the identification complete, discover just who the prisoners were, and
establish their connections with others believed to have financed the
kidnapping. Something deeper and more sinister than mere abduction for
ransom was suspected, and it seemed to be indicated by certain facts
that will appear presently. Accordingly the reporters and journalistic
investigators were conducting a fresh search on very broad lines.
On the evening of the second of June this hunt came to an abrupt close,
when a reporter traced the mysterious Carrie Jones to the home of an
aunt at White Oak Ridge, near Summit, New Jersey, and got from her the
admission that she was, in fact, Bella Anderson, a country girl who
had been for no long period a waitress in the Mills Hotel, in Bleecker
Street, New York. Bella Anderson readily told who the captive man and
woman were, and how the kidnapping plot had been concocted and carried
out. Her story may be summarized to clear the ground.
Bella Anderson was born in London, the daughter of a retired soldier
who had seen service in India and Africa. At the age of fourteen,
her parents being dead, she and her brother, Samuel, had set out for
America and been received by relatives in the States of New York and
New Jersey. The girl had been recently schooled and aided financially
both by her brother and other relatives. The year before the kidnapping
she had gone to New York to make her own way. At the Mills Hotel, in
the course of her duties, she had met Mr. and Mrs. George Beauregard
Barrow. They had been kind to her and become her intimates, nursing her
through an illness and otherwise befriending a lonely creature.
The Barrows, this being the true name of the arrested pair, had
persuaded her that the work of waiting on table in a hotel was too
arduous and advised her to seek employment in a private family as nurse
to a child. In this way, they told her, she would have an opportunity
to seize some rich man’s darling and exact a heavy ransom for its
return. All this part of the business they would manage for her. All
she needed to do was to seize the child, a very easy matter. For this
she was to receive one half of whatever ransom might be collected.
Accordingly, Bella Anderson had advertised for a place as child’s
nurse. Several parents answered. At the first two homes she was just
too late to procure employment, other applicants having anticipated
her. So it was mere chance that took her to the Clarke home and
determined Marion Clarke to be the victim.
The girl went on to recite that the Barrows had coached her carefully.
They had instructed her in the matter of her lack of references, in the
manner of taking the child, in her conduct at her employers’ home, in
the details of an inoffensive account of her past, and so on through
the list. They had been the mentors and the “master minds.”
After she had been employed at the Clarkes’ a few days and had taken
little Marion to the Park the first time, Mrs. Barrow had consulted
with the nurse and instructed her to be ready for the abduction on the
next excursion. Bella Anderson said she had suffered many qualms and
been unable to bring herself to the deed for several visits. Each time
Mrs. Barrow met her in the Park and was ready to flee with the little
girl. Finally the nurse reached the point of yielding. Sunday noon she
found Mrs. Barrow waiting for her, as usual. They left the baby’s cart
at the rest room, carried the child to a remote place, changed its
coat and cap, and then set out at once for South Brooklyn, where they
took the room from Mrs. Cosgriff. This matter attended to, the women
exchanged clothes, and Mrs. Barrow returned to Manhattan, gave the note
to the boy, and turned back to Brooklyn. The next morning she had seen
the headlines in the newspapers, realized that the game was dangerous,
and set out quickly for Sloatsburg, where the farmhouse had been rented
in advance by Barrow. Two days later Bella Anderson had been sent away
because the Barrows felt she was being too hotly sought and might be
recognized in the neighborhood.
This story was readily confirmed, though the Barrows naturally sought
to shield themselves. It was also discovered that Mrs. Barrow had been
an Addie McNally, born and reared in up-State New York, and that she,
with her husband, had once owned a small printing establishment, thus
explaining the chirographical characteristics of the Clarke abduction
note. She was about twenty-five years old, shrewd, capable and not
unattractive.
Investigation brought out romantic and pathetic facts concerning the
husband. He had apparently had no better employment in New York than
that of motorman in the hire of an electric cab company then operating
in that city. But this derelict was the son of distinguished parents.
