What happened to Dorothy Arnold, subject of America's oldest missing persons case?

Dorothy Arnold told her mother to stay home that December morning.

“I’ll give you a call,” she said, heading alone to New York to go dress shopping.

Walking down Fifth Avenue, she stopped at Park & ​​Tilford for chocolates and made her way through the icy streets to the Brentano Bookstore for Emily Calvin Blake's book. Sketches of engaged girls. She told a friend in passing that she would go home through Central Park.

It was December 12, 1910. No one saw Dorothy again.

The missing Upper East Side heiress has made headlines across the country. Forty years later, The temperature called the case “one of New York's greatest mysteries.”

Still unsolved, this is the oldest missing persons case included in the Charley Project, a database of more than 15,000 missing persons cases. More than a century later, the circumstances of her disappearance continue to fascinate and confound: was she kidnapped, murdered – or did she simply choose to leave one life for another?

Dorothy Harriet Camille Arnold, daughter of a wealthy perfume importer and niece of a Supreme Court justice, seemed – to outsiders – to have it all. But during her last months spent with her family, the 25-year-old single woman seemed to want something else: independence.

In the fall of 1910, the Bryn Mawr College literature graduate asked her father for permission to purchase her own apartment in Greenwich Village, an artists' paradise. But his father did not support him, according to American heritage“The Girl Who Never Came Back” in the 1960 magazine.

From her Upper East Side mansion, the Bryn Mawr College literature graduate wrote several short stories — “Poinsettia Flames” and “Lotus Leaves” — which she sent for publication. McClure Magazine rejected first. She apparently never got an answer the second time.

Dorothy often corresponded with George S. Griscom, Jr., her eldest, telling him in a letter of McClure rejection: “Failure is staring me in the face. All I see in front of me is a long road with no turns. And in a line that The National Geographic recently reported, allowed her mother to believe in her daughter's eventual return: “The mother will always think that an accident happened. »

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That December day, dressed in a blue skirt suit, her hair “in a very loose pompadour” under a black velvet hat with blue silk roses, Dorothy, police later said, according to The temperature: “wore a large flat black fox muff with white tips”, as well as “20 or 30 dollars, cards and possibly other papers of all kinds”.

In January, the New York police commissioner sent a letter “to the police in every major city and town,” according to The temperaturea set of “three excellent portraits of Miss Arnold, one in walking costume, the other in evening dress, and the third in bust.”

Police said they “searched thoroughly without result” for the 5-foot-4 woman with “dark brown hair, grayish blue eyes, fair complexion and beautiful color.” Additionally, “every steamboat bound for Europe was found and the passengers scrutinized.”

There have been erroneous sightings in Philadelphia, Muskegee, Oklahoma and San Antonio, Texas.

After discovering Dorothy's correspondence with Griscom, her mother and brother traveled to Italy, where, according to The temperaturethe family lawyer had “not denied” the information according to which the brother “had hit [Griscom] to the face with his fist and followed the explosion with another that floored Griscom,” securing his sister's letter, which Griscom had kept in his pocket.

Dorothy and Griscom had spent a week together in Boston just months before her disappearance. There, she pawned her jewelry worth $500 to a pawnbroker who then spoke to the press.

In a grisly end to this unknown story, two Pennsylvania doctors and a nurse were arrested in April 1914 for operating a private hospital providing abortions out of a house in Bellevue, Pennsylvania, in which “a table of operation and in the cellar two large furnaces”, according to The temperature. One of the doctors later claimed that Dorothy had been cremated, after a presumably botched abortion.

From the first weeks, Dorothy's father publicly stated that he believed his daughter was dead, but her descendants have recently stated The National Geographic that he spent $1 million on a search for his daughter that only resulted in his own death.

More than a decade after her disappearance on Fifth Avenue, the head of the city's Missing Persons Bureau announced that the case “had been solved” and that “Dorothy Arnold was no longer on the missing persons list.” But he recanted shortly after.

The family's lawyer responded in The temperature: “Dorothy's disappearance is as much a mystery today as the day she disappeared.”

And it remains that way.