The Disappearance of Dorothy Arnold

Unsolved disappearance of Dorothy Arnold

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1:57Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too. And we've got our sleuth suits on, which are really revealing, ultra-tight rubber suits. Gross. And the reason we're wearing our sleuth suits today is because this is a unsolved mystery edition of Stuff You Should Know. Yeah. I feel like we haven't done one of these in a little while. And this is sort of the, one of the original missing persons editions because I think this is the oldest missing persons case in New York City.

2:31Yeah. From what I understand, it is, too, which suggests that it's still on the books as an open investigation. Yeah. I mean, I guess that's the reveal. They haven't solved this one. No. Which, I mean, we kind of gave that away when I said it was an unsolved mystery edition. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Good point. Or, or are we just jerking everybody's chain right now? You'll have to listen all the way through to find out. That's right. This is the sad story of the mysterious disappearance of Dorothy Arnold, who was a New York socialite in the early 1900s who disappeared in 1910, never to be seen again.

3:11No. And one of the reasons why it's just so, it's still, you know, being talked about literally right now is because it is one of the most baffling disappearance cases I've ever heard of. Yeah. Like, there was, there is not a single shred of evidence that ever turned up that suggested what happened to her. Nothing. Every tip that came in, every suggestion, every idea, nothing ever panned out. She just vanished without a trace in the middle of, I think at the time, the busiest city in the world.

3:44Yeah. Should we get into it? Yeah.

A well-heeled New York family

3:48All right. Well, she was born, Dorothy Harriet Camille Arnold, and she was a rich kid from a very well-heeled family. She was a daughter of a perfume importer named Francis Arnold, and she had a lineage that goes back to the Mayflower. Her uncle was a Supreme Court justice, Rufus W. Peckham. And she studied literature in college at, how do you pronounce that, Bryn Mawr College? Mm-hmm. You nailed it. You've been brushing up on your Welsh.

4:19She fancied herself a writer, and as we'll see, it's not something her parents approved of. But yeah, she was living with her family uptown, right? Right. Yes, on East 79th Street. She lived two blocks down from where Emily Post would live a decade later. Fascinating. I thought it was kind of fascinating, too. It was almost like looking at a map of New York and just seeing two phantoms overlapping. Wow. Okay. Anyway, yeah, she lived in a mansion on East 79th. I think it's still there. I think it's 108 East 79th Street, and it is pretty well-heeled, and it was back then, too.

5:01Her family was well-to-do, like you said, well-connected New York society, but she was a bit of a black sheep of the family. She, like you said, fancied herself a writer, and she kind of wanted to go live a bohemian life in Greenwich Village. And I think in a good early reveal of her personality and how she grew up in, she asked her father, can I get an apartment in Greenwich Village? And he said, no. In no uncertain terms, no. And then he added a little chide in there, too. He's like, you want to be a writer? A writer should be able to write anywhere.

5:34And apparently her family was really mean about this ambition of hers because they wanted to knock it out of her so she would go get married and have kids and do what women were supposed to do back then. Yeah. I mean, she, you know, she even went so far as to submit stories. She submitted a couple of them for publication in McClure's magazine. They rejected one. We don't know about the other. But her family, like, literally made fun of her for doing this kind of thing such that she felt the need to keep it a secret moving forward.

6:05So she got a P.O. box so she could, you know, kind of have these secret correspondences when she submitted to magazines.

The day of the disappearance

6:11And that brings us to December, December 12th, specifically of 1910, the day she disappeared when she went dress shopping. She was going to go buy a dress for her sister's debutante ball and initially told a friend she was taking her mother, Mary, with her, but then told her mom, like, hey, I want to shop by myself. I'll let you know if I find a dress and you can check it out. And this is when we should probably mention that some people were saying that Mary wasn't in great health and she may not have been.

6:43But there were some sort of confusing aspects to that as we move forward. For sure. And I wonder if that's one of those things where it got people heard snippets over time and that got worked into later. Maybe. Yeah. Or maybe it was blown out of proportion. Who knows? For sure. But at any rate, she went by herself dress shopping and she had about $30 in cash, which is close to a grand today. And that was a quarter of her monthly allowance. She was all done up like a society 25 year old would be at the time.

7:16She looked like a Gibson girl. She had a Fox muffler, you know, for her hands, because this is December in New York, of course. And supposedly it was a beautiful day, but still quite cold. And she ended up walking 50 blocks down to 27th Street in the end, down Fifth Avenue. And she never stopped at a dress shop. She stopped at two other places. But as far as anyone's ever known, she didn't pop into any dress shop, even though that's supposedly what she had left to go do that morning. Yeah. And I also feel like that's one of those things.

