An Heiress is Missing
When seventeen year old Laura Louisa Fletcher vanishes, the world takes notice
Sept. 10, 1920. Laura Fletcher was a difficult child: headstrong, petulant, stubborn as a Missouri mule.
By age seventeen, she had been expelled from two private schools for offenses that involved cigarette parties, gambling, and the corruption of her classmates. A bane to headmasters, a headache for her family.
Nevertheless when this heiress to an Indianapolis banking fortune abruptly vanished while studying art on the Massachusetts coast, city newspapers from New York to San Francisco cleared space on their front pages to tell her tale.
An heiress was missing.
Near the end of the summer, 1920, Laura’s mother enrolled her daughter in Miss Felicie Howells’ Art School, Gloucester, Massachusetts. The young woman would live in the family’s beach house at nearby Grapevine Cove.
Laura’s parents hoped that the study of art might settle their daughter, cure her wild ways. Once Laura was established in a routine, her mother returned to Indianapolis. Laura was left in the care of her governess, Miss Fritz.
This did not go well. According to a later statement by a relative, W. J. Holliday, Laura’s art studies appeared to have consisted…
