The Disappearance of Dorothy Arnold

When socialite Dorothy Arnold disappeared in 1910, no one imagined the case would remain forever unsolved. Today we tell her story. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:46Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:56Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too. And we've got our sleuth suits on, which are really revealing ultra-tight rubber suits.

• 2:09Josh Clark?

  And the reason we're wearing our sleuth suits today is because this is a Unsolved Mystery Edition of Stuff You Should Know.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah, from what I understand, it is too, which suggests that it's still on the books as an open investigation.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess that's the reveal. They haven't solved this one.

• 2:42Josh Clark?

  No, which, I mean, we kind of gave that away when I said it was an Unsolved Mystery Edition.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay. Yeah, good point.

• 2:49Josh Clark?

  Or, or are we just jerking everybody's chain right now? You'll have to listen all the way through to find out.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:10Josh Clark?

  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.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:22Josh Clark?

  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.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. Should we get into it?

• 3:46Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  All right, well, she was born Dorothy Harriet Camille Arnold, and she was a rich kid from a very well-heeled family. She was a daughter of a perfume importer 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 in college at, how do you pronounce that? Bryn Mawr College?

• 4:15Josh Clark?

  You nailed it. You've been brushing up on your Welsh.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  She fancied herself a writer, and as we'll see, it's not something her parents approved of. But yeah, she was, she was living with her family uptown, right?

• 4:27Josh Clark?

  Yes, on East 79th Street. She lived two blocks down from where Emily Post would live a decade later.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Fascinating.

• 4:37Josh Clark?

  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.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 4:46Josh Clark?

  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, and it is pretty well-heeled, 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 the house she grew up in, she asked her father, can I get an apartment in Greenwich Village? And he said, no, in no uncertain terms, no. And then he added a little chide in there, too. He's like, you want to be a writer?

• 5:31Josh Clark?

  A writer should be able to write anywhere. And apparently, her family was really mean about this ambition of hers because they wanted to knock it out of her so that she would go get married and have kids and do what women were supposed to do back then.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, she, you know, 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, like, literally made fun of her for doing this kind of thing.

• 5:59Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Such that she felt the need to keep it a secret moving forward. So she got a P.O. box so she could, you know, kind of have these secret correspondences when she submitted to magazines. And that brings us to December, December 12th specifically of 1910, the day she disappeared, when she went dress shopping. She was gonna go buy a dress for her sister's debutante ball, and initially told a 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 wasn't in great health.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  And she may not have been, but there were some sort of confusing aspects to that as we move forward.

• 6:47Josh Clark?

  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 reporting, maybe?

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, or maybe it was blown out of proportion. Who knows?

• 6:59Josh Clark?

  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 5th 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

• 7:40Josh Clark?

  any dress shop, even though that's supposedly what she had left to go do that morning.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:54Josh Clark?

  It's possible.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  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. She, 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.

• 8:31Josh Clark?

  Sure. But, but yeah, I've seen it pointed out, like, if you fly in an airplane today, you get a snack and a book, and that's like what you do when you're going on a trip, right?

• 8:40Speaker 01

  I mean, I've never done it, but...

• 8:42Josh Clark?

  You've seen people do it in movies, though.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Sure, it's a thing. But like I said, this is where I think people, like, read so much into everything, like, she bought chocolates, so she was going on a steamer ship.

• 8:53Josh Clark?

  Sure. And she bought chocolates, by the way, at Pilford and some Bonbons. Isn't that the greatest name of a business you've ever heard?

• 9:02Speaker 01

  It's pretty good. So she runs into 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 gonna go through Central Park on the way home, and that was the last person to ever see her alive.

• 9:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 9:30Josh Clark?

  That was in, I think, the afternoon. Did you say about 2:00 PM?

• 9:34Speaker 01

  I did.

• 9:34Josh Clark?

