SYMHC Classics: Disappearance of Joseph Force Crater

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

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Today's Saturday Classic did not come out in
October or otherwise in proximity to Halloween. Lately, when I
have had a little bit of downtime that I wanted
to fill with something comforting, I've been watching episodes of
the TV show Designing Women, which ran in the eighties
and nineties, and on one of the ones I saw recently,
there was this joke about Elvis Presley still being alive

(00:25):
and hanging out with Judge Crater and like the space Dog,
and I was like, hey, we did an episode on that, Judge. Yes,
we did. This episode is called the Disappearance of Judge
Joseph Force Crater and it originally came out on February.
It also mentions Elvis, and it is Today's Saturday Classic.

(00:46):
So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Holly Front and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy,
have you ever heard someone thinking they were a comedian,

(01:09):
get on a p a like at a store and say,
Judge Crater call your office. It rings a bell. Yeah,
I have vague recollections of it, but it seems like
weird things when I was very young or foe memory.
But people who have heard that or didn't know that
was a thing. It was a thing people would do.
Comedians would also use that line, and it's actually a

(01:29):
joke that's housed in a historical reference. I think I
thought it was from television, like that I had something
to do with Mrs Wiggins or something. No, So, the
vanishing of Judge Joseph Force Crater is one of our
most requested topics. Lots of people want to hear about it,
and it's considered one of the largest missing person cases
in the US in history, and it was one of

(01:51):
the biggest news stories of the ninety thirties, probably second
only to the Lindbergh Baby, which happened a couple years later.
And it's actually fueled decades of spect elations about what
exactly happened to this New York State Supreme Court justice,
because there are a million question marks, and as we'll
talk about a little bit more later, and as we've
talked about in many other episodes, a lot of contradicting

(02:14):
accounts of what actually happened. So we'll do a very
brief kind of biographical where he started, but really we're
going to focus on his career in this vanishing. So
he was born in Pennsylvania on the fifth of January
eighty nine. His parents were Frank Ellsworth Creater and Layla
Virginia Montague and he was named for his grandfather. And

(02:37):
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

(02:58):
that was in what was, I believe at the time
one of the largest office buildings in the country, and
it was a little bit prestigious. In nineteen sixteen, he
represented Stella Wheeler in a divorce and later the they
got married in nineteen seventeen, and that was a week
after Wheeler's divorce was finalized. Yeah, kind of found love

(03:21):
at the laws and married her divorce lawyer. Early on
in his career, Crater joined the Cayuga Democratic Club, which
was the seat of another group you may have heard of,
which is the Tammany Society sometimes it's also called Tammany Hall,
which was a New York political organization that had actually
originated in the late seventeen hundreds, and as time went on,

(03:43):
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

(04:04):
kind of joining in with this group of people that
had some kind of seed connections. There's even a Dr
Seu's political cartoon from one featuring the phrase vote early
and vote often and a cat wearing a Tammany sweater,
so widely recognized as a little bit dicey political arena there. Yeah.

(04:27):
So in nine State Supreme Court Justice Robert F. Wagner
Senior appointed Creator as his secretary. And at this point
Creator was also teaching law at Fordham and n y
U as an adjunct professor. Yeah, so he was getting
in with, you know, kind of the heavy hitters in
the justice system. At this point. And he you know,
had various political appointments that came his way and opportunities

(04:50):
that came his way, and they were you know, believed
to be uh favor based or possibly bribe based in
many accounts. But the one interesting kind of counter to
that is that even though people don't necessarily contradicted that
being the case, that they weren't always gotten through the
most noble means. Uh. He was viewed as really quite

(05:12):
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

(05:34):
there's kind of almost a um, there's a lot of interplay. Yeah,
there's a lot. It's like the layers of an onion,
but all the layers interconnects sort of tests react style,
like they're all kind of feeding each other from different angles.
On April, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who at that point was
the governor, appointed creator to a vacancy on the State

(05:55):
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,

(06:17):
and that was it a lot of money. I mean,
it's a lot of money for somebody now, but it
was even more a lot of money thirty to just
go pull out. Yes, there's a lot. So we're gonna
jump right to his disappearance because it happened very shortly
after he was appointed to the State Supreme Court. So
in August three, Judge Crater was on vacation in Maine

(06:41):
with his wife Stella uh and there they had a
vacation house there, and he abruptly left to return to
New York City. And he had done this previously a
couple of weeks or a week before and then came back.
And so again he was kind of leaving abruptly, and
he had promised her that he would return within the
week so that they could finish out their vacation together.

