VII

DOROTHY ARNOLD

On the afternoon of Monday, December 12, 1910, a young woman of the upper social world vanished from the pavement of Fifth Avenue. Not only did she disappear from the center of one of the busiest streets on earth, at the sunniest hour of a brilliant winter afternoon, with thousands within sight and reach, with men and women who knew her at every side, and with officers of the law thickly strewn about her path; but she went without discernible motives, without preparation, and, so far as the public has ever been permitted to read, without leaving the dimmest clew to her possible destination.

These are the peculiarities which mark the Dorothy Arnold case as one of the most irritating puzzles of modern police history, a true mystery of the missing.

It is one of the maxims in the administration of absent-persons bureaus that disappearing men and women, no matter how carefully they may plan, regardless of all natural astuteness, invariably leave behind some token of their premeditation. Similarly, it is a truism that, barring purposeful self-occultation, the departure of an adult human being from so crowded a thoroughfare can be set down only to abduction or to mnemonic aberration. Remembering that a crime must have its motivation, and that cases of amnesia almost always are marked by previous symptoms and by fairly early recovery, the recondite and baffling aspects of this affair become manifest; for there was never the least hint of a ransom demand, and the girl who vanished was conspicuous for rugged physical and mental health.

Thus, to sum up the affair, a disappearance which had from the beginning no standing in rationality, being logically both impenetrable and irreconcilable, remains, at the end of nearly a score of years, as obstinate and perplexing as ever—publicly a gall to human curiosity, an impossible problem for reason and analytical power.

Dorothy Arnold was past twenty-five when she walked out of her father’s house into darkness that shining winter’s day. She was at the summit of her youth, rich, socially preferred, blessed with prospects, and to every outer eye, uncloudedly happy. Her father, a wealthy importer of perfumes, occupied a dignified house on East Seventy-ninth Street, in the center of one of the best residential districts, with his wife and four children—two sons and two daughters. Mr. Arnold’s sister was the wife of Justice Peckham of the United States Supreme Court, and the entire family was socially well known in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York. His missing daughter had been educated at Bryn Mawr and figured prominently in the activities of “the younger set” in all these cities. All descriptions set her down as having been active, cheerful, intelligent, and talented.

The accepted story is that Miss Arnold left her father’s home at about half past eleven on the morning of her disappearance, apparently to go shopping for an evening gown. She appears to have had an appointment with a girl friend, which she broke earlier in the morning, saying that she was to go shopping with her mother. A few minutes before she left the house, the young woman went to her mother’s room and said she was going out to look for the dress. Her mother remarked that if her daughter would wait till she might finish dressing, she would go along. The girl demurred quietly, saying that it wasn’t worth the bother, and that she would telephone if she found anything to her liking. So far as her parent could make out, the girl was not anxious to be alone. She was no more than casual and seemed especially happy and well.

At noon, half an hour after she had left her home, Miss Arnold went into a shop at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, where she bought a box of candy and had it charged on her father’s account. At about half past one she was at Brentano’s bookshop, Twenty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue. Here she bought a volume of fiction, also charging the item to her father.

Whether she was recognized again at a later hour is in doubt. She met a girl chum and her mother in the street some time during the early part of the afternoon and stopped to gossip for a few moments; but whether this incident occurred just before or after her visit to the bookstore could not be made certain. At any rate, she was not seen later than two o’clock.

When the young woman failed to appear at home for dinner, there was a little irritation, but no concern. Her family decided that she had probably come across friends and forgotten to telephone her intention of dining out. But when midnight came, and there was still no word from the young woman, her father began to feel uneasy and communicated by telephone with the homes of various friends, where his daughter might have been visiting. When he failed to discover her in this way, Mr. Arnold consulted with his personal attorney, and a search was begun.

The reader is asked to note that there was no public announcement of the young woman’s absence for more than six weeks. Just why it was considered wise to proceed discreetly and privately cannot be more than surmised. This action on the part of her family has always been considered suggestive of a well-defined suspicion and a determination to prevent its publication. At any rate, it was not until January 26, that revelation was made to the newspapers, at the strong urging of W. J. Flynn, then in charge of the New York detectives.

