Dorothy Forstein, born Dorothy Cooper, was a former cosmetics saleswoman who in 1943 married Jules Forstein, a rising figure in Philadelphia Republican politics who had just been made a city magistrate. She took on his two daughters from his first marriage, Merna and Marcy, and the couple had a son, Edward, the following year. The family lived in a three-story brick house at 1835 North Franklin Street in North Philadelphia. Within six years that house would be the scene of two crimes that the city’s detectives never solved.
The attack of 1945
On the late afternoon of January 25, 1945, Dorothy left the children with a neighbor and went shopping. Shopkeepers remembered her as cheerful. Soon after she got home, a telephone operator heard what sounded like a struggle on the line and called the police. A detective found the front door open and Mrs. Forstein unconscious on the living room floor, with a broken jaw and nose, a fractured shoulder and a concussion. Her purse lay untouched beside her and nothing in the house was missing. When she could speak, she said someone had sprung at her, probably from a recess under the front stairs, and kept hitting her; she never saw his face. Her husband’s alibi was checked and held, she had no known enemies, and the attacker was never identified. Accounts written afterward describe her as physically and emotionally changed, nervous and in frequent pain from the damaged shoulder.
The night of October 18, 1949
Four years later the magistrate was campaigning for reelection, and on the evening of Tuesday, October 18, 1949 he went to a ward club banquet. He phoned home at about 7 pm; by his account she was in good spirits. She called a friend at 9:30 to arrange a shopping trip for the next day. When Forstein let himself in at about 11:30, he heard his nine-year-old daughter Marcy calling from upstairs. She and five-year-old Edward were huddled together in tears, saying their mother was gone.
Dorothy’s purse, with about $40 in it, was on her dresser, and her keys were in the house. There was no sign of a struggle. Forstein first assumed she had stepped out to a neighbor, then began phoning relatives, and in the early hours called Captain James A. Kelly of the detective bureau, a lifelong friend who had handled the 1945 case.
Marcy’s story was the only lead. She said she had woken late, gone to the top of the stairs and seen a man climbing toward her mother’s front bedroom. Through the door she saw her mother lying face down on the rug. The man turned her over, lifted her onto his shoulder with her head hanging down his back, and when Marcy challenged him he gave her a pat on the head, said her mother had been ill but was going to be fine, and sent her back to bed. Then he went down and out the front door, and she heard the lock click. She described him as about her father’s age, in a brown peaked cap and brown jacket; her mother, she said, wore red silk pajamas and red slippers.
The investigation
At first the adults dismissed the account as a child’s nightmare shaped by the earlier attack. Kelly had Marcy examined by a psychiatrist and a psychologist, who reported that she appeared to be telling the truth, and on October 24 the Associated Press reported that police in eleven states had joined the search. A squad of detectives was assigned full time. Kelly circulated her description to police departments, hospitals, hotels, rooming houses, convalescent homes and morgues across the country. As in 1945, no door or window had been forced and no fingerprints were found. The family safe was opened by court order; she had taken no money and no clothes, and she never touched her bank account.
The explanations
Police first suspected someone with a grudge against the magistrate, but no such person was found. The family considered amnesia or a breakdown, given her fragile state, yet a woman in pajamas without purse or keys could hardly have left on her own, and Marcy had seen her carried. Whether she was alive when the man took her, and whether he was the same man who beat her in 1945, are questions the record cannot answer. By 1954, when Coronet magazine revisited the case, the file had been moved from missing persons to homicide.
Where it stands
No trace of Dorothy Forstein has ever been found, and nobody was ever charged with either the beating or the abduction. Some later retellings place her disappearance in 1950, but newspaper reports from the week it happened fix the date as October 18, 1949. What happened inside the house on North Franklin Street, on either occasion, is still unknown.