Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. 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 stage 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 Comedians would also use that line, and it's actually a joke that's housed in a historical reference. Yeah. I think I thought it was from television, like I had something to do with Mrs Wiggins or something. No, So, the vanishing of Judge Joseph forced Crater is one of our most requested topics. Lots people want to hear about it, and it's considered one of the largest missing person cases in the US UH in history, and it was one of the biggest news stories of the nineteen thirties, probably second only to the Lindberg Baby, which happened a couple of years later. And it's actually feel decades of speculations 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 eighteen eighty nine. His parents were Frank Ellsworth Creator 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. Kind of found love at the law off 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 Doctor Seu's political cartoon from ninety 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 ninety 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 bride based in many accounts. But the one interesting kind of counter to that is that even though people don't necessarily contradict 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 interconnect, sort of tests ract style, like they're all kind of feeding each other from different angles. On April eighth, 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 twenty dollars, Yes, 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 of ninety 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 Yor 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 Creator 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. And then before we get to the investigation and kind of what has grown out of this vanishing, do you want to take a moment and talk about a new sponsor. 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 sixteenth, 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 he 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 a four moal 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, which I suppose is possible. Yeah, I would say that, especially for someone in a position of power. Uh, 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 thirties, 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 room 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, to 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 they're 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, and 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 gonna have my birth certificate on my person at the time, So they're 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 and 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 nineteen thirty 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 soap plot. 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 Crater 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 drink untouched and then leave, which in a way sounds very sort of wistful and sand 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, a 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 yeah, which is what happens with missing persons. Yeah, so there are so called craterists, 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 have 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, ran off with a show girl. Yeah, since it it was at this point, you know, once he disappeared, it became very public knowledge, and in fact, he had had a lot of affairs with show girls, 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. It's far fetched. There are some the assert that he somehow became amnesia, 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 soapished, 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 being 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, she wrote that Crater died in her bordello and then 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. But now they're gone and destroyed. Uh, so we don't know. That's another that's another kind of soap operated 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 get a ton of these calls. At the thirty year mark, to get 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 n 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, and he's like a judicial Elvis. Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking. But I was reading all of these weird accounts that people have reported through the years. So there have even been some staged hopeses. 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 Creator as he had appeared when he vanished in nine thirty. And there are lots of video cameras. Yeah, and the person that was playing Creator in this staged hoax also looked like Creater would have looked in the nineteen thirties, 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 thousand five, Stella Ferrucci, Good of Belle Rose, New York, died at the age of nine. 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, Ferruci had left a note that claimed that her late husband had learned the actual truth 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 revealed 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 forty fifth Street, 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 insists 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 ninety uh and he was assigned to the sixtieth Precinct, which was 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 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 Rifkin, who was a lawyer who worked with Joe Crater and I think some degree viewed him as a mentor, and Rifkin actually signed the form that formally 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 crown. 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 Crater 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. I just don't know. So yes, that's the Judge creator disappearing. That 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, possibly solved it, but it really didn't unfortunately. Yeah, do you have some listener mail go along with this episode. It doesn't really go along with this episode, but it's a fun listener mail and it is from our listener John. He says, Hello, ladies, I write to you from Australia, where I have just listened to your podcast on Zenobia. What first attracted my interest is that my grandmother, who lives in the city of Perth on the West Coast, lives near as Enobia Street. This was the only other time I had heard the name before, so naturally I thought there might be a connection. You can imagine my growing excitement as I learned that not only was it the same Zenobia, but this was confirmed by the fact that all surrounding st It's where other historical figures from her era Aurelian, Solomon, and Cleopatra. The icing on the cake was to learn that the ancient colony she ruled over is also the name of the suburb where these streets are found, Palm my Ira. After many decades of walking these streets in this suburb, I had no idea of any of their significance or historical connection until now. I've already passed on zenobious story to most of my family members. Not only was this stuff we missed in history class, but stuff we certainly missed on our GPS as well. I love that me too. Uh. If you would like to write us about discovering the streets near you have historical names or anything else, or if you know what, if you know where Judge Crater is, you can do that at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. Uh. You can also connect with us in many other ways. Uh. You can connect with us on Facebook dot com, slash missed in History. We're still on Twitter at missed in History. We're available at missed in History dot tumbler dot com. And we have a whole new pinterest at pinterest dot com slash missed in History with many many boards that have many, many different categories of historical things to look at. Obviously we had one board on the how stuff Works page. Now we have many boards, heard of boards any board. If you would like to learn something sort of related to our podcast today, you can go to our website and type in the words missing person and one of the articles you will get is how to volunteer for missing persons. So YouTube could become part of a group that helps investigate and search for clues. If you would like to learn more about that, or almost anything else you can think of, you can do that at our website, which is how stone works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it how stuff works dot com. This episode of stuff you Missed in History classes brought to you by Linda dot com. You can learn at it Linda dot com and on line learning company with more than seventy seven thousand video tutorials that teach software, creative and business skills. Membership starts at twenty five dollars a month and provides unlimited seven access to top quality video courses topped by expert instructors. With real world experience. Listeners of stuff you missed in history class can trial Inda dot com free for seven days by visiting Linda dot com slash history stuff

