The Impossible Disappearance Of Dorothy Arnold

**"The Impossible Disappearance Of Dorothy Arnold"** is a video made by Ryan Bergara and Shane Madej, uploaded onto YouTube on September 26, 2019. As a bonus episode, it was assigned to be the ninth and final episode of the fifth season of *BuzzFeed Unsolved: True Crime*, and the ninety-eighth episode overall. You can find it here.

## Description

A special bonus episode of True Crime!

A 25-year-old socialite goes missing off the streets of New York City in 1910. Did she run away…or was it something worse? Don't miss Nancy Drew. Premiering October 9th at 9/8c on The CW.

## Background

Tales of the missing wealthy have always captivated the public's imagination, and today we're looking into one such case that's more a hundred years old, Dorothy Arnold. Dorothy Harriet Camille Arnold was the daughter of Mary Parks Arnold and wealthy perfume importer, Francis Rose Arnold. As far as anybody knew, she had a happy home life.

On the morning of December 12th, 1910, the 25-year-old left her family home in the Upper East Side of Manhattan and told her mother she was heading downtown to buy an evening dress. According to The New York Times, when Mrs. Arnold offered to accompany her daughter, Dorothy said no, "when I find the gown I want, I will telephone you, and you can come down and see it." Her family believed that when she left at 11:30 a.m., she had as much as $30 in her purse, which in today's dollars would be more than $750.

Dorothy made her way down Fifth Ave, stopping at a grocery store on 59th Street to buy some chocolates, then at Brentano's, a bookstore on 27th Street where she bought a copy of "Engaged Girl Sketches," a lightly humorous collection of short romantic stories.

Around that time, reportedly 2:00 p.m., she ran into a friend from college, Gladys King. The two talked about a party they'd both been invited to, the same party for which Dorothy was supposedly dress shopping. Gladys left to meet her mother for lunch and Dorothy was never seen again.

When Dorothy wasn't home for dinner that night, her family started to worry. The next morning, they began calling Dorothy's friends. By that evening with no one knowing Dorothy's whereabouts, the family began contacting private investigators. The investigators searched hospitals, morgues, and even prisons looking for Dorothy. They visited her friends in Boston, Washington D.C., and other cities, but turned up nothing. Detectives in Europe even watched as people disembarked from ships arriving from the U.S. to try to spot Dorothy. Nothing. Shortly before Christmas with the private dets having made little progress, the family went to the police. When they too came up empty handed, the family finally Dorothy's disappearance public on January 25th, a full six weeks after their daughter was last seen, hoping more clues would surface. Despite a $1,000 reward by Dorothy's family, more than $26,000 today, no leads managed to turn up Dorothy Arnold.

