The Disappearance of Dorothy Arnold

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Lisa, tell them about our new show. We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie To Me. I'm Lexi Juanio, we're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa de Julio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions, and at this point in my food days, I've lived it all. Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business. Listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hamza, and I'm Martin, and we're the hosts of Out of Character. The funniest podcast in the entire world. I like that. It's a good way to promote ourselves. We are two funny guys having fun and enjoying ourselves. And we just know how to have fun, unlike anyone else. If you guys like fun conversations, hot takes, what else? Not too hot, just kind of lukewarm takes to get your mind thinking a little bit. Listen out of character on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There are thousands of podcasts that can tell you how to better yourself. Get worse with Kyle Pru is not one of those podcasts. So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptide, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making your better, getting closer, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts. If you're interested in blackmail, love, bomb, and cloning yourself, or getting revenge, then we've got a little something-something for a dastardly individual like you. Listen to get worse with Kyle Pru on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. We've got our sleuth suits on, which are really revealing ultra tight rubber suits for us. 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 I 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. Yeah, from what I understand it is too, which suggests that it's still on the books as an open investigation. Yeah, I guess that's the reveal. They have it solved this one. No, I mean, we kind of gave that away when I said it was an unsolved mystery edition. Yeah, okay. Yeah, good point. Or are we just jerking everybody to 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. No, 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. 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. Yeah. Should we get into it? Yeah. All right. Well, she was born Dorothy Harriet, Camille Arnold, and she was a rich kid from a very well healed family. She was a daughter of a perfume and porter 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 and college at, how do you pronounce that, Brinmore College? You nailed it. You've been brushing up on your Welsh. 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? 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's almost like looking at a map of New York and just seeing two phantoms overlapping. Okay. Anyway, yeah, she was, she lived in a mansion on East 79th. I think it's still there. I think it's 108 East 79th Street. It is pretty well healed, and it was back then too. Her family was well to do, like you said, well connected New York society, but she did, 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, and she asked her father, can I get an apartment in Greenwich Village? And he said, no. You know uncertain terms, no. And then he added a little child in there too. He's like, you want to be a writer? A writer should be able to write anywhere. And apparently your family was really mean about the same mission 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 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, you know, kind of have these secret correspondences when she submitted to magazines. And that brings us to December, December 12, specifically of 1910. The day she disappeared when she went dress shopping, she was going to go buy a dress for her sister's debut, Tant 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 was in great health. And she may not have been, but 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. Yeah, maybe, yeah, or maybe 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. She 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. It'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. 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. 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. But again, she also just might have wanted a book and some chocolates. Sure. But yeah, I've seen it pointed out like if you find 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. It's a thing. But like I said, this is what 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 bond bonds. And let the greatest name of a business you've ever heard. It's pretty good. So she runs it to a friend and says, hey, you know, they kind of catch up a little bit. 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 and the way home. And that was the last person to ever see her a lot. Yeah. That was in, I think that afternoon, do 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. 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. And that was the time where, like, if a unmarried girl 25 from a wealth. family was suddenly missing, that was scandalous. So 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 a young woman who disappeared again from a whale healed 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. One 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 a 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. And her mom told the friend, oh, she's, she got back home. She's fine. She, uh, she has a headache and went straight to bed and just completely live. That's just not the case. Um, but that was, so that was something that I think a lot of people in retrospect to are like, did that family know something? For my two cents, the family did not know anything. Uh, and they were as in the, in the, um, dark as anybody else about what happened to her. Yeah. So they decided to get someone on the case, uh, 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. Like, 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. Uh, 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, uh, that she is getting rid of, uh, again, a bit of a leap. Um, but he helped them out, you know, like, let's call the morgue, let's call the hospitals, let's call some jails. Uh, and eventually he was like, listen, get a pinkerton detective on this thing, um, because they can be quite discreet as well. Um, and so they did that and then started reaching out to, uh, I think through the pinkerton guy to other cities nearby. Like basically, anyone that she had ever known, uh, 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, um, and 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 the really affluent influential New York family, uh, he did his best