What Happened to Dorothy Arnold? N.Y. Socialite’s 1910 Disappearance Is Oldest Missing Persons Case in U.S.

The heiress’s disappearance captured imaginations and highlighted societal woes in considered one of America’s earliest true crime tales

Dorothy Arnold informed her mom to remain dwelling that December morning.

“I’ll phone you,” she stated, .

Strolling down Fifth Avenue, she stopped at Park & Tilford for some candies and made her means alongside the icy streets to Brentano’s bookstore for Emily Calvin Blake’s . She informed a pal in passing that by means of Central Park.

That was Dec. 12, 1910. Nobody noticed Dorothy once more.

The lacking Higher East Facet heiress made headlines throughout the nation. Forty years later, The Instances heralded the case as “.”

Nonetheless unsolved, it’s the oldest lacking individuals case included in , a database monitoring over 15,000 lacking individuals circumstances. Greater than a century later, the circumstances surrounding her disappearance proceed to fascinate and confound: Was she kidnapped, murdered — or, did she merely select to go away one life for an additional?

Dorothy Harriet Camille Arnold, the daughter of a rich fragrance importer and the , appeared — to outsiders — to have every part. However in her closing months with household, the single 25-year-old appeared to crave one thing else: independence.

Within the fall of 1910, the Bryn Mawr School literature graduate requested her father for permission to get her personal house in Greenwich Village, a haven for artists. However her father was not supportive, in accordance with American Heritage’s 1960 journal story “.”

From her Higher East Facet mansion, Dorothy wrote a number of brief tales – “Poinsettia Flames” and “Lotus Leaves” – which she despatched off for publication. McClure’s Journal rejected the primary. She reportedly by no means heard again on the second.

Dorothy typically corresponded with the older George S. Griscom, Jr., telling him in a letter of McClure’s rejection: “Failure stares me within the face. All I see forward is a protracted highway with no turning.” And in a line, which not too long ago reported, saved her mom believing in her daughter’s eventual return: “Mom will at all times suppose an accident has occurred.”

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That December day, wearing a blue skirt go well with, her hair “in a really full pompadour” below a black velvet hat with blue silk roses, Dorothy, , per The Instances: “carried a big black fox flat muff with white factors,” together with “$20 or $30, playing cards, and presumably different papers of assorted sorts.”

By January, New York’s police commissioner had mailed “to the police of each metropolis and city of consequence,” per The Instances, a set of “three glorious portraits of Miss Arnold, one in strolling costume, one other in night gown, and the third a bust portrait.”

Police claimed that they had “minutely searched with out end result” for the 5-foot, 4-inch lady with “darkish brown hair, grayish blue eyes, vibrant complexion, and good coloration.” Additional, “each steamer for Europe has been traced and the passengers scrutinized.”

There have been mistaken sightings in , , and .

After discovering Dorothy’s correspondence with Griscom, her mom and a brother traveled to Italy, the place, per The Instances, the household’s lawyer had “” experiences that the brother “struck [Griscom] within the face together with his fist and adopted the blow up with one other that floored Griscom,” securing his sister’s letter, which Griscom had saved in his pocket.

Dorothy and Griscom had in Boston simply months earlier than she went lacking. There, she pawned $500 value of her jewellery to a pawnbroker who later spoke to the press.

In a grisly ending to the unknown story, two Pennsylvania medical doctors and a nurse have been arrested in April 1914 for out of a Bellevue, Pa., dwelling, wherein was discovered “an working desk and within the cellar have been two massive furnaces,” per The Instances. One of many medical doctors later claimed that Dorothy had been cremated, after a presumably botched abortion.

From early weeks, Dorothy’s father he believed his daughter to be useless, however his descendants not too long ago informed The Nationwide Geographic that he spent for his daughter that ended solely together with his personal loss of life.

Greater than a decade after she vanished off Fifth Avenue, the pinnacle of the town’s Bureau of Lacking Individuals introduced that the case “” and “Dorothy Arnold is now not listed as a lacking particular person.” However he quickly after.

The household’s lawyer responded in The Instances: “The disappearance of Dorothy is as a lot of a thriller right now because the day she disappeared.”

And so it stays.

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