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The Disappearance of Dorothy Arnold · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck,
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: and Jerry's here, too. And we've got our sleuth suits on,
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: which are really revealing, ultra-tight rubber suits.
• 0:23
  Speaker 3: Gross.
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: And the reason we're wearing our sleuth suits today is
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: because this is an unsolved mystery edition of Stuff You
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: Should Know.
• 0:31
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel like I haven't done one of these
• 0:33
  Speaker 3: in a little while. And this is sort of one
• 0:36
  Speaker 3: of the original Missing Persons editions because I think this
• 0:41
  Speaker 3: is the oldest Missing Persons case in New York City.
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, from what I understand it is too, which suggests
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: that it's still on the books as an open investigation.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess that's the reveal. They haven't solved this one.
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: No, which, I mean, we kind of gave that away
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: when I said it was an unsolved mystery edition.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, okay. Yeah, good point.
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: Or are we just jerking everybody's chain right now? You'll
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: have to listen all the way through to find out.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: That's right.
• 1:11
  Speaker 3: This is the sad story of the mysterious disappearance of
• 1:15
  Speaker 3: Dorothy Arnold, who was a New York socialite in the
• 1:19
  Speaker 3: early 1900s who disappeared in 1910, never to be seen again.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: No.
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: And one of the reasons why it's just so it's still,
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: you know, being talked about literally right now is because
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: it is one of the most baffling disappearance cases I've
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: ever heard of. Yeah. Like there was there is not
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: a single shred of evidence that ever turned up that
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: suggested what happened to her. Nothing. Every tip that came in,
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: every suggestion, every idea, nothing ever panned out. She just
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: vanished without a trace in the middle of. I think
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: at the time, the busiest city in the world.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Should we get into it? Yeah. All right.
• 2:03
  Speaker 3: Well, she was born Dorothy Harriet Camille Arnold, and she
• 2:07
  Speaker 3: was a rich kid from a very well-heeled family. She
• 2:11
  Speaker 3: was a daughter of a perfume importer named Francis Arnold,
• 2:15
  Speaker 3: and she had a lineage that goes back to the Mayflower.
• 2:19
  Speaker 3: Her uncle was a Supreme Court justice, Rufus W.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: Peckham.
• 2:24
  Speaker 3: And she studied literature in college at, how do you
• 2:27
  Speaker 3: pronounce that, Bryn Mawr College?
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: You nailed it. You've been brushing up on your Welsh.
• 2:33
  Speaker 3: She fancied herself a writer, and as we'll see, it's
• 2:35
  Speaker 3: not something her parents approved of. But yeah, she was
• 2:39
  Speaker 3: living with her family uptown, right?
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: Yes, on East 79th Street. She lived two blocks down
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: from where Emily Post would live a decade later.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: Fascinating.
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: I thought it was kind of fascinating, too. It's almost
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: like looking at a map of New York and just
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: seeing two phantoms overlapping.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: Anyway, yes, she lived in a mansion on East 79th.
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: I think it's still there. I think it's 108 East
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: 79th Street, and it is pretty well-heeled, and it was
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: back then, too. Her family was well-to-do, like you said,
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: well-connected New York society, but she was a bit of
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: a black sheep of the family. She, like you said,
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: fancied herself a writer, and she kind of wanted to
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: go live a bohemian life in Greenwich Village. And I
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: think in a good early reveal of her personality and
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: how she grew up, and she asked her father, can
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: I get an apartment in Greenwich Village? And he said, no.
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: In no uncertain terms, no. And then he added a
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: little chide in there too. He's like, you want to
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: be a writer? A writer should be able to write anywhere.
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: And apparently her family was really mean about this ambition
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: of hers because they wanted to knock it out of
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: her so she would go get married and have kids
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: and do what women were supposed to do back then. Yeah.
• 3:59
  Speaker 3: I mean, she even went so far as to submit stories.
• 4:03
  Speaker 3: She submitted a couple of them for publication in McClure's magazine.
• 4:08
  Speaker 3: They rejected one. We don't know about the other, but
• 4:11
  Speaker 3: her family literally made fun of her for doing this
• 4:13
  Speaker 3: kind of thing, such that she felt the need to
• 4:17
  Speaker 3: keep it a secret moving forward.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: So she got a P.O.
• 4:20
  Speaker 3: Box so she could kind of have these secret correspondences
• 4:23
  Speaker 3: when she submitted to magazines. And that brings us to December,
• 4:28
  Speaker 3: December 12th, specifically of 1910, the day she disappeared when she.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: Went dress shopping.
• 4:34
  Speaker 3: She was going to go buy a dress for her
• 4:36
  Speaker 3: sister's debutante ball and initially told a friend she was
• 4:40
  Speaker 3: taking her mother, Mary, with her, but then told her mom, like, hey,
• 4:44
  Speaker 3: I want to shop by myself. I'll let you know
• 4:46
  Speaker 3: if I find a dress and you can check it out.
• 4:49
  Speaker 3: And this is when we should probably mention that some
• 4:51
  Speaker 3: people were saying that Mary wasn't in great health. And
• 4:56
  Speaker 3: she may not have been, but there were some sort
• 4:58
  Speaker 3: of confusing aspects to that as we move forward.
• 5:02
  Speaker 2: For sure. And I wonder if that's one of those
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: things where It got people heard snippets over time and
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: that got worked into later. Yeah, maybe.
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Or maybe it was blown out of proportion. Who knows?
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: For sure. But at any rate, she went by herself
• 5:17
  Speaker 2: dress shopping and she had about thirty dollars in cash,
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: which is close to a grand today. And that was
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: a quarter of her monthly allowance. She was all done
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: up like a society. Twenty five year old would be
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: at the time. She looked like a Gibson girl. She
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: had a fox muffler. you know, for her hands, because
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: this is December in New York, of course, and supposedly
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: it was a beautiful day, but still quite cold. And
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: she ended up walking 50 blocks down to 27th Street
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: in the end, down Fifth Avenue. And she never stopped
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: at a dress shop. She stopped at two other places.
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: But as far as anyone's ever known, she didn't pop
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: into any dress shop, even though that's supposedly what she
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: had left to go do that morning.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 6:00
  Speaker 3: And I also feel like that's one of those things.