and he was successful at keeping this under wraps, again, to avoid scandal. Yet he issued what, um, 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 from December 22nd on. And, um, I think for a full month, Flynn and the cops kept it under wraps, uh, 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 Debbie Tompall was like five days after she was missing. I'm sure they, they kept that, you know, they had no reason publicly to to postpone that. So how did they explain Dorothy's absence? I was just curious about that. I couldn't find it anywhere. Yeah. Uh, who knows, um, that 10 days is certainly, uh, 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, uh, 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. Uh, they let everyone know what happened, offered a thousand dollar reward. And all of a sudden, the New York Times has picked up the story, um, under the heading, uh, niece of Peckham, strangely missing, which was the Supreme Court justice. So, you know, initially tying her to, uh, 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 column by his last name. Yeah. The peckster, I think, is what most people called him. Should we take a break? Uh, yeah. Sure. All right. We'll take a break. Uh, it's out in the news and in the public and we'll come back right after this. Lisa, we should tell them about our new show. Oh my god, Lexi. I'm Lexi Iwaneo, we're two bus friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa Giulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions. And at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. I'm not gonna get any worse than fighting. That is wild. I learned that about you today. And I've always got something to say. The men were just honest about this. There would be so much more peace in the world. We're going to talk about dating, relationships, beauty, getting older, and a little wiser. We're best friends, but we don't always agree. Because you told us how accommodating you are. Obviously, I would do what I think I could do to fight the fight, but there's only so much fight I can fight. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Lie. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I don't really care. Get worse with Kyle Proo is not one of those podcasts. So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptide, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making your better getting closer, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts. But if you're interested in blackmail, love bombing, cloning yourself, or getting revenge, then we've got a little something, something for a dastardly individual like you. Take a listen to some of the incredible advice we've given so far. Fake a back injury. Get the spray tan, up your alcohol consumption. Only women should be allowed to have guns. Kill them. Kill them. Kill them. Kill the gun. Listen, it's already over. I'm all about lying if it's something that really happened. The next time a bear is running at you, you just calmly stop what you're doing. You look the bear in the eye and you say this isn't you. Do not preserve relationships. You don't need them. You only need one thing and that's the Get Worse podcast. Listen to Get Worse with Kyle Pru on the IHR Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome global here. It's a child growing up in rural Canada. I was always puzzled by America's peculiar problem with gun violence. The murder rate in the US is nearly three times higher than Canada's and five times higher than the murder rate in the UK than much of Western Europe. Why? What's so different about the United States? In my new book The American Way of Killing, the invention of an epidemic, I speak to the doctors who worked miracles on gunshot victims. Reexamine the strangely important story of a 17th century English night and parse out the grammar of the second amendment with a linguist and travel to a shooting range in North Carolina. All in an attempt to understand where this problem came from and why Americans so often misdiagnose the nature of the violence that plays their streets. But this book really isn't about guns. It's about why a country has never quite understood its own problem and why you can't fix what you refuse to see. Get the American Way of Killing at Pushkin.fm/audiobooks or at audible, Spotify or wherever audiobooks are sold. Okay 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 a 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 the bow. That'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. Yeah 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 aloping to dying by suicide, to being like the family knows that there was a crime like that she was murdered or kidnapped or something and they're just trying to keep it quiet because they're you know rich and powerful family and obviously false reporting 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 'cause 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 gonna be solved and that she was seen in the city recently. So 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. It turned up just zip, right? Like no friend came forward and said, hey, she actually had a secret life she was seeing this guy know and 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 for 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. She didn't have a lot of stuff on her mind. The worst thing that had happened to her, and it does seem to have been significant was being rejected by McClure's. 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. They got in touch with every ocean liner going to Europe at the time to see if anyone on board Matt's shirt description or was in their register under her name. And again, not a 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 thinks that she's dead, the police, you know, or at least the police in the public were 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 time reported that police in New York and Philly weren't even working on the case anymore. And that, 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 this. - Yeah, which is pretty cruel. - Of course. - Imagine also being the kind of person who's like, here's of us an era is disappearing and thinking, now's my chance. I'm going to send a fake ransom letter and hope for the best. If you're sending fake ransom letters to people who's 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, but-- - Oh yeah, I don't mean to get preachy. - I can get behind that. - Okay. So what's 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. 