7:49It's like she could have very well popped into dress shops and just and people had not known that she did that. It's possible. Because, you know, it's like an old case. So you have to sort of take some of these things with a grain of salt. She we do know that she didn't take like her passport and she left her jewels at home. So nothing was shady as in like, hey, she was about to go skip town or anything like that or try and go overseas because that would become, you know, some a theory at some point. Mm hmm. She bought chocolates and a book at another shop and charged it to her dad's account, which some people say may mean she was might have been looking to take a trip.

8:28But again, she also just might have wanted a book and some chocolates. Sure. But but yeah, I've seen it pointed out. Like if if you fly in an airplane today, you get a snack in the book and that's like what you do when you're going on a trip. Right. I mean, I've never done it, but you've seen people do it in movies, though. Sure. Sure. It's a thing. But like I said, this is where I think people like read so much into everything. Like she bought chocolates. So she was going on a steamer ship. Sure. And she bought chocolates, by the way, at Pilford and some bonbons.

9:01Isn't that the greatest name of a business you've ever heard? It's pretty good. So she runs into a friend and says, hey, you know, they kind of catch up a little bit. But she does mention one detail, which she was looking forward to, like some Christmas gift that was coming up. Another sort of clue that she wasn't like planning on skipping town or something. And she told the friend, like, I'm going to go through Central Park on the way home. And that was the last person to ever see her alive. Yeah. That was in, I think, the afternoon.

9:33Did you say about 2 p.m.? I did. So by the time dinner came, her family started to get worried because apparently she did not miss a meal without alerting her family that she wasn't going to be home for that meal. So that was very out of character for her. And then as night fell, they started to get worried enough that they gambled scandal by calling her friends and kind of surreptitiously asking if anybody had seen her without saying we haven't seen her outright. Because this was the time where, like, if an unmarried girl, 25, from a wealthy family was suddenly missing, that was scandalous.

10:12So her family had this on their mind throughout this entire disappearance. Yeah, for sure. And there was an actual case a couple of years before of a young woman who disappeared, again, from a well-heeled family. It turns out that she, like, ran away from home to be a waitress. And after a couple of days was like, waitressing stinks. She said nuts to that. I want to go back to my life as a socialite. But the parents had, like, put that out in the public eye. And then a lot of embarrassment was served up. So this, you know, they had reason to kind of, I guess, try and keep this under wraps initially, at least.

10:47One of the other explanations I saw that's a little more heartening is that if this got out and it did turn into a scandal, if, say, Dorothy was just off doing whatever, she might become so mortified at all of the negative attention that she might not want to come back to her old life because she would have to face such crazy social repercussions that she just might stay away. So there were a few reasons to kind of be cagey about it. And one of the first cagey things they did was after calling her friends and none of them had seen her, one of her friends called back just to check on her around midnight.

11:25And her mom told the friend, oh, she got back home. She's fine. She has a headache and went straight to bed and just completely live. That's just not the case. But that was that was something that I think a lot of people in retrospect, too, are like, did that family know something for my two cents? The family did not know anything and they were as in the in the dark as anybody else about what happened to her. So they decided to get someone on the case, not the police yet, but they called an attorney, a friend of theirs named John Keith and said, hey, this is what's going on.

12:01Like, what can you do to help us? I guess he had, you know, I guess he seemed like a person that they thought could help at the time he came over, started doing a little, I guess, lawyer like investigation and found some letters in her room, saw that some papers had been burned in the fireplace that the family all thought was like, hey, this is that story that got rejected for McClure's that she is getting rid of. So, again, a bit of a leap, but he helped him out, you know, like, let's call the morgue, let's call the hospitals, let's call some jails.

12:35And eventually he was like, listen, get a Pinkerton detective on this thing because they can be quite discreet as well. And so they did that and then started reaching out to, I think, through the Pinkerton guy to other cities nearby, like basically anyone that she had ever known that lived in another town they were trying to get in touch with to see if they knew anything at all. Yeah. And to a person, they were like, I haven't seen her, you know.

Police involvement and public reveal

13:00And then finally, 10 days after she went missing, they went to the cops. They went straight to the deputy police commissioner, William J. Flynn. And Flynn, knowing that he was dealing with a really affluent, influential New York family, he did his best and he was successful at keeping this under wraps, again, to avoid scandal. Yet he issued what is called a silent alarm, which is basically like you're letting the cops know, but also do not tell the press about this kind of thing. So the cops started looking for her from December 22nd on.

13:33And I think for a full month, Flynn and the cops kept it under wraps and kept it out of the public that Dorothy was missing. And I didn't see anywhere, like, how did they explain her absence to, like, friends? Or, like, I think Marjorie's debutante ball was, like, five days after she was missing. I'm sure they kept that, you know, they had no reason publicly to postpone that. So how did they explain Dorothy's absence? I was just curious about that. I couldn't find it anywhere. Yeah.