• 6:03
  Speaker 3: It's like, She could have very well popped into dress
• 6:05
  Speaker 3: shops and people had not known that.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: She did that.
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: It's possible.
• 6:10
  Speaker 3: Because, you know, it's like an old case.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: So you have to sort of take some of these
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: things with a grain of salt.
• 6:16
  Speaker 3: We do know that she didn't take like her passport
• 6:19
  Speaker 3: and she left her jewels at home. So nothing was
• 6:21
  Speaker 3: shady as in like, hey, she was about to go
• 6:24
  Speaker 3: skip town or anything like that or try and go
• 6:26
  Speaker 3: overseas because that would become a theory at some point.
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: She bought chocolates.
• 6:33
  Speaker 3: And a book at another shop and charged it to
• 6:36
  Speaker 3: her dad's account, which some people say may mean she
• 6:39
  Speaker 3: was might have been looking to take a trip. But again,
• 6:43
  Speaker 3: she also just might have wanted a book and some chocolates.
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: Sure. But but yeah, I've seen it pointed out, like
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: if if you fly in an airplane today, you get
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: a snack in the book. And that's like what you
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: do when you're going on a trip. Right.
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: I mean, I've never done it, but you've.
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: Seen people do it in movies, though. Sure.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: It's a thing.
• 7:01
  Speaker 3: But like I said, this is where I think people
• 7:03
  Speaker 3: like read so much into everything. Like she bought chocolate.
• 7:06
  Speaker 3: So she was going on a steamer ship.
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: Sure. And she bought chocolates, by the way, at Pilford
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: and some bonbons. Isn't that the greatest name of a
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: business you've ever heard?
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: It's pretty good.
• 7:18
  Speaker 3: So she runs into a friend and says, hey, you know,
• 7:23
  Speaker 3: they kind of catch up a little bit. She does
• 7:26
  Speaker 3: mention one detail, which she was looking forward to, like
• 7:28
  Speaker 3: some Christmas gift that was coming up. Another sort of
• 7:32
  Speaker 3: clue that she wasn't like planning on skipping town or something.
• 7:35
  Speaker 3: And she told the friend, like, I'm going to go
• 7:38
  Speaker 3: through Central Park on the way home. And that was
• 7:40
  Speaker 3: the last person to ever see her alive.
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah. That was in, I think, the afternoon. Did you
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: say about 2 p.m.? I did. So by the time
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: dinner came, her family started to get worried because apparently
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: she did not miss a meal, um, without alerting her
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: family that she wasn't going to be home for that meal.
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: So that was very out of character for her. And
• 8:02
  Speaker 2: then as night fell, they started to get worried enough
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: that they gambled scandal by calling her friends and kind
• 8:09
  Speaker 2: of surreptitiously asking if anybody had seen her without saying
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: we haven't seen her out outright, because this was the
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: time where like, if, if, uh, uh, unmarried girl, 25
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: from a wealthy family was suddenly missing. That was scandalous.
• 8:26
  Speaker 2: So her family had this on their mind throughout this
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: entire disappearance.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure.
• 8:32
  Speaker 3: And there was an actual case a couple of years
• 8:34
  Speaker 3: before of a young woman who disappeared again from a
• 8:37
  Speaker 3: well-heeled family. It turns out that she like ran away
• 8:41
  Speaker 3: from home to be a waitress. And after a couple
• 8:43
  Speaker 3: of days was like waitressing stinks.
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: She said nuts to that.
• 8:47
  Speaker 3: I want to go back to my life as a socialite.
• 8:50
  Speaker 3: But the parents had like put that out in the
• 8:52
  Speaker 3: public eye and then a lot of embarrassment was served up.
• 8:55
  Speaker 3: So this, you know, they had reason to kind of,
• 8:58
  Speaker 3: I guess, try and keep this under wraps initially.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: At least.
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: One of the other explanations I saw that's a little
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: more heartening is that if this got out and it
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: did turn into a scandal, if, say, Dorothy was just
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: off doing whatever, she might become so mortified at all
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: of the negative attention that that she might not want
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: to come back to her old life because she would
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: have to face such crazy social repercussions that she just
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: might stay away. So there were a few reasons to
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: kind of be cagey about it. And one of the
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: first cagey things they did was after calling her friends
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: and none of them had seen her, one of her
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: friends called back just to check on her around midnight.
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: And her mom told the friend, oh, she got back home.
• 9:42
  Speaker 2: She's fine. She has a headache and went straight to bed.
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: And just completely lie. That's just not the case. But
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: that was that was something that I think a lot
• 9:51
  Speaker 2: of people in retrospect to are like, did that family
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: know something? For my two cents, the family did not
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: know anything. And they were as in the in the
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: dark as anybody else about what happened to her.
• 10:03
  Speaker 3: So they decided to get someone on the case, not
• 10:06
  Speaker 3: the police yet, but they called an attorney, a friend
• 10:09
  Speaker 3: of theirs named John Keith and said, hey, this is
• 10:13
  Speaker 3: what's going on.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: Like, what can you do to help us?
• 10:16
  Speaker 3: I guess he had, you know, I guess he seemed
• 10:18
  Speaker 3: like a person that they thought could help at the time.
• 10:22
  Speaker 3: He came over, started doing a little, I guess, lawyer
• 10:26
  Speaker 3: like investigation and found some letters in her room, saw
• 10:31
  Speaker 3: that some papers had been burned in the fireplace that
• 10:33
  Speaker 3: the family all thought was like, hey, this is that
• 10:36
  Speaker 3: story that got rejected for McClure's that she is getting
• 10:39
  Speaker 3: rid of.
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: Again, a bit of a leap.
• 10:42
  Speaker 3: But he helped him out, you know, like, let's call
• 10:45
  Speaker 3: the morgue, let's call the hospitals, let's call some jails.
• 10:48
  Speaker 3: And eventually he was like, listen, get a Pinkerton detective
• 10:52
  Speaker 3: on this thing because they can be quite discreet as well.
• 10:56
  Speaker 3: And so they did that and then started reaching out to,
• 10:59
  Speaker 3: I think, through the Pinkerton guy to other cities nearby,
• 11:02
  Speaker 3: like basically anyone that she had ever known. that lived
• 11:05
  Speaker 3: in another town they were trying to get in touch
• 11:07
  Speaker 3: with to see if they knew anything at all.
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And to a person, they were like, I haven't
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: seen her, you know. And then finally, 10 days after
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: she went missing, they went to the cops. They went
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: straight to the deputy police commissioner, William J. Flynn. And Flynn,
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: knowing that he was dealing with a really affluent, influential
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: New York family, he did his best and he was
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: successful at keeping this under wraps, again, to avoid scandal.
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: Yet he issued what is called a silent alarm, which
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: is basically like you're letting the cops know, but also
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: do not tell the press about this kind of thing.
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: So the cops started looking for from December 22nd on.
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: And I think for a full month, Flynn and the
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: cops kept it under wraps and kept it out of
• 11:54
  Speaker 2: the public eye. that Dorothy was missing and I didn't
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: see anywhere. Like how did they explain her absence to
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: like friends or like, I think Marjorie's debutante ball was
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: like five days after she was missing. I'm sure they,
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: they kept that, you know, they had no reason publicly to,
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: to postpone that. So how did they explain Dorothy's absence?
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: I was just curious about that. I couldn't find it anywhere. Yeah.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: Uh, who knows?
• 12:18
  Speaker 3: Um, that 10 days is certainly, uh, Probably a dumb
• 12:22
  Speaker 3: thing to do if you're trying to find your daughter.
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: For sure.
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: Successfully. But yeah, that's what they did.
• 12:28
  Speaker 3: They waited 10 days for the cops and then even
• 12:30
  Speaker 3: longer to eventually go public. On January 25th, the cops
• 12:33
  Speaker 3: were like, hey, listen, you got to get the public's
• 12:36
  Speaker 3: help here. And they held a press conference. They let
• 12:40
  Speaker 3: everyone know what happened, offered a thousand dollar reward. And
• 12:44
  Speaker 3: all of a sudden, the New York Times has picked
• 12:46
  Speaker 3: up the story under the heading Niece of Peckham. strangely missing,
• 12:51
  Speaker 3: which was the Supreme Court justice. So, you know, initially
• 12:54
  Speaker 3: tying her to, you know, a Supreme Court justice, obviously
• 12:59
  Speaker 3: just a grabby headline, I think, probably.
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: Sure.
• 13:03
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: I guess he was well known enough that you could
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: even say him by his call him by his last name. Yeah.
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: The Pexter, I think, is what most people call them.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: Should we take a break?
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, sure. All right.
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: We'll take a break. It's out in the news and
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: in the public, and we'll come back right after this.
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: Okay, Chuck, so we're back and Dorothy's missing. This is
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: pretty early in the investigation. January 25th is where we reached.
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: And initially, the police were reported to basically think that
• 13:53
  Speaker 2: Dorothy just ran off. that she went off to get married.
• 13:57
  Speaker 2: One of the clues that actually panned out to nothing
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: was a sheath of brochures for ocean liners, which suggested
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: strongly that she had planned or intended to run off
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: and probably run off with the bow. That's why most
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: people ran off at the time. And the family was like,
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: we don't believe that at all. We just absolutely don't
• 14:20
  Speaker 2: think that. So there was this constant disagreement with The
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: cops publicly saying we think she's alive and just ran
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: off in the family saying she just would not do
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: that to us. We think she's dead, actually.
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And, you know, the rumor mill is going to spread.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: The tabloids are going to pick it up.
• 14:36
  Speaker 3: So, of course, they were suggesting everything from eloping to
• 14:42
  Speaker 3: dying by suicide to being like the family knows that
• 14:46
  Speaker 3: there was a crime like that she was murdered or
• 14:48
  Speaker 3: kidnapped or something. And they're just trying to keep it
• 14:51
  Speaker 3: quiet because they're, you know, rich and powerful family. And obviously,
• 14:55
  Speaker 3: false reportings of sightings come in, fake ransom letters start
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: coming in. And this is all the reason why the
• 15:02
  Speaker 3: family didn't want this to go public, because that's the
• 15:04
  Speaker 3: kind of thing that comes along with it. But finally,
• 15:09
  Speaker 3: the last week of January, reporters basically were hearing from
• 15:14
  Speaker 3: people involved in the case that it was going to
• 15:17
  Speaker 3: be solved and that she was seen in the city recently.
• 15:20
  Speaker 3: So this happened a couple of times where they were
• 15:24
  Speaker 3: like a report came out that like, yeah, we, we
• 15:26
  Speaker 3: basically know where she is. She's coming home and it
• 15:28
  Speaker 3: never amounted to anything.
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: No, no, for sure. And very interestingly, if you read
• 15:34
  Speaker 2: some of the headlines, um, covering Savannah Guthrie's mother's disappearance,
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: there's a lot of like someone spotted her. They think
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: she's coming home. Like that's, it seems to be pretty
• 15:44
  Speaker 2: standard that the press will just print whatever somebody says,
• 15:48
  Speaker 2: you know? So, um, the, the investigation, um, not just
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: for her whereabouts, but into her background, looking for any
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: kind of clue, like those ocean liner brochures, um, to
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: figure out where she went, what happened to her. It
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: turned up just zip, right? Like no friend came forward
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: and said, Hey, she actually had a secret life. She
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: was seeing this guy no one knows about, um, or
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: bank accounts that her family didn't know about. None of
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: those turned up. Um, She was like a she seems
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: to have been the person that she appeared to be
• 16:22
  Speaker 2: on the surface. She wasn't hiding a secret life or
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: anything like that. She was very loyal to her family.
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: She listened to what her father told her to do.
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: And like she wasn't troubled. She didn't have a lot
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: of stuff on her mind. The worst thing that had
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: happened to her. And it does seem to have been
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: significant was being rejected by McClure's. And I think also
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: her family making fun of her probably weighed on her
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: more than. then she led on, but nothing was coming up.
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: And it's not like those ocean liners, like her family's like, no,
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: she didn't run off. And that's where that lead went.
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: They got in touch with every ocean liner going to
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: Europe at the time to see if anyone on board
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: matched her description or was in their register under her name.
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: And again, nada, nothing turned up. So every lead that
• 17:08
  Speaker 2: they had just completely went nowhere.
• 17:10
  Speaker 3: Yeah. And you know, poor Francis, the father is, uh,
• 17:15
  Speaker 3: Like he's telling reporters out loud that he he thinks
• 17:18
  Speaker 3: that she's dead. The police, you know, or at least
• 17:23
  Speaker 3: the police and the public are like, there's no body.
• 17:26
  Speaker 3: So she's probably still out there somewhere. But the family
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: was like, no, she probably was just disposed of in
• 17:31
  Speaker 3: a way where they haven't found this body. In February,
• 17:35
  Speaker 3: I think February 7th, the Times reported that police in
• 17:40
  Speaker 3: New York and Philly weren't even working on the case anymore.
• 17:44
  Speaker 3: And that, you know, basically like, hey, the family knows
• 17:47
  Speaker 3: where she is. Again, she's about to return any day now.
• 17:51
  Speaker 3: And in that story from The Times, it was I
• 17:55
  Speaker 3: think that they said the previous day that Francis, the father,
• 18:00
  Speaker 3: had gotten a supposedly at least gotten a postcard that said,
• 18:04
  Speaker 3: I am safe in her handwriting. But the family basically
• 18:08
  Speaker 3: was like, no, this is a joke. Somebody saw her
• 18:10
  Speaker 3: handwriting there. and a letter that they had published in
• 18:13
  Speaker 3: the newspaper. And again, it's just somebody messing around with us.
• 18:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Which is pretty cruel.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: Of course.
• 18:19
  Speaker 2: Imagine also being the kind of person who's like, here's
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: an heiress disappearing and thinking, well, now's my chance. I'm
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: going to send a fake ransom letter and hope for
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: the best.
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: If you're sending fake ransom letters to people whose loved
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: one has disappeared, you should stop and reevaluate your life,
• 18:37
  Speaker 2: I think is a good rule of thumb.
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Hey, we usually don't like to tell people what
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: to do. Oh, yeah.
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: I don't mean to get preachy.
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: I can get behind that.
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: Okay. So something that you had said was that it's
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: kind of up in the air whether her mother Mary's
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: health was delicate, I guess. Yeah. And her father told
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: the press, like, her mom's off limits. She's in a
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: rest home in New Jersey. She's about to have a
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: nervous breakdown. Just leave her alone. And the press left
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: her alone. They didn't search for her. But she turned
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: up anyway, not in New Jersey. She turned up in Italy.
• 19:16
  Speaker 2: And the reason she was in Italy, as we'll see,
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: is because she and her son, John, went looking for
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: a man named George S. Griscom Jr., a.k.a. Junior, because
• 19:29
  Speaker 2: the family already knew. But it turned out that as
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: a big reveal to the public, she had a secret
• 19:34
  Speaker 2: romance with this guy who was 15 years older than her.
• 19:37
  Speaker 3: Yeah, this kind of came about because there was a
• 19:40
  Speaker 3: reporter early on interviewing the father and said like, hey,
• 19:46
  Speaker 3: did she run off because you don't let her date?
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: Because that's a thing.
• 19:50
  Speaker 3: And the dad said, I would have been glad to
• 19:53
  Speaker 3: see her associate with more young men than she did,
• 19:55
  Speaker 3: especially some young men of brains and position, one whose
• 19:58
  Speaker 3: profession or business would keep them occupied. I don't approve
• 20:01
  Speaker 3: of young men who have nothing to do. And the
• 20:03
  Speaker 3: reporter was like, well, that's a really Weirdly specific thing
• 20:07
  Speaker 3: to say. And so the reporters tracked down this information
• 20:12
  Speaker 3: about Junior, who how old was she?
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: Twenty five. So this made him 40 years old.
• 20:19
  Speaker 3: He went to Harvard, which is like, that's great from
• 20:22
  Speaker 3: a wealthy family.
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: That's great.
• 20:24
  Speaker 3: But he was 40 years old and unemployed and living
• 20:27
  Speaker 3: with his parents still had been engaged to another heiress
• 20:30
  Speaker 3: that broke. She had broken off the engagement the night
• 20:33
  Speaker 3: before the wedding. Never a good sign. He had proposed
• 20:37
  Speaker 3: to Dorothy already. But Francis, the dad, was like, no,
• 20:40
  Speaker 3: you're not marrying my daughter.
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: Sure.
• 20:43
  Speaker 3: And so all of a sudden there's this secret romance
• 20:46
  Speaker 3: exposed where they learn that she had a little illicit
• 20:50
  Speaker 3: fling with him in Cambridge. She was like, I'm going
• 20:52
  Speaker 3: to go visit a college friend down there. But what
• 20:55
  Speaker 3: really happened was she went down there to have a
• 20:57
  Speaker 3: little fling with Junior. And like it looks like pawned
• 21:01
  Speaker 3: some jewelry in order to finance this thing. Yeah.
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: Five hundred dollars in 19. 10 money for $ 60. And
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: a lot of people are like, good, there you go.
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: She ran off to Boston with the guy. There's more
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: nuance to it that I think also shows Dorothy's personality.
• 21:19
  Speaker 2: Number one, they didn't stay at the same hotel. She
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: registered at the Lenox while George stayed at the Essex.
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: So even during this rendezvous, she still had propriety, I guess.
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: And then second, she registered at the Lenox under her name,
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: no alias. At the time you would put your address down,
• 21:38
  Speaker 2: she put her actual address in New York. So like
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: she wasn't, she didn't show any signs of being this
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: person who could like keep a secret life or something
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: like that. The one time she had the chance to
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: like perform in secret, she didn't. She just was herself. Yeah.
• 21:57
  Speaker 3: See, I read that more as not, she's trying to
• 21:59
  Speaker 3: be proper, but that she wanted to have two different
• 22:03
  Speaker 3: hotels to cover her tracks.
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: But why would she register in her real name then?
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: Because she went down there to see a friend. Okay.
• 22:12
  Speaker 3: Like there was nothing secret about that. She has her story. Like, yeah,
• 22:15
  Speaker 3: I went and stayed at the Lenox and saw my friend.
• 22:17
  Speaker 3: And no one at that hotel will say you saw
• 22:19
  Speaker 3: me with some dude because.
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: That happened at the other hotel.
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: All right.
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: Fair enough.
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: Under his name. That's at least the way I read it.
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: Okay. Yeah, that's fine. That's fine, Chuck. We can all
• 22:31
  Speaker 2: have different opinions.
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: I appreciate that.
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: So let's see. We have established that Junior was a planetismal.
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: He never formed a full planet. And the reason that
• 22:43
  Speaker 2: he was in Italy was because he was on vacation
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: with his parents, his elderly parents. I think they were
• 22:48
  Speaker 2: probably in their 60s at the time, which was super
• 22:51
  Speaker 2: old in 1910. And George Griscombe, when he turned up,
• 22:56
  Speaker 2: when he became like a I guess a person, a
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: part of this whole disappearance. He started like, he kind
• 23:05
  Speaker 2: of added a whole new dynamic. The family did not
• 23:08
  Speaker 2: like him at all. And in fact, when Mary and
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: John confronted him in Italy, John beat him up. He
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: knocked him down. He reached into his coat pocket and
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: took some letters that Dorothy had mailed to him. Like
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: they didn't like George Griscombe at all, but he, If
• 23:27
  Speaker 2: you read some of the stuff that George Griscom did,
• 23:30
  Speaker 2: he really seems to have been genuinely concerned that Dorothy
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: was missing so much so that he came home early
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: to kind of try to help aid in the search
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: for her, despite her family saying, we don't want your help.
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: Stay away.
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure.
• 23:47
  Speaker 3: Jumping back, though, on the Monday after Thanksgiving, they learned
• 23:51
  Speaker 3: that she had gone to the post office, that P.O.
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: box that she had set up in secret and gotten
• 23:56
  Speaker 3: a bunch of letters that were apparently had come from overseas.
• 24:00
  Speaker 3: And everyone basically presumes that they were from Griscom while
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: he was over there in Europe. And there was a
• 24:06
  Speaker 3: letter that he shared publicly later on where she wrote
• 24:09
  Speaker 3: to him talking about, you know, how much it hurt
• 24:13
  Speaker 3: her to have that story rejected. And she said, failure
• 24:16
  Speaker 3: stares me in the face. All I see ahead is
• 24:18
  Speaker 3: a long road with no turning. And then this weird line,
• 24:22
  Speaker 3: she said, mother will always think an accident has happened. Yeah.
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: And I didn't see anywhere that Griscom tried to explain
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: that when he revealed that letter to the press.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I don't know what that means.
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: I don't think anybody knows what she meant specifically. Yeah.
• 24:38
  Speaker 2: It's weird. And it is very chilling. It definitely supports
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: the suicide theory for sure. Yeah. So should we take
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: our second break and come back and talk a little
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: more about stuff they turned up on Dorothy?
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, let's do.
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: It.
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: All right, so....
• 25:14
  Speaker 3: When we left you, I think Griscom had just come
• 25:17
  Speaker 3: back from Italy. This is February 9th. He comes back
• 25:21
  Speaker 3: and the reporters obviously are all over him. And he
• 25:24
  Speaker 3: was like, hey, listen, I'm here to help find her. Like,
• 25:27
  Speaker 3: you know, I loved her. Like, I want to find her.
• 25:30
  Speaker 3: And he changed his story a bit here and there, though,
• 25:34
  Speaker 3: which is a little fishy. Sometimes his story was that
• 25:37
  Speaker 3: they were engaged. Sometimes his story was that they were
• 25:41
  Speaker 3: just really good friends. He said at one point that
• 25:44
  Speaker 3: he said, hey, there's one at least one family member
• 25:47
  Speaker 3: that knows where she is and she's going to be
• 25:49
  Speaker 3: back soon and we're going to get married when she
• 25:51
  Speaker 3: gets back. So another time where someone publicly said like, yeah,
• 25:55
  Speaker 3: she's she's we know she's coming back.
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And one of the other things. So, like I said,
• 26:00
  Speaker 2: he added some new like component to the whole thing.
• 26:03
  Speaker 2: He was a foil to the family in a lot
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: of ways, because when John beat him up and took
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: those letters in Italy, the police were like, hey, can
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: we see those letters and see if there's any clues
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: in them? And John said they've already been destroyed. There's
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: nothing of consequence in there. But her family was also
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: very much convinced that she was dead. So it suggests
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: that there was something in the letters that satisfied the
• 26:25
  Speaker 2: family of her fate. But Griscom had the same letters, too.
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: He knew of that same content and he wasn't satisfied
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: that she was dead. So he's like him being there,
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: like I think really helps make this case the way
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: it is, that it's just so baffling because he he
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: he acts as an answer, an antidote to a lot
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: of the assumptions you can make when just looking at
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: the family's actions.
• 26:52
  Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. And, you know, the press is asking
• 26:54
  Speaker 3: him about these letters. They were like, hey, what about
• 26:57
  Speaker 3: this one letter that she wrote where she said she
• 27:00
  Speaker 3: was going to, quote, do something that may be cowardly?
• 27:04
  Speaker 3: And he didn't even answer them and said, like, I
• 27:07
  Speaker 3: promised her I wouldn't talk about this kind of thing
• 27:11
  Speaker 3: when she wrote me this stuff. He said, I had
• 27:13
  Speaker 3: a long talk with her mom in Europe. I agreed
• 27:15
  Speaker 3: to do certain things to help you guys. He dodged
• 27:18
  Speaker 3: questions about John beating him up. And then started running
• 27:22
  Speaker 3: like his own personal ads in the paper, like trying
• 27:25
  Speaker 3: to find her.
• 27:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So this is at least the third parallel investigation
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: into her disappearance that Griscom has now undertaken. Although I
• 27:34
  Speaker 2: get the impression that his was a little slapdash compared
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: to the others.
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Less investigation, maybe more just public show. I don't know.
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: I don't know. I don't know. I hadn't gotten a
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: good read on him. I did believe he was genuinely concerned.
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: But yes, he seemed to have been not not roundly
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: liked by everybody.
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: I mean, he had no job. What else has he
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: got to do?
