Joseph Force Crater
Joseph Force Crater was a New York State Supreme Court Justice who vanished amid political scandal. He was last seen leaving a restaurant on West 45th Street in Manhattan, and entered popular culture as one of the most mysterious missing persons cases of the twentieth century. Despite massive publicity, the case was never solved and was officially closed forty years after he disappeared. Crater's disappearance fueled public disquiet about New York City corruption and was a factor in the downfall of the Tammany Hall political machine.
Early life and legal career
Crater was born in Easton, Pennsylvania, the eldest of four children of Frank Ellsworth Crater and the former Leila Virginia Montague. He was educated at Lafayette College and Columbia University. He was a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity.Crater's official title was Justice of the New York Supreme Court for New York County, which is a trial court despite the designation "supreme". Bank records later revealed that he withdrew $20,000 shortly before taking up the position in April 1930 at the relatively young age of 41. This caused suspicion that a payment to corrupt Tammany Hall politicians had secured his appointment. While acting as official receiver in a bankruptcy, Crater sold a property at a tiny fraction of the $3 million that the city paid to get it back shortly afterward. The huge profit generated in the transaction later caused speculation that Crater had been killed in a dispute over the money made on a corrupt scheme, although no evidence of corruption was ever found.
Crater issued two published opinions: Rotkowitz v. Sohn, involving fraudulent conveyances and mortgage foreclosure fraud; and Henderson v. Park Central Motors Service, dealing with a garage company's liability for an expensive car stolen and wrecked by an ex-convict.
Disappearance
In the summer of 1930, after the start of the first investigations of what would become the Seabury Commission, Crater and his wife Stella Mance Wheeler were vacationing at their summer cabin in Belgrade, Maine. In late July, Crater received a telephone call. 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 next day, he arrived at his 40 Fifth Avenue apartment, but instead of dealing with business, he proceeded onwards to Atlantic City, New Jersey, with his mistress, showgirl Sally Lou Ritzi.Crater returned to Maine on August 1, and traveled back to New York on August 3. Before making this final trip, he promised his wife that he would return by her birthday on August 9. Crater's wife stated that he was in good spirits and behaving normally when he departed for New York City. On the morning of Wednesday, August 6, Crater spent two hours going through his files in his courthouse chambers, reportedly destroying several documents. He then had his law clerk 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, Supreme Tickets, and bought one seat from William Deutsch, the proprietor of Supreme, for a comedy called Dancing Partner at the Belasco Theatre. He then went to Billy Haas's Chophouse at 332 West 45th Street, where he ate dinner with Ritzi and William Klein, a lawyer friend. Klein 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 p.m., shortly after the curtain rose on the show for which Crater had bought a ticket, and the small group went outside.
Last known sighting
Crater's dinner companions gave differing accounts of Crater's departure from the restaurant. William Klein initially testified that "the judge got into a taxicab outside the restaurant about 9:30 p.m. and drove west on Forty-fifth Street," and this account was initially confirmed by Sally Lou Ritz: "At the sidewalk Judge Crater took a taxicab". Klein and Ritz later changed their story and said that they had entered a taxi outside the restaurant while Crater had walked down the street.Delayed responses to disappearance
There was no immediate reaction to Crater's disappearance. When he did not return to Maine after 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 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.Investigation
Once an official investigation was launched, the case received widespread publicity. Detectives discovered that the judge's safe deposit box had been emptied and the two briefcases that Crater and Mara had taken to his apartment were missing. These promising leads were quickly lost amid the thousands of false reports from people claiming to have seen the missing man.Sally Lou Ritzi, June Brice, and Vivian Gordon
Crater enjoyed the city's nightlife and had been involved with several women. In the aftermath of the case, two of the women he had been involved with left town abruptly and a third was murdered. Ritzi, the showgirl who had dined with him the evening that he vanished, left New York in August or September 1930. She was found in late September 1930, living in Youngstown, Ohio, with her parents. She said that she had left New York suddenly because she had received word that her father was ill. Ritzi was still being subjected to interviews by police investigating the Crater case in 1937, by which time she was living in Beverly Hills, California.Showgirl June Brice had been seen talking to Crater the day before he disappeared. A lawyer acting for Crater's wife believed that Brice had been at the center of a scheme to blackmail Crater and that a gangster boyfriend of Brice had killed the judge. Brice disappeared the day that a grand jury was to convene on the case. In 1948, she was discovered in a mental hospital.