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. Griscombe Jr., AKA Jr., because the family already knew, but it turned out that as a big reveal of 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've been glad to see your 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." And the reporter was like, well, that's a really weirdly specific thing to say. - Right. - 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 ares that broke, she had broken off the engagement the night before the wedding. Never a good sign. He had proposed Dorothy already, but Francis the dad was like, no, you're not marrying my daughter. - Sure. - And so all of a sudden, there's this secret romance exposed where they learned that she had a little elicit fling with him in Cambridge. She was like, I'm gonna 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 pawns and jewelry in order to finance this thing. - Yeah, $500 in 1910 money for $60. And 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 Lennox while George stayed at the Essex. So even during this rendezvous, she still had propriety, I guess. And then second, she registered at the Lennox under her name, no alias, at the time you would put your address down, she put her actual address in New York. So she didn't show any signs of being this person who could keep a secret life or something like that. The one time she had the chance to perform in secret, she didn't, she just was herself. - Yeah, see, I read that more as 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. - Okay. - Like there was nothing secret about that. She has her story, like yeah, I went and stayed at the Lennox 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. (laughing) - Appreciate that. - So let's see, we have established that junior was a planet, Tismal, he never formed a full planet. And 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 Griscombe, when he turned up, when he became like 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. He 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 Griscombe at all. But if you read some of the stuff that George Griscombe 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. Jumping back, though, on the Monday after Thanksgiving, they learned that she had gone to the post office, that PO box that she had set up in secret, and gotten a bunch of letters that were apparently had come from overseas. And everyone basically presumed that they were from Griscombe while he was over there in Europe. And there was a letter that he shared publicly later on where she wrote to him, talking about how much it hurt her to have that story rejected. And she said, failure stares me in the face. All 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 Griscombe 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? - Yeah. - Let's do it. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Lisa, we should tell them about our new show. - Oh my God, Lexi, we have a new podcast. I'm Lexi Iwanyu, we're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. - And I'm Lisa Julio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions. - I'm not gonna get any work I'm fighting. - That is wild. - Now in my 30s, being the founder of New Shoes, good taste is my business. - If man were just honest about this, there would be so much more peace in the world. - We're gonna talk about dating, relationships, beauty, getting older, and a little wiser. - We're best friends, but we don't always agree. - Because you told us how accommodating you are. - Obviously I would do what I think I could do to fight the fight, but there's only so much fight. I can fight. - Don't lie to me. - Don't lie to me. - Don't lie to me. - Liar. - Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I don't really care. - There are thousands of podcasts that can tell you how to better yourself. So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptide, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making you better getting closer, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts. But if you're interested in blackmail, love, bomb, and cloning yourself or getting revenge, then we've got a little something, something for a dastardly individual like you. Fake a back injury. - Kill 'em. - Kill 'em. - Kill 'em with a gun. - Listen, it's already over. The next time a bear is running at you, you just calmly stop what you're doing, you look the bear in the eye, and you say this isn't you. - Do not preserve relationships, you don't need them. You only need one thing, and that's the Get Worse podcast. - Listen to Get Worse with Kyle Pru on the IHR Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. - Malcolm Gladwell here is a child drunk up in rural Canada. The murder rate in the US is nearly three times higher than Canada's and five times higher than the murder rate in the UK and much of Western Europe. Why? Reexamine the strangely important story of a 17th century English knight and parse out the grammar of the Second Amendment with a linguist and travel to a shooting range in North Carolina. All in an attempt to understand where this problem came from and why Americans so often misdiagnose in nature of the violence that plagues their streets. Get the American Way of Killing at pushkin.fm/audiobooks or at audible Spotify or wherever audio books are sold. ♪ We look so much stuff from Josh and Chuck ♪ ♪ Stuff you should know ♪ All right, so when we left you, I think Griscombe had just come back from Italy. This is February 9th. He comes back in 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, 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." So 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 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. Sure. 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, but Gryskum had the same letters too. He knew of that same content and he wasn't satisfied that she was dead. So he, 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 to a lot of the assumptions you can make when just looking at the family's actions. Yeah, for sure. And 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, "May do something that may be cowardly." And 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 our disappearance that Gryskum has now undertaken, although I get the impression that his was a little slap-dash compared to the others. Yeah, less investigation, maybe more, just public show. I don't know. I don't know. I hadn't gotten a good read on him. I did believe he was genuinely concerned, but yes, he seemed to have been 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 city and town of consequence, their police station got an alert to be on the lookout with photos and descriptions and all that stuff. It was reported around the world. I found a paper in Tasmania that had a long story describing the disappearance the following July. Like it was everywhere 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.com, shout out newspapers.com for contemporarious articles. 