May 16, 2025 • 10 mins
What happens when you’re born into tremendous wealth and social standing, but all you want is a bohemian life filled with creativity and freedom? In 1910 the life of a socialite was pre determined before birth. One young woman felt trapped and simply disappeared. But what really happened to Dorothy Arnold?
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
It's been called the oldest missing person case in New
York City. Twenty five year old heiress Dorothy Arnold was
a bright, warm, well educated, pretty young socialite who from
the outside seemed to have the perfect life. So why,
on a cold Monday morning in December of nineteen ten
did she suddenly just evaporate into thin air? I'm Patty Steele.
(00:24):
Did Dorothy just want a different life or did her
older lover have something to do with her disappearance? That's
next on the backstory. The backstory is back. The sensational
disappearance of Dorothy Arnold in nineteen ten was the talk
of the town. Every sort of crummy journalist wanted to
(00:46):
find her, or, at the very least, uncover another salacious
story about her. But we have to start at the beginning.
Dorothy Harriet Camille Arnold was born into a wealthy family
in eighteen eighty five and raised on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
She graduated from a finishing school and then Brynmore College. Afterwards,
(01:07):
she came home hoping to start a career as a writer,
but it wasn't going so well. Dorothy had written several stories,
and she sent them to the Big News and literary
magazine of the day called McClure's. They were rejected. Her
family and friends were amused by her ambition to be
a writer, since young women in her position weren't really
(01:28):
encouraged to think about work, they didn't take her seriously,
which of course upset her. She finally asks her dad
if she can get an apartment in Greenwich Village so
she'd have a place to write. But her parents simply
want her to find a guy in their social circle
and settle down to have kids and the life of
an Upper east Side socialite. So dad says no way
(01:50):
to the apartment, telling Dorothy a good writer can write anywhere.
She keeps trying to make a go of her writing,
but without any success. Now it's December to Wealth nineteen ten,
a frigid Monday morning. Dorothy is dressed in a slim
fitting dark blue coat and a black velvet hat. She
tells her mother she's going shopping for a gown for
(02:11):
her little sister's upcoming debutante ball. Now here's the first clue.
She told a friend she was going shopping with her mother,
but she told her mother that she didn't need to
come with her. She'd rather shop alone. She didn't bring
anything with her that would raise suspicion. No passport, no
jewelry or extra clothing, just thirty dollars in cash, which
(02:34):
is the equivalent of about one thousand dollars today. She
does go shopping at several stores. She looks at dresses,
but she doesn't buy one. She buys a book of
short funny stories and jokes at a bookshop, and then
a half pound box of chocolates at a candy shop.
She puts both items on her father's accounts. Now, it's
(02:54):
right around two o'clock in the afternoon by this time,
and Dorothy meets a pal at the corner of twenty
seventh Street and Fifth Avenue. The two have a fun
chat about upcoming social events, and she tells her friend
that she's going to take a walk through Central Park.
As she heads home to East seventy ninth Street, she
waves goodbye, and that's it. Dorothy Arnold disappears forever. Now
(03:19):
what happens that evening? She's a no show for dinner.
Her family starts to worry when she doesn't come home.
By late evening. The family starts calling around to friends.
No luck when she's still not home in the morning.
They get serious, but they don't call the police. Her
father hires a lawyer and a team of private investigators
(03:39):
from the Pinkerton Agency. They actually don't get the police
involved for six full weeks. Now that sounds kind of
suspicious to us, but keep in mind it was a
different time. But we take for granted that the first
thing you would do would be to call the cops.
But there was an attitude among elite types in those
days that the police were used for criminals and drunk,
(04:00):
not for fancy young heiresses that may have decided to
drop out of society for a little while. The folks
in the social register were exceptionally private, and once the
police were involved, the muckraking press would start digging in,
which would be socially devastating. Now, the problem is, the
family's team of Pinkerton detectives got absolutely nowhere after six
(04:22):
long weeks. So finally mister Arnold holds his nose and
he calls the NYPD. There's a press conference on January
twenty fifth, nineteen eleven. Her dad describes Dorothy as being
five foot four, one hundred forty pounds, pretty and stylish.
He says she was wearing an ankle length navy dress
and coat and a velvet hat, her hair in a
(04:45):
full pompadour. Mister Arnold then offers a reward of one
thousand dollars that's almost thirty five thousand dollars today for
any info on her whereabouts. That's when the press swoops
in the next day, Dorothy's disappearance is on the front
page of every newspaper, along with her photo. Everybody is speculating.