In those six weeks, however, there had been no idleness. As soon as it was apparent that the girl could not be merely visiting, private detectives were summoned, and a formal quest begun. Her room and its contents revealed nothing of a positive character. She had left the house in a dark-blue tailored suit, small velvet hat and street shoes, carrying a silver-fox muff and satin bag, probably containing less than thirty dollars in money. Her checkbook had been left behind; nor had there been any recent withdrawals of uncommon amounts. No part of the girl’s clothing had been packed or taken along; none of her more valuable jewelry was missing; no letter had been left, and nothing pointed to preparation of any sort.

A search of her correspondence revealed, however, a packet of letters from a man of a well-known family in another city. When, somewhat later, Mr. Arnold was summoned by the district attorney and asked to produce the letters, he swore that they had been destroyed, but added that they contained nothing of significance.

It developed, too, that, while her parents were in Maine in the preceding autumn, Dorothy Arnold had gone to Boston on the pretext of visiting a school chum, resident in the university suburb of Cambridge; whereas she had actually stopped at a Boston hotel and had pawned about five hundred dollars’ worth of personal jewelry with a local lender, taking no trouble, however to conceal her name or home address. It was shown that the man of the letters was registered at another Boston hotel on the day of Dorothy’s visit; but he denied having seen her or been with her on this occasion, and there was no way of proving to the contrary. The date of this Boston visit was September 23, about two and a half months before Miss Arnold’s disappearance. The police were never able to establish any connection between the Boston visit, the pawning of the jewels, and the subsequent events, so that the reader must rely at this point upon his own conjecture.

Before the public was made acquainted with the vanishment of the young heiress, both her mother and brother and the man of the letters had returned from Europe, and the latter took part in the search for her. He disclaimed, from the beginning, all knowledge of Miss Arnold’s plans, proclaimed that he knew of no reason why she should have left home, announced that he had considered himself engaged to marry her, and he pretended, at least, to believe that she would shortly appear. Needless to say, a close watch was secretly maintained over the young man and all his movements for many months. In the end, however, the police seemed satisfied that he knew no more than any one else of Dorothy Arnold’s possible movements. He dropped out of the case almost as suddenly as he had entered it.

In the six weeks before the public was acquainted with the facts, private detectives, and later the public police, had worked unremittingly on the several possible theories covering the case. There were naturally a number of possibilities: First, that the girl had met with a traffic accident and been taken unconscious to a hospital; second, that she had been run down by some reckless motorist, killed, and carried off by the frightened driver and secretly buried; third, that she had been kidnapped; fourth, that she had eloped; fifth, that she had been seized by an attack of amnesia and was wandering about the country, unable to give any clew to her identity; sixth, that she had quarreled with her parents and chosen this method of bringing them to terms by the pangs of anxiety; seventh, that she had been arrested as a shoplifter and was concealing her identity for shame.

As the weeks went by, all these ideas were exploded. The hospitals and morgues were searched in vain; the records of traffic accidents were scanned with the utmost care; the roadhouses and resorts in all directions from the city were visited, and their owners closely questioned. Cemeteries and lonely farms were inspected, the passenger lists of all departing ships examined, and later sailings observed. The authorities in European and other ports were notified by cable, and the captains of ships at sea were informed by wireless, now for the first time employed in such a quest. The city jails and prisons were visited and every female prisoner noted. Similar precautions were taken in other American cities, where the hospitals, infirmaries, and morgues were also subjected to search. Marriage-license bureaus, offices of physicians, sanitariums, cloisters, boarding schools, and all manner of possible and impossible retreats were made the objects of detective attention—all without result.

The notion that the girl might have been abducted and held for ransom was discarded at the end of a few weeks, when no word had come from possible kidnappers. The thought of a disagreement was dismissed, with the most emphatic denials coming from all the near and distant members of Miss Arnold’s family. The idea of an elopement also had to be discarded after a time, and so also the theory of an aphasic or amnesic attack.

