The Disappearance of Dorothy Arnold

Josh Clark (0:11)

Hey, 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. And the reason we're wearing our sleuth suits today is because this is a unsolved mystery edition of Stuff You Should Know.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (0:30)

Yeah, I feel like we haven't done one of these in a little while, and this is sort of one of the original Missing Persons editions, because I think this is the oldest Missing Persons case in New York City.

Josh Clark (0:45)

Yeah, from what I understand it is too, which suggests that it's still on the books as an open investigation.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (0:54)

Yeah, I guess that's the reveal. They haven't solved this one.

Josh Clark (0:57)

No, which, I mean, we kind of gave that away when I said it was an Unsolved Mystery edition.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (1:02)

Yeah, okay, yeah, good point.

Josh Clark (1:04)

Or are we just jerking everybody's chain right now? You'll have to listen all the way through to find out.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (1:09)

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.

Josh Clark (1:25)

No. And one of the reasons why it's just so, it's still being talked about literally right now, is because it is one of the most baffling disappearance cases I've ever heard of.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (1:37)

Yeah.

Josh Clark (1:37)

Like, there was, there is not a single shred of evidence that ever turned up that suggested what happened to her.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (1:44)

Nothing.

Josh Clark (1:45)

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.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (1:58)

Yeah. Should we get into it?

Josh Clark (2:01)

Yeah.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (2:02)

All 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?

Josh Clark (2:29)

Mm-hmm, you nailed it. You've been brushing up on your Welsh.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (2:33)

She 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?

Josh Clark (2:42)

Yes, on East 79th Street. She lived two blocks down from where Emily Post would live a decade later.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (2:51)

Fascinating.

Josh Clark (2:52)

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. Okay.

Anyway, yes, 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.

Her 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 the house 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. And 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.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (3:59)

Yeah. I mean, 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 literally made fun of her for doing this kind of thing, such that she felt the need to keep it a secret moving forward. So she got a PO box so she could have these secret correspondences when she submitted to magazines.

And 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 her 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, but there were some sort of confusing aspects to that as we move forward.