Joseph F. Crater

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Jump to: navigation, search
 This article documents a current event.
Information may change rapidly as the event progresses.

Joseph Force Crater (18891930?) was a judge in New York City who disappeared on August 6, 1930. He was last seen leaving a restaurant and entering a taxi. He had stated earlier that he was planning to attend a Broadway show. His disappearance earned him the title of "The Missingest Man in New York".

Judge Crater was an Associate Justice of the New York Supreme Court1. He had been appointed to the state bench by then-Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt just four months before disappearing on August 6, 1930. He had been educated at Lafayette College (Class of 1910) and Columbia University.

Contents

Timeline of Events

In the summer of 1930, Judge Crater and his wife, Stella Mance Wheeler, were vacationing at their summer cabin at Belgrade Lakes, Maine. In late July, he received a telephone call and he offered no information to his wife about the content of the call, other than to say that he had to return to the city “to straighten those fellows out.” The following day, he arrived at his Fifth Avenue apartment but instead of dealing with business, he made a trip to Atlantic City in the company of a showgirl. He returned to Maine on August 1 and travelled back to New York on August 3. Before making this final trip, he promised his wife he would return by her birthday, on August 9. His wife stated that Crater was in good spirits and behaving normally when he departed for New York City. On the morning of August 6, Crater spent two hours going through his files in his courthouse chambers. He then had his assistant, Joseph Mara, cash two checks for him that amounted to $5,150. At noon, he and Mara carried two locked briefcases to his apartment and he let Mara take the rest of the day off.

Later that evening, Crater went to a Broadway ticket agency and purchased one seat for a comedy that was playing that night called "Dancing Partners" at the Belasco Theater. He then went to Billy Haas’ chophouse on West 45th Street for dinner. Here, he ate dinner with his friend, a lawyer, and his mistress, showgirl Sally Lou Ritz. The lawyer later told investigators that Crater was in a good mood that evening and gave no indication that anything was bothering him. The dinner ended a little after 9:00 (a short time after the curtain had opened for the show that Crater had a ticket for) and the small group went outside. Crater then waved goodbye to his friends and entered a cruising taxi he hailed down. His next, and likely final location, remains a mystery. Theories about his disappearance have suggested that he was murdered, that he ran off with another woman, or that he had been involved in some corrupt practices that were about to be revealed.

Strangely, there was no immediate reaction to Judge Crater’s disappearance. When he did not return to Maine for 10 days, his wife began making calls to their friends in New York, asking if anyone might have seen him. Only when he failed to appear for the opening of the courts on August 25 did his fellow justices become alarmed. They started a private search but failed to find any trace of him. The police were finally notified on September 3 and after that, the missing judge was front-page news.

The story captivated the nation and a massive investigation was launched. The official investigations started off with a bang, but quickly slowed down. Detectives discovered that the judge’s safe-deposit box had been emptied and the two briefcases that Crater and his assistant had taken to his apartment were missing. These promising leads were also quickly bogged down by the thousands of false reports that were coming in from people who claimed to have seen the missing man.

In October, a grand jury began looking into the case and ended up calling 95 witnesses and amassing 975 pages of testimony. After all of that, the conclusion was: “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.” 3

None of the investigations succeeded in discovering the judge's fate or possible whereabouts, and Crater was officially declared legally dead in 1939, and his case — Missing Persons File No. 13595 — was officially closed in 1979.

Mystery Solved?

On August 19, 2005 authorities revealed they received a letter written half a century ago by Stella Ferrucci-Good. In it, the woman identified a location near West Eighth Street in Brooklyn, at the current site of the New York Aquarium, where she claimed the judge was buried under the boardwalk. Moreover, the letter identified as Crater's killers her husband Robert Good, NYPD officer Charles Burns, also bodyguard of Abe Reles of Murder, Inc., and Burns's brother Frank, a cab driver.1 2

Police confirmed that skeletal remains had been discovered at that location in the 1950s, and they are now being examined to see if they are related to the Crater case.

Trivia

  • Though no longer in wide use, the phrase "to pull a Crater" suggests vanishing to avoid facing responsibility.
  • Sally Lou Ritz, a 22-year old New York showgirl and one of Crater's girlfriends, disappeared sometime during August-September 1930. She has never been seen again.

Note

1 In New York, the "Supreme Court" is a trial-level court, not the state's highest court. The highest court in New York is the Court of Appeals, whose members are titled "Judge" instead of "Justice".

References

  • 1. New York Daily News. 19 Aug 2005.
  • 2. 1010 WINS. 19 Aug 2005.

External Links

Personal tools