His father was Judge John C. Barrow of the superior court of Little
Rock, Arkansas, and the descendant of other persons politically well
known in the South. George Beauregard Barrow--his middle name being
that of the famous Confederate commander at the first battle of Bull
Run or Manassas, to whom distant relationship was claimed--had been
incorrigible from childhood. In early manhood he had been connected
with kidnapping threats and plots in his home city and with assaults on
his enemies, with the result that he was finally sent away, cut off and
told to make his own berth in the world. Judge Barrow tried to aid his
unfortunate son at the trial, but public feeling was too sorely aroused.
George Barrow and Bella Anderson were tried before Judge Fursman and
quickly convicted. Barrow was sentenced to fourteen years and ten
months, and the Anderson girl to four years, both judge and jury
accepting her statement that she had been no more than a pawn in the
hands of shrewder and older conspirators. Mrs. Barrow, sensing the
direction of the wind, took a plea of guilty before Judge Werner,
hoping for clemency. The court, however, said that her crime merited
the gravest reprehension and severest punishment. He fixed her term at
twelve years and ten months.
These trials were had, and the sentences imposed within six weeks of
the kidnapping, the courts having acted with despatch. While the cases
were pending, Barrow, Mrs. Barrow, and the Anderson girl had again and
again been asked to reveal the names of others who had induced them
to their crime or had financed them. All said there had been no other
conspirators, but the feeling persisted that Barrow had acted with the
support of professional criminals, or of some enemy of the Clarkes,
either of whom had supplied him with considerable sums of money.
This belief, which was specially strong with some of the newspapers,
was predicated upon two facts.
On the morning of Thursday, May 25, four days after the abduction
of Marion Clarke, there had appeared in the _New York Herald_ the
following advertisement:
“M. F. two thousand dollars reward will be O. K. in Baby Clarke case.
Write again and let me know when and where I can meet you Thursday
evening. Don’t fail--strictly confidential.”
Neither the Clarkes, the newspapers, nor any persons acting for
them knew anything about a two-thousand-dollar-reward offer or had
communicated with any one who had been promised such a sum. Hence
there were only two possible explanations of the advertisement. Either
it had been inserted by some unbalanced person who wanted to create
a stir--the kind of restless neurotic who projects his unwelcome
apparition into every sensation--or there was really some dark force
moving behind the kidnapping.
A second fact led many to persist in this latter notion. In spite of
the fact that George Barrow had been disowned at home and driven from
his town, and opposed to the circumstances that he had worked at common
and ill-paid jobs, had been unable to pay his rent for eleven months,
had been seen in the shabbiest clothes and was known to be in need--the
only force that might have prompted him to attempt a kidnapping--he was
found to have a considerable sum in his pockets when searched at the
jail; he informed his wife that he would get plenty of cash for their
defense, and he was shown to have expended a fairly large sum on the
planning of the crime, the traveling and other expenses, the rent of
the farmhouse, the needs of Bella Anderson, and for his own amusement.
Where had this come from?
Not only the public and the newspapers, but Detective Chief McClusky
were long occupied with this enigma. Barrow himself gave various
specious explanations and finally refused to say more. Hints and
bruits of all kinds were current. Many said that Arthur Clarke could
furnish the answer if he would, an accusation which the harried father
indignantly rejected.
In the end the guilty trio went to prison, the Clarkes removed to
Boston, the public interest flagged, and the mystery remained unsolved.
VII
DOROTHY ARNOLD
On the afternoon of Monday, December 12, 1910, a young woman of the
upper social world vanished from the pavement of Fifth Avenue. Not
only did she disappear from the center of one of the busiest streets
on earth, at the sunniest hour of a brilliant winter afternoon, with
thousands within sight and reach, with men and women who knew her at
every side, and with officers of the law thickly strewn about her path;
but she went without discernible motives, without preparation, and, so
far as the public has ever been permitted to read, without leaving the
dimmest clew to her possible destination.
These are the peculiarities which mark the Dorothy Arnold case as one
of the most irritating puzzles of modern police history, a true mystery
of the missing.
