SYMHC Classics: Disappearance of Joseph Force Crater

Published Oct 22, 2022, 1:00 PM

This 2014 episode covers the 1930 vanishing of Joseph Force Crater. His missing person cases has fueled decades of speculation about what exactly happened to the New York State Supreme Court justice.

Happy Saturday. Today's Saturday Classic did not come out in October or otherwise in proximity to Halloween. Lately, when I have had a little bit of downtime that I wanted to fill with something comforting, I've been watching episodes of the TV show Designing Women, which ran in the eighties and nineties, and on one of the ones I saw recently, there was this joke about Elvis Presley still being alive and hanging out with Judge Crater and like the space Dog, and I was like, hey, we did an episode on that, Judge. Yes, we did. This episode is called the Disappearance of Judge Joseph Force Crater and it originally came out on February. It also mentions Elvis, and it is Today's Saturday Classic. So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Front and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, have you ever heard someone thinking they were a comedian, get on a p a like at a store and say, Judge Crater call your office. It rings a bell. Yeah, I have vague recollections of it, but it seems like weird things when I was very young or foe memory. But people who have heard that or didn't know that was a thing. It was a thing people would do. Comedians would also use that line, and it's actually a joke that's housed in a historical reference. I think I thought it was from television, like that I had something to do with Mrs Wiggins or something. No, So, the vanishing of Judge Joseph Force Crater is one of our most requested topics. Lots of people want to hear about it, and it's considered one of the largest missing person cases in the US in history, and it was one of the biggest news stories of the ninety thirties, probably second only to the Lindbergh Baby, which happened a couple years later. And it's actually fueled decades of spect elations about what exactly happened to this New York State Supreme Court justice, because there are a million question marks, and as we'll talk about a little bit more later, and as we've talked about in many other episodes, a lot of contradicting accounts of what actually happened. So we'll do a very brief kind of biographical where he started, but really we're going to focus on his career in this vanishing. So he was born in Pennsylvania on the fifth of January eighty nine. His parents were Frank Ellsworth Creater and Layla Virginia Montague and he was named for his grandfather. And he worked his way through Lafayette College and Columbia Law School. He took clerk jobs, uh, and you know, kind of tried to work in law offices as he was working on his education. And from day one he seemed to always cultivate professional and political connections. Uh. And he eventually opened his own law office at one twenty Broadway, and that was in what was, I believe at the time one of the largest office buildings in the country, and it was a little bit prestigious. In nineteen sixteen, he represented Stella Wheeler in a divorce and later the they got married in nineteen seventeen, and that was a week after Wheeler's divorce was finalized. Yeah, kind of found love at the laws and married her divorce lawyer. Early on in his career, Crater joined the Cayuga Democratic Club, which was the seat of another group you may have heard of, which is the Tammany Society sometimes it's also called Tammany Hall, which was a New York political organization that had actually originated in the late seventeen hundreds, and as time went on, it came to be associated with corrupt voting practices, bribery, and other political corruption. Uh. The phrase vote early and vote often was heavily associated with the Tammany Society, particularly in the late eighteen hundreds, although I don't believe that is where originated, but the group continued to be linked to corruption well into the nineteen hundreds. So Creator was kind of joining in with this group of people that had some kind of seed connections. There's even a Dr Seu's political cartoon from one featuring the phrase vote early and vote often and a cat wearing a Tammany sweater, so widely recognized as a little bit dicey political arena there. Yeah. So in nine State Supreme Court Justice Robert F. Wagner Senior appointed Creator as his secretary. And at this point Creator was also teaching law at Fordham and n y U as an adjunct professor. Yeah, so he was getting in with, you know, kind of the heavy hitters in the justice system. At this point. And he you know, had various political appointments that came his way and opportunities that came his way, and they were you know, believed to be uh favor based or possibly bribe based in many accounts. But the one interesting kind of counter to that is that even though people don't necessarily contradicted that being the case, that they weren't always gotten through the most noble means. Uh. He was viewed as really quite a good lawyer and in fact, an excellent professor by many people. Uh. And even though he was doing all of these uh kind of favor appointments and you know, possibly corruptly gained positions, he was still making most of his income from actually practicing law, but his business was booming because he had all of these political connections. So there's kind of almost a um, there's a lot of interplay. Yeah, there's a lot. It's like the layers of an onion, but all the layers interconnects sort of tests react style, like they're all kind of feeding each other from different angles. On April, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who at that point was the governor, appointed creator to a vacancy on the State Supreme Court. So there's already rumors going on that he actually bought his way into the position by paying off the Tammany bosses. There are stories that indicate that he had withdrawn twenty dollars from his bank just before the appointment. It's not completely confirmed, but if so, that would support the rumor that there was a big payoff going on. Yeah, and that was it a lot of money. I mean, it's a lot of