(07:03):
On the morning of August six, Joe Crator went through
his office in the State Supreme Court chambers and he
destroyed all kinds of documents and then also packed up
other stuff into folders and briefcases, and he moved a
lot of documents into his Fifth Avenue apartment. And he
also directed his clerk to withdraw five thousand dollars from
his bank, and he arranged for a ticket to that

(07:26):
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

(07:47):
ticket that he had booked earlier in the day was used,
though witnesses said it was most definitely not Judge Crater
who actually used it, and then he was never seen again.
There's just four months after his appointment to the State
Supreme Court, and he had just vanished, yeah, completely into
thin air. So it will sound completely odd initially, and

(08:18):
it is odd, but there's some sort of explanations for it,
but Creater wasn't actually reported missing for almost a month.
His wife, who he had left in Maine, thought he
was in the city, and she didn't really grow concerned
until uh the sixteen, which point at which point it
had been about ten days since she had seen him

(08:39):
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

(09:01):
wasn't immediately available, they kind of started to investigate themselves,
and they chose not to tell his wife because they
didn't want to alarm her. Yeah. This seems bizarre to
like a really modern ear because now cell phones are ubiquitous, Yeah,
but landline phones were not ubiquitous at this point, Like, Yeah,

(09:23):
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

(09:45):
August that a formal investigation began, so at that point
it had been about twenty days, and even then it
didn't really hit the newspapers and become public knowledge until
September three, And at that point the news was broken
that Judge Crater was officially missing, so the official investigation started,
and once that was made public, all kinds of less

(10:08):
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

(10:30):
how much of that is um people kind of trying
to paint a nice picture of this guy that they
knew and they were friends with, or how much of
it really is that he seemed to have you know,
both a very steadfast devotion to his wife and a
tendency to have affairs on the side, right, which I
suppose is possible. Yeah, I would say that's possible, especially

(10:53):
for someone in a position of power. You know, he
would certainly have available to him a lot of options,
a temptation rich environment, so to speak. Uh. There was
also a news story that ran briefly in September of
nineteen thirty so just a little while after Judge Crater
vanished that Sally lou Ritz, who remember was the show

(11:13):
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,

(11:36):
and she was interviewed there. So initially there was an
even seedier thing that people thought was coming to light
and then it turned out to be nothing. But on
a similar story, June Bryce, who was rumored to be
his favorite show girl, did vanish in late nineteen thirty
but she resurfaced later in an insane asylum and that's
where she lived for the rest of her life. In

(11:57):
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

(12:18):
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

(12:40):
police miss this envelope during their searches of the apartment
when they were investigating right, like during a missing person investigation,
you do pretty thorough combing of their personal effects. One
would think that they looked in the bureau, but apparently not,
so it could have been overlooked, but There's the other
thing that rang very oddly to Creator's friends about this

(13:02):
discovery of this envelope was that they insisted that the
judge always carried his insurance policies and his other important
documents on his person. Uh so if he had been
snatched theoretically, which sounds completely bizarre to me, but I'm
laughing at that. That's why you're saying that, because I'm
laughing at this idea. Yeah, just I can't imagine carrying
important documents with me everywhere. I'm like, that's not safe

(13:23):
at all. I'm just going to have my birth certificate
on my person at the time. So there. Uh. You know,
assertion is that if he had truly been you know,
kidnapped or plucked from his normal goings on, he would
have had those documents with him and not tucked carefully
in an envelope left for his wife. And so this fact,

