In April 1930 Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Joseph Force Crater, a 41-year-old Manhattan lawyer, to a vacancy on the New York Supreme Court, the state’s main trial court. Four months later Crater left a restaurant in the theater district and was never seen again.
What happened
Crater and his wife, Stella, spent their summers in Maine. In early August he went back to New York, telling her he would return by August 9, her birthday. On August 6 he spent much of the day in his court chambers sorting papers into briefcases and folders. He had a court attendant, Joseph Mara, cash two checks for a total of $5,150 and carry the files to the Craters’ Fifth Avenue apartment. He also arranged a ticket for that night’s performance of the comedy Dancing Partner at the Belasco Theatre.
That evening he ate at Billy Haas’s chophouse on West 45th Street with a lawyer friend, William Klein, and a showgirl, Sally Lou Ritz. He left a little after nine. For decades the story was that his companions watched him get into a taxi, but later reviews of the evidence treat that detail as mistaken. Someone used his theater ticket. Who it was, and where Crater went, has never been established.
The investigation
Stella Crater heard nothing and made quiet inquiries among friends and colleagues. The disappearance became public on September 3, 1930. The timing drew attention because the state was then starting its investigation of corruption in New York City’s courts and government, and there were rumors that judgeships could be bought for about a year’s salary. A grand jury heard 95 witnesses and produced nearly 1,000 pages of testimony. It was discharged in January 1931 without being able to say whether Crater was alive or dead.
That same January Stella returned to the apartment and found something the police had missed in a bureau drawer: $6,619 in cash, a handwritten list of people who owed her husband money, and life insurance policies worth about $30,000 that named her as beneficiary. The documents Mara remembered delivering were never found. Police chased roughly 16,000 tips over the following decades. A court declared Crater legally dead on June 6, 1939, and the department formally closed the case in 1979.
The explanations
Each of the old theories rests on one part of his life. He may have been killed to stop him talking about corruption, or because he owed or held money. He may have died in an embarrassing place and been moved, or he may have taken his own life. Some held that he started over somewhere with a woman. Nothing in the official record favors one of these over the rest.
The newest account surfaced in August 2005. Stella Ferrucci-Good of Bellerose, Queens, who had died that April aged 91, left a handwritten note in an envelope marked not to be opened until her death. It said her late husband, Robert Good, who died in 1975, had told her that he, a New York police officer named Charles Burns, and Burns’s brother Frank, a cab driver, were responsible for Crater’s death. According to the note, the judge was buried under the Coney Island boardwalk near West Eighth Street, where the New York Aquarium now stands.
Some of it checked out. The New York Post found that a Charles Burns had served in the department from 1926 to 1946, partly at Coney Island’s 60th Precinct, and police sources said skeletal remains had been uncovered when the aquarium was built in the 1950s. But the story reached the note second-hand, years after the fact, and the site had already been dug up and built over. No remains from it have been linked to Crater.
Where it stands
Stella Crater published a memoir, The Empty Robe, in 1961, and for years she marked each anniversary by ordering two drinks at a Greenwich Village bar and drinking only one. The disappearance is a matter of record, but the 2005 letter is an unproven claim with no remains to back it. With no body, no confession that can be tested and no surviving witnesses, what happened to Judge Crater is unproven.