February 24, 2014 • 27 mins
The 1930 vanishing of Joseph Force Crater is considered one of the largest missing person cases in U.S. history, and has fueled decades of speculation about what exactly happened to the New York State Supreme Court justice.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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
(00:21):
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
(00:41):
in a historical reference.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
(01:03):
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
(01:26):
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
(01:48):
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
(02:10):
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
(02:32):
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,
(02:54):
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
(03:15):
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.
(03:38):
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
(04:01):
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
(04:24):
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
(04:46):
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
(05:06):
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
(05:28):
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
(05:51):
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
(06:12):
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
(06:35):
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
(06:56):
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.
(07:18):
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,
(07:40):
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
(08:00):
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
(08:21):
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
(08:44):
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
(09:05):
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
(09:27):
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
(09:49):
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
(10:12):
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
(10:33):
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
(10:53):
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,
(11:15):
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,
(11:37):
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
(11:59):
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
(12:19):
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
(12:43):
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
(13:04):
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
(13:25):
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
(13:46):
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
(14:07):
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,
(14:30):
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
(14:51):
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
(15:13):
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
(15:34):
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
(15:57):
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
(16:19):
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
(16:41):
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
(17:03):
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,
(17:23):
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
(17:45):
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,
(18:05):
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,
(18:28):
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
(18:51):
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,
(19:11):
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
(19:33):
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
(19:54):
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.
(20:17):
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
(20:39):
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
(21:01):
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
(21:24):
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
(21:46):
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,
(22:08):
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
(22:30):
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.
(22:51):
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
(23:12):
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,
(23:34):
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
(24:01):
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,
(24:24):
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
(24:44):
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
(25:05):
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
(25:25):
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.
(25:46):
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.
(26:08):
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
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that helps investigate and search for clues. If you would
(26:30):
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
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(26:55):
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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
(00:21):
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
(00:41):
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
(01:03):
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
(01:26):
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
(01:48):
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
(02:10):
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
(02:32):
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,
(02:54):
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
(03:15):
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.
(03:38):
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
(04:01):
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
(04:24):
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
(04:46):
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
(05:06):
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
(05:28):
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
(05:51):
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
(06:12):
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
(06:35):
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
(06:56):
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.
(07:18):
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,
(07:40):
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
(08:00):
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
(08:21):
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
(08:44):
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
(09:05):
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
(09:27):
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
(09:49):
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
(10:12):
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
(10:33):
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
(10:53):
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,
(11:15):
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,
(11:37):
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
(11:59):
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
(12:19):
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
(12:43):
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
(13:04):
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
(13:25):
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
(13:46):
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
(14:07):
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,
(14:30):
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
(14:51):
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
(15:13):
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
(15:34):
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
(15:57):
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
(16:19):
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
(16:41):
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
(17:03):
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,
(17:23):
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
(17:45):
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,
(18:05):
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,
(18:28):
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
(18:51):
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,
(19:11):
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
(19:33):
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
(19:54):
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.
(20:17):
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
(20:39):
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
(21:01):
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
(21:24):
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
(21:46):
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,
(22:08):
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
(22:30):
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.
(22:51):
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
(23:12):
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,
(23:34):
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
(24:01):
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,
(24:24):
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
(24:44):
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
(25:05):
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
(25:25):
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.
(25:46):
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.
(26:08):
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
(26:30):
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
(26:55):
History classes brought to you by Linda dot com. You
can learn at it Linda dot com and on line
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