(05:06):
The New York Times says her father is prostrated with
grief and worry, and her mother on the verge of
nervous collapse. The police don't suspect suicide or anything criminal.
They think she's run away with a lover, pointing out
that there's no trace of insanity in the family and
the young woman has never shown signs of a troubled mind,
although she's been devoted to books and speak several languages. Wow,
(05:30):
that's horrifying, right, The paper goes on to say. It's
troubling because miss Arnold was not of a secretive nature.
Although she'd been admired by many young men. A family
representative said she'd never been engaged as far as they
knew anyway. It's not an easy case. By now again,
it's been six weeks, and only then do the police
(05:51):
get involved. Keep in mind this is at a time
when it's incredibly easy to disappear. You just change your name,
your clothes, in your hair style, and voila. You can
fade into oblivion. But the press keeps digging. A bombshell
arrives on February fifteenth via The Daily News. The paper
says that the previous September, three months before she went missing,
(06:15):
Dorothy had pawned some of her jewelry to pay for
a week long rendezvous at a glamorous hotel in Boston.
She had told her family she was visiting a girlfriend
in Cambridge, but truth was Dorothy was meeting up with
George Griscom, a forty year old unemployed bachelor from Pittsburgh.
She'd apparently hooked up with him while at Bryne Moore,
(06:37):
and after three years, was still secretly seeing him. Griscom
wasn't much of a catch. He'd been engaged to another
very young heiress who canceled their wedding the night before.
Friends said he'd proposed to Dorothy as well, but her
dad had put his foot down about that. When that
story came out, the Arnolds denied every bit of it,
(06:58):
but then came word that Dorothy's mother and older brother
John had actually sailed to Europe weeks earlier to find
Griscom and confront him. The paper's headline read Griscom licked
by young Arnold in foreign hotel. For his part, Griscom
said he knew nothing about Dorothy's disappearance and that he
loved her and would marry her as soon as she
(07:19):
turned up. Police were apparently comfortable with that. The more
they dug into her past, the more complicated her life looked.
She was supposed to marry Well, have a vibrant social
and charitable life, and raise beautiful children who would also
marry well, and so on. That's the way it was done.
But that wasn't what she wanted. She wanted the bohemian
(07:41):
life in Greenwich Village. She wanted to write, to travel,
to take an older lover if she felt like it.
There was a sort of heartbreaking letter to Griscom at
one point, that's the boyfriend that shows her sadness, She wrote,
McClure's has turned down my writing again. Failure stares me
in the face. All I see ahead is a long
(08:02):
road with no turning, and this part is chilling. She
goes on to say, at least mother will always think
an accident has happened. Her mother, by the way, spent
the rest of her life believing Dorothy would eventually come home.
There were other theories about what might have happened to her.
Some thought she'd gone to a place in Pittsburgh, euphemistically
(08:23):
referred to as a maternity hospital, the House of Mystery
it was called, which was raided by cops. Turns out
it was an illegal abortion clinic where a number of
young women had died and been cremated in the basement.
Dorothy's dad called that theory ridiculous, and there were other stories.
There was talk she'd gotten pregnant and her parents had
(08:44):
sent her to Switzerland so that there wouldn't be any scandal.
In nineteen fourteen, an LA woman named Ellen Nevin said
she was Dorothy, and she told the press, if you
don't believe I'm Dorothy Arnold, ask my sister Marjorie. She'll
know why my father doesn't answer my letters. By that time,
Marjorie had gotten married, moved to Europe and actually didn't
(09:06):
communicate with her family either. There were even tons of
postcards allegedly from Dorothy, including one in Dorothy's handwriting that
simply said I am safe. So the months, years and
decades went on and no trace of Dorothy Arnold ever
showed up where it is Her father spent a million
dollars searching for her, although publicly he claimed until his
(09:28):
death in nineteen twenty two that he believed she'd been
kidnapped and murdered. The police maintained she'd probably run away
to start a new life with a new name and
a new hairdoo. A lot of us probably wish it
was still that easy. Hope you like the Backstory with
Patty Steele. Please leave a review. I would love it
if you'd subscribe or follow for free to get new
(09:51):
episodes delivered automatically, and feel free to dm me if
you have a story you'd like me to cover. On Facebook,
It's Patty Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele. I'm
Patty Steele. The Backstories a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks,
the Elvis Durand Group and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer
(10:12):
is Doug Fraser. Our writer Jake Kushner. We have new
episodes every Tuesday and Friday. Feel free to reach out
to me with comments and even story suggestions on Instagram
at real Patty Steele and on Facebook at Patty Steele.
