Unsolved Mystery
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Joseph Crater made headlines throughout the city last week, which is not bad for someone who went missing 75 years ago. The son of Irish immigrants, Crater opened a law office after working his way through college and law school. He joined the Cayuga Democratic Club, the base of Tammany district leader Martin Healy, and he invested years in organizing campaigns and providing free legal services to constituents. Eventually, he became club president and Healy’s right-hand man.
On April 8, 1930, Governor Franklin Roosevelt appointed him to the state Supreme Court. Even the respectable City Bar Association supported Crater’s appointment. Only 41 years old, Crater’s fleshy features and iron-gray hair made him seem older. After the courts recessed in June 1930, Crater and his wife Stella went to their summer house in Belgrade Lakes, Maine, six miles from a telephone. In July, after New York County District Attorney Thomas Crain indicted Healy for selling judgeships, Crater briefly went away, supposedly to confer about his mentor’s legal problems. On Sunday, August 3, after returning a long-distance call at the town drugstore, Crater told Stella that he had to go to the city “to straighten out a few people” and promised to return for her birthday on Saturday, August 9.
Crater arrived at their 40 Fifth Avenue co-op on Monday, August 4. He gave the maid a few days off and saw his doctor. On Tuesday and Wednesday, he was in his 60 Centre Street chambers, removing papers from his files to several briefcases. On Wednesday, his personal assistant, Joseph Mara, cashed checks for him totaling $5,150 and helped him carry the briefcases, now locked, to Crater’s apartment. Crater’s papers would vanish, too.
Crater bought a ticket for that night’s performance of “Dancing Partners” at the Belasco on 44th Street. After dining with friends, Crater hailed a passing cab between 9 and 9:15 p.m. He waved his Panama out the window.
On the record, no one saw Crater again.
Someone picked up the ticket. No one knows if that was Crater.
Stella thought Crater had been detained on business. On September 3, when the courts remained one justice short, the police were notified. Crater became front-page news. District Attorney Crain impaneled a grand jury. After taking 2,000 pages of testimony, the grand jury, dismissed on January 9, 1931, came to no conclusion. Although the police had supposedly searched the Crater apartment several times, on January 19, 1931, Stella Crater there found four manila envelopes containing his will, $6,619 in cash, checks, life insurance policies, and a three-page note, listing 20 of his debtors. On the bottom was penned: “Am very weary. Love, Joe.”
The judge’s actions during August 3-6 led Police Commissioner Edward Mulrooney to say, “Crater’s disappearance was premeditated.” But that answered no questions. Crater was reported everywhere: on trains and ships, driving a taxi in a dozen towns, or panning for gold in California and Alaska. For a while, the police followed up every lead. They found nothing. Crater and his papers, as a reporter later wrote, had “disappeared efficiently, completely, and forever.”
Theories abounded: amnesia, running off with a secret lover, abduction and murder by criminals angered by a ruling. Crater had known numerous criminals in his practice. Perhaps he had known too much.
Crater had been appointed receiver in foreclosure of the Libby Hotel in February 1929 and had auctioned the building in June 1929 for $75,000. Two months later, the city took the hotel by eminent domain for $2,850,000 – giving the new owners a $2,775,000 profit on two months’ investment of $75,000. Although the deal was gamy, no one found anything illegal in Crater’s conduct. Some speculated that a person unknown, having not received his share of the profits, had whacked Crater.
Stella’s lawyer, Emil Ellis, argued Crater was being blackmailed by showgirl June Brice, whose pimp killed the judge when he refused to pay more money. Witnesses had seen Crater talking to Brice before his disappearance. Brice, too, vanished. Others tied Crater to blackmailing prostitute Vivian Gordon, found garroted in Van Cortlandt Park on February 26, 1931, after being summoned to testify about Healy.
The Seabury Commission found Crater had raised more than $20,000, equal to a justice’s annual salary, before his disappearance. Tammany had traditionally assessed a year’s salary from persons appointed to high office. Roosevelt-haters suggested Crater was killed because he might have talked about Tammany judgeship sales, damning FDR’s presidential hopes.
Crater was declared legally dead on June 6, 1939. But as late as 1959, Westchester authorities dug up a Yonkers backyard in a fruitless search for remains of the “Missingest Man in New York.” Last week, a generation after the NYPD closed his case in 1979, they reopened what must be the coldest of case files.
We still don’t know what happened to Judge Crater.