Profile of Dorothy Arnold on Famous Like Me

Dorothy Harriet Camille Arnold (1884?–1910?) was an American socialite who disappeared mysteriously in 1910.

Arnold was the daughter of wealthy perfume importer Francis Arnold and the niece of the magistrate Rufus Wheeler Peckham. She had graduated from Bryn Mawr College and unsuccessfully tried her hand as a writer.

Arnold left her parent's home in Manhattan, New York City on the morning of December 12, 1910. She was going to go shopping for a dress for a party. Acquaintances she met in the Fifth Avenue later described her as cheerful. She was last seen in Brentano's bookstore on 26th Street, where she purchased a book of epigrams; before that, she had visited Park & Tilford's store at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 27th Street and charged a pound of candy to her account. At the bookstore she met a female friend, who later reported that Arnold had intended to walk home through Central Park. That night, she failed to come back for dinner.

The Arnolds feared that the case could be socially embarrassing — Dorothy had eloped and spent a week with George Griscom, Jr., a month before. Death would have been preferable to a social gaffe. Instead of calling the police, they made discreet enquiries through John S. Keith, a family friend, and hired Pinkerton detectives to investigate the disappearance. Keith searched hospitals, morgues and jails in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia for three weeks until giving up.

The Arnold family turned to police six weeks after their daughter had disappeared. In a press conference, Francis Arnold said he believed that Dorothy might have been attacked and killed in Central Park and her body thrown into the reservoir. Although he refused to mention Griscom's name, journalists tracked him down.

Griscom, who was in Naples at the time, sent a telegram where he stated that he did not know where Dorothy was. In January 1911 Dorothy's mother and his brother John travelled to Italy to forcibly interrogate him, without results. Griscom could only hand over a letter where Dorothy had mentioned her depression over a story she had written and which had been rejected by a magazine.

Intrigued by the disappearance, and probably to quell any suspicions he might have something to do with it, Griscom later spent thousands of dollars searching for Dorothy — without results. He paid for ads in major newspapers asking Dorothy to come home.

Rumors and theories abounded. Dorothy was rumored to be in a hospital somewhere with total amnesia, but there was nobody who matched her description. Others suggested she might have died during a botched abortion. Some of Dorothy's friends suspected that Dorothy might have committed suicide because Griscom had refused to marry her. The most widespread rumor was that she had become pregnant out of wedlock, the family had banished her to Switzerland, and the search was a very elaborate ruse to hide the scandal. Others said that she had simply decided to disappear.

There were numerous "sightings" or Dorothy all over the United States, but all of them proved to be false. In 1916 a Rhode Island convict claimed that somebody resembling Griscom had paid him $150 to dig a grave for Dorothy in a cellar of a house near West Point. Police did not find any sign of any corpse.

Francis Arnold died in 1922, having spent over $100,000 trying to find Dorothy. In his will he stated that he had come to believe his daughter was dead. His wife died in 1928.

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