In 1983, he was kidnapped as a boy. Bizarre tale of Florida man's terrifying abduction
VERO BEACH, Fla. — When David Rattray thinks back to 1983 when he was a 4-year-old boy snatched from his family’s house by an armed intruder who tied up the maid and told her it would take $250,000 to get him back alive, he remembers being put in a dirt pit near a mobile home, or a trailer.
“He put me in a hole in the ground with a bamboo cage over the top with little tree spurs that were lined at the bottom,” Rattray, 43, recalled during his first media interview since being kidnapped 38 years ago.
His abductor, a burly man who posed as an electrician in blue work clothes to fake his way into the home in a well-to-do neighborhood west of Vero Beach, gagged maid Wille Mae Nichols, 62, tied her to a dining room chair, grabbed the boy and fled in her car.
The 53-hour ordeal — with extremes of hope, prayer and despair — began at 3:45 p.m., March 1, 1983, and mobilized dozens of sheriff’s deputies and FBI agents determined to find the blond-haired blue-eyed preschooler.
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Doctor’s son
David Rattray’s father, prominent Vero Beach physician Charles F. Rattray Jr, then 54, and his mother Pamela, 33, didn’t know who’d taken their son, or why.
“In 1983, the kidnapping of a doctor’s 4-year-old son, it jumped right out on us,” said Phil Redstone, an Indian River County sheriff’s detective who worked the case with about 60 law enforcement officials.
“It was not something that happened in Indian River County in the early 1980s by any means.”
FBI agents worked from a trailer in the Rattray backyard and phones were installed to monitor calls to the home and doctor’s office. The longtime physician secured a $250,000 bank loan and waited for a ransom call, which didn’t come until the next morning.
“You’re so helpless,” Charles Rattray, who died in 2005, later told reporters. “That first night was so cold.”
Retired Indian River County Sheriff R.T. "Tim" Dobeck, 72, knew the Rattrays — his mother worked in the doctor’s office.
“They were absolutely terrified,” Dobeck recalled.
Journalists from national wire services, and from Florida radio, TV and newspapers converged on Vero Beach.
Renowned Florida author Carl Hiaasen, who recently retired from the Miami Herald after a 35-year career, said Rattray’s abduction was the first story from the Treasure Coast he was dispatched from Miami to cover.
“It was pretty brazen,” said Hiaasen, of Vero Beach. “Of course, everyone was terrified; it was right after the Adam Walsh case. The difference was there was no ransom demand in Adam’s case.”
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Adam Walsh vanished July 27, 1981 from a Hollywood Sears store. The 6-year-old’s severed head was found two weeks later in an Indian River County canal.
By 1983, thanks in part to lobbying efforts on behalf of missing children by Adam’s father, John Walsh, the FBI had changed its policy to take a lead role in recovering abducted minors like David Rattray.
Foiled escape
The maid’s stolen car was found the first day at a Winn Dixie store near the Rattray home.
The next morning, the kidnapper — later identified as Thomas Gordon Ross, 49, from Wabasso — spoke by phone to Charles Rattray’s receptionist Kathy King.
During an FBI recorded call that was never released to the public, King is heard confirming the $250,000 ransom demand.
“And no police,” Ross warned.
All the while, authorities were chasing nearly 200 leads trying to locate the missing boy.
David Rattray remembers being alone in that hole as night turned to dawn.
“I was waiting on the superheroes to come and save me,” he said. “I mean, that's what you think when you're that age.
“I stayed awake all night and when it became daylight and I figured nobody was going to come get me, I made foot holes in the hole to climb up and push open the bamboo cage on top.”
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He crawled out, headed down a dirt road, but quickly hit a dead end.
“I started sneaking my way back and then he (Ross) caught me right when I got close to the house,” Rattray recalled. “He was upset. Took me in the house and put a shotgun next to me and told me if I ever did that again that he would kill me. Then he fed me vanilla ice cream.”
Ransom demand
When Ross called the third day at 7 p.m., he told a woman at the doctor’s office Charles Rattray must bring cash in a pillowcase and go to a Winn Dixie store where he’d find a note with instructions.
“He is to pick it up now,” Ross said. “It's a matter of life and death.”
A 46-minute FBI audio tape of the ransom drop provided to TCPalm, a part of the Paste BN Network, by David Rattray details his father’s fraught-filled mission as FBI Agent David Callan, now deceased, hid in the car’s back seat using a two-way radio to alert agents tracking their trip.