  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. So 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." Because this was the time where, like, if a unmarried girl of 25 from a wealthy family was suddenly missing, that was scandalous. So her family had this on their mind throughout this entire disappearance.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. And there was an actual case a couple of years before of a young woman who disappeared, again, from a well-heeled 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."

• 10:31Josh Clark?

  She said nuts to that.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  "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.

• 10:46Josh Clark?

  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 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, she has

• 11:28Josh Clark?

  a headache and went straight to bed." And just completely lie. That's just not the case. But that was, 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. And they were as in the, in the dark as anybody else about what happened to her.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  So they decided to get someone on the case, 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. 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 that she is getting rid of." Again, a bit of a leap. But he helped them out, you know, like, "Let's call the morgue. Let's

• 12:31Speaker 01

  call the hospitals. Let's call some jails." And eventually, he was like, "Listen, get a Pinkerton detective on this thing, because they can be quite discreet as well." And so they did that. And then started reaching out to, I think, through the Pinkerton guy to other cities nearby, like, basically, anyone that she had ever known that lived in another town, they were trying to get in touch with to see if they knew anything at all.

• 12:54Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And to a person, they were like, "I haven't seen her," you know? 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 a really affluent, influential New York family, he did his best, and he was successful at keeping this under wraps, again, to avoid scandal. Yet, he issued what 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 her from December 22nd on. And I think for a full month, Flynn and the cops kept it under

• 13:37Josh Clark?

  wraps 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 debutante ball was, like, five days after she was missing. I'm sure they, they kept that, you know? They had no reason publicly to postpone that. So how did they explain Dorothy's absence? I was just curious about that. I couldn't find it anywhere.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Who knows? That 10 days is certainly probably a dumb thing to do if you're trying to find your daughter.

• 14:09Josh Clark?

  For sure.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Successfully. But yeah, that's what they did. They waited 10 days for the cops, and then 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. They let everyone know what happened, offered a $1,000 reward, and all of a sudden, The New York Times has picked up this story under the heading, "Niece of Peckham Strangely Missing," which was the Supreme Court justice. So, you know, initially tying her to, you know, a Supreme Court justice, obviously, just a grabby headline, I think, probably.

• 14:47Josh Clark?

  Sure. Yeah. I guess he was well-known enough that you could even say him by his, call him by his last name.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:54Josh Clark?

  The Pexter, I think, is what most people called him.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Should we take a break?

• 14:59Josh Clark?

  Uh, yeah, sure.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  All right. We'll take a break. It's out in the news and in the public, and we'll come back right after this.

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• 18:16Speaker 06

  Learned so much stuff from Josh and Chuck. Stuff you should know.

• 18:27Josh Clark?

  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, she had planned or intended to like run off and probably run off with a beau. That's why most people ran off at the time. And the, 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

• 19:12Josh Clark?

  alive and just ran off. And the family saying she just would not do that to us. We think she's dead, actually.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  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 eloping 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, a rich and powerful family. And obviously, false reportings 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 because that's the kind of thing that comes along with it.

• 19:52Josh Clark?

  For sure.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  But finally, the last week of January, reporters basically were hearing from people involved in the case that it was going to be solved and that she was seen in the city recently. So this, this happened a couple of times where they were, like a report came out that like, yeah, we, we basically know where she is. She's coming home and it never amounted to anything.

• 20:15Josh Clark?

  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?

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:35Josh Clark?

  So the, 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 no one knows about. Or bank accounts that her family didn't know about. None of those turned up. She was like, she, it seems to have been the person that she appeared to be on the surface. She wasn't hiding a secret life or 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.

• 21:19Josh Clark?

  She, she didn't have a lot of stuff on her mind. The, the worst thing that had happened to her, and it does seem to have been significant, was being rejected by McClures. And I think also her family making fun of her probably weighed on her more than, than she let on. But nothing was coming up. And, 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 matched her description or was in their register under her name. And again, nada, nothing turned up. So every lead that they had just completely went nowhere.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, poor Francis, the father is, like, he's telling reporters out loud that he, 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 Times 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.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  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 in a letter that they had published in the newspaper. And again, it's just somebody messing around with us.