14:03Who knows? That 10 days is certainly probably a dumb thing to do if you're trying to find your daughter. For sure. Successfully. But, yeah, that's what they did. They waited 10 days for the cops. And then even longer to eventually go public on January 25th. The cops were like, hey, listen, you got to get the public's help here. And they held a press conference. They let everyone know what happened, offered a $1,000 reward. And all of a sudden, the New York Times has picked up this story under the heading, niece of Peckham, strangely missing, which was the Supreme Court justice.

14:39So, you know, initially tying her to, you know, a Supreme Court justice, obviously just a grabby headline, I think, probably. Sure. Yeah. I guess he was well known enough that you could even say him by his, call him by his last name. Yeah. The Pexter, I think, is what most people called him. Should we take a break? Yeah, sure. All right. We'll take a break. It's out in the news and in the public. And we'll come back right after this. First thought is like, wow, now we're going to do all this.

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17:16Hey, Chuck. YouTube Premium has become one of those things that makes your everyday YouTube experience a little better, especially if you're a dog owner. Because if you wanted to go find out more about how to train your dog, all you have to do is go on to YouTube Premium, type in dog training videos, and sit back and learn. Yeah, between Gibson and Momo, we're constantly looking up something dog-related, like when Gibson suddenly decided barking at the mailman was his full-time job. Yeah, or Momo likes to chew things a lot. And sometimes it's not always things that she should be chewing.

17:47Yeah, so naturally, YouTube is one of the first places someone might use for training tips. Everything from stopping barking and jumping to getting maybe a little bit better at walking on a leash. But what about dog nutrition, too? You got to know about that these days. And there's an endless world of videos about dog nutrition on YouTube Premium. What foods are actually safe? Is homemade dog food a good idea? Yeah, I mean, look at this one right here. This is veterinarian approved. And look at this lady. Her name is Dr. Wolf. Are you kidding me? So YouTube has a ton of creators, not just Dr. Wolf,

18:18who can help you learn a lot more and make everyday pet parent decisions feel a little less overwhelming. Yeah, I mean, that's where YouTube Premium really comes in. It takes something you already love, which is YouTube, it makes it even better because you get an enhanced, supercharged YouTube experience. It's got benefits that make it easier to enjoy the content and creators that you're into whenever and wherever you need them. Well, and now here we are watching guilty dog videos, which is my guilty pleasure. Look at these guys. Yeah, I know. I feel guilty watching them, but you just can't look away. It's too adorable and sad.

18:48I know. Poor buddies. And since YouTube Premium has ad-free viewing, we can watch guilty dog videos uninterrupted. Plus, background play means we can keep listening to those poor guilty dogs with our screen locked, which is pretty handy when you're walking the dog, right? That's right. And with offline downloads, you can save videos ahead of time, which is awesome, and access them even when you don't have Wi-Fi. So if you like YouTube, you'll love Premium. Whether you're figuring out the latest weird dog behavior or looking for something useful for your next walk or maybe just indulging in your guilty pleasure, guilty dog videos,

19:20YouTube Premium makes the whole experience more seamless. Sign up now for your free trial. Terms and conditions apply. We learned so much stuff from Josh and Chuck. Stuff you should know.

The investigation and secret romance

19:41Okay, Chuck, so we're back. And Dorothy's missing. This is pretty early in the investigation. January 25th is where we reached. And initially, the police were reported to basically think that Dorothy just ran off, that she went off to get married. One of the clues that actually panned out to nothing was like a sheath of brochures for ocean liners, which suggested strongly that she had planned or intended to like run off and probably run off with a bow.

20:13That's why most people ran off at the time. And the family was like, we don't believe that at all. We just absolutely don't think that. So there was this constant disagreement with the cops publicly saying we think she's alive and just ran off and the family saying she just would not do that to us. We think she's dead, actually. And, you know, the rumor mill is going to spread. The tabloids are going to pick it up. So, of course, they were suggesting everything from eloping to dying by suicide to being like the family knows that there was a crime,

20:47like that she was murdered or kidnapped or something. And they're just trying to keep it quiet because they're a rich and powerful family. And obviously, false reportings of sightings come in. Fake ransom letters start coming in. And this is all the reason why the family didn't want this to go public, because that's the kind of thing that comes along with it. For sure. But finally, the last week of January, reporters basically were hearing from people involved in the case that it was going to be solved and that she was seen in the city recently.