## Theories

* **Dorothy Arnold ran away.** After searching her bedroom, investigators found information Dorothy had collected about various ocean liners she could take to Europe. It wasn't clear when Dorothy researched the ships, but the cruise companies were nevertheless contacted. They all told investigators no Dorothy Arnold had been aboard their ships.
	+ On February 6, 1911, Mr. Arnold received a postcard that had been sent from New York City that stated, "I am safe." And appeared to be signed by Dorothy. Mr. Arnold, however, insisted it was a fake and that whoever wrote it merely copied Dorothy's handwriting samples that were published in the papers.
	+ While riding the New York subway in 1917, John Galvin, a man claiming to be a detective at Scotland Yard grabbed a woman and reportedly declared, "I know you, Dorothy Arnold. I've got you at last." The woman, not Dorothy Arnold, but rather a Mrs. Smith begged strangers around her to help, but Galvin insisted he was a detective. He marched her into an NYPD precinct where officers let Mrs. Smith go, and sent Galvin to Bellevue Hospital for observation.
	+ Over the following decades, many others would come forward claiming to have seen Dorothy or even to be Dorothy. None of the claims ever led anywhere. Casting doubt on the theory that Dorothy ran away is the fact that she left behind practically all of her valuables, expensive jewelry that could've been sold to help her journey as well as personally valuable correspondents with friends.
* **Dorothy eloped.** By the time The New York Times broke the story, however, that theory, "had been completely abandoned". After investigators interviewed everyone they were sure knew Dorothy in any way, every one of Dorothy's family members and every friend they could get the name of, no one was aware of any secret marriage, but before investigators gave up on the elopement theory, one potential suitor merited extra attention. George Griscom, Jr.
	+ George Griscom, Jr. was a Pennsylvania man in his 40s at the time of Dorothy's disappearance. The two had known one another for approximately four years, though Dorothy's family never approved of George. Mrs. Arnold event on record to say she would never let George marry her daughter. After she went missing, it came out that Dorothy had met up with George in Boston a couple months before she disappeared. She had told her family she was visiting a college friend, but there was evidence that Dorothy checked out of her hotel at the same time that George had checked out of a different Boston hotel. Reports say that Dorothy may have also pawned some of her jewelry to fund their rendezvous. While the Arnolds denied this, a Boston pawn shop was given the name Dorothy Arnold by someone while she was in Boston.
	+ At the time Dorothy went missing however, George had been vacationing with his family out of the country for about a month, even after replying to a telegram from the Arnolds that he didn't know where she was. The family remains suspicious. On January 16th, before the public even knew about Dorothy's disappearance, Dorothy's older brother, John, confronted George in Florence, Italy. During this interaction, reports suggested John even hit George and knocked him to the ground. In February, George ended his trip early and sailed back to America. He then hired his own private investigators to look for Dorothy. In the month that George paid for them, his investigators didn't find Dorothy either.
* **Dorothy was kidnapped and murdered.** This is the theory that Dorothy's father eventually came to accept as what happened to his daughter. In the absence of clues, the family came to believe this was the only logical explanation.
	+ By April, the family was so convinced their daughter was dead, that they started requesting the police give up the case. In fact, both her parents evidently wrote Dorothy out their wills because they were so certain she would not resurface.
	+ Perhaps the strongest lead in the murder theory comes from one Edward Glenorris. In 1916, Glenorris was serving time in the Rhode Island State Prison for attempted extorsion of a clergyman. He claimed he found God and wanted to come clean to the warden about his supposed involvement in burying the body of a woman he had come to believe was Dorothy Arnold. Glenorris said in what he remembered being December of 1910, a man at a bar named Benoit asked for help from him and another man that some reports named Little Louie.
	+ Benoit, Glenorris, and Little Louie were tasked with moving an unconscious woman from a house in New Rochelle to a home up the Hudson near West Point. The next day, Glenorris was informed that the woman had died. And he was asked to return to the West Point home to help bury her. Glenorris allegedly buried the woman under a concrete floor in the basement and was paid $250 for his involvement by a wealthy-looking man. There has been some speculation that man who paid Glenorris could have been George Griscom, though there's no hard evidence to support this.
	+ After Glenorris confessed to helping bury the woman thought to be Dorothy, a team of detectives searched a home matching Glenorris's vague description on April 21, 1916. When they got to the basement, the team was surprised to find an area of the concrete floor that appeared to have been broken up in the past. The area, however, was small, about five feet by six inches, and the caretaker claimed the floor had been broken to fix a gas pipe. When authorities returned a couple days later with the owner's permission to dig up the spot, they indeed found a gas pipe. Within the year, authorities were satisfied that Glenorris's claims were false.
* **Dorothy accidentally died during an abortion.** In April 1914, the Pittsburgh home of one Dr. C.C. Meredith was raided by police. Meredith, his nurse, and another doctor, one H.E. Lutz were all arrested. The home was used as a private office where women would come seeking abortions.
	+ Lutz made a statement to the DA that at one time Meredith had told him Dorothy Arnold had been one of his patients. From the way Meredith spoke of her, Lutz inferred that she had died and her body had been cremated in Meredith's office. While Lutz didn't admit to seeing Dorothy himself, he did testify that he'd witnessed another young woman who died in Meredith's care be cremated in the basement. In their raid, detectives did find two oversized furnaces in Meredith's basement. There's speculation that Griscom could've been who had impregnated Dorothy, but evidence of this or of Dorothy ever being in Pittsburgh for an abortion is scant at best.