The Disappearance of Judge Crater

The case

On the evening of Wednesday 6 August 1930, Joseph Force Crater, a justice of the New York Supreme Court, finished dinner at Billy Haas's chophouse on West 45th Street with a lawyer friend and a showgirl, stepped out onto the pavement, and vanished. He had a ticket waiting for him at the box office of the Belasco Theatre, a few blocks away, for a comedy he had already seen. No one has been able to show that he used it.

Crater was forty-one, a lawyer from Easton, Pennsylvania, who had made his career in Manhattan through Tammany Hall, the Democratic machine that ran New York City. He belonged to a Tammany district leader's club, organised its election workers and argued its election cases, and in April 1930 Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him to the state Supreme Court. That spring he sold about $16,000 in securities and drew $7,000 from his bank, a sum that later invited the suspicion that he had paid for the seat. He was also known about town as 'Good Time Joe', a regular in the speakeasies and showrooms of the theatre district.

That summer the state had begun to look into corruption in the city's courts, the inquiry that became the Seabury investigation. Crater was on holiday with his wife Stella at their cabin in Belgrade, Maine, when he took a telephone call he would not explain, other than to say he had to go to New York to straighten some people out. He made two trips back to the city. On the morning of 6 August, according to his clerk, he spent hours going through papers in his court chambers, then had the clerk cash two cheques for him totalling $5,150 and helped carry two locked briefcases to his apartment at 40 Fifth Avenue.

That night's dinner companions, the lawyer William Klein and the showgirl Sally Lou Ritz, first said Crater got into a taxi outside the restaurant and was driven off west along 45th Street. Later they said they were the ones who had taken the taxi, and that Crater had walked away. Nobody else claimed to have seen him leave.

Strangely, nobody raised the alarm for weeks. His wife waited in Maine and made discreet calls; his fellow judges noticed when he missed the opening of the courts on 25 August and searched quietly; the police were not told until 3 September. By then the briefcases were gone and his safe deposit box had been emptied. A grand jury heard ninety-five witnesses that autumn and concluded that it could not say whether he was alive or dead, a runaway, a victim of amnesia or the victim of a crime. In January 1931 Stella Crater found envelopes of cash, cheques, securities and a note listing debts owed to him in a dresser drawer that police said had been empty when they searched it.

The case became a national joke and an enduring puzzle. Sightings poured in from all over the world. Theories ran from a quiet flight abroad to a killing by gangsters or by people afraid of what he might tell the Seabury inquiry, to blackmail by a showgirl's associates. Crater was declared legally dead in 1939, and the police finally closed the file in 1979. In 2005, after the death of a Queens woman, police received her handwritten claim that her late husband had learned Crater was killed by a police officer and his brother and buried at Coney Island, under what is now the New York Aquarium. Nothing was found to support it.