21:20So this happened a couple of times where they were like a report came out that like, yeah, we basically know where she is. She's coming home. And it never amounted to anything. No, no, for sure. And very interestingly, if you read some of the headlines covering Savannah Guthrie's mother's disappearance, there's a lot of like someone spotted her. They think she's coming home. Like that's it seems to be pretty standard that the press will just print whatever somebody says, you know. So the investigation, not just for her whereabouts, but into her background, looking for any kind of clue like those ocean liner brochures to figure out where she went, what happened to her.

22:03It turned up just zip, right? Like no friend came forward and said, hey, she actually had a secret life. She was seeing this guy no one knows about or bank accounts that her family didn't know about. None of those turned up. She was like a – she seems to have been the person that she appeared to be on the surface. She wasn't hiding a secret life or anything like that. She was very loyal to her family. She listened to what her father told her to do. And like she wasn't troubled.

22:33She didn't have a lot of stuff on her mind. And the worst thing that had happened to her, and it does seem to have been significant, was being rejected by McClure's. Yeah. And I think also her family making fun of her probably weighed on her more than she let on. But nothing was coming up. And it's not like those ocean liners, like her family's like, no, she didn't run off and that's where that lead went. And they got in touch with every ocean liner going to Europe at the time to see if anyone on board matched her description or was in their register under her name.

23:05And again, nada. Nothing turned up. So every lead that they had just completely went nowhere. Yeah, and, you know, poor Francis, the father is like he's telling reporters out loud that he he thinks that she's dead. The police, you know, or at least the police and the public are like, there's no body. So she's probably still out there somewhere. But the family was like, no, she probably was just disposed of in a way where they haven't found this body. In February, I think February 7th, the Times reported that police in New York and Philly weren't even working on the case anymore.

23:44And, you know, basically like, hey, the family knows where she is. Again, she's about to return any day now. And in that story from the Times, it was I think that they said the previous day that Francis, the father, had gotten a supposedly at least gotten a postcard that said, I am safe in her handwriting. But the family basically was like, no, this is a joke. Somebody saw her handwriting and a letter that they had published in the newspaper. And again, it's just somebody messing around with us.

24:16Yeah, which is pretty cruel. Of course. Imagine also being the kind of person who's like, here's an heiress disappearing and thinking, now's my chance. I'm going to send a fake ransom letter and hope for the best. Yeah. If you're sending fake ransom letters to people whose loved one has disappeared, you should stop and reevaluate your life, I think, is a good rule of thumb. Hey, we usually don't like to tell people what to do. Oh, yeah, I don't mean to get preachy. I can get behind that. Okay. So something that you had said was that it's kind of up in the air whether her mother Mary's health was delicate, I guess.

24:56Yeah. And her father told the press, like, her mom's off limits. She's at a rest home in New Jersey. She's about to have a nervous breakdown. Just leave her alone. And the press left her alone. They didn't search for her. But she turned up anyway, not in New Jersey. She turned up in Italy. And the reason she was in Italy, as we'll see, is because she and her son, John, went looking for a man named George S. Griscom, Jr., a.k.a. Jr., because the family already knew.

25:30But it turned out that as a big reveal to the public, she had a secret romance with this guy who was 15 years older than her. Yeah, this kind of came about because there was a reporter early on interviewing the father and said, like, hey, did she run off because you don't let her date? Because that's a thing. And the dad said, I would have been glad to see her associate with more young men than she did, especially some young men of brains and position, one whose profession or business would keep them occupied. I don't approve of young men who have nothing to do.

26:03And the reporter was like, well, that's a really weirdly specific thing to say. And so the reporters tracked down this information about Junior, who – how old was she, 25? So this made him 40 years old. He went to Harvard, which is like, that's great, from a wealthy family, that's great. But he was 40 years old and unemployed and living with his parents still, had been engaged to another heiress that broke – she had broken off the engagement the night before the wedding.

26:34Never a good sign. He had proposed to Dorothy already. But Francis, the dad, was like, no, you're not marrying my daughter. And so all of a sudden, there's this secret romance exposed where they learn that she had a little illicit fling with him in Cambridge. She was like, I'm going to go visit a college friend down there. But what really happened was she went down there to have a little fling with Junior. And, like, it looks like pawned some jewelry in order to finance this thing. Yeah, $500 in 1910 money for $60.

27:08And a lot of people are like, good, there you go. She ran off to Boston with the guy. There's another – there's more nuance to it that I think also shows Dorothy's personality. Number one, they didn't stay at the same hotel. She registered at the Lenox while George stayed at the Essex. So even, like, during this rendezvous, she still was – she still had propriety, I guess. And then second, she registered at the Lenox under her name. No alias. At the time, you would put your address down. She put her actual address in New York.

