August 6, 1930: Joseph Force Crater, a Justice of the New York State Supreme Court, disappears, never to be seen again.
Born on January 5, 1889 in Easton, Pennsylvania, he went to Lafayette College there, and got his law degree at Columbia University. He was already a little sketchy there: In 1917, he helped a woman named Stella Wheeler get a divorce, and then married her.
In April 1930, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Crater to be a Justice of the New York Supreme Court for New York County (which is contiguous with New York City's Borough of Manhattan). In fact, that court is not the highest court in the State of New York: That is the New York Court of Appeals.
In late July, the Craters were on vacation at a cabin they owned in Belgrade, Maine, in the forest just to the north of the State capital, Augusta. There, Crater received a phone call, and then told his wife he had to return to New York City "to straighten those fellows out."
But when he got to New York, to his apartment at 40 5th Avenue (at 11th Street in Greenwich Village), instead of dealing with court business, or any other business, he met Sally Lou Ritz, his mistress. Together, they went to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where the gambling was, until 1978, illegal, but it was still known as a Shore resort and an organized crime-run party town.
He got back to the cabin on August 1. On August 3, he again told his wife he had to go to New York, saying he would be back by August 9, her birthday. She later said he was "in good spirits" and "behaving normally" when he left.
On August 6, he was seen in his chambers, destroying documents. He asked his law clerk, Joseph Mara -- as far as I can tell, he was not related to the Mara family that owned the NFL's New York Giants, and still does -- to cash 2 checks for him, totaling $5,150 -- about $92,000 in today's money. At 12:00 noon, he and Mara took 2 briefcases to the 5th Avenue apartment. Once they got there, Crater gave Mara the rest of the day off.
Crater then bought a ticket to see Dancing Partner, a comedy, staged at the Belasco Theatre at 111 West 44th Street. One ticket, not two, meaning he did not intend to take his wife (who was still back in Maine), or his mistress, or anyone else. Apparently, he never saw the show -- or, maybe, it wasn't for that night's performance. Because instead of seeing that night's performance, he went to Billy Haas' Chophouse, at 332 West 45th. There, he had dinner with Ritz, and also with a friend, lawyer William Klein.
Klein later testified that they left the restaurant at 9:30, and that Crater got into a taxicab, which drove west down 45th. Ritz backed this story up. But both later changed their story, saying they got into the cab, leaving Crater on the sidewalk. If either version of this story is true, then this remains the last sighting of Crater to which anyone has ever admitted.
By August 9, Crater had not returned to the Maine cabin. Still, his wife didn't take action until August 13, 10 days after he'd left, and 7 days after he'd last been seen in Manhattan. And the action she took was limited to making phone calls to friends in New York, asking whether they'd seen him. It was only after the opening of court on August 25, when he was expected to show up, and didn't, that his fellow Justices decided to... start a private investigation. Finally, the police were notified on September 3 -- 28 days later.
After that, his disappearance was front-page news. Stage and radio comedians began dropping the line, "Judge Crater, call your office!" A grand jury investigation interviewed 95 witnesses. Nothing. On January 21, 1931, Mrs. Crater looked in her husband's dresser drawer, which had been empty when the police looked, but now found it filled with envelopes, containing stocks and bonds. Who put them there? A still-living Crater would seem to have been the likeliest suspect, but nobody could prove anything.
So what happened to Crater? Maybe he ran off with a mistress -- other than Ritz. Maybe there was an accident, and his body was never found. Maybe he was rubbed out by the Mob, and they disposed of his body where it would never be found. Mrs. Crater found out that her husband had been seen the day before his disappearance, talking to June Brice, a showgirl. Mrs. Crater's lawyer suggested that the checks Crater had cashed was for blackmail, and that Crater was then killed by her boyfriend, a gangster -- who was never identified. One theory is that the $5,150 was intended to gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond, who wanted him to make a case go away, and he couldn't, and that the cash was a payoff to leave him alone. Occasionally, someone would come forward, claiming to be the missing Judge, but it never panned out.
Stella Crater, having lost her husband's income, lost the 5th Avenue apartment, kept the Maine cabin, moved there, and became a telephone operator, before marrying a New York electrical contractor in 1938, publishing a book in 1961 that suggested he was murdered, and living until 1969. Sally Lou Ritz moved on, changed her name, moved to Youngstown, Ohio, married someone else, and lived until 2000. Crater was officially declared dead in 1939, and the case was officially closed in 1970, 40 years after his disappearance.
Long after jokes about getting the judge to call his office faded away, his name remained in the public mind. Anytime someone disappeared -- Amelia Earhart in 1937, Glenn Miller in 1944, Michael Rockefeller in 1961, Lord Lucan in 1974 and Jimmy Hoffa in 1975 -- Crater's name would come up again.
References to him were made on the TV shows The Dick Van Dyke Show, Green Acres, M*A*S*H, The Golden Girls, Designing Women, CSI: NY, Archer, and even Star Trek: Enterprise. On a 1972 episode of Night Gallery, Crater is listed among the missing people gathered by a mysterious man, along with others who have disappeared, including Grand Duchess Anastasia and polar explorer Roald Amundsen (but not Earhart).
The most recent lead was in 2005. Stella Good died. Years earlier, the NYPD received envelopes from her, marked "Do not open until my death." When opened, they contained messages claiming that her husband, Detective Robert Good, who had died in 1975, had, along with fellow cop Charles Burns and his brother, taxi driver Frank Burns, killed Crater. (Was Frank Burns -- not to be confused with the M*A*S*H character -- the driver who picked Crater up that night in 1930?) She also said that the judge was buried under the Coney Island boardwalk, near West 8th Street, where the New York Aquarium was built in 1957.
The New York Post was able to confirm that a man named Charles Burns had served with the NYPD from 1926 to 1946, and spent part of that career, including 1930, assigned to the 60th Precinct, which includes the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn, which includes the Aquarium. The Post also claimed that skeletal remains had been found during the excavation for the Aquarium. However, being the New York Post, who tend to secure the sensationalism first and the facts second, they ended up getting some things wrong. Police records showed no skeletal remains had been found at the site. The case was closed again.
*
August 6, 1930 was a Wednesday. Jazz singer Abbey Lincoln was born on this day.
These baseball games were played that day:
* The New York Yankees beat the Boston Red Sox, 4-2 at Yankee Stadium. Babe Ruth went 0-for-3 with a walk, but Lou Gehrig went 2-for-3 with a walk.
* The Brooklyn Dodgers beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 7-4 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. (The Dodgers were actually named the Brooklyn Robins during the managerial tenure of Wilbert Robinson, from 1914 to 1931, but the name "Dodgers" still stuck, and was restored after Robinson was fired.)
* The Boston Braves beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 5-4 at Braves Field in Boston.
* The Washington Senators beat the Philadelphia Athletics, 5-1 at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. Jimmie Foxx went 2-for-4, and Mickey Cochrane went 0-for-4.
* The Detroit Tigers beat the Cleveland Indians, 9-1 at Navin Field in Detroit. (It was renamed Briggs Stadium in 1938, and Tiger Stadium in 1961.)
* A doubleheader was split at Comiskey Park in Chicago. The St. Louis Browns won the opener, 5-0. Dick Coffman pitched a 3-hit shutout. The Chicago White Sox won the nightcap, 5-2.
* The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Chicago Cubs, 4-3 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis.
* And the New York Giants and the Pittsburgh Pirates were not scheduled.
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