Dottie Epstein

Dolores ’Dottie’ Epstein was a student at Ellingham Academy and the first victim in the Ellingham murders. She was recruited by Albert Ellingham personally from her old school, where she didn’t fit in, due to her intelligence. She was placed in Minerva, where she lived with Francis Crane and Gertie van Coevorden. She had an uncle who worked as a police officer in New York, and who taught her tricks on how to break-in. On April 13th, 1936 she snuck out to the dome in the lake with a book, A Study in Scarlet, to read. There she was found by George Marsh who was preparing to meet Albert Ellingham and receive the first ransom. Marsh was the original brain behind the kidnappings of Iris and Alice Ellingham, but it was never his intention that anyone should get hurt, so he was facing a problem with Dottie. He couldn’t let her go, but he couldn’t call off the kidnapping. Desperately, Dottie marked a quote in A Study of Scarlet to leave Albert Ellingham a message. She knew George Marsh had been a policeman in New York like her uncle before he started working for Ellingham, and she had told Ellingham a bit about her uncle and how he had called her a second story-man. The quote she marked was about an attic. After that, she jumps into the hole-entrance to the underground tunnel trying to escape but ended up badly injured from hitting the floor. George Marsh climb down the latter and found her still alive and still trying to escape. And in a moment of desperation, he took a pipe and finished her off, cleared the scene and smuggled her body to his car before meeting Ellingham. On May 16th, 1936 her body was discovered by a milk truck driver in the field in Jericho, Vermont.