27:41So, like, she wasn't – she didn't show any signs of being this person who could, like, keep a secret life or something like that. The one time she had the chance to, like, perform in secret, she didn't. She just was herself. Yeah. See, I read that more as not she's trying to be proper, but that she wanted to have two different hotels to cover her tracks. But why would she register in her real name then? Because she went down there to see a friend.

28:12Okay. Like, there was nothing secret about that. She has her story. Like, yeah, I went and stayed at the Lenox and saw my friend. And no one at that hotel will say you saw me with some dude because that happened at the other hotel. Okay. All right. Fair enough. Under his name. That's at least the way I read it. Okay. Yeah. That's fine. That's fine, Chuck. We can all have different opinions. I appreciate that. So, let's see. We have established that Junior was a planetismal. He never formed a full planet.

28:42And the reason that he was in Italy was because he was on vacation with his parents, his elderly parents. I think they were probably in their 60s at the time, which was super old in 1910. And George Griscom, when he turned up, when he became, like, I guess a person, a part of this whole disappearance, he started, like, he kind of added a whole new dynamic. The family did not like him at all. And, in fact, when Mary and John confronted him in Italy, John beat him up.

29:16He knocked him down. He reached into his coat pocket and took some letters that Dorothy had mailed to him. Like, they didn't like George Griscom at all. But if you read some of the stuff that George Griscom did, he really seems to have been genuinely concerned that Dorothy was missing, so much so that he came home early to kind of try to help aid in the search for her, despite her family saying, we don't want your help. Stay away. Yeah, for sure.

29:47Jumping back, though, on the Monday after Thanksgiving, they learned that she had gone to the post office, that P.O. box that she had set up in secret, and gotten a bunch of letters that were apparently had come from overseas. And everyone basically presumes that they were from Griscom while he was over there in Europe. Sure. And there was a letter that he shared publicly later on where she wrote to him talking about, you know, how much it hurt her to have that story rejected. And she said, failure stares me in the face.

30:17All I see ahead is a long road with no turning. And then this weird line, she said, mother will always think an accident has happened. Yeah, and I didn't see anywhere that Griscom tried to explain that when he revealed that letter to the press. Yeah, I don't know what that means. I don't think anybody knows what she meant specifically. Yeah. It's weird. And it is very chilling. It definitely supports the suicide theory for sure. Yeah. So should we take our second break and come back and talk a little more about stuff they turned up on Dorothy?

30:50Yeah, let's do it.

31:02Hey, Chuck. YouTube Premium has become one of those things that makes your everyday YouTube experience a little better, especially if you're a dog owner. Because if you wanted to go find out more about how to train your dog, all you have to do is go on to YouTube Premium, type in dog training videos, and sit back and learn. Yeah, between Gibson and Momo, we're constantly looking up something dog-related, like when Gibson suddenly decided barking at the mailman was his full-time job. Yeah, or Momo likes to chew things a lot, and sometimes it's not always things that she should be chewing.

31:35Yeah, so naturally, YouTube is one of the first places someone might use for training tips. Everything from stopping barking and jumping to getting maybe a little bit better at walking on a leash. But what about dog nutrition, too? You got to know about that these days. And there's an endless world of videos about dog nutrition on YouTube Premium. What foods are actually safe? Is homemade dog food a good idea? Yeah, I mean, look at this one right here. This is veterinarian approved, and look at this lady. Her name is Dr. Wolf. Are you kidding me? So YouTube has a ton of creators, not just Dr. Wolf, who can help you learn a lot more and make everyday pet parent decisions feel a little less overwhelming.

32:11Yeah, I mean, that's where YouTube Premium really comes in. It takes something you already love, which is YouTube, and makes it even better because you get an enhanced, supercharged YouTube experience. It's got benefits that make it easier to enjoy the content and creators that you're into whenever and wherever you need them. Well, and now here we are watching guilty dog videos, which is my guilty pleasure. Look at these guys. Yeah, I know. I feel guilty watching them, but you just can't look away. It's too adorable and sad. I know. Poor buddies. And since YouTube Premium has ad-free viewing, we can watch guilty dog videos uninterrupted.

32:42Plus, background play means we can keep listening to those poor guilty dogs with our screen locked, which is pretty handy when you're walking the dog, right? That's right. And with offline downloads, you can save videos ahead of time, which is awesome, and access them even when you don't have Wi-Fi. So, if you like YouTube, you'll love Premium. Whether you're figuring out the latest weird dog behavior or looking for something useful for your next walk or maybe just indulging in your guilty pleasure, guilty dog videos, YouTube Premium makes the whole experience more seamless. Sign up now for your free trial. Terms and conditions apply.