After the police finally insisted on the publication of the facts and the summoning of public aid, and after the various early hypotheses had one and all failed to stand the test of scrutiny and time, various more and more fantastic or improbable conjectures came into currency. One was that the girl might have been carried off to some distant American town or foreign port. Another was that some secret enemy, whose name and grievance her parents were loath to reveal, had made away with the young woman, or was holding her to satisfy his spite. The public excitement was nigh boundless, and ingenious fabulations or diseased imaginings came pouring in upon the harried police and the distracted parents with every mail.

Rumors and false alarms multiplied enormously. As the story of the young woman’s disappearance continued to occupy the leading columns of the daily papers, day upon day, the disordered fancy of the unstable elements of the population came into vigorous play. Dorothy Arnold was reported from all parts of the country, and both the members of her family and numberless detectives were kept on the jump, running down the most absurd reports on the meager possibility that there might be a grain of truth in one of them. Soon there appeared the pathological liars and self-accusers, with whose peculiarities neither the police nor the public were then sufficiently acquainted. In more than a hundred cities—judging from a tabulation of the newspaper reports of that day—women of the most diverse ages and types came forward with the suggestion that they concealed within themselves the person of the missing heiress. Girls of fourteen made the claim and women of fifty. Such absurdities soon had the police in a state of weary skepticism, but the Arnold family and the newspaper-reading public were still upset by every fresh report.

~~ DOROTHY ARNOLD ~~

Naturally enough, the fact that a prominent young woman, enjoying the full protection of wealth and social distinction, could apparently be snatched away from the most populous quarter of a world city, struck terror to the hearts of many. If a Dorothy Arnold could be ravished from the familiar sidewalks of her home city, what fate waited for the obscure stranger? Was it not possible that some new and strange kind of criminal, equipped with diabolic cunning and actuated by impenetrable motives, was launched upon a campaign of woman stealing? Who was safe?

One of the popular beliefs of the time was that Miss Arnold might have gone into some small and obscure shop at a time when there was no other customer in the place and been there seized, bound, gagged, and made ready for abduction. The notion was widely accepted for the dual reason that it provided a set of circumstances under which it was possible to explain the totally unwitnessed snatching of the young woman and, at the same time, set a likely locale, since there are thousands of such little shops in New York. As a result of the currency of this story, many women hesitated to enter the establishments of cobblers, bootblacks, stationers, confectioners, tobacconists, and other petty tradesmen, especially in the more outlying parts of the city. Many bankruptcies of these minor business people resulted, as one may read from the court records.

A similar fabulation, to the effect that the girl might have entered a cruising taxicab, operated by a sinister ex-convict, and been whisked off to some secret den of crime and vice, was almost as popular, with the result that cabs did a poor business with women clients for more than a year afterward. An old hackman, who was arrested in that feverish time because of the hysteria of a woman passenger, tells me that even to-day he encounters women who grow suspicious and excited, if he happens to drive by some unaccustomed route, a thing often done in these days to avoid the congestion on the main streets.

While all this popular burning and sweating was going on, the police and many thousands of private investigators, professional and amateur, were busy with the problem of elucidating some motive to fit the case. Reducing the facts to their essentials and then trying to reason, the possibilities became a very general preoccupation. The deductive steps may be briefly set down. First, there were the alternative propositions of voluntary or involuntary absence, of hiding or abduction. Second, if the theory of forced absence was to be entertained, there were only two general possibilities—abduction for ransom or kidnapping by some maniac. The ideas of murder, detention for revenge, and the like, come under the latter head. The notion of a fatal accident had been eliminated.

The proposition of voluntary absence presented a more complex picture. Suicide, elopement, amnesia, personal rebellion, an unrevealed family situation, a forbidden love affair, the desire to hide some social lapse—any of these might be the basis of a self-willed absence of a permanent or temporary kind.

The failure, after months of quest, to find any trace of a body, seemed to have rendered the propositions of murder and of suicide alike improbable. Elopement and amnesia were likewise rendered untenable theories by time, nor was it long before the conceit of a disagreement was relegated to the improbabilities.

