The Disappearance of Judge Joseph Crater

Judge Joseph Force Crater was a New York State Supreme Court justice appointed by Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1930. On August 6, 1930, he had dinner with friends at a restaurant on West 45th Street in Manhattan, stepped into a taxi outside the restaurant, waved goodbye, and vanished completely. He was 41 years old. Despite one of the most extensive investigations in New York history at the time, he was never found and the case was never solved.

Crater had recently returned from a Maine vacation when, on August 3, he made two unexplained trips to his law office, withdrawing $5,150 in cash and removing files and papers. The nature of those documents was never established. Investigators later learned he had cashed checks totaling around $7,000 in the weeks before his disappearance — suggesting preparation. He had also been embroiled in the Tammany Hall political corruption machine that dominated New York politics, and there were suggestions of connections to organized crime and a missing witness in a corruption investigation.

His wife delayed reporting him missing for a full month, telling police she initially expected him to return. By the time the investigation began in earnest, critical trails had gone cold. A state legislative investigation in 1930 exposed widespread corruption in the New York judiciary, part of the web that Crater was enmeshed in, but produced no answers about his fate. He was officially declared dead in 1939 at his wife's request.

In 2005, an elderly Queens woman died and left a note claiming that her late husband — a police officer — and his friend had murdered Crater on behalf of a Coney Island nightclub owner, and that the body was buried under what was then the boardwalk. Investigation of the alleged burial site was inconclusive. Joseph Crater gave his name to American slang — "to pull a Crater" once meant to vanish without explanation — and his case remains a defining mystery of the Jazz Age.