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35:34We learned so much stuff from Josh and Chuck. Stuff you should know.

George Griscom returns from Italy

35:44All right. So, when we left you, I think Griscom had just come back from Italy. This is February 9th. He comes back and the reporters obviously are all over him. And he was like, hey, listen, I'm here to help find her. Like, you know, I loved her. Like, I want to find her. And he changed his story a bit here and there, though, which is a little fishy. Sometimes his story was that they were engaged. Sometimes his story was that they were just really good friends. He said at one point that he said, hey, there's at least one family member that knows where she is and she's going to be back soon and we're going to get married when she gets back.

36:24So, another time where someone publicly said, like, yeah, we know she's coming back. Yeah. And one of the other things, so, like I said, he added some new, like, component to the whole thing. He was a foil to the family in a lot of ways because when John beat him up and took those letters in Italy, the police were like, hey, can we see those letters and see if there's any clues in them? And John said they've already been destroyed. There's nothing of consequence in there. But her family was also very much convinced that she was dead. So, it suggests that there was something in the letters that satisfied the family of her fate.

36:58But Griscom had the same letters, too. He knew of that same content and he wasn't satisfied that she was dead. So, like him being there, like, I think really helps make this case the way it is that it's just so baffling because he acts as an answer, an antidote to a lot of the assumptions you can make when just looking at the family's actions. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, the press is asking him about these letters. They were like, hey, what about this one letter that she wrote where she said she was going to, quote, do something that may be cowardly?

37:37And he didn't even answer them and said, like, I promised her I wouldn't talk about this kind of thing when she wrote me this stuff. He said, I had a long talk with her mom in Europe. I agreed to do certain things to help you guys. He dodged questions about John beating him up. And then started running, like, his own personal ads in the paper, like trying to find her. Yeah. So this is at least the third parallel investigation into her disappearance that Griscom has now undertaken. Although I get the impression that his was a little slapdash compared to the others.

38:10Yeah. Less investigation, maybe more just public show. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I hadn't gotten a good read on him. I did believe he was genuine, genuinely concerned. But, yes, he seemed to have been not not roundly liked by everybody. I mean, he had no job. What else has he got to do? Exactly. Exactly. So this was there was a worldwide search for her. I saw that every every city and town of consequence, their police station got, you know, an alert of be on the lookout with photos and descriptions and all that stuff.

38:44It was reported around the world. I found a paper in Tasmania that had a long story describing the disappearance the following July. Like, like it was everywhere for for a few years, as a matter of fact. But as with everything, interest waned, interest in new stuff kind of came along. But yet there's still plenty of reporting that pops up over the years. If you go on to newspapers dot com, shout out newspapers dot com for contemporary anious articles.

39:16Yeah. Like you can find them throughout the decades, just basically like what happened. And most of the time it doesn't add anything new, but it's just such a baffling case that somebody could say, oh, I haven't read about or I haven't written about Dorothy Arnold in a while. I'll do that for my call on this week. Yeah. So here are some of those stories right now.

Theories and hospital raids

39:38Four years later, in 1914, there was a story where police raided a hospital in Pittsburgh in a suburb of Pittsburgh that, you know, abortion was illegal. And so they it was one of those hospitals that offered kind of, you know, secret abortions. They were there to arrest people. They arrested two doctors and a nurse. And one of the doctors implied that Dorothy had died there, basically went in to get a got pregnant from Griscom is the assumption, went there to get an abortion, died there during the process and was cremated in the cellar.

40:12And some people noted that like Griscom could have traveled there. It wasn't too far away and it could, you know, people die during those procedures. But nothing ever came from that. No, but that is really random for one of the doctors to pipe up and say that. And it is clear that that some women did die during procedures and were cremated in the in the basement. I mean, that's a pretty that's a pretty likely possibility, right? Yeah, that could have been what happened. Yeah. Her family, of course, is like, no, that absolutely didn't happen.

40:44So did George Griscom. A couple of years after that, there was a prisoner in Rhode Island State Prison who said that years back he had been paid two hundred and fifty dollars to help dispose of a body of a woman. And he said that woman was one hundred percent Dorothy Arnold. Yeah. And as a matter of fact, you can find her in the cellar of this this house in West Point, New York. And the cops went and dug up the cellar of that house in West Point, New York and not only didn't find her, they found nothing. So the guy was just bored, I guess.

41:17So that went absolutely nowhere. Yeah. This one is really, really weird to me. In 1921, during like a public interview, I guess, the head of New York Police Department's Bureau of Missing Persons, it was a guy named Captain J.H. Ayers. He said the police department knew what happened to her a few months earlier. They figured it out basically and solved it and that they probably should not have mentioned the case as it was strictly confidential in the department. He wouldn't say whether she was alive or dead, but she was no longer a missing person.

