The disappearance of Judge Joseph Crater nearly 75 years ago led to one of the most famous missing persons cases of the 20th century. In his new book published this month by Ivan R. Dee, the assistant publisher of the Wall Street Journal, Richard Tofel, tells this amazing story. The New York Sun will be excerpting “Vanishing Point” for each of the next three days.

Judge Crater returned to his chambers at about ten o’clock on Wednesday morning, August 6. What he was working on is not known, but it is likely that politics rather than law absorbed his attention. Only one, relatively trivial, case was pending on his docket, but he was expected to run for a full fourteen year term as a Supreme Court justice in the fall.

Some time that morning, Crater asked Joseph Mara, his confidential assistant, to cash two checks and bring the cash back to him. One was for $3,000 drawn on his account at the Chase National Bank, the other for $2,150 drawn on another account, at the Empire Trust Company. The Empire Trust check left $12,000 remaining in Crater’s account there, but the Chase account was nearly cleared out. (Later Mara lied about the amount of the Chase check, but eventually he admitted that he had cashed both checks for the amounts stated.) Crater received a brief visit from Simon Rifkin, perhaps while Mara was out cashing the checks. There is no record of what they discussed.

When Mara returned, Crater asked for his help in lugging to the Crater apartment six portfolios of assorted papers. The cases Mara and Crater used for the purpose were later found in the apartment, but the papers themselves were not. Crater also spent some time that morning destroying other papers.

Leaving chambers, Crater told his law secretary, Fred Johnson, that he was planning to go up to Westchester for a swim, presumably as a means of relief from the stifling heat of the day. (Between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., the temperature in mid-town had risen from eighty to eighty-seven degrees.) Dismissing Mara after the papers had been delivered to his apartment, the judge again mentioned going up to Westchester for a swim. Mara and Johnson both assumed Crater meant that he was planning to visit the Larchmont Shore Club, of which he was a member. While not a strong swimmer, Crater was fond of the water. The club, however, later indicated that Crater did not appear, and indeed had not visited its premises since June.

Instead Crater, as was his custom once or twice a week, had lunch at the Epicure Restaurant on Stone Street with attorney Martin Lippman. Later, at around 5:30 p.m., the judge telephoned an attorney, Reginald Issacs, about a case. Issacs owed Crater $1,000 in connection with a legal matter from Crater’s days in practice, but it is not known if they talked about this.

At some point in the afternoon Crater had changed his clothes, putting aside the suit he had work in the morning to be sent to the cleaners, and putting on a brown suit with thin green stripes and the wide lapels he favored. Self-conscious about his unusually thin, size 10 neck, Crater wore a high, stiff collar of the sort still favored by President Hoover but otherwise already moving well out of style. One writer has since noted that Crater “always looked something like a turtle walking upright.”

At about 7 p.m., Crater asked at the Arrow Ticket Agency, 1539 Broadway, for a ticket to Dancing Partner, the Belasco production of a comedy by Alexander Engel and Alfred Grunwald. The show had opened the previous evening at Belasco’s own theater on West Forty-fourth Street, and the World had called it “one of those glib brittle, machine-made romances.”

Crater must have enjoyed it; he had already seen a preview during his Atlantic City visit a few weeks earlier, on which he was accompanied by thee Arrow Agency broker Joseph Grainsky. The judge was well known at Arrow, and a clerk later recalled that he said he would be returning to Maine the next day. While at Arrow Crater also bumped into Frank Bowers, Collector of Revenue and a fellow native of Easton, Pennsylvania, and the two talked briefly. The agency clerk told Crater that a ticket would be waiting for him at the box office, and a ticket for seat D-110 was left in his name. It was later picked up, but it is not known by whom.

At about eight o’clock that evening, Crater entered Billy Haas’s restaurant at 332 West Forty-fifth Street. There, already having dinner, were Shubert lawyer William Klein and the showgirl Sally Lou Ritz (nee Ritzi).They invited the judge to join them, and he did so. Crater ate lobster cocktail as an appetizer, chicken and vegetables for his main course, and pie for dessert, all washed down with coffee. Showtime for Dancing Partner was 8:40 p.m., but dinner did not conclude until about 9:15. Perhaps Crater, having already seen the show once, was unconcerned.

The standard account of this tale says that Crater then hailed a cab down Forty-fifth Street, headed toward Ninth Avenue. That is curious on at least two scores: first, it would have left him driving in the opposite direction from the theater to which he was ostensibly headed; and second, it would have placed him in a very warm and uncomfortable automobile, with the temperature still at eighty-six degrees, when he could easily have walked just a few blocks to his destination. Moreover, extensive inquiry later failed to turn up any cab driver who had picked up the judge.

That is almost certainly because there was no such cab. The image of Crater hailing a taxi comes from Klein’s initial testimony in a later grand jury inquiry – testimony which made little mention of Sally Lou Ritz. But her account of the situation differed. She and Klein, she reported, left the curb outside the restaurant first, getting into a cab and heading off together to Coney Island. She saw Judge Crater standing there as they left. Faced with this, Klein changed his story, to say that Crater had moved off toward Broadway, and seemed to be hailing a cab. But it is not clear how Klein could have seen such thing as he headed away from Broadway down the side street – and the illogic of Crater seeking a taxi remains.

Yet, if we can be confident that Crater did not hail a cab, we cannot be at all sure of what he did do. Did he go to the theater? We don’t know. Did he return to Club Abbey? Elaine Dawn recalls two evenings there with him, and other witnesses said they saw him there twice with Klein, but one of these nights could have been the previous week, before his trip to Maine, and Klein was off to Coney Island with Miss Ritz.

The fact is that Joseph Crater’s trail runs cold at Billy Haas’s restaurant. After his dinner there, no one has convincingly admitted to having seen him ever again.