True crime is one of the most popular and most followed genres of media in the digital world today. Millions upon millions of people track murders, missing person cases, serial killer stories, and all sorts of other grisly things as they progress through the news. The stories of people vanishing into thin air are the most interesting and confusing of them all. How can it be that a person just disappears forever? Especially in this day and age—with digital tracking, technology, and cameras everywhere. Can you really just vanish?
However, in 1910, the world was a very different place. It was much easier to vanish back then. Just ask Dorothy Arnold—well, if you could ever find her. She was a young woman who vanished into thin air in New York City just a few days before Christmas that year. Sadly, she was never seen again. And now, her tale is the United States’ oldest unsolved missing persons case. In this list, we’ll look at ten fascinating, eerie, and unsettling facts about Dorothy’s disappearance and the century spent looking for her.
Related: 10 Inspiring Journeys in the Search for Missing Loved Ones
10 December Drama
It was the morning of December 12, 1910, and Dorothy Arnold told her mother to stay home in their New York City apartment. The heiress, who lived with her parents in their Upper East Side home, didn’t want her mom to go out in the cold and bother about anything. Dorothy had to do a bit of dress shopping for an upcoming party, so she told her mother that she’d get it done on her own. “I will telephone you,” she said to her mom and then left. That was the last time anyone in her family ever saw or heard from her again.
In the ensuing hours, Dorothy did indeed go dress shopping. Then, at some point later in the day, on the 12th, she saw a friend in the city. During their conversation, she told the friend that she would be returning home through Central Park. But after the friend’s confirmed sighting, Dorothy simply vanished. Nobody ever definitively saw or heard from her again.
Decades later, the case still burned in people’s minds. And today, among the Charley Project’s more than 15,000 missing person cases, it is still the oldest unsolved one in the database. But what happened? Was she kidnapped? Or murdered? Or did she leave of her own accord and start a new life under an assumed identity?[1]
9 Lockdown Living
Her full name was Dorothy Harriet Camille Arnold, and she was the adult daughter of a wealthy perfume importer named Francis. She was also the niece of a Supreme Court justice and lived her entire life in the lap of luxury. So, to say that Dorothy was sheltered and well cared for growing up is putting it very mildly. To outsiders, the unmarried 25-year-old appeared to have everything she could have wanted and then some. But to family members, it was clear that she very badly wanted something else: her independence.
In the fall of 1910, just a few months before she disappeared, Dorothy asked her father if she could get her own apartment in Greenwich Village. The area was then an up-and-coming haven for artists and writers, and she wanted to live there. Unfortunately for Dorothy, her father was not very supportive of the idea. He didn’t want his adult daughter living with a bunch of layabouts. So he turned her down. In turn, it left the Bryn Mawr College graduate to dream about the writer’s life she so badly wanted but couldn’t have.[2]
8 The Writer’s Life
While living in her family’s Upper East Side mansion, Dorothy busied herself by writing several short stories. Those included titles such as “Poinsettia Flames” and “Lotus Leaves.” She sent them out for publication, but she didn’t have much success. McClure’s Magazine straight-up rejected the first title, which made her upset. Even worse, she never heard back from any magazine about possibly publishing the second one.
Distraught, Dorothy turned to her friends. Most notably, that meant corresponding often with an older man with whom she’d become well acquainted, George S. Griscom, Jr. She lamented the unfortunate McClure’s Magazine rejection in one particularly somber letter to him. “Failure stares me in the face,” she wrote. “All I see ahead is a long road with no turning.”
If that wasn’t bad enough, another letter written later by Dorothy to Griscom was even more chilling, considering what would happen in December: “Mother will always think an accident has happened.”[3]
7 Gone Girl
On the morning of December 12, 1910—the day that would live in infamy as the last one when anybody saw any confirmed trace of Dorothy—she rose early and dressed herself in a blue skirt suit. She put her hair up in what was later called “a very full pompadour,” as was the style at the time. Then, she added a black velvet hat with blue silk roses to top it off. Cops later said she was carrying “a large black fox flat muff with white points” as she left the house. She also had somewhere between $20 and $30 (roughly between $650 and $950 today) and other papers of various kinds.
Dorothy walked straight down Fifth Avenue for her morning errands. She stopped at Park & Tilford first, buying some chocolates. Then, she carefully made her way down the icy streets to Brentano’s Bookstore. There, she bought author Emily Calvin Blake’s short story anthology “Engaged Girl Sketches.” She saw that aforementioned friend, told her she would be walking home through Central Park, and then vanished. After the bookstore and the impromptu friend meeting, no one else could definitively confirm that they had seen Dorothy. It was as if she’d disappeared into thin air.[4]
6 Looking Everywhere
The next few weeks were a madhouse of uncertainty and frantic searching. Police were slow on the uptake since Dorothy was an adult of apparently sound mind and could do what she wanted. But her family knew something was up, and they began looking around frantically. It helped that they had nearly endless money at their disposal, too.
However, even with incredible resources, they had no luck finding her. By early January, police officials in New York had finally stepped in. They sent photos and descriptions of Dorothy that were mailed “to the police of every city and town of consequence” around the country, per the New York Times.
