A lunch box, a kidnapping plea and a 1926 mystery police called a hoax

A handwritten message found on the Sarnia–London highway sparked a cross-border police search in July 1926.

A Lambton County farmer walking along the highway between Sarnia and London spotted a lunch box lying beside the road on July 16, 1926.

Attached to it was a hurried message:

“I am being kidnaped in a Hudson car. License number Mich. 500407. Send officer.”

The writing was jerky and blurred. A contemporary newspaper report described it as a woman’s handwriting, apparently produced in haste.

Inside the lunch box were a few crumbs and the remains of a sandwich. There were no names or other identifying marks.

The farmer reported the discovery to Lambton County Constable R.J. Whiting, who immediately telephoned police in London, Toronto and Hamilton.

By the following day, the message had become national news. Reports appeared in Calgary, Regina and Michigan as police attempted to trace the Michigan licence plate.

That search quickly produced a contradiction.

The July 17 editions of the Owosso Argus-Press and Monroe Evening News reported that plate 500-407 was registered to a man in Bad Axe, Michigan. It belonged to a different make of car.

Two days later, Windsor’s Border Cities Star identified the registered vehicle as a Chevrolet.

The lunch-box message had named a Hudson.

By then, Sarnia police believed they were dealing with a prank. The July 19 Border Cities Star carried the headline “Mystery Note Is Believed to Be Hoax.”

“The police are inclined to call it a hoax, the story of attempted kidnapping on the London road,” the newspaper reported.

Whiting had a theory about what inspired it.

He pointed to the disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson, a famous Los Angeles evangelist whose claim of being kidnapped had become one of the year’s biggest news stories.

McPherson disappeared from Venice Beach in May 1926. Five weeks later, she emerged in Mexico and said she had escaped from people who kidnapped and held her for ransom.

Her return produced an enormous media spectacle. Newspapers followed every turn in the investigation, including allegations that McPherson had staged the disappearance. Her account remained the subject of intense public debate when the lunch box appeared beside the Sarnia–London highway.

Whiting called the local message “the silly idea of someone who has been reading the McPherson case in Los Angeles.”

The investigation appears to have ended with the Michigan plate search. The registered Chevrolet did not match the Hudson described in the message, and the kidnapping alarm gave way to the police theory that someone had manufactured the mystery.

The location was reported simply as the Sarnia–London highway, then part of the provincial route known as Highway 7. The former highway is now divided among several Lambton and Middlesex county roads.

After the July 19 report, the story disappeared from newspaper coverage.

For three days, a short pencilled message found beside a Lambton County road had drawn in police across Ontario, investigators in Michigan and newspapers across Canada.

Police called it a hoax. The person who wrote it was never publicly identified.