One of the most arresting disappearances, and one that fully captured the public’s attention, was the disappearance on August 6, 1930, of a justice of the New York Supreme Court named Joseph Force Crater. The dapper, 41-year-old judge was missing for decades and became part of popular lore. But at long last, the mystery may (and the emphasis is on may) have been solved.
The following is a roundup of murders that are likely to turn into cold cases.
The mystery of Judge Crater’s disappearance started in early August 1930, while he and his wife, Stella, were vacationing at their summer home in the bucolic Belgrade Lakes area of Maine. The phone rang and Judge Crater answered, but he didn’t tell his wife what the call was about. After he hung up, he said he had to leave to go to “straighten those fellows out.”
It is questionable whether Judge Crater actually went to straighten anyone out. He had a showgirl mistress named Sally Ritz, and after frolicking with her in Atlantic City, the judge returned to his wife in Maine. But his stay was temporary. He told his wife he had to go back to Manhattan, but before making this final trip, he promised his wife he would return by her birthday, August 9.
For years, to “pull a Crater” meant to disappear, and the phrase was a standard joke for nightclub comedians. In addition, “Judge Crater, call your office,” was often heard on public address systems.
As a promotional gimmick, when Warner Brothers released the film Bureau of Missing Persons in 1933, the studio offered to pay Crater $10,000 if he claimed the money in person at the box office. That prize would be worth more than $130,000 today.
When he left for New York City on August 3, Crater was in good spirits and behaving normally, according to his wife. On August 5, Crater spent two hours going through the files in his courthouse chambers. The next day, he had his court attendant, Joseph Mara, cash two checks for him that totaled $5,150 (or around $65,000 by today’s standards) and represented practically all of his money. At noon, they took two locked briefcases, ostensibly containing the money, to his apartment and Crater let Mara take the rest of the day off.
Crater was still around in the evening when he went to buy a ticket from a Broadway agency and purchased a single seat to a comedy named Dancing Partner, which was playing that night at the Belasco Theatre. Then he went to Billy Haas’s Chophouse on West 45th Street for dinner with his mistress, and a lawyer friend, perhaps planning to go from there to catch the second act of the show.
If the judge was scared or watchful, his behavior didn’t show that. His friend would later tell investigators that Crater was in positively jovial spirits. The dinner party broke up around 9:15 p.m., and Crater’s lawyer friend and mistress got a taxi together outside the restaurant. Later, they said they last saw Crater by himself, walking down the street, This idea contradicts the popular notion that Crater was the one getting into a cab and speeding away.
At that point, the mystery began. There was no immediate, explosive reaction to Judge Crater’s disappearance, but when he did not return to Maine for ten days, his wife began making calls to their friends in New York, asking if anyone had seen him. Only when he failed to appear for the opening of the courts on August 25 did his fellow justices become concerned. They started a private search but failed to find any trace of the judge. The police were finally notified on September 3, and after that, Crater was front-page news.
Many people think that a person must be absent for seventy-two hours before he or she can be classified as missing. However, that is rarely the case. If there is evidence of violence or if the absence is somehow unusual, law-enforcement agencies often stress the need to begin the investigation promptly.
The story of Crater’s disappearance got into the public consciousness like few stories did, and a full-scale investigation was launched. Right away, detectives assumed that money was involved because the judge was believed to be carrying the $5,000 in cash in his pockets that evening. They also found that both his safe deposit box and the pair of briefcases that Crater and his assistant had taken to his apartment were missing.
Thousands of leads poured in, bogging down the investigation more than anything else, but several months later, there was a shocker. The judge’s money was not, in fact, missing. His wife found stocks and bonds and nearly $7,000 in cash in a desk drawer in the couple’s Fifth -Avenue apartment in January 1931, along with a note from Crater. According to Stella Crater, the note ended with: “I’m so weary. Love, Joe.” She took that to mean her husband expected to be killed, not that he had committed suicide.
In the fall of 1930, a grand jury began examining the case, eventually calling ninety-five witnesses and amassing 975 pages of testimony. The conclusion was that “the evidence is insufficient to warrant any expression of opinion as to whether Crater is alive or dead, or as to whether he has absented himself voluntarily, or is the sufferer from disease in the nature of amnesia, or is the victim of crime.”
None of the investigations unearthed Crater’s whereabouts or why he had disappeared. Crater was officially declared dead “in absentia” on June 6, 1939, and his case—Missing Persons File No. 13595—was officially closed in 1979. Sally Ritz disappeared in September 1930 and was never seen again. Are the disappearances related? That, too, is unknown.
Many theories have been offered through the years about what happened to Judge Crater. Judges often have enemies—dangerous enemies—and Crater was no exception. One theory holds that he was killed so he couldn’t testify in the Tammany Hall corruption case, which involved Boss Tweed’s notorious crew. Another suggests that he was “executed” by a hit man ordered by gangster Legs Diamond when the judge didn’t pay an extortionist. Crater was also a womanizer, prompting some to believe he was murdered by a jealous lover or found dead in the arms of a prostitute, thereby leading to a cover-up. There has been talk of amnesia and suicide; and others believe he ran away with a showgirl.
Crater’s disappearance led to reported sightings in America as well as foreign countries, and some of the sightings were hilarious. He was said to be seen shepherding sheep in the Pacific Northwest, locked away in a Missouri mental facility, mining for gold in California, gambling in Atlanta, aboard a ship in the Adriatic, and operating a bingo game in northern Africa.
But at least one theory has some credibility. In 2005, Barbara O’Brien found a letter from her grandmother, Stella Ferrucci-Good, that was to be opened after Stella’s death. In the letter, Stella claimed that Judge Crater had been murdered by New York City policeman Charles Burns and his brother, taxi driver Frank Burns, who buried Crater’s remains under the Coney Island boardwalk.
O’Brien found the letter in a metal box in her grandmother’s house in Queens. The box also contained old newspaper clippings about Crater’s disappearance, marked up with notes in the margins.
Skeletal remains were found under a section of the boardwalk that was removed in the mid-1950s as an aquarium was being built. The human remains were exhumed and re-interred in a mass grave on Hart Island. At the time, no science was available to positively identify the bodies. Some wonder why the public wasn’t told about the discovery of the remains until fifty years later. The discovery most likely received brief mention in the media at the time, but why would any editor make the connection to Crater?
The one missing element is motive. No one has yet offered a definitive motive for why someone would have wanted to murder Judge Crater. However, when the answer does come out—if it ever does—it most likely will seem simple. Jimmy Pavese, a former Suffolk County homicide investigator, once commented, “All crimes are simple once you know the answer.”
Q. How many people in the United States are missing?
A. By the end of 2005, there were 109,531 active missing-person records, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Children under the age of eighteen accounted for 58,081 (53.03 percent) of the records, while 11,868 (10.84 percent) were for young adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty.