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 is the second of three excerpts from “Vanishing Point” appearing in The New York Sun.

Simon Rifkind had known something was amiss with Joseph Crater since August 11. But only on September 3, as the first reports of Crater’s disappearance were published, did Rifkind seek to involve the New York Police Department. He did so by contacting Police Commissioner Edward Mulrooney and requesting the department’s help in locating Crater.

Fifty years later, Rifkind told the New Yorker that he had filed the missing person’s report only because Fred Johnson, Crater’s law secretary, had delayed in doing so. But Rifkind neglected to tell the New Yorker’s John Brooks that he had known of Crater’s disappearance well before Johnson did.

At almost the same moment Rifkind opened the missing persons case, however, he sought effectively to close it – and to contain the political damage. Rifkind told the New York Times on September 3 that he believed that Crater had been murdered; he repeated that belief – based on what, he said not – to The New York Sun the next day. Even more important, Rifkind asserted that Crater’s disappearance (and murder, if that had been) was unrelated to the Ewald-Healy investigation.

On the question of the Ewald connection, the newspapers were not so sure. They quickly noted that Crater had presided at the ceremony when, on May 12, 1927, Ewald had been sworn in as a magistrate. And they noted that Crater had also acted as toastmaster when the event was soon celebrated at a dinner at the Concourse Plaza Hotel in the Bronx. The Sun’s headline called Crater “Ewald’s friend.”

In the interviews he gave, Rifkind made no mention of the call he had received from Stella Crater in Maine on August 11, nor of the wire he sent her after that, nor of her call to him from the New York apartment later in the month. Given the questions he was asked, there can be no doubt that Rifkind’s omissions were intentional.

The picture Rifkind painted in public of Crater was disingenuous in the extreme. In words that may have accurately described himself, but certainly fell wide of the mark with respect to Joe Crater, Rifkind told the Sun that the jurist “avoided public affairs or receptions, and denied himself creature comforts. He was extremely careful of his conduct in all because he wanted no discredit to attach itself to him.”

Meanwhile, on September 4, Rifkind moved to shore up Stella Crater’s finances by retrieving the judge’s paychecks and depositing them to the Crater’s joint account; he also made the first of two loans to Stel la, for $200. (Another loan of $1,000 followed less than two weeks later.)

More troubling to Rifkind, no doubt, were the articles linking Judge Crater to Senator Wagner. The initial World story went the furthest, calling Wagner “perhaps [Crater’s] closest friend.” On September 4, the second day of the public phase of the Crater mystery, Wagner’s ship, the North German Lloyd Liner Bremen, was due to dock in New York as he returned from his summer vacation in Europe.

Having learned of the stories about Crater’s disappearance by radiograms received aboard ship, and unwilling to wait even until he docked, Wagner sent a radiogram to the World taking exception to their characterization of his relationship with Crater. He wrote of his law office colleague, his law secretary of six years, a man who had seen him off on this very same cruise five weeks earlier: “I have absolutely no knowledge of information about his personal or business affairs.” The senator added that he had seen Crater only two or three times since May, and that the two men had not been in contact since Wagner sailed for Europe.

In New York the next day, Crater was the main subject that reporters meeting the Bremen wanted to talk about with Wagner. Now the senator went even further, went over the line into clear deceit, saying that he and Crater “were never more than mere acquaintances.”

Wagner asserted that he had opposed Roosevelt’s nomination of Crater for the Supreme Court, having favored Shientag, the choice of Smith and the Bar Association. He did allow that he had told FDR that Crater “was a very competent man,” but ostensibly not more than that. The assembled press seems to have swallowed whole this rewriting of very recent history. The New York Times deadpanned, “It had generally been believed until yesterday, when he denied it, that Senator Wagner’s intervention had obtained the office for Justice Crater.”

That evening, back in the privacy of his city apartment with just a few close aides and family, including Rifkind and a Wagner niece, Wagner was seen to be “boiling mad” and took to “whacking a golf ball about the living room.”

Meanwhile, theories about what had happened to Crater diverged. Crater’s colleagues in the courts echoed Rifkind’s line that they believed he had been killed – certainly a curious approach for friends in the first days of an official investigation. On the other hand, the police commissioner offered the view that the judge had disappeared intentionally, noting his destruction of documents and the monogrammed items he had left behind.

By Friday, September 5, Judge Crater was New York’s latest obsession. The front page of Thursday’s World had carried the headline “Crater Mystery Deepens;/No Clue to Whereabouts/Police Making No Search.” A frantic police search ensued, and suddenly Crater, simply on the basis of a few photographs published in the newspapers, was being “sighted’ everywhere, from Rouse’s Point, New York, to Toronto and Montreal. New York Police Department detectives were dispatched to check each sighting, only to find them groundless. Newspaper reporters followed them – and fanned out elsewhere, interviewing the judge’s father in Orlando, Florida, for instance, on Sunday, September 7.