Mysteries of the missing

by Edward H. Smith

The trouble with a great many of the theories evolved in the first months following the disappearance of Dorothy Arnold, was that they fitted only a part of the facts and probabilities. After all, here was an intricate and baffling situation, involving a person who, because of position, antecedents, and social situation, might be expected to act in a conventional manner. Accordingly, any explanation that fitted the physical facts and was still characterized by extraordinary details might reasonably be discarded.

It was several years before the girl’s father finally declared his belief in her death, and it is a fact that a sum of not less than a hundred thousand dollars was expended, first and last, in running down all sorts of rumors and clews. The search extended to England, Italy, France, Switzerland, Canada—even to the Far East and Australia. But all trails led to vacancy, and all speculations were at length empty. No dimmest trace of the girl was ever found, and no genuinely satisfactory explanation of the strange story has ever been put forward.

It is true there have been, at times in the intervening dozen or more years, rumors of a solution. Persons more or less closely connected with the official investigation have on several occasions been reported as voicing the opinion that the Arnold family was in possession of the facts, but denials have followed every such declaration. On April 8, 1921, for instance, Captain John H. Ayers, in charge of the Missing Persons Bureau of the New York Police Department, told an audience at the High School of Commerce that the fate of Miss Arnold had at that time been known to the police for many months, and that the case was regarded as closed. This pronouncement received the widest publicity in the New York and other American newspapers, but Captain Ayers’ statement was immediately and vigorously controverted by John S. Keith, the personal attorney of the girl’s father, who declared that the police official had told a “damned lie,” and that the mystery was as deep as ever it had been. The police chiefs later issued interviews full of dubiety and qualifications, the general tenor being that Captain Ayers had spoken without sufficient knowledge of the facts.

Just a year later the father of this woman of mysterious tragedy died, the last decade of his life beclouded by the sorrowful story and painful doubt. In his will was this pathetic clause:

“I make no provision in this will for my beloved daughter, H. C. Dorothy Arnold, as I am satisfied that she is dead.”

The death of Miss Arnold’s father once more set the rumor mongers to work and a variety of tales, bolder than had been uttered before, were circulated through the demi-world of New York and hinted in the newspapers. These rumors have not been printed directly and there has thus been no need of denial on part of the family. It must be said at once that they are mere bruits, mere attempts on the part of the cynical town to invent a set of circumstances to fit what few facts and alleged facts are known.

On the other hand, the newspapers have been only too ready to take seriously the most absurd fabulations. In 1916, for instance, a thief arrested at Providence, R. I., for motives best known to himself, declared that he had helped to bury Dorothy Arnold’s body in the cellar of a house about ten miles below West Point, near the J. P. Morgan estate. Commissioner Joseph A. Faurot, Captain Grant Williams and a number of detectives provided with digging tools set out for the place in motor cars, closely pursued by other cars containing the newspaper reporters. The police managed to shake off the newspaper men and reached the house. There they dug till they ached and found nothing whatever.

Returning to New York, the detectives left their shovels, some of which were rusty or covered with a red clay, at a station house and there the reporters caught a glimpse of them. The result was that a bit of rust or ferrous earth translated itself into blood and thence into headlines in the morning papers, declaring that Dorothy Arnold’s body had been found. Denials followed within hours, to be sure.

So the case rests.

Perhaps, in some year to come, approaching death will open the lips of one or another who knows the secret and has been sealed to silence by the fears and needs of life. But it is just as likely that the words of her dying parent contain as much as can be known of the truth about the missing Dorothy Arnold.