money for somebody now, but it was even more a lot of money thirty to just go pull out. Yes, there's a lot. So we're gonna jump right to his disappearance because it happened very shortly after he was appointed to the State Supreme Court. So in August three, Judge Crater was on vacation in Maine with his wife Stella uh and there they had a vacation house there, and he abruptly left to return to New York City. And he had done this previously a couple of weeks or a week before and then came back. And so again he was kind of leaving abruptly, and he had promised her that he would return within the week so that they could finish out their vacation together. On the morning of August six, Joe Crator went through his office in the State Supreme Court chambers and he destroyed all kinds of documents and then also packed up other stuff into folders and briefcases, and he moved a lot of documents into his Fifth Avenue apartment. And he also directed his clerk to withdraw five thousand dollars from his bank, and he arranged for a ticket to that evening's Broadway performance of Dancing Partners, which was a show that had opened just the day before. That evening creator left Billy Hassa's chop House on West forty fifth Street after having dinner with a show girl named Sally lou Ritz and his friend and fellow lawyer, William Klein. He headed off allegedly going to the theater, and the theater ticket that he had booked earlier in the day was used, though witnesses said it was most definitely not Judge Crater who actually used it, and then he was never seen again. There's just four months after his appointment to the State Supreme Court, and he had just vanished, yeah, completely into thin air. So it will sound completely odd initially, and it is odd, but there's some sort of explanations for it, but Creater wasn't actually reported missing for almost a month. His wife, who he had left in Maine, thought he was in the city, and she didn't really grow concerned until uh the sixteen, which point at which point it had been about ten days since she had seen him and she hadn't been able to contact him. And some of his friends and associates in the city initially thought he was still in Maine with his wife, so they weren't thinking there was anything amiss. But then, uh, it became apparent that he was m i A when he didn't show up for court when court was back in session. Uh, And initially his friends that had already realized that he wasn't immediately available, they kind of started to investigate themselves, and they chose not to tell his wife because they didn't want to alarm her. Yeah. This seems bizarre to like a really modern ear because now cell phones are ubiquitous, Yeah, but landline phones were not ubiquitous at this point, Like, Yeah, so you would go days and days without hearing from someone. There were many many households that didn't even have phones in them. So it's not completely unheard of that a person would be used to not hearing from their partner for that long. The very thought is terrifying to me. I don't get a text from my husband by a certain point in the day and I start freaking out, like something bad has happened. Uh. And it wasn't until August that a formal investigation began, so at that point it had been about twenty days, and even then it didn't really hit the newspapers and become public knowledge until September three, And at that point the news was broken that Judge Crater was officially missing, so the official investigation started, and once that was made public, all kinds of less than noble things, a lot of which had been rumored for a really long time, came to light. He was involved in brokering deals to buy and sell judge ships, and he definitely had a taste for dalliances with show girls, although a lot of people characterize his marriage to Stella as being very devoted. So yeah, and I never know how much of that is um people kind of trying to paint a nice picture of this guy that they knew and they were friends with, or how much of it really is that he seemed to have you know, both a very steadfast devotion to his wife and a tendency to have affairs on the side, right, which I suppose is possible. Yeah, I would say that's possible, especially for someone in a position of power. You know, he would certainly have available to him a lot of options, a temptation rich environment, so to speak. Uh. There was also a news story that ran briefly in September of nineteen thirty so just a little while after Judge Crater vanished that Sally lou Ritz, who remember was the show girl that he had dinner with the night he vanished, had also disappeared. Uh, And this caused people to immediately speculate that she had been killed by someone to keep her quiet. But apparently uh, that report was published in haste because of all, reporters couldn't locate her for a day or two. It soon turned out that she was in fact in her parents home in Ohio, perfectly safe, and she was interviewed there. So initially there was an even seedier thing that people thought was coming to light and then it turned out to be nothing. But on a similar story, June Bryce, who was rumored to be his favorite show girl, did vanish in late nineteen thirty but she resurfaced later in an insane asylum and that's where she lived for the rest of her life. In early nineteen thirty one, so still just a few months after Judge Crater had vanished, his wife, Stella allegedly found a two inch thick envelope in a bureau in the couple's Fifth Avenue apartment, and this envelope contained insurance policies and six thousand dollars in cash, as well as a letter that was written by Joe Crater which listed out people who owed him money uh and and was very insistent that this information was confidential, and presumably, according to many people's assessment of the situation, he had left this information for Stella so that she could collect on these debts to support herself and maintain her lifestyle. And this raised all kinds of other questions, like how did the police miss this envelope during their searches of the apartment when they were investigating right, like during a missing person investigation, you do pretty thorough combing of their personal effects. One