The Heiress Who Walked Into Central Park and Vanished: Dorothy Arnold

On a cold Monday afternoon in December 1910, a young woman stood on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 27th Street in New York City, talking to an old friend.

She had just bought a book. She had a box of chocolates tucked into her fur muff. She was in a good mood. She said she might walk home through Central Park.

Then she turned, waved goodbye, and walked away up Fifth Avenue.

Her friend watched her wave a second time. And that was the last confirmed sighting of Dorothy Arnold.

Her family was one of the wealthiest in New York. They had money, connections and private detectives. And yet, for six weeks, they told almost no one she was gone.

By the time the public found out, the trail was cold. More than a century later, it still is.

The girl from 79th Street

Dorothy Harriet Camille Arnold was born in Manhattan on July 1, 1885. She was the second of four children.

Her father, Francis Arnold, was a Harvard graduate and the head of a company that imported perfumes and luxury goods. Her mother, Mary, was from Montreal. The family was listed in the Social Register, the who's who of New York high society. One of her aunts was married to a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

They lived in a big house at 108 East 79th Street, just off Fifth Avenue, across from Central Park.

Dorothy went to private school and then to Bryn Mawr College, where she studied literature and languages. She graduated in 1905.

After college, she lived at home. And she wanted to be a writer.

The writer

It was not going well.

In the spring of 1910, she sent a short story to McClure's Magazine, one of the biggest magazines in the country. It was rejected. Her family teased her about it. After that, she rented her own post office box so that letters from publishers would not come to the house.

In November 1910, she sent another story, called "The Poinsettia Flames." It was rejected too. Friends said she was crushed.

About two months before she disappeared, she asked her father if she could move into her own apartment in Greenwich Village, the artists' neighborhood downtown, so she could write. Her father said no. According to reports, he told her, "A good writer can write anywhere."

The secret

Dorothy also had a secret.

His name was George Griscom Jr. He was about forty, an engineer from a wealthy Pittsburgh family. Fifteen years older than Dorothy. They had met at Bryn Mawr.

In September 1910, Dorothy told her parents she was going to Boston to visit a college friend. Instead, she spent a week in a hotel with Griscom. To pay for it, she pawned about five hundred dollars' worth of jewelry.

That is how her parents found out. And they were furious. They forbade her from seeing him.

She kept writing to him anyway. The last time they saw each other was in early November 1910, before Griscom left on a long vacation in Europe with his parents.

December 12, 1910

On the morning of Monday, December 12, 1910, Dorothy told her mother she was going shopping for a dress for her younger sister Marjorie's upcoming debutante party. Her mother offered to go with her. Dorothy said no. She would call if she found something.

At about eleven in the morning, she left the house on 79th Street. She had about twenty-five to thirty dollars in cash.

She walked down Fifth Avenue. At about noon, she stopped at Park and Tilford, a fancy grocery and candy shop at 59th Street, and charged a half-pound box of chocolates to the family account. She tucked them into her muff.

Then she kept walking. About thirty blocks south, to Brentano's bookstore at 27th Street. There, she bought a book called Engaged Girl Sketches, a collection of light, funny essays. The clerks later said there was nothing unusual about her at all.

Outside Brentano's, she ran into a friend named Gladys King. They chatted for a few minutes about Marjorie's party. Gladys said Dorothy seemed cheerful. Dorothy said she might walk home through Central Park.

Shortly before two o'clock, they said goodbye. Gladys was going to lunch with her mother at the Waldorf-Astoria. As Dorothy walked away, she turned and waved. Then she turned and waved a second time.

That was the last time anyone who knew her saw Dorothy Arnold.

The silence

That evening, Dorothy did not come home for dinner. That was unusual. She always let the family know if she would miss a meal.

Shortly after midnight, a friend named Elsie Henry called the house looking for her. Dorothy's mother told her that Dorothy had come home and gone to bed with a headache.