Because Dorothy was from a well-to-do family, there were multiple recent and excellent portraits of her. Per the newspaper, “three excellent portraits of Miss Arnold, one in walking costume, another in evening dress, and the third a bust portrait” were sent to police stations and law enforcement officers nationwide. Furthermore, every single steamship bound for Europe was traced and searched for signs of Dorothy, and the passengers were carefully scrutinized.
The search turned up several mistaken sightings. People in places as far-flung as Philadelphia, San Antonio, and even Muskogee, Oklahoma, thought they saw her. They were false positives, though. It seemed as though Dorothy had simply vanished.[5]
5 A Break?
Weeks after Dorothy disappeared, her mother uncovered her correspondence with Griscom. After that, her mother and brother traveled to Italy to search for the missing woman. There, the two apparently had some kind of altercation with Griscom. One newspaper account reported that the family’s lawyer “had not denied” rumors that the brother got into a physical fight with Griscom!
As the report went, the brother supposedly “struck [Griscom] in the face with his fist and followed the blow up with another that floored Griscom.” In turn, the brother secured a letter from Dorothy that Griscom had kept with him in the hopes of finding out where she’d gone.
Now, it was true that Dorothy and Griscom had spent at least a week together in Boston just a few months before she turned up missing. When she was there, she even decided to pawn more than $500 worth of her jewelry (which comes out to more than $16,000 today) for an unknown reason.
A Boston pawnbroker later confirmed that she’d come in and sold off her jewelry to him. But nobody could figure out with certainty why she’d done that or how deep her relationship with Griscom really went.[6]
4 A Grisly Fate
A grisly ending to Dorothy’s story would possibly come nearly four full years later. In April 1914, two doctors and a nurse in Pennsylvania were arrested and charged with operating a private hospital that was offering discreet abortions. The abortions were allegedly taking place inside a home in the city of Bellevue, Pennsylvania, which is just northwest of Pittsburgh on the far western side of the state. According to cops who spoke to reporters about the arrest, they found an operating table inside the home’s cellar, along with two large furnaces.
Those furnaces were particularly noteworthy to the police, who worried that the doctors had used them to cremate the remains of women who came there for back-alley abortions but died during the procedures. That suspicion only grew even stronger after one of the doctors later claimed to cops that Dorothy had shown up for an abortion, died on the operating table, and was cremated quickly to get rid of the evidence. Cops could never confirm if that claim was true, but it certainly sent her family and loved ones into shock.[7]
3 A Father’s Worry
Even though Dorothy’s mother had held out hope for a long time that her daughter might still be alive, her father knew better from pretty much the very start of the situation. Not long after she disappeared, and even before the calendar turned from 1910 to 1911, Francis openly lamented that he thought his daughter was dead. He knew the worst had probably happened to her when she failed to come home to her cushy life on the Upper East Side. And whether it was a kidnapping and murder situation or a back-alley abortion gone wrong, fate wasn’t likely to be on her side.
That’s not to say Francis didn’t try his best to figure out what happened to her, though. And he certainly had ample resources to do it. In the first few months after her disappearance, newspapers reported that he spent upward of $250,000 searching for his daughter using private investigators and all kinds of means of looking around.
Years later, descendants of the family claimed that Francis spent as much as $1 million during the last years of his life searching for Dorothy. Sadly, he went to his grave without ever knowing what had happened to her.[8]
2 Case Closed?
The case was abruptly closed—for about a day, at least—about a decade after Dorothy disappeared off Fifth Avenue. One afternoon, the leader of New York City’s Bureau of Missing Persons held a panel discussion for a group of local residents. During the course of that discussion about various missing persons cases, he abruptly said that Dorothy Arnold’s “case has been solved” and that the woman “is no longer listed as a missing person.”
That sent immediate shockwaves through the city. Newspaper reporters picked up on the story, wondering if they’d missed a major update. The Arnold family was gobsmacked by the admission, too. Not even 24 hours later, though, the bureau chief recanted his statement.
In short order, the family confirmed as much to the New York Times, saying: “The disappearance of Dorothy is as much of a mystery today as the day she disappeared.” So, what was the bureau chief talking about? Did he mean that cops more or less assumed they knew what had happened to Dorothy, even if they couldn’t officially close the case? Was there much more there than he was letting on? Sadly, no further explanations were forthcoming.[9]
1 The Family’s Bleak Future
In the end, Francis Arnold believed that Dorothy had been kidnapped—and that she’d been murdered on the day she was taken, or possibly very soon after. He died twelve years later, on April 6, 1922. He went to death, not knowing anything about his daughter’s fate. He also intentionally made no provisions for Dorothy in his substantial will, as he was convinced that she was not alive and wouldn’t be turning up after that.
As for Dorothy’s mother, Mary, the last family member to see her alive when she left their Upper East Side home on that fateful December day in 1910, she maintained more optimism. Mary lived the rest of her life, hoping that Dorothy was alive somehow. Sadly, on December 29, 1928, Mary passed away without any answers either.
Family friends waited until after Mary’s death to drop the bomb on the world: it was their belief that Dorothy had committed suicide after becoming despondent over her failed writing career. That was a theory, too, though. Ultimately, nobody could say for certain what happened to the young women. And to this day, the mystery of Dorothy Arnold remains one for the ages.[10]