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: Exactly. Exactly. So this was there was a worldwide search
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: for her. I saw that every every. city and town
• 28:03
  Speaker 2: of consequence, uh, their police station got, um, you know, uh,
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: an alert of beyond the lookout with photos and descriptions
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: and all that stuff. Um, it was reported around the world.
• 28:14
  Speaker 2: I found a paper in Tasmania that, um, had a
• 28:17
  Speaker 2: long story describing the disappearance the following July. Like, like
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: it was everywhere for, for a few years as a
• 28:25
  Speaker 2: matter of fact, but as with everything, Interest waned. Interest
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: in new stuff kind of came along. But yet there's
• 28:32
  Speaker 2: still plenty of reporting that pops up over the years.
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: If you go on to newspapers.com, shout out newspapers.com for
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: contemporary-aneous articles.
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: Like you can find them throughout. the decades, just basically
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: like what happened. And most of the time it doesn't
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: add anything new, but it's just such a baffling case
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: that somebody could say, oh, I haven't read about, or
• 28:58
  Speaker 2: I haven't written about Dorothy Arnold in a while. I'll
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: do that for my column this week. Yeah.
• 29:03
  Speaker 3: So here are some of those stories right now. Four
• 29:06
  Speaker 3: years later in 1914, there was a story where police
• 29:10
  Speaker 3: raided a hospital in Pittsburgh, in a suburb of Pittsburgh
• 29:14
  Speaker 3: that You know, abortion was illegal. And so they it
• 29:17
  Speaker 3: was one of those hospitals that offered kind of secret abortions.
• 29:21
  Speaker 3: They were there to arrest people. They arrested two doctors
• 29:23
  Speaker 3: and a nurse. And one of the doctors implied that
• 29:27
  Speaker 3: Dorothy had died there, basically went in to get a
• 29:30
  Speaker 3: got pregnant from Griscom is the assumption, went there to
• 29:35
  Speaker 3: get an abortion, died there during the process and was
• 29:38
  Speaker 3: cremated in the cellar. And some people noted that like
• 29:41
  Speaker 3: Griscom could have traveled there. It wasn't too far away.
• 29:45
  Speaker 3: And it could, you know, people died during those procedures,
• 29:49
  Speaker 3: but nothing ever came from that.
• 29:51
  Speaker 2: No, but that is really random for one of the
• 29:54
  Speaker 2: doctors to pipe up and say that. And it is
• 29:56
  Speaker 2: clear that some women did die during procedures and were
• 29:59
  Speaker 2: cremated in the basement. I mean, that's a pretty likely possibility, right?
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that could have been what happened.
• 30:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Her family, of course, was like, nope, that absolutely
• 30:11
  Speaker 2: didn't happen. So did George Griscom. A couple of years
• 30:15
  Speaker 2: after that, there was a prisoner in Rhode Island State
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: Prison who who said that years back he had been
• 30:22
  Speaker 2: paid $ 250 to help dispose of a body of a woman.
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: And he said that woman was 100% Dorothy Arnold. And
• 30:30
  Speaker 2: as a matter of fact, you can find her in
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: the cellar of this house in West Point, New York.
• 30:36
  Speaker 2: And the cops went and dug up the cellar of
• 30:38
  Speaker 2: that house in West Point, New York, and not only
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: didn't find her, they found nothing. So the guy was
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: just bored, I guess. So that went absolutely nowhere.
• 30:48
  Speaker 3: Yeah, this one is really, really weird to me. In 1921,
• 30:53
  Speaker 3: during like a public interview, I guess, the head of
• 30:57
  Speaker 3: New York Police Department's Bureau of Missing Persons was a
• 31:00
  Speaker 3: guy named Captain J.H.
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: Ayers.
• 31:03
  Speaker 3: He said the police department knew what happened to her
• 31:06
  Speaker 3: a few months earlier. They figured it out basically and
• 31:09
  Speaker 3: solved it and that they probably should not have mentioned
• 31:11
  Speaker 3: the case as it was strictly confidential in the department.
• 31:15
  Speaker 3: He wouldn't say whether she was alive or dead. But
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: she was no longer a missing person. And the next
• 31:19
  Speaker 3: day he was like, oh, yeah, you know what? I
• 31:21
  Speaker 3: was misquoted or I misspoke or whatever. And like, I
• 31:25
  Speaker 3: guess nothing ever came from that either, which is just nuts.
• 31:27
  Speaker 2: It is like that one's very weird. But again, nothing
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: did come of it. Like you said, like even after
• 31:35
  Speaker 2: all these years, it just seems to have died right there.
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: And so those theories over the years, like you said,
• 31:43
  Speaker 2: basically amount to murder. Kidnapping, which eventually led to murder.
• 31:49
  Speaker 2: And the murder theory was that she probably if she
• 31:54
  Speaker 2: was murdered, it would have happened in Central Park in
• 31:57
  Speaker 2: some lonely stretch where she was. You remember, she said
• 32:00
  Speaker 2: she was about to walk home through Central Park and
• 32:03
  Speaker 2: they actually did have the reservoir dragged. And no surprise,
• 32:06
  Speaker 2: absolutely no evidence turned up from that.
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: Just a few other bodies.
• 32:10
  Speaker 2: I'm sure. I'm sure. But one of the things that
• 32:14
  Speaker 2: I thought was pretty interesting, one of the theories is
• 32:16
  Speaker 2: that she had amnesia. Yeah.
• 32:18
  Speaker 3: I mean, there certainly have been cases where someone bonks
• 32:21
  Speaker 3: their head and forgets who they are and starts a
• 32:24
  Speaker 3: new life like that has happened. But again, you know,
• 32:28
  Speaker 3: no evidence of this. This is people just kind of
• 32:30
  Speaker 3: throwing spaghetti at the wall at this point, I think.
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: Sure.
• 32:33
  Speaker 3: What about the woman in Kansas City, though? Because they
• 32:35
  Speaker 3: found an almost dead ringer for her, which was very strange.