• 23:02Josh Clark?

  Yeah, which is pretty cruel.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 23:05Josh Clark?

  But imagine also being the kind of person who's like, here's an heiress disappearing and thinking, well, now's my chance. I'm going to send a fake ransom letter and hope for the best.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:16Josh Clark?

  If you're sending fake ransom letters to people who have, whose loved one has disappeared, you should stop and reevaluate your life, I think is a good rule of thumb.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  Hey, we usually don't like to tell people what to do, but.

• 23:28Josh Clark?

  Oh yeah, I don't mean to get preachy.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  I can get behind that.

• 23:30Josh Clark?

  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.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:42Josh Clark?

  And her father told the press, like, her mom's off limits. She's in a rest home in New Jersey. She's, 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. Griscum Jr., AKA Junior. Because the family already knew, but it turned out that as a big reveal to the public, she had a secret romance with this guy who was 15 years older than her.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. This kind of came about because there was a reporter early on interviewing the father and said like, hey, did, you know, did she run off because you don't let her date? Because that's a thing. And the dad said, I would have been glad to see her 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. And so the reporters tracked down this information about Junior, who, how old was she? 25? So this made him 40 years old.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  He went to Harvard, which is like, that's great for my wealthy family. That's great. But he was 40 years old and unemployed and living with his parents still, had been engaged to another heiress that broke, she had broken off the engagement the night before the wedding. Never a good sign. He had proposed to Dorothy already, but Francis, the dad was like, no, you're not marrying my daughter.

• 25:28Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  And so all of a sudden, there's this secret romance exposed where they learned that she had a, a little illicit fling with him in Cambridge. She was like, I'm going to 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 pawned some jewelry in order to finance this thing.

• 25:49Josh Clark?

  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 like during this rendezvous, she still was, 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 like she, she wasn't, she didn't show any signs of being this person who could like

• 26:33Josh Clark?

  keep a secret life or something like that. The one time she had the chance to like perform in secret, she didn't. She just was herself.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. See, I read that more as not, she's trying to be proper, but that she wanted to have two different hotels to cover her tracks.

• 26:52Josh Clark?

  But why would she register in her real name then?

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Because she went down there to see a friend.

• 26:57Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:09Josh Clark?

  Okay. All right. Fair enough.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  Under his name. That, that's at least the way I read it.

• 27:13Josh Clark?

  Okay. I, yeah, that's fine. That's fine, Chuck. We can all have different opinions.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  Appreciate that.

• 27:20Josh Clark?

  So let's see. We have established that Junior was a planetismal. He never formed a, 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 Griscum, when he turned up, when he became like a, I guess 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.

• 28:03Josh Clark?

  He reached into his coat pocket and took some letters that Dorothy had mailed to him. Like, they didn't like George Griscum at all. But if you read some of the stuff that George Griscum 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.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. Jumping back though, on the Monday after Thanksgiving, they learned that she had gone to the post office, that P O. 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 Griscum while he was over there in Europe.

• 28:50Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  And there was a letter that he shared publicly later on where she wrote to him, talking about, you know, 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.

• 29:11Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And I didn't see anywhere that Griscum tried to explain that when he revealed that letter to the, to the press.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't know what that means.

• 29:20Josh Clark?

  I don't think anybody knows what she meant specifically.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:24Josh Clark?

  It's weird. And it is very chilling. It definitely supports the suicide theory for sure.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:31Josh Clark?

  So should we take our second break and come back and talk a little more about stuff they turned up on Dorothy?

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 29:49Josh Clark?

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• 29:59Speaker 01

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• 30:12Josh Clark?

  Or discover Toyota's off-road lineup, including the iconic forerunner and Land Cruiser, designed to go beyond the everyday. And with Toyota's proven reputation for quality and reliability, plus hybrid power on many models, you can get more for every mile and drive for less along the way.