would think that they looked in the bureau, but apparently not, so it could have been overlooked, but There's the other thing that rang very oddly to Creator's friends about this discovery of this envelope was that they insisted that the judge always carried his insurance policies and his other important documents on his person. Uh so if he had been snatched theoretically, which sounds completely bizarre to me, but I'm laughing at that. That's why you're saying that, because I'm laughing at this idea. Yeah, just I can't imagine carrying important documents with me everywhere. I'm like, that's not safe at all. I'm just going to have my birth certificate on my person at the time. So there. Uh. You know, assertion is that if he had truly been you know, kidnapped or plucked from his normal goings on, he would have had those documents with him and not tucked carefully in an envelope left for his wife. And so this fact, as well as the discovery of several other small personal effects in the Fifth Avenue apartment, that Creator was known to carry on his person at all times. Uh and they were just sitting in the apartment. So this fed the theory that Judge Creator had in fact chosen to vanish rather than having been the victim of a crime. So his wife had this ongoing struggle to collect on the insurance policies, and as a result of that, in ninety nine, Joseph Creator was legally declared dead. In nineteen seventy nine, the missing person's case was officially closed. Yeah, it's without him being declared dead, life insurance policies would not pay out because he could just show up again and it could all have been a scam. I feel like that's a soap opera plot, and well it kind of was. There was a whole other trial but went on with Stella that really dragged on, and it sounds just miserable. Uh So. An interesting point in terms of how Stella handled things after the disappearance and long after she had settled these life insurance issues, is that for more than three decades, so every anniversary of her husband's disappearance, Stella Creator would walk into a bar and Greenwich village and she would order to drinks and she would toast good luck, Joe, wherever you are, and she would drink one of the drinks and she would leave the other inrink untouched, and then leave, which in a way sounds very sort of wistful and sad and romantic. Yeah, it makes me feel a little teerious. But then the part of me that wonders if she long suspected or even knew that he had arranged his own vanishing, if it's not kind of a like, wherever you are, jerk, I'm drinking in your honor um. But that might just be my cynical side coming out. So we have lots of theories about what happened and reported sightings, yeah, which is what happens with missing persons. Yeah. Uh so there are so called craterrists, and these are unsolved mystery enthusiasts who study all these pieces of this puzzle to try to come up with the most logical explanation for what happened. And they've come up with a lot of explanations throughout the years, and even people who don't identify as part of that group. Some of the theories have included that he was a victim of a hit because of a mob connection and some sort of deal gone wrong. There's ran off with a show girl. Yeah, since it it was at this point, you know, once he disappeared, it became very public balanced and in fact, he had had a lot of affairs with show girls, right, so perhaps he are you in N O F T? Right? Uh? The other one, this one I kind of find hilarious and I don't know why, because it's very silly as well, it's far fetched. There are some the assert that he somehow became amnesiac, like he had amnesia and couldn't remember who he was or what he was doing. Because soap opera. Because soap opera, which so much of the actual story is very soapish, you can see where people might land there. There's also the theory that he committed suicide. Yeah. Uh. There's also a theory that he was maybe killed by a blackmailer for not paying them off. There's also a theory that he landed at Polly Adler's brothel, so allegedly, according to these early drafts of a memoir that Adler wrote much later, he wrote that Crazy died in her bordello and she had had his body removed by friends. Um, we don't really have these alleged drafts though, right. Uh, we're kind of taking someone's word for it that they Oh, I've seen these drafts, but I cannot show you. But now they're gone and destroyed. Uh, so, we don't know. That's another that's another kind of soap operation, one that people like to talk about, that he died in the arms of a prostitute and then there was a big cover up. And for decades the New York Police Department received letters and phone calls from people all over the US and the world claiming to have seen Judge Crater, and particularly as important anniversaries of the disappearance, would you know be coming up or just passed so, Like at the twenty year mark, they got a ton of these calls. At the thirty year mark, they got a ton of these calls. And he's been reported as being seen everywhere from walking down Park Avenue on jets to other countries, prospecting in California, hurting sheep in the Pacific Northwest. I guess someone thought maybe he had a yen for a simpler life. Uh in a mental hospital in Missouri, playing dice in Atlanta, running small time casino games in North Africa. Uh, just hanging out in Havana in the South Pacific, in Shanghai, basically anywhere and everywhere on the planet, doing any possible thing you could be doing. He has been reported as having been witnessed doing and being that thing in that place. He's like a judicial Elvis. Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking that I was reading all of these weird accounts that people have reported through the years. Yeah. So there have even been some staged hoaxes. There was one in the nineteen seventies where police were called to a bar on New York's East Side and they found a man dressed as Creater as he had appeared when he vanished in nineteen thirty. And they had lots of video cameras. Yeah, and the person that was playing Craater in this staged hoax also looked like Crater would have looked in the nine So it was clearly not the same person. When we get into the time traveler theory, he was a doctor. Um uh. So before we get to another development that happened in the two thousands, much more recent thing. Yeah, we will pause for just a moment for a word from our sponsor. Yes, So now we get to a very interesting letter. In April two, Thive Stella Ferrucci Good of Belle Rose, New York, died at the age of one, And this would have been a completely unremarkable circumstance, but she left behind a letter that reignited the Judge Crater case and in an envelope that UH she had left behind that said do not open until my death. UH, Ferrucci Good left a note that claimed that her late husband had learned the actual true about what had happened to Creator and who had murdered him. According to this note, a New York Police Department policeman named Charles Burns and Burns taxi driver brother Frank conspired with other people to kill the judge and bury his remains under the boardwalk in Coney Island near West eighth Street. And one interesting point of note UH, and this comes up a lot, particularly as we're looking through some of this information that was reeled in the note, is that various media reports of the contents of this note, even though this is a fairly modern event, UH, as well as other aspects of the Creator disappearance that have been reported through the years, have been consistently inconsistent. UH. In some stories about the Ferruci Good note, UH, it's reported that her husband was actually involved in the murder, and in other reportings of this note they say that her husband was simply told about it by Charles Burns while they were having drinks in a bar. So Frank Burns allegedly picked Crater up in his cab from the chop house that we referenced earlier on West Fort, then stopped a few blocks later and two more men got into the cab. The car then headed to Coney Island, where they were joined by two more men, and that's when the judge, according to this letter, was killed and buried. And this is where we need to point out another inconsistency in the various accounts of the last time that Judge Crater was seen. If you look through any of the various, uh, you know, books about it, and there have been many newspaper accounts, etcetera. Some report that witnesses saw him getting into a cab, which at least sort of connects to the idea that Frank Burns could have picked him up in a cab, but others insist that there is no such witness testimony that he walked away from the chop house and did not get into a cab. So that's another kind of pebble to turn over in your mind on this about how inconsistent everything is. Although we've talked about lots of different motives that people could have for wanting to kill a judge who was involved in the various activities. There was no motive mentioned in the note. Uh. There was for fact checkers, Charles Burns that was on the police force from nine uh and he was assigned to the sixtieth Precinct, which is in Coney Island. So there is some substantiation of some of the information in this note, but then other things are a lot murkier. Right. There are some reports that indicate that in the fifties, when the New York Aquarium was being built, remains were found under the boardwalk. Other sources say that there's no such evidence and that this is just a rumor, and since there hasn't been any kind of big announcement that creators remains were found. Either way, the case remains unsolved. If there had been a body unearthed in the fifties, you would think that the first person that most people would think of would have been that it was the famous missing judge. Yeah, that's another one that news outlets will say, like there were uh, there was a body found in the fifties. We've called the police for confirmation and others will say, there are rumors that there was a body found there in the fifties, but we've called the police and they firmly deny this. So it's kind of interesting and a little bit confusing. In the words of Simon Rifkind, who was a lawyer who worked with Joe Crater and I think to some degree viewed him as a mentor. And Rifkin actually signed the form that formerly opened the investigation into the disappearance. Uh, he described him as saying, quote, Judge Crater was a man of such commanding appearance he couldn't possibly get lost in a crowd. And Rifkin is not alone in that sort of description. This was a man who was very dapper. He was always well dressed. Many people would have called him handsome. Uh, you know, a tall, commanding presence, not someone who could just vanish. One of the problems it's ongoing in this whole mystery is that there's all kinds of obfuscation and spin that's been put on the case through the years. As many many, many authors and different people who have a little part in the mystery have published their own accounts of the disappearance. So as with any event, I witness accounts also contradict each other, and there's also the possibility that people are purposefully bending the truth. Uh yeah, I mean it's one of those things where no, no, my account is the correct account. I am writing the new version of what really happened, and it's supported by these things, but there's always something different. So what really happened to Judge creater in n I would say at this point it's a safe bet we will never actually know. For all we know he lived out his life somewhere very happily elsewhere, or he's been at the bottom of a body of water for a long time, or any number of other things we just don't know. So yes, that's the Judge Greater disappearance. It kind of leaves more questions than answers, unfortunately. But sometimes when so many people really want us to talk about something, we get pretty invested in wanting to deliver on that, even though we don't wind up at a satisfactory mystery solving conclusion. Yeah, there isn't any. I think a lot of people that were very into the case. We're probably so excited in two thousand five when that letter appeared and possibly solved it. But it really didn't. Unfortunately. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcastists. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H

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