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. 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 stage 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. Yeah. I think I thought it was from television, like I had something to do with Mrs Wiggins or something. No, So, the vanishing of Judge Joseph forced Crater is one of our most requested topics. Lots people want to hear about it, and it's considered one of the largest missing person cases in the US UH in history, and it was one of the biggest news stories of the nineteen thirties, probably second only to the Lindberg Baby, which happened a couple of years later. And it's actually feel decades of speculations 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 eighteen eighty nine. His parents were Frank Ellsworth Creator 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. Kind of found love at the law off 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 Doctor Seu's political cartoon from ninety 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 ninety 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 bride based in many accounts. But the one interesting kind of counter to that is that even though people don't necessarily contradict 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 interconnect, sort of tests ract style, like they're all kind of feeding each other from different angles. On April eighth, 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 twenty dollars, Yes, 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 of ninety 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 Yor 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 Creator 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. And then before we get to the investigation and kind of what has grown out of this vanishing, do you want to take a moment and talk about a new sponsor. 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 sixteenth, 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 he 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 a four moal 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, which I suppose is possible. Yeah, I would say that, especially for someone in a position of power. Uh, 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 thirties, 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 room 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, to 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 they're 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, and 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 gonna have my birth certificate on my person at the time, So they're 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 and 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 nineteen thirty 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 soap plot. 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 Crater 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 drink untouched and then leave, which in a way sounds very sort of wistful and sand 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, a 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 yeah, which is what happens with missing persons. Yeah, so there are so called craterists, 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 have 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, ran off with a show girl. Yeah, since it it was at this point, you know, once he disappeared, it became very public knowledge, and in fact, he had had a lot of affairs with show girls, 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. It's far fetched. There are some the assert that he somehow became amnesia, 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 soapished, 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 being 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, she wrote that Crater died in her bordello and then 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. But now they're gone and destroyed. Uh, so we don't know. That's another that's another kind of soap operated 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 get a ton of these calls. At the thirty year mark, to get 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 n 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, and he's like a judicial Elvis. Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking. But I was reading all of these weird accounts that people have reported through the years. So there have even been some staged hopeses. 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 Creator as he had appeared when he vanished in nine thirty. And there are lots of video cameras. Yeah, and the person that was playing Creator in this staged hoax also looked like Creater would have looked in the nineteen thirties, 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 thousand five, Stella Ferrucci, Good of Belle Rose, New York, died at the age of nine. 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, Ferruci had left a note that claimed that her late husband had learned the actual truth 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 revealed 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 forty fifth Street, 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 insists 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 ninety uh and he was assigned to the sixtieth Precinct, which was 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 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 Rifkin, who was a lawyer who worked with Joe Crater and I think some degree viewed him as a mentor, and Rifkin actually signed the form that formally 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 crown. 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 Crater 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. I just don't know. So yes, that's the Judge creator disappearing. That 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, possibly solved it, but it really didn't unfortunately. Yeah, do you have some listener mail go along with this episode. It doesn't really go along with this episode, but it's a fun listener mail and it is from our listener John. He says, Hello, ladies, I write to you from Australia, where I have just listened to your podcast on Zenobia. What first attracted my interest is that my grandmother, who lives in the city of Perth on the West Coast, lives near as Enobia Street. This was the only other time I had heard the name before, so naturally I thought there might be a connection. You can imagine my growing excitement as I learned that not only was it the same Zenobia, but this was confirmed by the fact that all surrounding st It's where other historical figures from her era Aurelian, Solomon, and Cleopatra. The icing on the cake was to learn that the ancient colony she ruled over is also the name of the suburb where these streets are found, Palm my Ira. After many decades of walking these streets in this suburb, I had no idea of any of their significance or historical connection until now. I've already passed on zenobious story to most of my family members. Not only was this stuff we missed in history class, but stuff we certainly missed on our GPS as well. I love that me too. Uh. If you would like to write us about discovering the streets near you have historical names or anything else, or if you know what, if you know where Judge Crater is, you can do that at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. Uh. You can also connect with us in many other ways. Uh. You can connect with us on Facebook dot com, slash missed in History. We're still on Twitter at missed in History. We're available at missed in History dot tumbler dot com. And we have a whole new pinterest at pinterest dot com slash missed in History with many many boards that have many, many different categories of historical things to look at. Obviously we had one board on the how stuff Works page. Now we have many boards, heard of boards any board. If you would like to learn something sort of related to our podcast today, you can go to our website and type in the words missing person and one of the articles you will get is how to volunteer for missing persons. So YouTube could become part of a group that helps investigate and search for clues. If you would like to learn more about that, or almost anything else you can think of, you can do that at our website, which is how stone works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it how stuff works dot com. 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