• 30:28Speaker 01

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• 30:52Josh Clark?

  Everyone has a story to tell. What's yours? The moment you met your partner, landed that promotion? For people living with a rare disease, life can feel divided into before the diagnosis and all the after moments that follow. On Voices of VivGart, VivGart is also known as its generic name, Fgart Tigamod Alpha F Cab, you'll hear powerful stories from people facing challenges and embracing a life with a rare disease.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Join host Andra Stratten as she guides listeners through honest conversations about life after diagnosis. You'll hear how each guest worked with her care team on their treatment plan, as well as their personal challenges, setbacks, progress and moments of connection.

• 31:28Josh Clark?

  These stories reveal that life is bigger than a moment, a condition or a tough day. Listen to Voices of VivGart on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 31:45Josh Clark?

  Hey Chuck, YouTube Premium has become one of those things that makes your everyday YouTube experience a little better, especially if you're a dog owner. Because if you wanted to go find out more about how to train your dog, all you have to do is go onto YouTube Premium, type in dog training videos and sit back and learn.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, between Gibson and Momo, we're constantly looking up something dog-related, like when Gibson suddenly decided barking at the mailman was his full-time job.

• 32:10Josh Clark?

  Yeah, or Momo likes to chew things a lot. And sometimes it's not always things that she should be chewing.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. So naturally YouTube is one of the first places someone might use for training tips. Everything from stopping barking and jumping to getting maybe a little bit better at walking on a leash.

• 32:25Josh Clark?

  But what about dog nutrition too? You gotta know about that these days and there's an endless world of videos about dog nutrition on YouTube Premium. What foods are actually safe? Is homemade dog food a good idea?

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, look at this one right here. This is veterinary and approved. And look at this lady, her name is Dr. Wolf. Are you kidding me?

• 32:43Josh Clark?

  So YouTube has a ton of creators, not just Dr. Wolf, who can help you learn a lot more and make everyday pet parent decisions feel a little less overwhelming.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's where YouTube Premium really comes in. It takes something you already love, which is YouTube, and makes it even better because you get an enhanced, supercharged YouTube experience. It's got benefits that make it easier to enjoy the content and creators that you're into, whenever and wherever you need them. Well, and now here we are, watching guilty dog videos, which is my guilty pleasure. Look at these guys.

• 33:10Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I know. I feel guilty watching them, but you just can't look away. It's too adorable and sad.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  I know. Poor buddies.

• 33:18Josh Clark?

  And since YouTube Premium has ad-free viewing, we can watch guilty dog videos uninterrupted. Plus, background play means we can keep listening to those poor guilty dogs with our screen locked, which is pretty handy when you're walking the dog, right?

• 33:31Speaker 01

  That's right. And with offline downloads, you can save videos ahead of time, which is awesome, and access them even when you don't have Wi-Fi. So if you like YouTube, you'll love Premium. Whether you're figuring out the latest weird dog behavior or looking for something useful for your next walk, or maybe just indulging in your guilty pleasure, guilty dog videos, YouTube Premium makes the whole experience more seamless.

• 33:51Josh Clark?

  Sign up now for your free trial. Terms and conditions apply.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  All right. So when we left you, I think Griscum had just come back from Italy. This is February 9th. He comes back and 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, 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, there's one, 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, she's, she's, we know she's coming back.

• 34:54Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And one of the other things, so like I said, he added some new like 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 was nothing of consequence in there. 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 Griscum had the same letters too. He knew of that same content and he wasn't satisfied that she was dead. So he's like him being there, like I think really helps make this case the way it is,

• 35:38Josh Clark?

  that it's just so baffling because he, he acts as an answer, an antidote to a lot of the assumptions you can make when just looking at the family's actions.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. And you know, 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.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  And then started running like his own personal ads in the paper, like trying to find her.