It is one of the maxims in the administration of absent-persons bureaus
that disappearing men and women, no matter how carefully they may plan,
regardless of all natural astuteness, invariably leave behind some
token of their premeditation. Similarly, it is a truism that, barring
purposeful self-occultation, the departure of an adult human being
from so crowded a thoroughfare can be set down only to abduction or to
mnemonic aberration. Remembering that a crime must have its motivation,
and that cases of amnesia almost always are marked by previous
symptoms and by fairly early recovery, the recondite and baffling
aspects of this affair become manifest; for there was never the least
hint of a ransom demand, and the girl who vanished was conspicuous for
rugged physical and mental health.
Thus, to sum up the affair, a disappearance which had from the
beginning no standing in rationality, being logically both impenetrable
and irreconcilable, remains, at the end of nearly a score of years, as
obstinate and perplexing as ever--publicly a gall to human curiosity,
an impossible problem for reason and analytical power.
Dorothy Arnold was past twenty-five when she walked out of her father’s
house into darkness that shining winter’s day. She was at the summit
of her youth, rich, socially preferred, blessed with prospects, and
to every outer eye, uncloudedly happy. Her father, a wealthy importer
of perfumes, occupied a dignified house on East Seventy-ninth Street,
in the center of one of the best residential districts, with his wife
and four children--two sons and two daughters. Mr. Arnold’s sister was
the wife of Justice Peckham of the United States Supreme Court, and
the entire family was socially well known in Washington, Philadelphia,
and New York. His missing daughter had been educated at Bryn Mawr and
figured prominently in the activities of “the younger set” in all these
cities. All descriptions set her down as having been active, cheerful,
intelligent, and talented.
The accepted story is that Miss Arnold left her father’s home at about
half past eleven on the morning of her disappearance, apparently to go
shopping for an evening gown. She appears to have had an appointment
with a girl friend, which she broke earlier in the morning, saying
that she was to go shopping with her mother. A few minutes before she
left the house, the young woman went to her mother’s room and said she
was going out to look for the dress. Her mother remarked that if her
daughter would wait till she might finish dressing, she would go along.
The girl demurred quietly, saying that it wasn’t worth the bother, and
that she would telephone if she found anything to her liking. So far as
her parent could make out, the girl was not anxious to be alone. She
was no more than casual and seemed especially happy and well.
At noon, half an hour after she had left her home, Miss Arnold went
into a shop at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, where she bought
a box of candy and had it charged on her father’s account. At about
half past one she was at Brentano’s bookshop, Twenty-seventh Street and
Fifth Avenue. Here she bought a volume of fiction, also charging the
item to her father.
Whether she was recognized again at a later hour is in doubt. She met a
girl chum and her mother in the street some time during the early part
of the afternoon and stopped to gossip for a few moments; but whether
this incident occurred just before or after her visit to the bookstore
could not be made certain. At any rate, she was not seen later than two
o’clock.
When the young woman failed to appear at home for dinner, there was
a little irritation, but no concern. Her family decided that she had
probably come across friends and forgotten to telephone her intention
of dining out. But when midnight came, and there was still no word
from the young woman, her father began to feel uneasy and communicated
by telephone with the homes of various friends, where his daughter
might have been visiting. When he failed to discover her in this way,
Mr. Arnold consulted with his personal attorney, and a search was begun.
The reader is asked to note that there was no public announcement of
the young woman’s absence for more than six weeks. Just why it was
considered wise to proceed discreetly and privately cannot be more
than surmised. This action on the part of her family has always been
considered suggestive of a well-defined suspicion and a determination
to prevent its publication. At any rate, it was not until January 26,
that revelation was made to the newspapers, at the strong urging of W.
J. Flynn, then in charge of the New York detectives.
In those six weeks, however, there had been no idleness. As soon as
it was apparent that the girl could not be merely visiting, private
detectives were summoned, and a formal quest begun. Her room and its
contents revealed nothing of a positive character. She had left the
house in a dark-blue tailored suit, small velvet hat and street shoes,
carrying a silver-fox muff and satin bag, probably containing less
than thirty dollars in money. Her checkbook had been left behind; nor
had there been any recent withdrawals of uncommon amounts. No part of
the girl’s clothing had been packed or taken along; none of her more
valuable jewelry was missing; no letter had been left, and nothing
pointed to preparation of any sort.
