On December 12, 1910, Dorothy Arnold, a 25-year-old Bryn Mawr graduate and aspiring writer from a prominent Manhattan family, left home to go shopping. A little before two that afternoon, she spoke with a friend outside Brentano’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue. The friend waved goodbye from the corner. No one has been documented seeing Dorothy Arnold since.

Her family waited roughly six weeks to go public. The search that followed spanned Pinkerton agents, transatlantic cables, a confrontation in Florence, and the dragging of Central Park ponds. Over the decades, five explanations have survived, and a handful of false leads, hoaxes and claims have come and gone. This episode walks through the documented record, presents the evidence for and against each theory without ranking them, and flags the places where historical sources disagree.

Sources: Allen Churchill, “The Girl Who Never Came Back,” American Heritage (1960); Rosemary Counter, National Geographic (2024); The Charley Project; period newspaper reporting.

The Charley Project maintains the public case file for Dorothy Arnold and thousands of other missing persons: charleyproject.org

Midnight Mystery Archive is a research-driven show with an evidence-first, no-speculation standard. New episodes bi-weekly.

• jared K
• Lisa Mooney
• Jamie Mcconnell

This is the final episode of the Midnight Mystery Archive.

In Part 1, we covered who Kerryn Tate was and what happened on December 29, 1979: a 22-year-old woman hitchhiking southeast of Perth, a deliberately set fire, a body found in bushland near the Canning Dam catchment. 45 years of the case staying open. And the biological evidence recovered at the scene in 1979 that police kept, year after year, waiting for science to catch up.

This is Part 2. The science caught up.

In 2023, Western Australia Police handed that biological evidence to their investigative genetic genealogy team — a unit WA Police has described as leading the world in this methodology. The team uploaded the DNA to a public genealogy database, the same kind people use to find their cousins and trace their ancestry. The database returned genetic matches: not to the offender, but to their relatives. From those relatives, the team built a family tree. Ten thousand people. Constructed from birth certificates, death records, census data, genealogical archives, and genetic connections. Every branch narrowed the pool. At the end of that tree was one name.

Terrence John Fisher.

Fisher had died in 2000 at the age of 50, of natural causes, while living with his father in Manning, Perth. He had never been charged. His name had never appeared in the original 1979 investigation. He had lived his life — working as a carpenter with the WA Public Works Department, sailing at the Fremantle Sailing Club, frequenting pubs in Carlisle and Victoria Park and Manning — and had died without ever facing a single consequence.

When WA Police named Fisher publicly in March 2025, they also said this: if Fisher were alive, he would be a person of interest in the deaths of two other Western Australian women — Barbara Western, murdered in 1986, and Carrie Turner, murdered in 1991. That is not an accusation. It is a statement of investigative significance. Police do not name dead men as persons of interest in other murders without a reason. The reason is not publicly detailed. What it means is that investigators looked at those three deaths and saw something worth pursuing.

Terrence John Fisher cannot be arrested. He cannot be tried. He cannot be convicted. Whatever he did on December 29, 1979, he died having never faced it.

Kerryn Tate's sister Anne-Marie Tate said publicly: "I strongly urge anyone who's had even a slight suspicion about Terrence Fisher to please come forward to police." She is still asking. The family is still building the picture of who he was. So is WA Police. And the investigative genealogy team that identified him is still working.

Kerryn Tate was 22 years old. She would be 68 today. This case, and this show, are for her.

ECHO 1953 - THE HOLLIS FILES, BOOK ONE
Available now on Amazon - Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and paperback.
Order your copy today.

THE HALLS OF MEDIOCRITY
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MIDNIGHT MYSTERY ARCHIVE
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• jared K
• Lisa Mooney
• Jamie Mcconnell

This is the final series of the Midnight Mystery Archive — the last two-parter before the podcast goes on hiatus. It ends in Australia, one of MMA's largest listener bases, with a case that captures something essential about why this show existed: what happens when a young woman's life is cut short, and what forensic science can now do that nobody could have imagined when the crime occurred.

Kerryn Tate was 22 years old when she was murdered in bushland southeast of Perth, Western Australia, on December 29, 1979. Forty-five years later, in March 2025, Western Australia Police named their prime suspect. He died in 2000. He will never stand trial. But his name is now on the record.

This is Part 1: who Kerryn was, what happened on December 29, 1979, and how a case with almost no leads in 1979 eventually had a name to put to it.

Kerryn was born in New South Wales and had been living in Western Australia for about a year. She worked in the arts. She was warm, social, well-connected — the kind of person whose presence in a room you noticed. She also hitchhiked. In 1979 Perth, this was not reckless. It was mainstream. Young Australians hitchhiked to the beach, between suburbs, between cities. It was an ordinary mode of transport. Kerryn was so accustomed to it that she carried a black motorcycle helmet specifically so she could accept lifts from motorbikes. That helmet is evidence of a routine, not a risk.

On the night of December 28th, Kerryn attended a dance at the North Cottesloe Surf Life Saving Club. She stayed with friends in Swanbourne. The following morning, December 29th, a friend drove her to her house-sitting address in Mount Lawley at approximately 11 AM. That is the last confirmed sighting of Kerryn Tate alive.

She was heading to Karragullen, approximately 40 kilometers southeast of Perth, to house-sit for other friends. She presumably hitchhiked. The next morning, December 30th, forestry workers found her body in bushland near the Canning Dam catchment. She was slumped over a smoldering tree stump. A fire had been deliberately set around the scene — calculated, not panic. A bloodstained piece of wood was recovered nearby. Kerryn had been beaten to death. Her jewelry was gone: the watch, the earrings, the bangle, the pendant, the rings that the Christmas Day family had noticed just four days earlier.

In 1979, without CCTV, without DNA, without any digital record of vehicle movements, identifying a stranger who gave a hitchhiker a lift on a rural road was essentially impossible. The case went cold. But it never closed. Police kept the biological material from the 1979 scene. In 2023, that evidence went to Western Australia Police's investigative genetic genealogy team. What they found is the story of Part 2.

ECHO 1953 - THE HOLLIS FILES, BOOK ONE
Available now on Amazon - Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and paperback.
Order your copy today.

THE HALLS OF MEDIOCRITY
Sports. True crime. Athletes who had everything and threw it away.
New episodes every Tuesday.
Find us wherever you get your podcasts.

MIDNIGHT MYSTERY ARCHIVE
True crime. Cold cases. Every Friday.
midnightmysteryarchive.com | Substack | Patreon

Follow us: X | Facebook Group

• jared K
• Lisa Mooney
• Jamie Mcconnell