Justly or unjustly, a good many practical detectives came after a time to the opinion that the case demanded a masculinizing of the familiar adage intocherchez l’homme. More seasoned officers inclined to the idea that there must have been some man, possibly one whose identity had been successfully concealed by the distraught girl. Again, as is common in such cases, there was the very general feeling that Miss Arnold’s family knew a good deal more than had been revealed either to the police or the public, and there was something about the long delay in reporting the case and the subsequent guarded attitude of the girl’s relatives that seemed to confirm this perhaps idle suspicion.

The trouble with a great many of the theories evolved in the first months following the disappearance of Dorothy Arnold, was that they fitted only a part of the facts and probabilities. After all, here was an intricate and baffling situation, involving a person who, because of position, antecedents, and social situation, might be expected to act in a conventional manner. Accordingly, any explanation that fitted the physical facts and was still characterized by extraordinary details might reasonably be discarded.

It was several years before the girl’s father finally declared his belief in her death, and it is a fact that a sum of not less than a hundred thousand dollars was expended, first and last, in running down all sorts of rumors and clews. The search extended to England, Italy, France, Switzerland, Canada—even to the Far East and Australia. But all trails led to vacancy, and all speculations were at length empty. No dimmest trace of the girl was ever found, and no genuinely satisfactory explanation of the strange story has ever been put forward.

It is true there have been, at times in the intervening dozen or more years, rumors of a solution. Persons more or less closely connected with the official investigation have on several occasions been reported as voicing the opinion that the Arnold family was in possession of the facts, but denials have followed every such declaration. On April 8, 1921, for instance, Captain John H. Ayers, in charge of the Missing Persons Bureau of the New York Police Department, told an audience at the High School of Commerce that the fate of Miss Arnold had at that time been known to the police for many months, and that the case was regarded as closed. This pronouncement received the widest publicity in the New York and other American newspapers, but Captain Ayers’ statement was immediately and vigorously controverted by John S. Keith, the personal attorney of the girl’s father, who declared that the police official had told a “damned lie,” and that the mystery was as deep as ever it had been. The police chiefs later issued interviews full of dubiety and qualifications, the general tenor being that Captain Ayers had spoken without sufficient knowledge of the facts.

Just a year later the father of this woman of mysterious tragedy died, the last decade of his life beclouded by the sorrowful story and painful doubt. In his will was this pathetic clause:

“I make no provision in this will for my beloved daughter, H. C. Dorothy Arnold, as I am satisfied that she is dead.”

The death of Miss Arnold’s father once more set the rumor mongers to work and a variety of tales, bolder than had been uttered before, were circulated through the demi-world of New York and hinted in the newspapers. These rumors have not been printed directly and there has thus been no need of denial on part of the family. It must be said at once that they are mere bruits, mere attempts on the part of the cynical town to invent a set of circumstances to fit what few facts and alleged facts are known.

On the other hand, the newspapers have been only too ready to take seriously the most absurd fabulations. In 1916, for instance, a thief arrested at Providence, R. I., for motives best known to himself, declared that he had helped to bury Dorothy Arnold’s body in the cellar of a house about ten miles below West Point, near the J. P. Morgan estate. Commissioner Joseph A. Faurot, Captain Grant Williams and a number of detectives provided with digging tools set out for the place in motor cars, closely pursued by other cars containing the newspaper reporters. The police managed to shake off the newspaper men and reached the house. There they dug till they ached and found nothing whatever.

Returning to New York, the detectives left their shovels, some of which were rusty or covered with a red clay, at a station house and there the reporters caught a glimpse of them. The result was that a bit of rust or ferrous earth translated itself into blood and thence into headlines in the morning papers, declaring that Dorothy Arnold’s body had been found. Denials followed within hours, to be sure.

So the case rests.

Perhaps, in some year to come, approaching death will open the lips of one or another who knows the secret and has been sealed to silence by the fears and needs of life. But it is just as likely that the words of her dying parent contain as much as can be known of the truth about the missing Dorothy Arnold.

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