(13:43):
as well as the discovery of several other small personal
effects in the Fifth Avenue apartment, that Creator was known
to carry on his person at all times. Uh and
they were just sitting in the apartment. So this fed
the theory that Judge Creator had in fact chosen to
vanish rather than having been the victim of a crime.
So his wife had this ongoing struggle to collect on

(14:04):
the insurance policies, and as a result of that, in
ninety nine, Joseph Creator was legally declared dead. In nineteen
seventy nine, the missing person's case was officially closed. Yeah,
it's without him being declared dead, life insurance policies would
not pay out because he could just show up again
and it could all have been a scam. I feel
like that's a soap opera plot, and well it kind

(14:27):
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,

(14:49):
Stella Creator would walk into a bar and Greenwich village
and she would order to drinks and she would toast
good luck, Joe, wherever you are, and she would drink
one of the drinks and she would leave the other
inrink untouched, and then leave, which in a way sounds
very sort of wistful and sad and romantic. Yeah, it
makes me feel a little teerious. But then the part
of me that wonders if she long suspected or even

(15:11):
knew that he had arranged his own vanishing, if it's
not kind of a like, wherever you are, jerk, I'm
drinking in your honor um. But that might just be
my cynical side coming out. So we have lots of
theories about what happened and reported sightings, yeah, which is
what happens with missing persons. Yeah. Uh so there are

(15:32):
so called craterrists, and these are unsolved mystery enthusiasts who
study all these pieces of this puzzle to try to
come up with the most logical explanation for what happened.
And they've come up with a lot of explanations throughout
the years, and even people who don't identify as part
of that group. Some of the theories have included that

(15:53):
he was a victim of a hit because of a
mob connection and some sort of deal gone wrong. There's
ran off with a show girl. Yeah, since it it
was at this point, you know, once he disappeared, it
became very public balanced and in fact, he had had
a lot of affairs with show girls, right, so perhaps
he are you in N O F T? Right? Uh?

(16:14):
The other one, this one I kind of find hilarious
and I don't know why, because it's very silly as well,
it's far fetched. There are some the assert that he
somehow became amnesiac, like he had amnesia and couldn't remember
who he was or what he was doing. Because soap opera.
Because soap opera, which so much of the actual story

(16:36):
is very soapish, you can see where people might land there.
There's also the theory that he committed suicide. Yeah. Uh.
There's also a theory that he was maybe killed by
a blackmailer for not paying them off. There's also a
theory that he landed at Polly Adler's brothel, so allegedly,
according to these early drafts of a memoir that Adler

(16:57):
wrote much later, he wrote that Crazy died in her
bordello and she had had his body removed by friends. Um,
we don't really have these alleged drafts though, right. Uh,
we're kind of taking someone's word for it that they Oh,
I've seen these drafts, but I cannot show you. But
now they're gone and destroyed. Uh, so, we don't know.

(17:20):
That's another that's another kind of soap operation, one that
people like to talk about, that he died in the
arms of a prostitute and then there was a big
cover up. And for decades the New York Police Department
received letters and phone calls from people all over the
US and the world claiming to have seen Judge Crater,
and particularly as important anniversaries of the disappearance, would you

(17:44):
know be coming up or just passed so, Like at
the twenty year mark, they got a ton of these calls.
At the thirty year mark, they got a ton of
these calls. And he's been reported as being seen everywhere
from walking down Park Avenue on jets to other countries,
prospecting in California, hurting sheep in the Pacific Northwest. I
guess someone thought maybe he had a yen for a

(18:05):
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.

