The Missingest Man In New York

On this day in 1930, Joseph Force Crater, a judge on the New York Supreme Court, became, according to the media, "the most missingest man in New York". His law clerk reported that on the morning of his disappearance he had destroyed some documents in his office, moved several others to his apartment on Fifth Avenue, and arranged for $5,000 to be withdrawn from his bank account. He then left his office, bought a ticket for a Broadway show, and had dinner with the lawyer William Klein and showgirl Sally Lou Ritz. After dinner, according to Klein and Ritz, Crater headed out to see the play. He was never seen again.

Joseph Force Crater was born to Irish immigrants in 1889 and grew up in Pennsylvania. After receiving a law degree from Columbia University, he worked his way up from law clerk to lawyer and made several political connections along the way. He was appointed to the New York Supreme Court in April 1930 by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was the governor at the time. Rumor had it that the Tammany Hall political machine had another candidate who they wanted to be placed on the court but Crater had paid them off to secure the position.

Although Judge Crater went missing on August 6, 1930, his disappearance was not reported to the police until September 3. He had told his wife, Stella, that he would meet her at their vacation home in Maine on August 10, four days after he was last seen. When he hadn't returned after 10 days, she began calling their friends asking if anyone knew where he was. His fellow Supreme Court Justices began their own search when Crater did not appear for the court opening on August 25. After the police were finally contacted, the case became front-page news. Investigators discovered that the judge's safe deposit box had been emptied and suitcases that his clerk had moved to the Fifth Avenue apartment were also gone. Despite these leads, the investigation soon became hampered by thousands of false claims by people who said they had seen Joseph Force Crater.

Before his disappearance, Judge Crater had garnered the reputation of a ladies man who enjoyed all that New York City's nightlife had to offer. The showgirl he had dined with on the night of August 6, Sally Lou Ritz, ended up leaving New York. In 1937, now living in California, she was still being questioned by police about the Crater case. She passed away in 2000, after becoming a great-grandmother. Another showgirl, June Brice, had been seen with Crater the day before he went missing. Brice was at the center of a theory provided by Stella Crater's lawyer. He proposed that Brice was blackmailing the judge and that he had been murdered by one of her other boyfriends. June Brice disappeared the day before a grand jury was convened in the Crater case and in 1948 was found in a mental hospital. A third woman that Crater was involved with, Vivian Gordon, was murdered on February 25, 1931. Gordon, a high-end sex worker, had ties to several prominent New York businessmen and organized crime figures. Five days before she was killed, she had offered to testify about police graft. She believed that she had been framed for a crime that led her to lose custody of her 16-year-old daughter. Her murder and the publicity that followed led to the resignations of the accused police officer and Jimmy Walker, who was the mayor of New York City at that time.

In October 1930, a grand jury was convened to examine the case. Stella Crater refused to appear. After questioning 95 witnesses, the grand jury determined 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". Several people thought he had run off with another woman or he was fleeing possible corruption allegations. His wife continued to claim that he had been murdered.

In 1939, the judge was officially declared dead, two years after Stella Crater's initial petition to the court. She had already remarried to a man named Carl Kunz, whose first wife had hanged herself just eight days before the Crater-Kunz wedding. Due to the court's declaration, the former Mrs. Crater collected on an insurance policy amounting to $20,561 ($372,744.30 in today's dollars). In 1950, she and Kunz separated. In 1961, she co-wrote her account of the Crater case, titled The Empty Robe. She passed away in 1969 at the age of 70.

The Crater case was officially closed in 1979. On August 19, 2005, it was revealed that authorities had received a letter from a 91-year-old woman named Stella Ferrucci-Good. She claimed that her husband, Robert Good, who had been an NYPD detective, was out drinking one night with another NYPD officer, Charles Burns and his brother Frank. The Burns brothers confessed to him that they, along with several other men, had killed the judge and buried him under the boardwalk at Coney Island. Ferrucci-Good's letter was not sent to the police until after her death, so it was impossible to question her. Investigators were never able to corroborate any of the statements made in the letter and the case remains unsolved, although it has made quite a mark on popular culture. For many years after the judge went missing "to pull a Crater" was a common euphemism for disappearing and "Judge Crater, call your office" was a common gag among nightclub comedians. In the episode of The Golden Girls where Rose has to find a new job, she says "Guess what I found...." and Dorothy replies "Judge Crater?"

Related Reading:

Decades Later, the Disappearance of Judge Joseph Force Crater Remains a Mystery

The unsolved mystery of Judge Joseph Force Crater's disappearance


Judge Is Still Missing, but Novel Tracks Him Down