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.
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.
VIII
EDDIE CUDAHY AND PAT CROWE
At seven o’clock on the bright winter evening of December 18,
1900, Edward A. Cudahy, the multimillionaire meat packer, sent
his fifteen-year-old son to the home of a friend, with a pile of
periodicals. The boy, Edward A., junior, but shortly to be known over
two continents as Eddie Cudahy, left his father’s elaborate house at
No. 518 South Thirty-seventh Street, Omaha, walked three blocks to
the home of Doctor Fred Rustin, also in South Thirty-seventh Street,
delivered the magazines, turned on his heel and disappeared.
Shortly before nine o’clock the rich packer noticed that his son had
not returned, and he observed to his wife that the Rustins must have
invited the boy to stay. Mrs. Cudahy felt a little nervous and urged
her husband to make sure. He telephoned to the Rustin home and was
promptly told that Eddie had been there, left the papers and departed
immediately, almost two hours before.
The Cudahys were instantly alarmed and convinced that something out
of the ordinary had befallen the boy. He had promised to return
immediately to consult with his father over a Christmas list. He was
known to have no more than a few cents in his pockets, and unexplained
absences from home at night were unprecedented with him.
The beef magnate notified the Omaha police without long hesitation, and
the quest for the missing rich boy was on. All that night detectives,
patrolmen, servants, and friends of the family went up and down the
streets and alleys of the overgrown Nebraska packing town, with its
strange snortings from the cattle pens, its grunting railroad engines,
its colonies of white and black laborers from distant lands, its
brawling night life and its pretentious new avenues where the brash and
sudden rich resided. At dawn the searchers congregated, sleepless, at
the police headquarters or the Cudahy mansion, baffled and affrighted.
Not the first clew to the boy had been found, and no one dared to
whisper the clearest suspicions.
By noon all Omaha was in turmoil. The great packing houses had
practically stopped their activity; the police had been called in
from their usual assignments and put to searching the city, district
by district; the resorts and gambling houses were combed by the
detectives; the anxious father had telegraphed to Chicago for twenty
Pinkerton men, and the usual flight of mad rumors was in the air.
One man reported that he had seen two boys, one of them with a broken
arm, leave a street car at the city limits on the preceding night.
The fact that the car line passed near the Cudahy home was enough to
lead people to think one of the boys must have been Eddie Cudahy. As
a result, his known young friends were sought out and questioned; the
schools were gone over for the boy with a broken arm, and all the
street-car crews in town were examined by the police.
By the middle of the afternoon, the newspapers issued special editions,
which bore the news that a letter had been received from kidnappers.
According to this account, a man on horseback had ridden swiftly past
the Cudahy home at nine o’clock that morning and tossed a letter to the
lawn. This had been picked up by one of the servants, and it read as
follows:
“We have your son. He is safe. We will take good care of him and
return him for a consideration of twenty-five thousand dollars. We
mean business.
“Jack.”
With the publication of this alleged communication, even more fantastic
reports began to reach the police and the parents. One young intimate
of the family came in and reported in all seriousness that he had seen
a horse and trap standing in Thirty-seventh Street, near the Cudahy
home on several occasions in the course of the preceding week. The fact
that it looked like any one of a hundred smart rigs then in common use
did not seem to detract from its fancied significance.
Another neighbor reported that three days before the kidnapping he had
seen a covered light wagon standing at the curb in the street, a block
to the rear of the Cudahy home. One man on the seat was talking with
another, who was standing on the walk, and, as the narrator passed,
they had lowered their voices to a whisper. He had not thought the
incident suggestive until after the report of the kidnapping. And the
police, quite forgetting the instinctive universal habit of lowering
the voice when strangers pass, sent out squads of men to find the wagon
and the whisperers!
In short, the town was excited out of all sanity, and the very
forces which should have maintained calmness and acted with all
possible self-possession seemed the most headless. All the officials
accomplished was the brief detention of several innocent persons, the
theatrical raiding of a few gambling houses, and the further excitation
of the citizenry, always ready to respond to police histrionism.
To add an amusing exhibit to the already heavy store of evidence on
this last point, it may be noted with amusement, not to say amazement,
that the kidnapping letter, which had so agitated the public, was
itself a police fake, and the rider who had thrown it on the lawn was a
clumsy invention.
Meantime, however, a genuine kidnapping letter had reached the hands
of Mr. Cudahy. A little before nine o’clock on the morning of the
nineteenth, after he too had been up all night, the family coachman was
walking across the front lawn when he saw a piece of red cloth tied to
a stout wooden stick about two feet long. He approached it, looked at
it suspiciously, and finally picked it up, to find that an envelope
was wrapped about the stick and addressed in pencil to Mr. Cudahy.
Evidently some one had thrown this curiously prepared missive into the
yard in the course of the preceding night, for there had been numbers
of policemen, detectives, and neighbors on the lawn and on the walks in
front of the property since dawn.
The letter, with its staff and red cloth, was immediately carried
to the packer, who read with affrighted eyes this remarkable and
characteristic communication:
“OMAHA, December 19, 1900.
“Mr. Cudahy:
“We have kidnapped your child and demand twenty-five thousand dollars
for his safe return. If you give us the money, the child will be
returned as safe as when you last saw him; but if you refuse, we will
put acid in his eyes and blind him. Then we will immediately kidnap
another millionaire’s child that we have spotted, and we will demand
one hundred thousand dollars, and we will get it, for he will see the
condition of your child and realize the fact that we mean business and
will not be monkeyed with or captured.
“Get the money all in gold--five, ten, and twenty-dollar pieces--put
it in a grip in a white wheat sack, get in your buggy alone on the
night of December 19, at seven o’clock p.m., and drive south from your
house to Center Street; turn west on Center Street and drive back to
Ruser’s Park and follow the paved road toward Fremont.
“When you come to a lantern that is lighted by the side of the road,
place your money by the lantern and immediately turn your horse around
and return home. You will know our lantern, for it will have two
ribbons, black and white, tied on the handle. You must place a red
lantern on your buggy where it can be plainly seen, so we will know
you a mile away.
“This letter and every part of it must be returned with the money,
and any attempt at capture will be the saddest thing you ever done.
_Caution! For Here Lies Danger._
“If you remember, some twenty years ago Charley Ross was kidnapped in
New York City, and twenty thousand dollars ransom asked. Old man Ross
was willing to give up the money, but Byrnes[8] the great detective,
with others, persuaded the old man not to give up the money, assuring
him that the thieves would be captured. Ross died of a broken heart,
sorry that he allowed the detectives to dictate to him.
[8] Mr. Crowe had his criminal history somewhat vaguely in mind.
“This letter must not be seen by any one but you. If the police or
some stranger knew its contents, they might attempt to capture us,
although entirely against your wish; or some one might use a lantern
and represent us, thus the wrong party would secure the money, and
this would be as fatal to you as if you refused to give up the money.
So you see the danger if you let the letter be seen.
“Mr. Cudahy, you are up against it, and there is only one way out.
Give up the coin. Money we want, and money we will get. If you don’t
give it up, the next man will, for he will see that we mean business,
and you can lead your boy around blind the rest of your days, and all
you will have is the damn copper’s sympathy.
“Do the right thing by us, and we will do the same by you. If you
refuse you will soon see the saddest sight you ever seen.
“Wednesday, December 19th. This night or never. Follow these
instructions, or harm will befall you or yours.”
There was no signature. I have quoted the letter exactly, with the
lapses in grammar and spelling preserved. It was written in pencil on
five separate pieces of cheap note paper and in a small, but firm,
masculine hand. It was read to the chief police authorities soon after
its receipt. Just why they felt compelled to announce that it had come,
and to invent the absurd draft they issued, remains for every man’s own
intuitions.
In this case, as in other abduction affairs, the police advised the
father not to comply with the demand of the criminals, but to rely upon
their efforts. No doubt their sense of duty to the public is as much
responsible for this invariable position as any confidence in their
own powers. An officer must feel, after all, that he cannot counsel
bargaining with dangerous criminals, and that to pay them is only to
encourage other kidnappers and further kidnappings.
In spite of the menacing terms of the rather garrulous letter, which
betrayed by its very length the fervor of its persuasive threats, and
the darkness of its reminders, the nervousness of its composer, Mr.
Cudahy was minded to listen to the advice of the officers and defy the
abductors of his son. In this frame of mind he delayed action until
toward the close of the afternoon, meantime sitting by the telephone
and hearing reports from police headquarters and his own private
officers every half hour. By four o’clock he and his attorney began to
realize that there was no clew of any kind; that the whole Omaha police
force and all the men his wealth had been able to supply in addition,
had been able to make not even the first promising step, and that the
hour for a decision that might be fatal was fast approaching. Still,
he hesitated to take a step in direct violation of official policy and
counsel.
In this dilemma Mrs. Cudahy came forward with a demand for action to
meet the immediate emergency and protect her only son. She refused to
listen to talk of remoter considerations, declared that the amount of
ransom was a trifle to a man of her husband’s fortune, and weepingly
insisted that she would not sacrifice her boy to any mad plans of
outsiders, who felt no such poignant concern as her own.
Shortly before five o’clock Mr. Cudahy telephoned the First National
Bank, which had, of course, closed for the day, and asked the cashier
to make ready the twenty-five thousand dollars in gold. A little later
the Cudahy attorney called at the bank and received the specie in five
bags and in the denominations asked by the abductors. The money was
taken at once to the Cudahy house and deposited inside, without the
knowledge of the servants or outsiders.
At half past six Mr. Cudahy ordered his driving mare hitched to the
buggy in which he made the rounds of his yards and plants. At seven
o’clock he slipped quietly out of his house, without letting his wife,
the servants, or any one but his attorney know his errand. He carried a
satchel containing the five bags of gold, which weighed more than one
hundred pounds, to the stable, put the precious stuff into the bottom
of his vehicle, took up the reins, and set out on his perilous and
ill-boding adventure.
Mr. Cudahy had not been allowed to leave home without warnings from the
police and his attorney. They had told him that he might readily expect
to find himself trapped by the kidnappers, who would then hold both him
and his son for still higher ransom. So he drove toward the appointed
place along the dim, night-hidden roads, with more than ordinary
misgiving. Once or twice, after he had proceeded six or seven miles
into the blackness of the open prairie, without seeing any signs from
the abductors, he came near turning back; but the danger to his son and
the thought that the criminals could have no object in sending him on a
fruitless expedition, held him to his course.
About ten miles out of town, still jogging anxiously along behind
his horse, Mr. Cudahy saw a passenger train on one of the two
transcontinental lines that converge at that point, coiling away into
the infinite blackness, like some vast phosphorescent serpent. The
beauty and mystery of the spectacle meant nothing to him, but it served
to raise his hopes. No doubt the kidnappers would soon appear now.
They had probably chosen this locality, with the swift trains running
by, for their rendezvous. Once possessed of the gold, they would catch
the next flyer for either coast and be gone out of the reach of local
police. Perhaps they would even have the missing boy with them and
surrender him as soon as they had been paid the ransom.
Thus buoyed and heartened, the father drove on. Suddenly the road
entered a cleft between two abrupt hills or butts. A sense of
impendency oppressed the lonely driver. He took up a revolver beside
him on the seat, clutching it near him, with some protective instinct.
At the same moment he turned higher the flame in his red lantern, which
swung from the whip socket of his buggy, and peered out into the gulch.