• 32:39
  Speaker 2: It's nuts, isn't it? Yeah. I turned this up, I think,
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: in a 1935 article from San Antonio. But there is
• 32:46
  Speaker 2: a woman named Mrs. Anna Miller who is located in
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: Kansas City. Enough reports of Dorothy Arnold sightings were coming
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: out of Kansas City in the 30s that the New
• 32:58
  Speaker 2: York Police Department actually traveled there to figure out what
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: the heck was going on. And they found Anna Miller,
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: who was said to be the wife of a movie
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: projector operator. And, yes, she was a dead bringer for
• 33:11
  Speaker 2: Dorothy Arnold. She had the same height, weight, same age,
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: same facial characteristics. She had the same birthmark, which is
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: really strange because it's a mole on her right leg
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: three inches above the knee. That's quite a coincidence. And
• 33:25
  Speaker 2: the coincidences kept building up. She told investigators, I actually
• 33:30
  Speaker 2: used to live in New York. And they said, when?
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: She said, well, I moved on December 12th, 1910, which
• 33:35
  Speaker 2: is the day Dorothy Arnold went missing. She also had
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: a Fifth Avenue fur and a Fifth Avenue muffler, which
• 33:42
  Speaker 2: is kind of surprising for the wife of a movie
• 33:45
  Speaker 2: projector operator in Kansas City. But somehow, some way, the
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: police were satisfied that she was not actually Dorothy Arnold.
• 33:54
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is one of those frustrating things where
• 33:56
  Speaker 3: it's so long ago, there's no way to find any
• 34:00
  Speaker 3: of these people or talk to them because the amnesia
• 34:04
  Speaker 3: theory actually could fit with that. That she bonked her
• 34:07
  Speaker 3: head on the way home, slipped or something, and woke up,
• 34:12
  Speaker 3: didn't know who she was, wandered.
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: Off to Kansas City.
• 34:15
  Speaker 2: Sure, as you do.
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: With her stuff, because, I don't know, birthmarks, that's pretty specific.
• 34:21
  Speaker 2: It is. The thing is, is They searched hospitals. They
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: searched the morgue. One of the reasons why it's not
• 34:29
  Speaker 2: probable that she was misidentified or identified as Jane Doe
• 34:34
  Speaker 2: is because not only did they search the morgue, people
• 34:36
  Speaker 2: who knew what she looked like, coroners trained to spot,
• 34:42
  Speaker 2: you know, like this person seems like a well-to-do person.
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: It's weird that they were found missing. naked and dead.
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: I'm going to look a little further into that. And
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: they checked all the hospitals and there weren't any reports
• 34:53
  Speaker 2: of any woman around that time showing up with amnesia.
• 34:56
  Speaker 2: So I don't know. The Anna Miller thing is quite weird.
• 34:59
  Speaker 2: I agree with you.
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: I mean, I'm going to go ahead and say it.
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: I bet you that was probably her.
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: Isn't that, that's so amazing though. If that's, And like
• 35:09
  Speaker 2: she convinced them, I'm not Dorothy Arnold. If she actually
• 35:12
  Speaker 2: did have amnesia and did not believe she was Dorothy Arnold,
• 35:15
  Speaker 2: that's just even more amazing.
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 35:17
  Speaker 3: I mean, if that is the case, I guess the
• 35:19
  Speaker 3: bright side is she lived a life in Kansas City
• 35:24
  Speaker 3: that was hopefully satisfying to her, being married to a projectionist.
• 35:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. And she got to keep her fur
• 35:31
  Speaker 2: in her muffler, too, which is nice.
• 35:34
  Speaker 3: Well, John Keith, the attorney, basically believes that she took
• 35:37
  Speaker 3: her own life because she was upset about, you know,
• 35:42
  Speaker 3: not being able to live her life as a bohemian
• 35:44
  Speaker 3: writer in the Greenwich Village. But then everyone else, all
• 35:48
  Speaker 3: of her friends were like, no, man, she did like
• 35:50
  Speaker 3: she was always in pretty good spirits. Like there was
• 35:52
  Speaker 3: no indication of anything like that going on. There's a
• 35:56
  Speaker 3: historian named Sylvia Petim who has written about the case
• 36:00
  Speaker 3: a lot, and she was leaning toward the– botched abortion
• 36:05
  Speaker 3: procedure where she was died and cremated initially. But I
• 36:10
  Speaker 3: think later on, she just thinks like now she I
• 36:14
  Speaker 3: think she disappeared herself because she wanted to get out
• 36:17
  Speaker 3: of that, like out from under the thumb of that family.
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 36:20
  Speaker 2: And I mean, if she wanted to go live the
• 36:23
  Speaker 2: bohemian life of a artist, a writer, she might not
• 36:27
  Speaker 2: have needed all that much money to get started. You know?
• 36:30
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: Kansas City. It's a good place to do it. Right.
• 36:34
  Speaker 2: One thing I saw that kind of contradicts that, you know,
• 36:37
  Speaker 2: the idea that she was in good spirits, so it
• 36:39
  Speaker 2: couldn't have been suicide, is that in a lot of cases,
• 36:43
  Speaker 2: I don't know if it's typical, people who have decided
• 36:46
  Speaker 2: to die by suicide the day before they do it
• 36:48
  Speaker 2: or the day of, they're actually in good spirits.
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true.
• 36:51
  Speaker 2: They've decided, they've resolved, and now there's some sort of
• 36:55
  Speaker 2: hope of getting out of the situation that they're in.
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's true.
• 37:00
  Speaker 3: As far as her family's concerned, her dad, spent about
• 37:03
  Speaker 3: a dozen years and about a million bucks in 1920s
• 37:07
  Speaker 3: dollars trying to find her. Mary Arnold died six years
• 37:12
  Speaker 3: after she disappeared. And when she died, the New York
• 37:16
  Speaker 3: Times identified her as Dorothy Arnold's mother. So she was
• 37:19
  Speaker 3: kind of forever tagged with that. And, you know, just
• 37:23
  Speaker 3: like with all these cases over the years, there have
• 37:26
  Speaker 3: been like fake letters of people claiming to be her
• 37:28
  Speaker 3: or perhaps sightings of her. I think as late as
• 37:32
  Speaker 3: even 1935, 25 years later, police said, like, people are
• 37:37
  Speaker 3: still calling in tips about this case.
