On Wednesday evening, August 6, 1930, New York City was in the grips a stifling heat wave. Shortly after nine P.M. Judge Joseph Force Crater, fanning his head with his Panama hat, said goodnight to two companions at a restaurant on West Forty-Fifth Street. He told them that that he was off to catch a Broadway show, but was never seen nor heard from again, despite being the subject of the most intensive missing-person search the NYPD had ever conducted to that point. The mystery might have been possible to solve if the judge’s wife, Stella Mance Wheeler Crater, had not waited several weeks before informing the police that her forty-one-year-old husband had disappeared.
Judge Crater was a well-connected Tammany Hall Democrat. Governor Franklin Roosevelt had appointed Crater to the New York Supreme Court just months before he vanished. Although the judge’s public persona was that of a devoted husband, in reality the police discovered that he was a cad who regularly cheated on his wife, not that Stella seemed to care very much. They had met at a dance when he was a law student at Columbia University. Later he helped her with her divorce from her first husband. Now she enjoyed the perks that went along with being married to a prominent public figure. The couple lived on Fifth Avenue and had a summer cabin near Belgrade Lakes, Maine. They were in Maine on August 3 when Crater told her he had to return to New York for a couple of days to take care of a problem. She was smart enough not to ask about the problem. His wife was aware of his dalliances, so at first she was not particularly concerned when she did not hear from him. After several days she made inquiries, only to be assured by his chauffeur (Crater did not drive) that the judge would return soon. When that did not happen, she hired a private investigator to look into the matter. He more or less confirmed what the chauffeur had said. Only when Judge Crater failed to appear at court after the summer recess did his colleagues notice his absence, but even they did not report it right away. They were far more worried about their own careers. Governor Roosevelt had recently appointed Justice Samuel Seabury to determine whether or not a city judge, George Ewald, had paid Tammany Hall $10,000 to secure his appointment. Most of Crater’s colleagues already knew the answer, because they had done the same.
Judge Crater and his wife lived in a swanky Fifth Avenue apartment.
Finally, after almost a month had gone by without word from her husband, Mrs. Crater contacted the police. In an instant, Judge Crater’s disappearance became front-page news.
The police distributed thousands of flyers bearing the judge’s likeness. The Board of Aldermen posted a $5,000 reward for information on his whereabouts. Within a week detectives from the Missing Persons Squad had a pretty good idea of what the judge had been up in the months leading up to his disappearance. They learned that he had taken his mistress to Atlantic City for an overnight stay after he left his wife in Maine. They knew that he visited the courthouse at Foley Square the day before he disappeared to remove files from his office. Later that same day, he withdrew $5,150 from his bank account. However, after Crater got into a cab that night, the trail went cold.
After Crater got into a cab that night, the trail went cold.
There was also evidence that Crater had paid someone connected to Tammany Hall $22,500, or the equivalent to a Supreme Court judge’s annual salary, for the privilege of serving on the bench. This payment was believed to be tied in with an investigation being conducted by Judge Seabury. In the end, Ewald and several other municipal judges connected to Tammany Hall would lose their posts.
Judge Samuel Seabury’s investigation into corruption in the city court system may have had something to do with Judge Crater’s mysterious disappearance.
Crater was spared being called to the stand to explain the payment only because he was missing. His disappearing act lent credence to the theory that he decided to go into hiding rather than suffer the humiliation of his colleagues. Others however, insisted that he had been murdered for fear that his testimony could ruin the careers of several high-ranking Tammany Hall officials.
Back in Maine, police dredged the lake near his summer cabin. A special grand jury was convened by Manhattan District Attorney Thomas Crain to gather information about the judge. (Ironically, Crain was later recommended for removal by Judge Seabury for general incompetence, but Governor Roosevelt let him finish out this term.)
During the months following his disappearance, Crater’s wife, friends, coworkers, political associates, and even paramours were questioned. Although the NYPD tracked thousands of leads over the course of several years, it was all for naught. The court declared Judge Crater legally dead in 1939. The NYPD finally closed case #13595 forty years later, his whereabouts still a mystery.
There was a brief reexamination of the case after the death of Stella Ferucci-Good at age ninety-one in 2005. Her granddaughter found a faded handwritten letter among her belongings. The note said that Mrs. Ferucci-Good’s husband once confided in her that he overheard two men in a bar, one of whom claimed to have been the cab driver who picked up Crater the night he went missing, and said that the judge had been killed and buried in sand dunes under the boardwalk at Coney Island. When the Coney Island Aquarium was being constructed on that same site in the 1950s, workers recovered unidentified human remains that were interred in potter’s field. Whether or not the bones were those of Judge Crater was never ascertained, but one thing is certain—he became much more well known after he disappeared than he ever had been when he was alive.