Judge Joseph Force Crater

Case background and investigation

Joseph Force Crater was born on January 5, 1889, in Easton, Pennsylvania, and built a legal career in New York City, where he was active in Democratic politics. On April 8, 1930, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him a justice of the New York Supreme Court for New York County. He had been on the bench about four months when he disappeared.

According to History.com, Crater was vacationing in Maine with his wife, Stella, when he returned to New York on August 3, 1930, telling her he would be back within about a week. On the morning of August 6 he went through papers in his chambers, had portfolios of documents taken to his Fifth Avenue apartment, and arranged for roughly $5,000 to be withdrawn from his bank accounts.

That evening he arranged for a single ticket to a Broadway comedy and then went to Billy Haas's Chophouse at 332 West 45th Street, where he dined with William Klein, a lawyer, and Sally Lou Ritz, a showgirl. What happened when the three left is not settled. Klein and Ritz at first told investigators that Crater got into a taxi at about 9:30 p.m.; they later said that they had taken the cab and that Crater had walked off down the street. No confirmed sighting followed.

The disappearance was not made public for nearly a month. News of it broke on September 3, 1930, setting off a large police investigation and nationwide press coverage. A grand jury convened that October called 95 witnesses and compiled close to 1,000 pages of testimony but was unable to determine whether Crater was alive or dead. In January 1931 his wife found envelopes in their apartment containing checks, securities and a note from him, in a drawer that police had previously searched; the discovery produced no resolution.

At his wife's request, Crater was declared legally dead in 1939. The New York police formally closed the missing-person case in 1979. Over the decades many theories were put forward, including that he left voluntarily or that he was killed because of what he knew about political corruption, but none was proved.

In August 2005, police disclosed that a woman who had recently died had left a letter, to be opened after her death, asserting that Crater had been killed by several men, among them a police officer and his brother, a cab driver, and buried under the Coney Island boardwalk near the present site of the New York Aquarium. News reports at the time said detectives were reviewing the claim. According to Wikipedia's summary of later reporting, police found no records showing that remains had been recovered when the site was excavated in the 1950s. No remains have been identified as Crater's.