• 37:39
  Speaker 2: For sure. It gets even weirder. Dorothy's younger sister, remember
• 37:44
  Speaker 2: the debutante Marjorie? She had a daughter named Rebecca, and
• 37:48
  Speaker 2: Rebecca became the heir to Dorothy's papers and letters. And
• 37:53
  Speaker 2: Rebecca destroyed them. I'm suspecting that she burned them. And
• 37:57
  Speaker 2: so that even like the the. The descendants today of
• 38:02
  Speaker 2: the Arnold family have no idea what happened.
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 38:06
  Speaker 2: So if there was any evidence in those letters, like
• 38:09
  Speaker 2: Rebecca knew and she took it to her grave, it's
• 38:12
  Speaker 2: also just as likely that the letters are maybe a
• 38:15
  Speaker 2: little embarrassing or, you know.
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: Sure.
• 38:19
  Speaker 2: They contain stuff that she didn't want her aunt to
• 38:22
  Speaker 2: be remembered by or whatever. It's not necessarily that she
• 38:26
  Speaker 2: was covering up something, you know, scandalous.
• 38:29
  Speaker 3: Yeah, or it could have just been like she wants
• 38:33
  Speaker 3: people to stop asking her, and the easy way to
• 38:35
  Speaker 3: do that is to have nothing to offer.
• 38:37
  Speaker 2: She went, watch this, and just started tearing them up.
• 38:41
  Speaker 3: Yeah, SAD will clearly never be solved at this point.
• 38:45
  Speaker 2: I don't see how it could be.
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 38:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, RIP, I mean, certainly by this point, Dorothy Arnold,
• 38:53
  Speaker 2: maybe Anna Miller, and we hope that whatever the outcome was,
• 38:58
  Speaker 2: It was either quick and painless or long and fulfilling.
• 39:02
  Speaker 2: How about that?
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: That's right.
• 39:03
  Speaker 3: And a less lazy podcaster would be intrigued enough to
• 39:07
  Speaker 3: do some more research on this Kansas City woman.
• 39:10
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: But that's not me.
• 39:13
  Speaker 2: No, same. No, we've got to move on to the next, right?
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: That's right.
• 39:18
  Speaker 2: Well, if you want to go do some research on
• 39:20
  Speaker 2: Anna Miller or Dorothy Arnold or anything like that, there's
• 39:24
  Speaker 2: plenty out there on the Internet just waiting for you.
• 39:27
  Speaker 2: And in the meantime, we're going to go ahead and
• 39:29
  Speaker 2: do listeners. mail.
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: Kind of a funny correction. Hey guys, love the show.
• 39:36
  Speaker 3: And I love it when my useless knowledge can help
• 39:38
  Speaker 3: one of my favorite podcasts. On the Social Identity Theory show,
• 39:41
  Speaker 3: you guys referenced the classic movie, Can't Buy Me Love. However,
• 39:45
  Speaker 3: when Josh referenced the quote, I'm pretty sure that quote
• 39:47
  Speaker 3: situation was from another Patrick Dempsey movie, the classic Loverboy.
• 39:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely was.
• 39:53
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't remember you saying that because I have
• 39:56
  Speaker 3: not seen Loverboy, so I would not have known is
• 39:58
  Speaker 3: probably why I didn't say anything.
• 40:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I didn't say it was Loverboy. I was mistaken,
• 40:03
  Speaker 2: I guess. It's weird. It feels weird.
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 40:07
  Speaker 3: Can't Buy Me Love is the example of social identity
• 40:09
  Speaker 3: theory of the lawnmower boy pays for popularity with the
• 40:13
  Speaker 3: cheerleader and the jocks.
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: Who could beat a night of cards, chips, dips, and dorks.
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: It's a quote from the movie.
• 40:19
  Speaker 3: Lover Boy is the story of the poor college boy
• 40:21
  Speaker 3: getting extra cash for pizza delivery extras. I remember that movie,
• 40:25
  Speaker 3: but I didn't see it.
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: Did you see it?
• 40:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, oh yeah.
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: Oh, clearly.
• 40:29
  Speaker 2: I guess I had a Patrick Dempsey thing when I
• 40:31
  Speaker 2: was like 12.
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you were early on the McDreamy train.
• 40:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, those were cute little movies for sure. I
• 40:38
  Speaker 2: don't know how they hold up, but I'm guessing they're
• 40:41
  Speaker 2: probably still pretty good.
• 40:42
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I Can't Buy Me Love is one of those
• 40:44
  Speaker 3: fun ones that I want to show Ruby at some
• 40:46
  Speaker 3: point until I remember that it was made in the 80s.
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: And so there's just nudity for no reason.
• 40:54
  Speaker 2: Oh, OK. All right.
• 40:55
  Speaker 3: Not that, you know, we're not nude shaming in our
• 40:58
  Speaker 3: house at all, but we're still not like showing her
• 41:00
  Speaker 3: movies with nude scenes yet.
• 41:01
  Speaker 2: You're not like elbowing her in the ribs like check
• 41:03
  Speaker 2: that out.
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: No, no, no.
• 41:06
  Speaker 2: So what are you waiting for? Like maybe 18 for Can't.
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: Buy Me Love?
• 41:09
  Speaker 2: I know.
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: I don't know. We'll see. I'll let everyone know.
• 41:12
  Speaker 2: How about this? I'll go back and watch it just
• 41:14
  Speaker 2: for fun, and I'll let you know if there's any
• 41:16
  Speaker 2: random nudity in it, because I don't remember that. Remember,
• 41:18
  Speaker 2: I was like 12 at the time, so I definitely
• 41:21
  Speaker 2: would have remembered that.
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: Oh, no. There was. I remember the exact scene.
• 41:25
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 41:26
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: It has a very.
• 41:29
  Speaker 3: Dumb, dumb line that Emily and I privately laugh at still.
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah? That I'll tell you about off mic.
• 41:35
  Speaker 2: Okay. I can't wait to hear.
• 41:37
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 41:38
  Speaker 2: I'm surprised at my 12-year-old self.
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: All right. Thanks, guys. Keep up the great work from
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: Alex Thompson.
• 41:44
  Speaker 2: Thanks a lot, Alex. That was a great email. Appreciate
• 41:46
  Speaker 2: it big time. And if you want to be like
• 41:48
  Speaker 2: Alex and email us so that we can appreciate you
• 41:51
  Speaker 2: big time, send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.