A search of her correspondence revealed, however, a packet of letters
from a man of a well-known family in another city. When, somewhat
later, Mr. Arnold was summoned by the district attorney and asked to
produce the letters, he swore that they had been destroyed, but added
that they contained nothing of significance.
It developed, too, that, while her parents were in Maine in the
preceding autumn, Dorothy Arnold had gone to Boston on the pretext of
visiting a school chum, resident in the university suburb of Cambridge;
whereas she had actually stopped at a Boston hotel and had pawned about
five hundred dollars’ worth of personal jewelry with a local lender,
taking no trouble, however to conceal her name or home address. It was
shown that the man of the letters was registered at another Boston
hotel on the day of Dorothy’s visit; but he denied having seen her or
been with her on this occasion, and there was no way of proving to the
contrary. The date of this Boston visit was September 23, about two and
a half months before Miss Arnold’s disappearance. The police were never
able to establish any connection between the Boston visit, the pawning
of the jewels, and the subsequent events, so that the reader must rely
at this point upon his own conjecture.
Before the public was made acquainted with the vanishment of the young
heiress, both her mother and brother and the man of the letters had
returned from Europe, and the latter took part in the search for her.
He disclaimed, from the beginning, all knowledge of Miss Arnold’s
plans, proclaimed that he knew of no reason why she should have left
home, announced that he had considered himself engaged to marry her,
and he pretended, at least, to believe that she would shortly appear.
Needless to say, a close watch was secretly maintained over the young
man and all his movements for many months. In the end, however, the
police seemed satisfied that he knew no more than any one else of
Dorothy Arnold’s possible movements. He dropped out of the case almost
as suddenly as he had entered it.
In the six weeks before the public was acquainted with the facts,
private detectives, and later the public police, had worked
unremittingly on the several possible theories covering the case. There
were naturally a number of possibilities: First, that the girl had
met with a traffic accident and been taken unconscious to a hospital;
second, that she had been run down by some reckless motorist, killed,
and carried off by the frightened driver and secretly buried; third,
that she had been kidnapped; fourth, that she had eloped; fifth, that
she had been seized by an attack of amnesia and was wandering about the
country, unable to give any clew to her identity; sixth, that she had
quarreled with her parents and chosen this method of bringing them to
terms by the pangs of anxiety; seventh, that she had been arrested as a
shoplifter and was concealing her identity for shame.
As the weeks went by, all these ideas were exploded. The hospitals
and morgues were searched in vain; the records of traffic accidents
were scanned with the utmost care; the roadhouses and resorts in
all directions from the city were visited, and their owners closely
questioned. Cemeteries and lonely farms were inspected, the passenger
lists of all departing ships examined, and later sailings observed. The
authorities in European and other ports were notified by cable, and
the captains of ships at sea were informed by wireless, now for the
first time employed in such a quest. The city jails and prisons were
visited and every female prisoner noted. Similar precautions were taken
in other American cities, where the hospitals, infirmaries, and morgues
were also subjected to search. Marriage-license bureaus, offices of
physicians, sanitariums, cloisters, boarding schools, and all manner
of possible and impossible retreats were made the objects of detective
attention--all without result.
The notion that the girl might have been abducted and held for ransom
was discarded at the end of a few weeks, when no word had come from
possible kidnappers. The thought of a disagreement was dismissed, with
the most emphatic denials coming from all the near and distant members
of Miss Arnold’s family. The idea of an elopement also had to be
discarded after a time, and so also the theory of an aphasic or amnesic
attack.
After the police finally insisted on the publication of the facts and
the summoning of public aid, and after the various early hypotheses had
one and all failed to stand the test of scrutiny and time, various more
and more fantastic or improbable conjectures came into currency. One
was that the girl might have been carried off to some distant American
town or foreign port. Another was that some secret enemy, whose name
and grievance her parents were loath to reveal, had made away with
the young woman, or was holding her to satisfy his spite. The public
excitement was nigh boundless, and ingenious fabulations or diseased
imaginings came pouring in upon the harried police and the distracted
parents with every mail.
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.
[Illustration: ~~ 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.