The note Charles Rattray found stuffed in a cement wall led him to the old Dodger Pines Golf Club course where he spoke to a voice in the dark, and implored for assurance his son was safe.
“You won't harm him, will you?” Charles Rattray cried out. “Please!”
“No, no, no,” Ross replied from several yards away.
The distraught doctor vowed police wouldn’t bother him.
“Please be honest with me, I want my son,” he repeated, his voice breaking with emotion.
“He’ll be playing with his toys tomorrow, or tonight,” Ross said.
“I want my boy,” he said, stifling sobs.
“He’s all right,” Ross yelled back.
Charles Rattray left the cash and drove home.
According to FBI agents, Ross picked up the cash, then set it down — not knowing two aircrafts hovered overhead tracking his flashlight’s tiny glow as he bobbed along in the dark.
Indian River County Sheriff’s Deputy Neil Bevis and FBI Agent R.B. McKeen — one of several law enforcement teams scattered about — suddenly found themselves nearly nose-to-nose with Ross.
The trio struggled, then Ross, seemingly by accident, fired a single bullet from his .22-caliber pistol, striking the right side of his head.
He fell to the ground.
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“Everybody was concerned after hearing the shot,” Redstone recalled, who was near the ransom drop scene. “Then we heard agents on the radio saying they were OK, that they had apprehended the suspect.”
Bevis and McKee repeatedly yelled, “Where’s the boy?”
Ross said to head west and look in the trunk of his Monte Carlo parked nearby.
Officers scanned out, found the car and pried open the trunk.
Inside, David Rattray, pale, barely conscious and mosquito bitten, was unharmed.
Within minutes the befuddled boy was reunited with his anxious parents at the Sheriff’s Office, surrounded by TV news crews and relieved reporters.
“That was a moment of so much elation,” Dobeck said. “It's really hard to describe.”
Redstone agreed.
“I remember when it came over the radio, there were cheers and everybody was excited and jubilant to be able to find the boy alive and unharmed," he said.
Ross, a former golf course superintendent from Stuart who once worked at the former Dodger Pines course, remained in critical condition for days.
Agents later said he'd once been a patient of Charles Rattray and the kidnapping was his revenge. He blamed the doctor for misdiagnosing a heart ailment that left him unable to work.
Ross was never charged with a crime. He lived in a nursing home as a ward of the state until his death in 1989.
Trio of tragedies
In any other era, Rattray’s kidnapping might have been Vero Beach’s crime of the decade, only in the 1980s, it wasn’t.
It didn’t even qualify as worst crime of the year in the sleepy seaside community known then for its citrus groves and pristine beaches.
That’s because four months later on July 26, 1983, deputies captured serial killer David Alan Gore, 29, who had shot dead 17-year-old Lynn Elliott as her friend Regan Martin, 14, was still inside his parent’s Vero Beach home hog-tied in the attic.
Sentenced to death, Gore eventually confessed to killing six women and girls and was executed in 2012.
Elliott’s brutal death happened three months before authorities returned to scour marshlands in northern St. Lucie County searching for the body of Adam Walsh after Jacksonville, Florida, drifter and convicted killer Ottis Toole confessed to his 1981 homicide.
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Charles Rattray, who knew of the Walsh tragedy, wrote to John Walsh after his own son's rescue to thank the celebrated crime-fighter for convincing the FBI to take a new stand on finding missing kids.
In Walsh’s book Tears of Rage, he recalled Rattray's letter said “his little boy was asleep in the next room, and that were it not for me, the situation might be otherwise.”
And while both live in Vero Beach, Walsh has never met David Rattray, he said, but he remembers his father’s heartfelt letter.
“I wish him well,” Walsh said. “I was determined that people like the Rattrays would get better treatment by the FBI.”
Now a married father of three children and a training captain with Indian River County Fire Rescue, David Rattray credits his parents for quickly getting life back to normal after his bizarre 3-day ordeal, which, he said, helped him process the trauma and come out stronger.
“I use it as an empowerment,” he said. “I think if I would have stayed in that hole … and not tried to get out of the situation for myself, it probably would have hurt me a lot more down the road.”
Added Rattray: “We're all survivors. We all go through things in our lives and we all have tough choices and have tough experiences.”
Follow Melissa E. Holsman on Twitter: @MHolsman.