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 written about Dorothy Arnold in a while. I'll do that from my call on this week. Yeah, so here are some of those stories right now. Four years later, in 1914, there was a story where police raided a hospital in Pittsburgh, in a suburb of Pittsburgh, that abortion was illegal. And so it was one of those hospitals that offered kind of 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 gut pregnant from griscom as the assumption went there to get an abortion died there during the process and was cremated in the cellar. And some people noted that griscom could have traveled there. It wasn't too far away. And it could, you know, people died 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 some women did die during procedures and were cremated in the basement. I mean, that's a pretty likely possibility, right? Yeah, that could have been what happened. Yeah, her family, of course, was like, nope, that absolutely didn't happen. So 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 $250 to help dispose of a body of a woman. And he said that woman was 100% Dorothy Arnold. And as a matter of fact, you can find her in the cellar of 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. So 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 Spear of Missing Persons. It was a guy named Captain J.H. Ares. 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. And the next day, he was like, yeah, yeah, you know what? I was misquoted or I misspoken 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, you remember, she said she was about to walk on 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. Sure. What about the woman in Kansas City, though, because they found a almost dead ringer for her, which was very strange. It's nuts, isn't it? Yeah. I turn this up. I think in a 1935 article from San Antonio, but there is a woman named Mrs. Anna Miller, who was located in Kansas City, enough reports of Dorothy Arnold's 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. And yes, she was a dead ringer for Dorothy Arnold's. 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 coincidence is 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 12, 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. But 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 them because that 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. 100 off the Kansas City. Sure, as you do. With her stuff, because I don't know, birthmarks. That's pretty specific. It is. The thing is, is they searched hospitals. They searched the more 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 more people who knew what she looked like. A coroner is 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. And they checked all the hospitals and there aren't any reports of any woman around that time showing up with amnesia. So I don't know. The animal or 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. 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. Yeah, for sure. And 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 bohemian writer in the Grinich village. 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. There's a historian named Sylvia Petem who has written about the case a lot and she was leaning toward the botched abortion procedure where she was died and cremated initially. But I think later on, she just thinks like, no, I think she disappeared herself 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 an artist, a writer, she might not have needed all that much money to get started, you know. Yeah. 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. 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. They decided they've resolved. Yeah. Now there's some sort of hope of getting out of the situation that they're in. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. As far as her family is concerned, her dad has spent about a dozen years and about a million bucks in 1920s dollars trying to find her. Mary Arnold died six years after 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. I think as late as even 1935, 25 years later, police said like people are still calling in tips about this case. For sure. It gets even weirder. 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 descendants today of the Arnold family have no idea what happened. Yeah. 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. 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 could it 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. She went watch this and just started tearing them up. Yeah, sad. Well, clearly never be solved at this point, you know. I don't see how it could be. Yeah. Yeah. Well, RIP, I mean, certainly by this point, Dorothy Arnold, maybe Anna Miller. And 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 Kansas City woman. Yes. But that's not me. Same. No, we've got to move on to the next, right? That's right. Well, if you want 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 in the meantime, we're going to go ahead and do listener mail. 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 on the social identity theory show you guys reference the classic movie can't buy me love. Yeah. 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 as probably why I didn't say anything. Yeah, no, I didn't say it was lover boy. I was I was mistaken, I guess. But it's weird. It feels weird. Yeah. Can't buy me love is the example of social identity theory of the lawnmower boy pays for popularity. But the cheerleader and the jocks who could be at the night of cards, chips, dips, and dorks. It's quite from the movie. lover boy is the story of the poor college boy getting extra cash for pizza delivery extras. 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 drain. Yeah. 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 new, shaming in our house at all, but we're still not like showing our movies with new teams yet. You're not like elbowing or in the ribs. Like check that out. No, no, no. So what are you waiting for? Like maybe 18 for camp? I love. I don't know. Well, 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 it's a it's a very as a very dumb dumb line that immobilized. and I privately laugh at still. - Oh yeah. - That I'll tell you about off mic. - Okay, 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 wanna be like Alex and email us so that we can appreciate you big time, send it off to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. (upbeat music) - Lisa, tell them about our new show. - We have a new podcast. I'm Lexi Wanyu, we're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. 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