nor did I find either Harding on the Find a Grave site.

The Baby Used As Laurence Harding, Jr.

The only thing I found in the Newspaper Archives relating to Laurence Harding, Jr.’s kidnapping was this small blurb published in the July 9, 1944, Personals section of the Chicago Tribune, ten days after he was kidnapped.

Sources:
• Chicago Sun-Times
• Chicago Tribune
• Unsolved Mysteries