Dorothy Arnold was 25 when she disappeared from her Upper East Side mansion with today’s equivalent of $1,000 on an icy Monday morning in December 1910.
The eldest daughter of perfume importer Francis R Arnold left her jewelry and passport at home and strolled towards Central Park, never to be seen again, according to The Charley Project which tracks missing persons cases.
Her disappearance has stumped detectives for more than 100 years, making her case the oldest recorded missing persons case in American history and what the Times has called ‘one of New York’s greatest mysteries’.
‘A hundred years later, I don’t expect any kind of resolution,’ Jane Vollmer, Dorothy’s great-niece told the National Geographic last month.
Full name Dorothy Harriet Camille Arnold, the socialite’s last words to her mother were ‘I’ll telephone you’ as she stepped out of their Manhattan mansion on East 79th Street.
Arnold gave different accounts of her plans for the day to different people – telling one friend she was shopping with her mother, and her mother that she wanted to go by herself.
She set off toward Fifth Avenue and stopped at the Park and Tilford’s candy store where she paid for some chocolates using her father’s credit card at 1.45pm. The clerk told investigators at the time that she had appeared to be in high spirits.
Arnold went on to purchase a book at Brentano’s on 27th and Fifth, before bumping into a friend who she chatted with for a few minutes, telling them she was headed for Central Park.
Her mother waited to meet her for lunch at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel that day, but she never turned up.
When she didn’t return home that night, the family grew concerned. Fearing bad publicity from contacting the police, they hired a private investigator.
Hellbound and Down 