Everything was pit-black and grave-silent. He lay back disappointed and
spoke to the horse, debating whether to turn back. Once more he decided
to go on. The cleft between the two eminences grew narrower. The horse
turned a swift sharp corner. Cudahy sat up with startled alertness.
There in the road before him, not ten rods away, was a smoky lantern,
throwing but a pallid radiance about it in the thick darkness, but
lighting a great hope in the father’s heart. He approached directly,
drew up his horse a few yards away, found that the lantern, tied to
a twig by the roadside, was decorated with the specified ribbons of
black and white, returned to his buggy, carried the bags of gold to the
lantern, put them down in the roadside, waited a few moments for any
sign that might be given, turned his horse about, and started for home,
driving slowly and listening intently for any sound from his expected
son.
The ten miles back to Omaha were covered in this slow and tense
way, with eyes and ears open, and a mind fluctuating between hope
and despair. But no lost boy came out of the darkness, and Cudahy
reached his house without the least further encouragement. It was
then past eleven o’clock. His attorney and his wife were still in
the drawing-room, sleepless, tense, and terrified. They greeted the
boy’s father with swift questions and relapsed into hopelessness
when he related what he had done. An hour passed, while Cudahy tried
to keep up the courage of his wife by argument and reasoning. Then
came one o’clock. Now half past one. Surely there was no longer any
need of waiting now. Either the kidnappers had hoaxed the suffering
parents, or that note had not come from kidnappers at all, but from
impostors--or--something far worse. At best, nothing would be heard
till morning.
“It’s no use, Mrs. Cudahy,” said the lawyer. “You’d better get what
sleep you can, and----”
“Hs-s-sh!” said the mother, laying her finger on her lips and listening
like a hunted doe.
In an instant she sprang out of her chair, ran into the hall, out of
the door, down the walk to the street, and out of the gate. The two men
sprang up and followed in time to see her catch the missing boy into
her arms. She had heard his footfall.
The news of the boy’s return was flashed to police headquarters within
a few minutes, and the detective chief went at once to the Cudahy home
to hear the returning boy’s story. It was simple and brief enough.
Eddie Cudahy had left Doctor Rustin’s house the night before, and gone
directly homeward. Three or four doors from his parents’ house Eddie
Cudahy was suddenly confronted by two men who faced him with revolvers,
called him Eddie McGee, declared that he was wanted for theft, that
they were officers, and that he must come to the police station. He
protested that he was not Eddie McGee, and that he could be identified
in the house yonder; but his captors forced him into their buggy and
drove off, warning him to make no outcry. They had gone only a few
blocks when they changed their tone, tied the lad’s arms behind him,
and put a bandage over his eyes and another over his mouth, so that he
could not cry out. He understood that he had been kidnapped.
Thus trussed up and prevented from either seeing where he was being
taken, or making any outcry, the young fellow was driven about for an
hour, and finally delivered to an old house, which he believed to be
unfurnished, judging from the hollow sound of the footsteps, as he
and his captors were going up the stairs. He was taken into a room on
the second floor, seated in a chair, and handcuffed to it. His gag
was removed, but not the bandage on his eyes. He was supplied with
cigarettes and offered food, but he could not eat. One of the two men
stood guard, the other departing at once, but returning later on.
All that night and the next day the boy was unable to sleep. But
he sensed that his captor seemed to be imbibing whisky with great
regularity. Finally, about an hour before he had been set free, Eddie
heard the other man return and hold a whispered conversation with his
guard. The boy was then taken from the house, put back into the same
buggy, driven to within a quarter of a mile of his father’s home, and
released. He ran for home, and his captors drove off.
Eddie Cudahy could not give any working description of the criminals.
He had not got a good look at them in the street when they seized him,
because it was dark, and they had the brims of their large hats pulled
down over their eyes. Immediately afterward he had been bandaged and
deprived of all further chance of observation. One man was tall, and
the other short. The tall man seemed to be in command. The short man
had been his guard. He thought there was a third man who was bringing
in reports.