It was a lie. And it was the first of many.

The next morning, the family quietly called a lawyer and family friend named John Keith. He searched Dorothy's room. Everything was there except the clothes she had been wearing. He found letters with foreign postmarks, two brochures for ocean liners sailing to Europe, and a pile of burned papers in the fireplace. People later assumed those were her rejected stories.

Over the next weeks, Keith quietly checked jails, hospitals and morgues in New York, Boston and Philadelphia. Nothing.

The family hired the Pinkerton detective agency. Pinkerton agents questioned her friends. They searched marriage records, thinking she might have eloped. They sent agents to check ships arriving in Europe. They found several women who looked like Dorothy. None of them were her.

What the family did not do was call the police. Or tell the newspapers.

Why? Most people believe it was fear of scandal. In their world, a daughter who ran off with a man, or worse, was a disgrace. They wanted to find her quietly and bring her home before anyone knew she was gone.

The man in Italy

Of course, the family had one obvious suspect for where she had gone. George Griscom.

On December 16, four days after Dorothy disappeared, they sent a telegram to Griscom, who was in Florence, Italy. He replied that he knew nothing.

In January 1911, Dorothy's mother and her brother John traveled to Italy and confronted him at his hotel. They demanded the letters Dorothy had written to him. John later said there was nothing important in them, and that he destroyed them.

Griscom said that if Dorothy was found, he would marry her, if her mother approved. Her mother said she never would.

He spent thousands of dollars on newspaper ads asking Dorothy to come home.

The story breaks

On January 25, 1911, about six weeks after Dorothy vanished, her father finally called a press conference at his office in New York. He announced that his daughter was missing and offered a reward of a thousand dollars.

The story exploded. The New York Times covered it almost every day. Police circulars with her photo went out across the United States, Canada and Mexico. Reporters quickly found out about George Griscom.

And then the hoaxes started.

The family got ransom notes demanding thousands of dollars. Both were fake. A postcard arrived, signed "Dorothy," with a New York postmark, saying, "I am safe." Her father believed the handwriting had been copied from samples printed in the newspapers.

Women all over the country wrote letters claiming to be her. Every one was checked. Every one was false.

The theories

So what happened to Dorothy Arnold?

Her father had his own theory from the start. He believed she had been attacked and killed in Central Park, and her body thrown into the reservoir. But police pointed out the reservoir was frozen solid that week, and when it was searched in the spring, nothing was found.

Some people, including Griscom, believed she took her own life, discouraged by her failed writing career. In one letter she wrote, she said, "Failure stares me in the face." Years later, the family lawyer, John Keith, said publicly that he believed she had died by suicide.

Others believed she ran away to start a new life, possibly with Griscom, possibly alone.

And then there was the darkest theory.

In April 1916, police in Pennsylvania raided an illegal abortion clinic near Pittsburgh. A doctor there testified that another doctor had told him that Dorothy Arnold had died at the clinic, and her body had been burned in a furnace. The district attorney said he believed it. Dorothy's father called the story "ridiculous and absolutely untrue."

That same month, a man serving a prison sentence for extortion claimed he had been paid to bury a young woman in a cellar in December 1910. Police dug up several cellars. They found nothing. The man's story fell apart.

What we still don't know

Dorothy's father spent about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars looking for her. That is millions in today's money. When he died in 1922, his will left her nothing. He wrote that he was satisfied she was not alive.

Her mother never gave up hope that Dorothy was still out there somewhere. She died in 1928.

Dorothy Arnold has never been found.

There is no body. No confirmed sighting after two o'clock on December 12, 1910. Just a box of chocolates, a book of light essays, a friend on Fifth Avenue, and a young woman turning to wave twice before she walked away.

Did she walk into Central Park and meet with violence? Did she leave to start a new life? Did she die somewhere far from home, in a way her family could not bear to be known?

And how different would this case be if her family had gone to the police on the first day, instead of the forty-fourth?