Thanks for listening to the Backstory with Patty Steele, the
pieces of history you didn't know you needed to know.
It's been called the oldest missing person case in New
York City. Twenty five year old heiress Dorothy Arnold was
a bright, warm, well educated, pretty young socialite who from
the outside seemed to have the perfect life. So why,
on a cold Monday morning in December of nineteen ten
did she suddenly just evaporate into thin air? I'm Patty Steele.
(00:24):
Did Dorothy just want a different life or did her
older lover have something to do with her disappearance? That's
next on the backstory. The backstory is back. The sensational
disappearance of Dorothy Arnold in nineteen ten was the talk
of the town. Every sort of crummy journalist wanted to
(00:46):
find her, or, at the very least, uncover another salacious
story about her. But we have to start at the beginning.
Dorothy Harriet Camille Arnold was born into a wealthy family
in eighteen eighty five and raised on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
She graduated from a finishing school and then Brynmore College. Afterwards,
(01:07):
she came home hoping to start a career as a writer,
but it wasn't going so well. Dorothy had written several stories,
and she sent them to the Big News and literary
magazine of the day called McClure's. They were rejected. Her
family and friends were amused by her ambition to be
a writer, since young women in her position weren't really
(01:28):
encouraged to think about work, they didn't take her seriously,
which of course upset her. She finally asks her dad
if she can get an apartment in Greenwich Village so
she'd have a place to write. But her parents simply
want her to find a guy in their social circle
and settle down to have kids and the life of
an Upper east Side socialite. So dad says no way
(01:50):
to the apartment, telling Dorothy a good writer can write anywhere.
She keeps trying to make a go of her writing,
but without any success. Now it's December to Wealth nineteen ten,
a frigid Monday morning. Dorothy is dressed in a slim
fitting dark blue coat and a black velvet hat. She
tells her mother she's going shopping for a gown for
(02:11):
her little sister's upcoming debutante ball. Now here's the first clue.
She told a friend she was going shopping with her mother,
but she told her mother that she didn't need to
come with her. She'd rather shop alone. She didn't bring
anything with her that would raise suspicion. No passport, no
jewelry or extra clothing, just thirty dollars in cash, which
(02:34):
is the equivalent of about one thousand dollars today. She
does go shopping at several stores. She looks at dresses,
but she doesn't buy one. She buys a book of
short funny stories and jokes at a bookshop, and then
a half pound box of chocolates at a candy shop.
She puts both items on her father's accounts. Now, it's
(02:54):
right around two o'clock in the afternoon by this time,
and Dorothy meets a pal at the corner of twenty
seventh Street and Fifth Avenue. The two have a fun
chat about upcoming social events, and she tells her friend
that she's going to take a walk through Central Park.
As she heads home to East seventy ninth Street, she
waves goodbye, and that's it. Dorothy Arnold disappears forever. Now
(03:19):
what happens that evening? She's a no show for dinner.
Her family starts to worry when she doesn't come home.
By late evening. The family starts calling around to friends.
No luck when she's still not home in the morning.
They get serious, but they don't call the police. Her
father hires a lawyer and a team of private investigators
(03:39):
from the Pinkerton Agency. They actually don't get the police
involved for six full weeks. Now that sounds kind of
suspicious to us, but keep in mind it was a
different time. But we take for granted that the first
thing you would do would be to call the cops.
But there was an attitude among elite types in those
days that the police were used for criminals and drunk,
(04:00):
not for fancy young heiresses that may have decided to
drop out of society for a little while. The folks
in the social register were exceptionally private, and once the
police were involved, the muckraking press would start digging in,
which would be socially devastating. Now, the problem is, the
family's team of Pinkerton detectives got absolutely nowhere after six
(04:22):
long weeks. So finally mister Arnold holds his nose and
he calls the NYPD. There's a press conference on January
twenty fifth, nineteen eleven. Her dad describes Dorothy as being
five foot four, one hundred forty pounds, pretty and stylish.
He says she was wearing an ankle length navy dress
and coat and a velvet hat, her hair in a
(04:45):
full pompadour. Mister Arnold then offers a reward of one
thousand dollars that's almost thirty five thousand dollars today for
any info on her whereabouts. That's when the press swoops
in the next day, Dorothy's disappearance is on the front
page of every newspaper, along with her photo. Everybody is speculating.
(05:06):
The New York Times says her father is prostrated with
grief and worry, and her mother on the verge of
nervous collapse. The police don't suspect suicide or anything criminal.
