Judge Crater

Joseph Force Crater was born on January 5, 1889. His date of death is unknown but he vanished August 6, 1930. Joseph Crater was a fairly new judge who sat on a bench in New York City. The last time it is known that he was seen, Crater was entering a taxi upon leaving a restaurant. Judge Crater's disappearance became one of the most famous in America. Indeed, he was often referred to as "The Missingest Man in New York".

Crater was from Pennsylvania and graduated from Columbia University. For most of his career he served as an associate justice of the New York Supreme Court. He had only just been appointed to the state bench by Franklin Roosevelt (who was governor at the time) 4 months before he vanished.

During the summer of 1930, Judge Crater and his wife were vacationing at their summer home at Belgrade Lakes in Maine. While there, the Judge received a strange telephone call, after which he told his wife that he must return to the city at once, "to straighten those fellows out". However, when he returned to the city, he left again straightaway on a trip to Atlantic City with his mistress, a showgirl by the name of Sally Lou Ritz. Crater had promised his wife that he would return to Maine by her birthday on August 9th. On August 6th, Judge Crater reported to his offices at the courthouse for a few hours, during which time he asked his assistant, a man by the name of Joseph Mara, to cash 2 checks for him that totalled $5,150. (That would be about the equivalent of $60,000 today). Around lunchtime, the Judge had Mara help him carry 2 locked briefcases to his apartment before giving Mara the rest of the day off.

Later that same day, Crater purchased 1 ticket to Dancing Partner, a Broadway musical playing that night at a nearby theater. Before the show, Judge Crater went to dinner with Sally Lou Ritz and another friend. After dinner, the Judge hailed a cab, telling his companions that he was headed to the musical. What happened to him after that remains a mystery to this day. Some theories include: he was murdered; he ran off with another woman - possibly Sally Lou Ritz; and that he had been involved in corrupt activity and was about to be caught, so he went into hiding.

His disappearance went strangely unnoticed for 10 days, at which time his wife began making calls to New York in search of him. A private search was conducted but no evidence of Crater was ever found. On September 3, 1930, the New York Police Department was notified and an official investigation was launched. The detectives assigned to the case discovered that before he vanished, Judge Crater's safe deposit box had been emptied and the two locked briefcases that Joseph Mara had helped carry to the Judge's apartment were missing. However, none of the leads in the investigation were able to conclusively answer the question as to the missing man's whereabouts. Crater was declared "dead in absentia" on June 6, 1939. His case was officially closed in 1979. It is interesting to note that Sally Lou Ritz also disappeared a few months after the Judge, and was never seen again, either.

On August 19, 2005, authorities revealed that they had received a letter from a woman identifying herself as Stella Ferrucci-Good. In the letter, she named a location in Brooklyn where the Judge had been buried. It is the site of the present day New York Aquarium. She also identified Crater's killers as 3 men. Two of them were New York City police officers, Robert Good (her husband) and Charles Burns. The other man was said to be Burns' brother, Frank, who was a New York City taxi driver. Police were able to confirm that human remains had indeed been found at that site in the 1950s. However, that was before the letter was discovered, and DNA testing was not available at that time. So the bones were almost immediately reburied in a field on Hart Island in New York. There are thousands of other unidentified souls buried in that same field. To locate the ones found in Brooklyn all those years ago would be almost impossible.