Dorothy Forstein

Case background and investigation

Dorothy Forstein, born Dorothy Cooper in 1909, lived in Philadelphia with her husband, Jules Forstein, a city magistrate, and their children. Most of what is known about her case comes from newspaper coverage in October 1949 and from later retellings, notably Jay Robert Nash's book Among the Missing, which Wikipedia cites as a principal source.

Several years before she vanished, Forstein was attacked at home. Later accounts, including one that cites a Camden Courier-Post report of January 26, 1945, date the assault to late January 1945. According to those accounts she was left with a concussion, a broken nose and jaw and a fractured shoulder, and could not identify the person who struck her. Nothing was taken from the house, and no one was charged.

On the evening of October 18, 1949, Jules Forstein was out, and according to Wikipedia he telephoned his wife to say he would be home late. When he returned, Dorothy was gone and two of the children, Marcy and Edward, were together in a bedroom in distress. Marcy, who later accounts say was nine, told her father that a noise had woken her and that she had seen a middle-aged man in a brown peaked cap carrying her mother over his shoulder. She said the man told her to go back to sleep and that her mother was all right.

Wikipedia, citing the Milwaukee Journal of October 24, 1949, says police found no fingerprints and no sign of forced entry, and that nothing had been stolen. Investigators at first doubted the child's story but came to accept it after she was interviewed by a psychiatrist. Their initial theory was that someone with a grudge connected to the magistrate's work had targeted his wife, in view of the earlier assault.

The search was extended across the country. According to an Associated Press report in the Reading Eagle of October 26, 1949, cited by Wikipedia, Captain James Kelly of the Philadelphia detective bureau sent about 10,000 notices describing Forstein to police departments and institutions, and hospitals, hotels, morgues and convalescent homes were asked to check for unidentified women.

No trace of Dorothy Forstein was found, and no suspect was ever publicly identified. Later accounts state that Jules Forstein died in the mid-1950s and that she was subsequently declared legally dead; these details come from secondary sources and their exact dates differ between accounts. The disappearance remains unexplained.