Vivian Gordon, a third woman, was involved in high-end prostitution and linked to madam Polly Adler. Gordon had liaisons with a large number of influential businesspeople, and was the owner, on paper at least, of a number of properties believed to be fronts for illegal activity. She was also seen around town with gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond, with whom Crater was rumored to socialize. Crater had known Diamond's former boss, organized crime figure Arnold Rothstein, and had been extremely upset at his murder. On February 20, 1931, Gordon was angry about a conviction that had resulted in her losing custody of her 16-year-old daughter. She met the head of an official inquiry into city government corruption and offered to testify about police graft. She was murdered five days later. Detectives searching her apartment found a coat that had belonged to Crater.
The publicity surrounding Gordon's killing led to the resignation of a policeman whom she had accused of framing her, and the suicide of her daughter. Tammany Hall's hold on the city was largely eliminated in the ensuing scandal, as it was already weakened by Rothstein and the conflict over his former empire. This also led to the resignation of New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker.
Open verdict
In October, a grand jury began examining the Crater case, calling 95 witnesses and amassing 975 pages of testimony. Mrs. Crater refused to appear. 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". At the time, some theorized that Crater had left town with another woman or fled to avoid revelations of corruption, but the case's extensive publicity would have made it virtually impossible for him to have begun a new life somewhere else.On January 20, 1931, six months after his disappearance, Crater's wife found envelopes containing checks, stocks, bonds, and a note from the judge in a dresser drawer which had been empty when searched earlier by police. The discovery led to a number of new but ultimately inconclusive leads, and no further trace of Crater was ever found. The case was officially closed in 1979.
Mrs. Crater
Judge Crater met Stella Mance Wheeler in 1917 when he served as her divorce lawyer, and they married seven days after her divorce was finalized. Mrs. Crater remained at their vacation home in Maine during the search for her husband, until her discovery of the hidden envelopes. Without Crater's income, Mrs. Crater was unable to maintain the couple's Fifth Avenue apartment and was evicted. She petitioned to have the judge declared officially dead in July 1937; she was reportedly living on the $12 per week that she earned as a telephone operator in Maine.Mrs. Crater married Carl Kunz, a New York electrical contractor, in Elkton, Maryland, on April 23, 1938. Kunz's first wife had hanged herself only eight days before the wedding. Crater was finally declared legally dead in 1939 thanks to Mrs. Crater's lawyer, noted New York attorney Emil K. Ellis. She received $20,561 in life insurance. She separated from Kunz in 1950 and died in 1969 at age 70.
Mrs. Crater expressed her belief that the judge had been murdered in her own account of the case, The Empty Robe, which was written with freelance writer and journalist Oscar Fraley and published by Doubleday in 1961.
Recent information
On August 19, 2005, authorities revealed that, after her death at age 91, they had received notes that had been written by Queens resident Stella Ferrucci-Good, in which she claimed that her husband, NYPD detective Robert Good, had learned that Crater was killed by Charles Burns an NYPD officer who also worked as a bodyguard of Murder, Inc. enforcer Abe Reles and Burns' brother, Frank. According to the letter, Crater was buried near West Eighth Street in Coney Island, Brooklyn, at the current site of the New York Aquarium. Police reported that no records had been found to indicate that skeletal remains had been discovered at that site when it was excavated in the 1950s. Richard J. Tofel, the author of Vanishing Point: The Disappearance of Judge Crater and the New York He Left Behind, expressed skepticism of Ferrucci-Good's account.Popular culture
The phrase "to pull a Judge Crater" means to disappear. It is no longer widely used. For many years following Crater's disappearance, "Judge Crater, call your office" was a standard gag of nightclub comedians. In the TV series "M*A*S*H", in the episode "Bless You, Hawkeye", Colonel Potter says the keys to the lab have been "pulling a Judge Crater."Judge Crater was also mentioned in the comedy television series Green Acres. In the episode "Not Guilty", Mr. Haney, speaking to his bloodhound, says "Come on, Clarence. Let's see if we can pick up on Judge Crater's trail again." Eb responds, "Who's Judge, uh-" followed by Oliver's, "Never mind."
As a publicity stunt for their 1933 film Bureau of Missing Persons, First National Pictures promised in advertisements to pay Crater $10,000 if he claimed it in person at the box office.
Crater's last letter, possibly written on the day of his disappearance, was sold at auction on June 22, 1981, for $700. The letter was marked "confidential" and began: "The following money is due me from the persons named. Get in touch with them for they will surely pay their debts." It was incorrectly reported that this letter was Crater's will.
Judge Crater was also mentioned in the dramatic series The Sopranos. When the doorbell rings, Uncle June jokes that it could be Judge Crater.
Judge Crater is portrayed on the television series Night Gallery in the season 3 episode Rare Objects. Carter is among several other presumed dead people in a living zoo-like collection.