Speaker 1: It's been called the oldest missing person case in New
Speaker 1: York City. Twenty five year old heiress Dorothy Arnold was
Speaker 1: a bright, warm, well educated, pretty young socialite who from
Speaker 1: the outside seemed to have the perfect life. So why,
Speaker 1: on a cold Monday morning in December of nineteen ten
Speaker 1: did she suddenly just evaporate into thin air? I'm Patty Steele.
Speaker 1: Did Dorothy just want a different life or did her
Speaker 1: older lover have something to do with her disappearance? That's
Speaker 1: next on the backstory. The backstory is back. The sensational
Speaker 1: disappearance of Dorothy Arnold in nineteen ten was the talk
Speaker 1: of the town. Every sort of crummy journalist wanted to
Speaker 1: find her, or, at the very least, uncover another salacious
Speaker 1: story about her. But we have to start at the beginning.
Speaker 1: Dorothy Harriet Camille Arnold was born into a wealthy family
Speaker 1: in eighteen eighty five and raised on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
Speaker 1: She graduated from a finishing school and then Brynmore College. Afterwards,
Speaker 1: she came home hoping to start a career as a writer,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't going so well. Dorothy had written several stories,
Speaker 1: and she sent them to the Big News and literary
Speaker 1: magazine of the day called McClure's. They were rejected. Her
Speaker 1: family and friends were amused by her ambition to be
Speaker 1: a writer, since young women in her position weren't really
Speaker 1: encouraged to think about work, they didn't take her seriously,
Speaker 1: which of course upset her. She finally asks her dad
Speaker 1: if she can get an apartment in Greenwich Village so
Speaker 1: she'd have a place to write. But her parents simply
Speaker 1: want her to find a guy in their social circle
Speaker 1: and settle down to have kids and the life of
Speaker 1: an Upper east Side socialite. So dad says no way
Speaker 1: to the apartment, telling Dorothy a good writer can write anywhere.
Speaker 1: She keeps trying to make a go of her writing,
Speaker 1: but without any success. Now it's December to Wealth nineteen ten,
Speaker 1: a frigid Monday morning. Dorothy is dressed in a slim
Speaker 1: fitting dark blue coat and a black velvet hat. She
Speaker 1: tells her mother she's going shopping for a gown for
Speaker 1: her little sister's upcoming debutante ball. Now here's the first clue.
Speaker 1: She told a friend she was going shopping with her mother,
Speaker 1: but she told her mother that she didn't need to
Speaker 1: come with her. She'd rather shop alone. She didn't bring
Speaker 1: anything with her that would raise suspicion. No passport, no
Speaker 1: jewelry or extra clothing, just thirty dollars in cash, which
Speaker 1: is the equivalent of about one thousand dollars today. She
Speaker 1: does go shopping at several stores. She looks at dresses,
Speaker 1: but she doesn't buy one. She buys a book of
Speaker 1: short funny stories and jokes at a bookshop, and then
Speaker 1: a half pound box of chocolates at a candy shop.
Speaker 1: She puts both items on her father's accounts. Now, it's
Speaker 1: right around two o'clock in the afternoon by this time,
Speaker 1: and Dorothy meets a pal at the corner of twenty
Speaker 1: seventh Street and Fifth Avenue. The two have a fun
Speaker 1: chat about upcoming social events, and she tells her friend
Speaker 1: that she's going to take a walk through Central Park.
Speaker 1: As she heads home to East seventy ninth Street, she
Speaker 1: waves goodbye, and that's it. Dorothy Arnold disappears forever. Now
Speaker 1: what happens that evening? She's a no show for dinner.
Speaker 1: Her family starts to worry when she doesn't come home.
Speaker 1: By late evening. The family starts calling around to friends.
Speaker 1: No luck when she's still not home in the morning.
Speaker 1: They get serious, but they don't call the police. Her
Speaker 1: father hires a lawyer and a team of private investigators
Speaker 1: from the Pinkerton Agency. They actually don't get the police
Speaker 1: involved for six full weeks. Now that sounds kind of
Speaker 1: suspicious to us, but keep in mind it was a
Speaker 1: different time. But we take for granted that the first
Speaker 1: thing you would do would be to call the cops.
Speaker 1: But there was an attitude among elite types in those
Speaker 1: days that the police were used for criminals and drunk,
Speaker 1: not for fancy young heiresses that may have decided to
Speaker 1: drop out of society for a little while. The folks
Speaker 1: in the social register were exceptionally private, and once the
Speaker 1: police were involved, the muckraking press would start digging in,
Speaker 1: which would be socially devastating. Now, the problem is, the
Speaker 1: family's team of Pinkerton detectives got absolutely nowhere after six
Speaker 1: long weeks. So finally mister Arnold holds his nose and
Speaker 1: he calls the NYPD. There's a press conference on January
Speaker 1: twenty fifth, nineteen eleven. Her dad describes Dorothy as being
Speaker 1: five foot four, one hundred forty pounds, pretty and stylish.
Speaker 1: He says she was wearing an ankle length navy dress
Speaker 1: and coat and a velvet hat, her hair in a
Speaker 1: full pompadour. Mister Arnold then offers a reward of one
Speaker 1: thousand dollars that's almost thirty five thousand dollars today for
Speaker 1: any info on her whereabouts. That's when the press swoops
Speaker 1: in the next day, Dorothy's disappearance is on the front
Speaker 1: page of every newspaper, along with her photo. Everybody is speculating.
Speaker 1: The New York Times says her father is prostrated with
Speaker 1: grief and worry, and her mother on the verge of
Speaker 1: nervous collapse. The police don't suspect suicide or anything criminal.
Speaker 1: They think she's run away with a lover, pointing out
Speaker 1: that there's no trace of insanity in the family and
Speaker 1: the young woman has never shown signs of a troubled mind,
Speaker 1: although she's been devoted to books and speak several languages. Wow,
Speaker 1: that's horrifying, right, The paper goes on to say. It's
Speaker 1: troubling because miss Arnold was not of a secretive nature.
Speaker 1: Although she'd been admired by many young men. A family
Speaker 1: representative said she'd never been engaged as far as they
Speaker 1: knew anyway. It's not an easy case. By now again,
Speaker 1: it's been six weeks, and only then do the police
Speaker 1: get involved. Keep in mind this is at a time
Speaker 1: when it's incredibly easy to disappear. You just change your name,
Speaker 1: your clothes, in your hair style, and voila. You can
Speaker 1: fade into oblivion. But the press keeps digging. A bombshell
Speaker 1: arrives on February fifteenth via The Daily News. The paper
Speaker 1: says that the previous September, three months before she went missing,
Speaker 1: Dorothy had pawned some of her jewelry to pay for
Speaker 1: a week long rendezvous at a glamorous hotel in Boston.
Speaker 1: She had told her family she was visiting a girlfriend
Speaker 1: in Cambridge, but truth was Dorothy was meeting up with
Speaker 1: George Griscom, a forty year old unemployed bachelor from Pittsburgh.
Speaker 1: She'd apparently hooked up with him while at Bryne Moore,
Speaker 1: and after three years, was still secretly seeing him. Griscom
Speaker 1: wasn't much of a catch. He'd been engaged to another
Speaker 1: very young heiress who canceled their wedding the night before.
Speaker 1: Friends said he'd proposed to Dorothy as well, but her
Speaker 1: dad had put his foot down about that. When that
Speaker 1: story came out, the Arnolds denied every bit of it,
Speaker 1: but then came word that Dorothy's mother and older brother
Speaker 1: John had actually sailed to Europe weeks earlier to find
Speaker 1: Griscom and confront him. The paper's headline read Griscom licked
Speaker 1: by young Arnold in foreign hotel. For his part, Griscom
Speaker 1: said he knew nothing about Dorothy's disappearance and that he
Speaker 1: loved her and would marry her as soon as she
Speaker 1: turned up. Police were apparently comfortable with that. The more
Speaker 1: they dug into her past, the more complicated her life looked.
Speaker 1: She was supposed to marry Well, have a vibrant social
Speaker 1: and charitable life, and raise beautiful children who would also
Speaker 1: marry well, and so on. That's the way it was done.
Speaker 1: But that wasn't what she wanted. She wanted the bohemian
Speaker 1: life in Greenwich Village. She wanted to write, to travel,
Speaker 1: to take an older lover if she felt like it.
Speaker 1: There was a sort of heartbreaking letter to Griscom at
Speaker 1: one point, that's the boyfriend that shows her sadness, She wrote,
Speaker 1: McClure's has turned down my writing again. Failure stares me
Speaker 1: in the face. All I see ahead is a long
Speaker 1: road with no turning, and this part is chilling. She
Speaker 1: goes on to say, at least mother will always think
Speaker 1: an accident has happened. Her mother, by the way, spent
Speaker 1: the rest of her life believing Dorothy would eventually come home.
Speaker 1: There were other theories about what might have happened to her.
Speaker 1: Some thought she'd gone to a place in Pittsburgh, euphemistically
Speaker 1: referred to as a maternity hospital, the House of Mystery
Speaker 1: it was called, which was raided by cops. Turns out
Speaker 1: it was an illegal abortion clinic where a number of
Speaker 1: young women had died and been cremated in the basement.
Speaker 1: Dorothy's dad called that theory ridiculous, and there were other stories.
Speaker 1: There was talk she'd gotten pregnant and her parents had
Speaker 1: sent her to Switzerland so that there wouldn't be any scandal.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fourteen, an LA woman named Ellen Nevin said
Speaker 1: she was Dorothy, and she told the press, if you
Speaker 1: don't believe I'm Dorothy Arnold, ask my sister Marjorie. She'll
Speaker 1: know why my father doesn't answer my letters. By that time,
Speaker 1: Marjorie had gotten married, moved to Europe and actually didn't
Speaker 1: communicate with her family either. There were even tons of
Speaker 1: postcards allegedly from Dorothy, including one in Dorothy's handwriting that
Speaker 1: simply said I am safe. So the months, years and
Speaker 1: decades went on and no trace of Dorothy Arnold ever
Speaker 1: showed up where it is Her father spent a million
Speaker 1: dollars searching for her, although publicly he claimed until his
Speaker 1: death in nineteen twenty two that he believed she'd been
Speaker 1: kidnapped and murdered. The police maintained she'd probably run away
Speaker 1: to start a new life with a new name and
Speaker 1: a new hairdoo. A lot of us probably wish it
Speaker 1: was still that easy. Hope you like the Backstory with
Speaker 1: Patty Steele. Please leave a review. I would love it
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Speaker 1: you have a story you'd like me to cover. On Facebook,
Speaker 1: It's Patty Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele. I'm
Speaker 1: Patty Steele. The Backstories a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks,
Speaker 1: the Elvis Durand Group and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer
Speaker 1: is Doug Fraser. Our writer Jake Kushner. We have new
Speaker 1: episodes every Tuesday and Friday. Feel free to reach out
Speaker 1: to me with comments and even story suggestions on Instagram
Speaker 1: at real Patty Steele and on Facebook at Patty Steele.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the Backstory with Patty Steele, the
Speaker 1: pieces of history you didn't know you needed to know.