They think she's run away with a lover, pointing out
that there's no trace of insanity in the family and
the young woman has never shown signs of a troubled mind,
although she's been devoted to books and speak several languages. Wow,
(05:30):
that's horrifying, right, The paper goes on to say. It's
troubling because miss Arnold was not of a secretive nature.
Although she'd been admired by many young men. A family
representative said she'd never been engaged as far as they
knew anyway. It's not an easy case. By now again,
it's been six weeks, and only then do the police
(05:51):
get involved. Keep in mind this is at a time
when it's incredibly easy to disappear. You just change your name,
your clothes, in your hair style, and voila. You can
fade into oblivion. But the press keeps digging. A bombshell
arrives on February fifteenth via The Daily News. The paper
says that the previous September, three months before she went missing,
(06:15):
Dorothy had pawned some of her jewelry to pay for
a week long rendezvous at a glamorous hotel in Boston.
She had told her family she was visiting a girlfriend
in Cambridge, but truth was Dorothy was meeting up with
George Griscom, a forty year old unemployed bachelor from Pittsburgh.
She'd apparently hooked up with him while at Bryne Moore,
(06:37):
and after three years, was still secretly seeing him. Griscom
wasn't much of a catch. He'd been engaged to another
very young heiress who canceled their wedding the night before.
Friends said he'd proposed to Dorothy as well, but her
dad had put his foot down about that. When that
story came out, the Arnolds denied every bit of it,
(06:58):
but then came word that Dorothy's mother and older brother
John had actually sailed to Europe weeks earlier to find
Griscom and confront him. The paper's headline read Griscom licked
by young Arnold in foreign hotel. For his part, Griscom
said he knew nothing about Dorothy's disappearance and that he
loved her and would marry her as soon as she
(07:19):
turned up. Police were apparently comfortable with that. The more
they dug into her past, the more complicated her life looked.
She was supposed to marry Well, have a vibrant social
and charitable life, and raise beautiful children who would also
marry well, and so on. That's the way it was done.
But that wasn't what she wanted. She wanted the bohemian
(07:41):
life in Greenwich Village. She wanted to write, to travel,
to take an older lover if she felt like it.
There was a sort of heartbreaking letter to Griscom at
one point, that's the boyfriend that shows her sadness, She wrote,
McClure's has turned down my writing again. Failure stares me
in the face. All I see ahead is a long
(08:02):
road with no turning, and this part is chilling. She
goes on to say, at least mother will always think
an accident has happened. Her mother, by the way, spent
the rest of her life believing Dorothy would eventually come home.
There were other theories about what might have happened to her.
Some thought she'd gone to a place in Pittsburgh, euphemistically
(08:23):
referred to as a maternity hospital, the House of Mystery
it was called, which was raided by cops. Turns out
it was an illegal abortion clinic where a number of
young women had died and been cremated in the basement.
Dorothy's dad called that theory ridiculous, and there were other stories.
There was talk she'd gotten pregnant and her parents had
(08:44):
sent her to Switzerland so that there wouldn't be any scandal.
In nineteen fourteen, an LA woman named Ellen Nevin said
she was Dorothy, and she told the press, if you
don't believe I'm Dorothy Arnold, ask my sister Marjorie. She'll
know why my father doesn't answer my letters. By that time,
Marjorie had gotten married, moved to Europe and actually didn't
(09:06):
communicate with her family either. There were even tons of
postcards allegedly from Dorothy, including one in Dorothy's handwriting that
simply said I am safe. So the months, years and
decades went on and no trace of Dorothy Arnold ever
showed up where it is Her father spent a million
dollars searching for her, although publicly he claimed until his
(09:28):
death in nineteen twenty two that he believed she'd been
kidnapped and murdered. The police maintained she'd probably run away
to start a new life with a new name and
a new hairdoo. A lot of us probably wish it
was still that easy. Hope you like the Backstory with
Patty Steele. Please leave a review. I would love it
if you'd subscribe or follow for free to get new
(09:51):
episodes delivered automatically, and feel free to dm me if
you have a story you'd like me to cover. On Facebook,
It's Patty Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele. I'm
Patty Steele. The Backstories a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks,
the Elvis Durand Group and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer
(10:12):
is Doug Fraser. Our writer Jake Kushner. We have new
episodes every Tuesday and Friday. Feel free to reach out
to me with comments and even story suggestions on Instagram
at real Patty Steele and on Facebook at Patty Steele.
Thanks for listening to the Backstory with Patty Steele, the
pieces of history you didn't know you needed to know.
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