List of People Who Disappeared Mysteriously - 1910s

1910s

• 1910 – Dorothy Arnold (25), Manhattan socialite and perfume heiress, vanished after buying a book in New York City. She intended to walk through Central Park but was never seen again.
• 1912 – Bobby Dunbar (4), disappeared during a fishing trip in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana. A child found in the custody of William Cantwell Walters of Mississippi some eight months later was ruled to be Bobby Dunbar by a court-appointed arbiter, and Walters was found guilty of kidnapping. The child grew up as Bobby Dunbar, had four children of his own, and died in 1966. In 2004, DNA tests proved that the child found was not related to Bobby Dunbar's brother, Alonzo.
• 1912 - Belgrave Edward Sutton Ninnis (25), Antarctic explorer, went down a crevasse during Sir Douglas Mawson's 1911 Australasian Antarctic Expedition and never came back up, though one of his dogs was later found dead nearby.
• 1913 – Rudolf Diesel (55), German inventor and mechanical engineer, was lost overboard from the steamer Dresden. The consensus of his biographers is that he committed suicide, but homicide theories abound, and no one can be sure.
• 1913 - Catherine Winters, 9, of New Castle, Indiana, vanished on her way home from school on March 20, 1913. Her case was treated as being roughly similar to that of Elsie Paroubek in that gypsies were the suspected culprits. Later attention focused on Catherine's father and stepmother. Murder charges were filed, but later dismissed. The father, a wealthy dentist, spent the rest of his life keeping his daughter's story alive. Many of his tactics are still used by parents of missing children today.
• 1914 – Ambrose Bierce (71), American writer known for "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and The Devil's Dictionary, was last heard from in a letter of December 1913 bearing a Chihuahua postmark to his secretary and companion, Carrie Christiansen. Although alternative theories are plentiful, he almost certainly perished in war-torn Mexico, possibly at the Battle of Ojinaga on 10 February, or perhaps was executed as a spy in the municipal cemetery of Sierra Mojada, Coahuila, where a gravestone bearing his name was erected in 2004.
• 1914 – F. Lewis Clark (52), businessman from the U.S. state of Idaho, disappeared while visiting Santa Barbara, California.
• 1914 – František Gellner (33), Czech poet, was recruited to the Austro-Hungarian Army at the beginning of World War I and went to Galicia, where he disappeared.
• 1914 – Alejandro Bello Silva (27), a lieutenant in the Chilean Army, disappeared during a qualifying exam flight over central Chile. Although search efforts commenced within hours, no trace was ever found. His disappearance is reflected in a Chilean set phrase, "more lost than Lieutenant Bello", applied to people who stray off course or disappear en route.
• 1916 - Béla Kiss (39), Hungarian serial killer who murdered 24 young women prior to his enrollment in the Austro-Hungarian Army in the First World War. Upon the discovery of his crimes he was traced to a Serbian military hospital, but escaped a few days before investigators arrived. Although there were several reported sightings of the killer (notably in New York in 1932), his true fate remains a mystery.
• 1918 – USS Cyclops, collier, left Barbados on March 4, lost with 309 crew and passengers en route to Baltimore, Maryland.
• 1918 – Arthur Cravan (31), French proto-dadaist writer and art critic, disappeared near Salina Cruz, Mexico; he most likely drowned.
• 1919 – Mansell Richard James (25), a Canadian flying ace, was last seen in western Massachusetts on 2 June, just days after a record-setting flight between Atlantic City and Boston
• 1919 – Ambrose Small (56), Canadian millionaire, disappeared from his office. He was last seen at 5:30 pm on December 2, 1919, at the Grand Theatre in London, Ontario.