• 36:22Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So this is at least the third parallel investigation into her disappearance that Griscum has now undertaken, although I get the impression that his was a little slapdash compared to the others.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, less investigation, maybe more just public show. I don't know.

• 36:38Josh Clark?

  I don't know. I don't know. I hadn't gotten a good read on him. I did believe he was genuinely, genuinely concerned, but yes, he seemed to have been not, not roundly liked by everybody.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  I mean, he had no job. What else has he got to do?

• 36:52Josh Clark?

  Exactly. Exactly. So this was, there was a worldwide search for her. I saw that every, every city and town of consequence, their police station got, you know, an alert, 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, like it was everywhere for, 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.

• 37:33Josh Clark?

  If you go onto newspapers.com, shout out newspapers.com for contemporary anious articles.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:42Josh Clark?

  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 read about, or I haven't written about Dorothy Arnold in a while. I'll do that for my column this week.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  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, you know, abortion was illegal. And so they, it was one of those hospitals that offered kind of, you know, 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, got pregnant from Griscum is the assumption. Went there to get an abortion, died there during the process and was cremated in the cellar. And some people noted that like Griscum could have traveled there, it wasn't too far away.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  And it could, you know, people die during those procedures, but nothing ever came from that.

• 38:48Josh Clark?

  No, but that is really random for one of the doctors to pipe up and say that. And it is clear that, that some women did die during procedures and were cremated in the, in the basement. I mean, that's a pretty, that's a pretty likely possibility, right?

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that could have been what happened.

• 39:06Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Her family, of course, was like, no, that absolutely didn't happen. So did George Griscum. 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 a hundred percent Dorothy Arnold. And as a matter of fact, you can find her in the cellar of this, 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.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  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's Bureau of Missing Persons, it was a guy named Captain J. H. Ayers. He said, the police department knew what happened to her a few months earlier. They, 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, you know what? I was misquoted or I misspoke or whatever. And like, I guess nothing ever came from that either, which is just nuts.

• 40:24Josh Clark?

  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 home through Central Park. And they actually did have the reservoir dragged. And no surprise, absolutely no evidence turned up from that.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  Just a few other bodies.

• 41:07Josh Clark?

  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.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:28Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  What about the woman in Kansas City, though? Because they found a almost dead ringer for her, which was very strange.

• 41:36Josh Clark?

  It's nuts, isn't it?

• 41:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:38Josh Clark?

  I turned 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, enough reports of Dorothy Arnold 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. 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.

• 42:22Josh Clark?

  And the coincidence has 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.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. And this is one of those frustrating things where it's so long ago, there's no way to, to find any of these people or talk to them, because that, that, the amnesia theory actually could fit with that.

• 43:02Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  That she bonked her head on the way home, slipped or something, and woke up, didn't know who she was, wandered off to Kansas City.

• 43:12Josh Clark?

  Sure, as you do.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  With her stuff, because, I don't know, birthmarks, that's pretty specific.

• 43:18Josh Clark?

  It is. The thing is, is they searched hospitals, they searched the morgue. 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 morgue, people who knew what she looked like, coroners 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 weren't any reports of any woman around that time showing up with amnesia. So I don't know. The Anna Miller thing is quite weird. I agree with you.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm going to go ahead and say it. I bet you that was probably her.

• 44:02Josh Clark?

  Isn't that, that's so amazing, though, if that's, and like, 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.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 44:25Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure. And she, she got to keep her fur and her muffler, too, which is nice.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  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, as a bohemian writer in the Greenwich 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 Pettem, 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, she, I think she disappeared herself, because she wanted to get out of that, like, out from

• 45:15Speaker 01

  under the thumb of that family.

• 45:17Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And I mean, if she wanted to go live the bohemian life of a artist, a writer, she might not have needed all that much money to get started, you know?

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Kansas City, it's a good place to do it.

• 45:30Josh Clark?

  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.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true.

• 45:48Josh Clark?