41:51And the next day he was like, yeah, yeah, you know what? I was misquoted or I misspoke or whatever. And like, I guess nothing ever came from that either, which is just nuts. It is like that one's very weird. But again, nothing did come of it. Like you said, like even after all these years, it just seems to have died right there. And so those theories over the years, like you said, basically amount to murder, kidnapping, which eventually led to murder. And the murder theory was that she probably if she was murdered, it would have happened in Central Park in some lonely stretch where she was.

42:31You remember, she said she was about to walk home through Central Park. And they actually did have the reservoir dragged and no surprise, absolutely no evidence turned up from that. Just a few other bodies. I'm sure. I'm sure. But one of the things that I thought was pretty interesting, one of the theories is that she had amnesia. Yeah, I mean, there certainly have been cases where someone bonks their head and forgets who they are and starts a new life like that has happened. But again, you know, no evidence of this. This is people just kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall at this point, I think.

43:04Sure. What about the woman in Kansas City, though?

The Kansas City lookalike

43:07Because they found an almost dead ringer for her, which was very strange. It's nuts, isn't it? Yeah. I turned this up, I think, in a 1935 article from San Antonio. But there is a woman named Mrs. Anna Miller who is located in Kansas City. Enough reports of Dorothy Arnold sightings were coming out of Kansas City in the 30s that the New York Police Department actually traveled there to figure out what the heck was going on. And they found Anna Miller, who was said to be the wife of a movie projector operator.

43:41And, yes, she was a dead ringer for Dorothy Arnold. She had the same height, weight, same age, same facial characteristics. She had the same birthmark, which is really strange because it's a mole on her right leg three inches above the knee. That's quite a coincidence. And the coincidences kept building up. She told investigators, I actually used to live in New York. And they said, when? She said, well, I moved on December 12th, 1910, which is the day Dorothy Arnold went missing. She also had a Fifth Avenue fur and a Fifth Avenue muffler, which is kind of surprising for the wife of a movie projector operator in Kansas City.

44:20But somehow, some way, the police were satisfied that she was not actually Dorothy Arnold. Yeah. And this is one of those frustrating things where it's so long ago, there's no way to find any of these people or talk to him because the amnesia theory actually could fit with that. Yeah. That she bonked her head on the way home, slipped her something, and woke up, didn't know who she was, wandered off to Kansas City. Sure, as you do. With her stuff because, I don't know, birthmarks, that's pretty specific.

44:54It is. The thing is, is they searched hospitals. They searched the morgue. One of the reasons why it's not probable that she was misidentified or identified as Jane Doe is because not only did they search the morgue, people who knew what she looked like, coroners trained to spot, you know, like, this person seems like a well-to-do person. It's weird that they were found naked and dead. I'm going to look a little further into that. But, and they checked all the hospitals and there weren't any reports of any woman around that time showing up with amnesia.

45:28So, I don't know. The Ann Miller thing is quite weird. I agree with you. I mean, I'm going to go ahead and say it. I bet you that was probably her. Isn't that, that's so amazing though. So, if that's, and like she convinced them, I'm not Dorothy Arnold. If she actually did have amnesia and did not believe she was Dorothy Arnold, that's just even more amazing. Yeah. I mean, if that is the case, I guess the bright side is she lived a life in Kansas City that was hopefully satisfying to her being married to a projectionist.

46:00Yeah, for sure. And she, she got to keep her fur and her muffler too, which is nice. Well, John Keith, the attorney, basically believes that she took her own life because she was upset about, you know, not being able to live her life as a, as a bohemian writer in the Greenwich village. Uh, but then everyone else, all of her friends were like, no man, she did like, she was always in pretty good spirits. Like there was no indication of anything like that going on. Um, there's a historian named Sylvia Petem who has written about the case a lot.

46:33And she was leaning toward the, um, botched, uh, abortion procedure where she was died and cremated initially. Uh, but I think later on she just thinks like, no, she, I think she disappeared herself. Uh, because she wanted to get out of that, like out from under the thumb of that family. Yeah. And I mean, if she wanted to go live the bohemian life of a artist, a writer, she might not have needed all that much money to get started. You know?

47:03Yeah. Kansas City. It's a good place to do it. Right. One thing I saw that kind of contradicts that, you know, the idea that she was in good spirits. So it couldn't have been suicide is that, um, in a lot of cases, I don't know if it's typical. People who have decided to die by suicide the day before they do it or the day of, they're actually in good spirits. Yeah, that's true. They've decided, they've resolved. Yeah. And now there's some sort of hope of getting out of, of the situation that they're in. Yeah. Yeah, that's true.

