Mysteries of the missing

by Edward H. Smith

Rumors and false alarms multiplied enormously. As the story of the young woman’s disappearance continued to occupy the leading columns of the daily papers, day upon day, the disordered fancy of the unstable elements of the population came into vigorous play. Dorothy Arnold was reported from all parts of the country, and both the members of her family and numberless detectives were kept on the jump, running down the most absurd reports on the meager possibility that there might be a grain of truth in one of them. Soon there appeared the pathological liars and self-accusers, with whose peculiarities neither the police nor the public were then sufficiently acquainted. In more than a hundred cities—judging from a tabulation of the newspaper reports of that day—women of the most diverse ages and types came forward with the suggestion that they concealed within themselves the person of the missing heiress. Girls of fourteen made the claim and women of fifty. Such absurdities soon had the police in a state of weary skepticism, but the Arnold family and the newspaper-reading public were still upset by every fresh report.

~~ DOROTHY ARNOLD ~~

Naturally enough, the fact that a prominent young woman, enjoying the full protection of wealth and social distinction, could apparently be snatched away from the most populous quarter of a world city, struck terror to the hearts of many. If a Dorothy Arnold could be ravished from the familiar sidewalks of her home city, what fate waited for the obscure stranger? Was it not possible that some new and strange kind of criminal, equipped with diabolic cunning and actuated by impenetrable motives, was launched upon a campaign of woman stealing? Who was safe?

One of the popular beliefs of the time was that Miss Arnold might have gone into some small and obscure shop at a time when there was no other customer in the place and been there seized, bound, gagged, and made ready for abduction. The notion was widely accepted for the dual reason that it provided a set of circumstances under which it was possible to explain the totally unwitnessed snatching of the young woman and, at the same time, set a likely locale, since there are thousands of such little shops in New York. As a result of the currency of this story, many women hesitated to enter the establishments of cobblers, bootblacks, stationers, confectioners, tobacconists, and other petty tradesmen, especially in the more outlying parts of the city. Many bankruptcies of these minor business people resulted, as one may read from the court records.

A similar fabulation, to the effect that the girl might have entered a cruising taxicab, operated by a sinister ex-convict, and been whisked off to some secret den of crime and vice, was almost as popular, with the result that cabs did a poor business with women clients for more than a year afterward. An old hackman, who was arrested in that feverish time because of the hysteria of a woman passenger, tells me that even to-day he encounters women who grow suspicious and excited, if he happens to drive by some unaccustomed route, a thing often done in these days to avoid the congestion on the main streets.

While all this popular burning and sweating was going on, the police and many thousands of private investigators, professional and amateur, were busy with the problem of elucidating some motive to fit the case. Reducing the facts to their essentials and then trying to reason, the possibilities became a very general preoccupation. The deductive steps may be briefly set down. First, there were the alternative propositions of voluntary or involuntary absence, of hiding or abduction. Second, if the theory of forced absence was to be entertained, there were only two general possibilities—abduction for ransom or kidnapping by some maniac. The ideas of murder, detention for revenge, and the like, come under the latter head. The notion of a fatal accident had been eliminated.

The proposition of voluntary absence presented a more complex picture. Suicide, elopement, amnesia, personal rebellion, an unrevealed family situation, a forbidden love affair, the desire to hide some social lapse—any of these might be the basis of a self-willed absence of a permanent or temporary kind.

The failure, after months of quest, to find any trace of a body, seemed to have rendered the propositions of murder and of suicide alike improbable. Elopement and amnesia were likewise rendered untenable theories by time, nor was it long before the conceit of a disagreement was relegated to the improbabilities.

Justly or unjustly, a good many practical detectives came after a time to the opinion that the case demanded a masculinizing of the familiar adage into cherchez l’homme. More seasoned officers inclined to the idea that there must have been some man, possibly one whose identity had been successfully concealed by the distraught girl. Again, as is common in such cases, there was the very general feeling that Miss Arnold’s family knew a good deal more than had been revealed either to the police or the public, and there was something about the long delay in reporting the case and the subsequent guarded attitude of the girl’s relatives that seemed to confirm this perhaps idle suspicion.