(18:29):
He's like a judicial Elvis. Yes, that's exactly what I
was thinking that I was reading all of these weird
accounts that people have reported through the years. Yeah. So
there have even been some staged hoaxes. There was one
in the nineteen seventies where police were called to a
bar on New York's East Side and they found a
man dressed as Creater as he had appeared when he
vanished in nineteen thirty. And they had lots of video cameras. Yeah,

(18:52):
and the person that was playing Craater in this staged
hoax also looked like Crater would have looked in the
nine So it was clearly not the same person. When
we get into the time traveler theory, he was a doctor.
Um uh. So before we get to another development that
happened in the two thousands, much more recent thing. Yeah,

(19:15):
we will pause for just a moment for a word
from our sponsor. Yes, So now we get to a
very interesting letter. In April two, Thive Stella Ferrucci Good
of Belle Rose, New York, died at the age of one,

(19:38):
And this would have been a completely unremarkable circumstance, but
she left behind a letter that reignited the Judge Crater
case and in an envelope that UH she had left
behind that said do not open until my death. UH,
Ferrucci Good left a note that claimed that her late
husband had learned the actual true about what had happened

(20:01):
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

(20:21):
point of note UH, and this comes up a lot,
particularly as we're looking through some of this information that
was reeled in the note, is that various media reports
of the contents of this note, even though this is
a fairly modern event, UH, as well as other aspects
of the Creator disappearance that have been reported through the years,
have been consistently inconsistent. UH. In some stories about the

(20:45):
Ferruci Good note, UH, it's reported that her husband was
actually involved in the murder, and in other reportings of
this note they say that her husband was simply told
about it by Charles Burns while they were having drinks
in a bar. So Frank Burns allegedly picked Crater up
in his cab from the chop house that we referenced
earlier on West Fort, then stopped a few blocks later

(21:09):
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,

(21:32):
books about it, and there have been many newspaper accounts, etcetera.
Some report that witnesses saw him getting into a cab,
which at least sort of connects to the idea that
Frank Burns could have picked him up in a cab,
but others insist that there is no such witness testimony
that he walked away from the chop house and did
not get into a cab. So that's another kind of

(21:54):
pebble to turn over in your mind on this about
how inconsistent everything is. Although we've talked about lots of
different motives that people could have for wanting to kill
a judge who was involved in the various activities. There
was no motive mentioned in the note. Uh. There was
for fact checkers, Charles Burns that was on the police
force from nine uh and he was assigned to the

(22:19):
sixtieth Precinct, which is in Coney Island. So there is
some substantiation of some of the information in this note,
but then other things are a lot murkier. Right. There
are some reports that indicate that in the fifties, when
the New York Aquarium was being built, remains were found
under the boardwalk. Other sources say that there's no such

(22:41):
evidence and that this is just a rumor, and since
there hasn't been any kind of big announcement that creators
remains were found. Either way, the case remains unsolved. If
there had been a body unearthed in the fifties, you
would think that the first person that most people would
think of would have been that it was the famous
missing judge. Yeah, that's another one that news outlets will say,

(23:03):
like there were uh, there was a body found in
the fifties. We've called the police for confirmation and others
will say, there are rumors that there was a body
found there in the fifties, but we've called the police
and they firmly deny this. So it's kind of interesting
and a little bit confusing. In the words of Simon Rifkind,
who was a lawyer who worked with Joe Crater and

(23:25):
I think to some degree viewed him as a mentor.
And Rifkin actually signed the form that formerly opened the
investigation into the disappearance. Uh, he described him as saying, quote,
Judge Crater was a man of such commanding appearance he
couldn't possibly get lost in a crowd. And Rifkin is
not alone in that sort of description. This was a
man who was very dapper. He was always well dressed.

(23:46):
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

(24:07):
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

(24:28):
really happened, and it's supported by these things, but there's
always something different. So what really happened to Judge creater
in n I would say at this point it's a
safe bet we will never actually know. For all we
know he lived out his life somewhere very happily elsewhere,
or he's been at the bottom of a body of
water for a long time, or any number of other
things we just don't know. So yes, that's the Judge

(24:53):
Greater disappearance. It kind of leaves more questions than answers, unfortunately.
But sometimes when so many people really want us to
talk about something, we get pretty invested in wanting to
deliver on that, even though we don't wind up at
a satisfactory mystery solving conclusion. Yeah, there isn't any. I
think a lot of people that were very into the case.

(25:14):
We're probably so excited in two thousand five when that
letter appeared and possibly solved it. But it really didn't. Unfortunately.
Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since
this episode is out of the archive, if you heard
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(25:35):
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(25:56):
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