Family aftermath and lost papers

47:32Uh, as far as her family's concerned, her dad, uh, spent about a dozen years and about a million bucks in 1920s dollars, uh, trying to find her. Uh, Mary Arnold died six years after, uh, she disappeared. And when she died, the New York Times identified her as Dorothy Arnold's mother. So she was kind of forever tagged with that. Yeah. And, you know, just like with all these cases over the years, there have been like fake letters of people claiming to be her or perhaps sightings of her.

48:02Uh, I think as late as even 1935, 25 years later, um, police said like people are still calling in tips about this case. For sure. It gets even weirder. Um, Dorothy's younger sister, remember the debutante Marjorie? She had a daughter named Rebecca and Rebecca became the heir to Dorothy's papers and letters. And Rebecca destroyed them. Yeah. I'm suspecting that she burned them. And so that even like the, the, the descendants today of the Arnold family have no idea what, what happened.

48:38Yeah. So if there was any evidence in those letters, like Rebecca knew and she took it to her grave, it's also just as likely that the letters are maybe a little embarrassing or, you know. Sure. Uh, they contain stuff that she didn't want her aunt to be remembered by or whatever. It's not necessarily that she was covering up something, you know, scandalous. Yeah. Or it could have just been like, she wants to, people to stop asking her. And the easy way to do that is to have nothing to offer, you know.

49:10She went, watch this and just started tearing them up. Yeah. Sad, uh, will clearly never be solved at this point, you know. I don't see how it could be. Yeah. Um, yeah. Well, RIP, I mean, certainly by this point, Dorothy Arnold, maybe Anna Miller. Um, and, uh, we hope that whatever the outcome was, it was either quick and painless or long and fulfilling. How about that? That's right. And a less lazy podcaster would be intrigued enough to do some more research on this, uh, Kansas City woman.

49:42Yes. But that's not me. No, same. No, we've got to move on to the next, right? That's right. Uh, well, if you wanted to go do some research on Anna Miller or Dorothy Arnold or anything like that, there's plenty out there on the internet just waiting for you. And, uh, in the meantime, we're going to go ahead and do listener mail.

Listener mail and movie corrections

50:05Uh, uh, kind of a funny correction. Hey guys, love the show. And I love it when my useless knowledge can help one of my favorite podcasts. Uh, on the social identity theory show, you guys referenced the classic movie, can't buy me love. However, when Josh referenced the quote, I'm pretty sure that quote and situation was from another Patrick Dempsey movie, the classic lover boy. Yeah, absolutely was. Yeah, I don't remember you saying that because I have not seen lover boy, so I would not have known is probably why I didn't say anything. Yeah, no, I didn't say it was lover boy. I was, I was mistaken, I guess.

50:36Yeah, yeah. It's weird. It feels weird. Yeah. Uh, can't buy me love is the example of social identity theory of the lawnmower boy pays for popularity with the cheerleader and the jocks, uh, who could beat a night of cards, chips, dips and dorks. It's a quote from the movie. Uh, lover boy is the story of the poor college boy getting extra cash for pizza delivery extras. Uh, I remember that movie, but I didn't see it. Did you see it? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, clearly. I guess I had a Patrick Dempsey thing when I was like 12. Yeah, you were early on the McDreamy train.

51:07Yeah. Well, those were cute little movies for sure. I don't know how they hold up, but I'm guessing they're probably still pretty good. Yeah. I can't buy me love is one of those fun ones that I want to show Ruby at some point until I remember that it was made in the 80s. And so there's just nudity for no reason. Oh, okay. All right. Not that, you know, we're not nude shaming in our house at all, but we're still not like showing her movies with nude scenes yet. You're not like elbowing her in the ribs, like check that out. No.

51:38No, no, no. So what are you waiting for? Like maybe 18 for Camp I'm Your Love? I don't know. We'll see. I'll let everyone know. How about this? I'll go back and watch it just for fun. Okay. And I'll let you know if there's any random nudity in it because I don't remember that. And remember, I was like 12 at the time, so I definitely would have remembered that. Oh, no. There was. I remember the exact scene. Really? Yeah. It's a very, has a very dumb, dumb line that Emily and I privately laugh at still. Oh, yeah. That I'll tell you about off mic.

52:08Okay. I can't wait to hear. Wow. I'm surprised at my 12-year-old self. All right. Thanks, guys. Keep up the great work from Alex Thompson. Thanks a lot, Alex. That was a great email. Appreciate it big time. And if you want to be like Alex and email us so that we can appreciate you big time, send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

52:30Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, and this new show features firsthand stories from people living with a rare disease. Hosted by Andrew Stratton, these perspectives highlight that life is more than a moment,

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