  They've decided, they've resolved. And now there's some sort of hope of getting out of, of the situation that they're in.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's true. As far as her family's concerned, her dad 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.

• 46:18Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:36Josh Clark?

  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.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:52Josh Clark?

  I'm suspecting that she burned them. And so that even, like, the, the descendants today of the Arnold family have no idea what, what happened.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:03Josh Clark?

  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.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 47:15Josh Clark?

  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.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  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?

• 47:34Josh Clark?

  She went, watch this, and just started tearing them up.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, sad. Will clearly never be solved at this point, you know?

• 47:42Josh Clark?

  I don't see how it could be.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:44Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Well, R.I.P., 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?

• 47:59Speaker 01

  That's right. And a less lazy podcaster would be intrigued enough to do some more research on this Kansas City woman.

• 48:06Josh Clark?

  Yes.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  But that's not me.

• 48:09Josh Clark?

  No, same. No, we've got to move on to the next, right?

• 48:13Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 48:14Josh Clark?

  Well, if you wanted 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.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  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 referenced the classic movie Can't Buy Me Love. However, when Josh referenced the quote, I'm pretty sure that quote and situation was from another Patrick Dempsey movie, the classic Lover Boy.

• 48:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah, absolutely was.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't remember you saying that, because I have not seen Lover Boy. So I would not have known, is probably why I didn't say anything.

• 48:56Josh Clark?

  Yeah, no, I didn't say it was Lover Boy. I was, I was mistaken, I guess. It's weird, it feels weird.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. Can't Buy Me Love is the example of social identity theory of the lawnmower boy pays for popularity with the cheerleader and the jocks who could beat the night of cards, chips, dips, and dorks, it's quoted 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?

• 49:24Josh Clark?

  Yeah, oh, yeah.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  Oh, clearly.

• 49:26Josh Clark?

  I guess I had a Patrick Dempsey thing when I was, like, 12.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, you were early on the McDreamy train.

• 49:32Josh Clark?

  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.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. 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.

• 49:50Josh Clark?

  Oh, okay. All right.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  Not that, you know, we're not nude shaming in our house at all, but we're still not, like, showing her movies with nude scenes yet.

• 49:58Josh Clark?

  You're not, like, elbowing her in the ribs, like, check that out.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no.

• 50:03Josh Clark?

  So what are you waiting for? Like, maybe 18 for Can't Buy Me Love?

• 50:06Speaker 01

  I don't know. We'll see. I'll let everyone know.

• 50:09Josh Clark?

  How about this? I'll go back and watch it, just for fun. 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.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  Oh, no, there was. I remember the exact scene.

• 50:21Josh Clark?

  Really?

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a, it's a, a very, has a very dumb, dumb line that Emily and I privately laugh at still.

• 50:30Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah?

• 50:31Speaker 01

  That I'll tell you about off mic.

• 50:32Josh Clark?

  Okay, I can't wait to hear. Wow, I'm, I'm surprised at my 12-year-old self.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  All right, that's, thanks, guys. Keep up the great work from Alex Thompson.

• 50:41Josh Clark?

  Thanks a lot, Alex. That was a great email. Appreciate it big time. And if you want to be like Alex and email us, so that we can appreciate you big time, send it off to [email protected].

• 50:55Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 51:11Josh Clark?

  Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota Fordability. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road-ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. And they're built on a reputation for quality and reliability, which is why Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today, and a great value tomorrow. Shop Toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places. Introducing Voices of VivGart. VivGart is also known as its generic name, F-Gart Tigamod Alpha F-Cab. And this new show features firsthand stories from people living with a rare disease.

• 51:52Josh Clark?

  Hosted by Andrew Stratton, these perspectives highlight that life is more than a moment, a condition, or a tough day. Living with a rare disease can be challenging, but it does not define the voices of VivGart. In these episodes, they share their stories, from diagnosis to working with their care team on their treatment plan. Listen to Voices of VivGart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 52:15Speaker 01

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• 52:44Speaker 07

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