Carter Roy (16:35)
By August 9, 1930, 43 year old Stella Crater hadn't heard her husband Joseph for six days. But a few other people had. Joseph's law clerk, Joe Mara, and his secretary Frederick Johnson both spoke to him in early August. That's when the judge asked them to meet at his chambers on the 6th. He said he needed help with something but didn't specify what. It was also the middle of a historic heat wave for New York. After a miserable commute, Mara and Johnson both made it to work before Joseph that day. When he arrived, Joseph seemed on edge. He went straight to his office and shut the door behind him. The two clerks could hear him rummaging around inside like he was gathering documents from desk drawers and packing them into his briefcase. When he came out, Joseph asked Mara to go to the bank and cash a pair of checks for him. They were worth a total of $5,150, which is about $100,000 in today's money. When Mara returned with the cash, the judge stuffed it into his suit pockets without comment. After that, Mara accompanied Joseph back to his apartment where they dropped off the documents from Joseph's office. As Mara turned to leave, Joseph mentioned that he was going up Westchester Way and would be back in the office tomorrow. Mara didn't think much of the comment. He assumed Joseph was just trying to escape the heat of the city. But the truth was far more complicated and Joseph's busy day was far from over. That Evening, at around 6pm Joseph arrived at a Broadway ticket agency run by his friend Joseph Gransky. He asked Gransky to hold a ticket for him at a musical called Dancing Partner that evening. Gransky thought it was a strange request. Joseph had already seen that musical 10 days ago. Then a few hours later, Joseph turned up at Billy Haw's Chop House, which was one of his favorite restaurants in midtown. He was all dressed up despite the heat. He wore a double breasted suit, bow tie, spats and a panama hat. To anyone watching, he looked like he was ready for a night on the town. Before long, an entertainment lawyer named William Klein spotted Joseph at the restaurant. William was having dinner with a showgirl who went by the stage name Sally Lou Ritz. William invited Joseph to join them. He agreed, but didn't seem very excited about it. Like the clerks from Joseph's office. Both William and Sally noticed that something was off about his behavior. He didn't speak much. They finished their meal at around 9pm and parted ways. Joseph said goodbye, and William and Sally watched as he got into a cab and and drove off into the night. But the theater where Joseph was supposed to see dancing partner was walking distance from the restaurant, only two blocks away. Plus, the show had started half an hour earlier. Joseph Forrest Crater never showed up to claim his ticket, which meant William and Sally were the last ones to see him, dead or alive. Nineteen days later, on August 25, 1930, the New York Supreme Court convened to find they were one member short. They called Maine to see if Joseph was still at his vacation house with Stella. Well, this whole time, Stella had been hoping he'd just show up. And she probably didn't want to cause a public scandal, so she didn't alert authorities. But when she learned the other justices hadn't heard from him either, it confirmed her worst fears. Something terrible had happened to Joseph. He would have never missed a Supreme Court meeting. His new job mattered too much to him. On August 28, she drove back to the city, where she and an NYPD detective and several of Joseph's colleagues began a quiet investigation. They hoped to find Joseph without the whole city knowing, but there was no sign of him or where he might have gone. The group finally brought the case to the police commissioner on September 3rd. As word spread about the disappearance, the NYPD began their manhunt. And it wasn't off to a promising start. It had been almost a month since Joseph was last seen. If the trail wasn't already cold, it was at least lukewarm. NYPD detectives tried to put together a timeline of the last day Joseph was seen. On August 6th. They interviewed as many people as they could, including his co workers, other attorneys, and members of the Cayuga Club. Senator Robert F. Wagner, Joseph's mentor, got back from vacation the same day the investigation started. As soon as he stepped off the steamship, he was surrounded by reporters who asked about his friend's case. Wagner downplayed how close they were. He might have suspected that Joseph's disappearance had something to do with his extramarital affairs and wanted to keep his name away from any scandals. He did confirm that he'd seen Joseph on August 1, but said that was the last time they spoke. Meanwhile, William Klein, the entertainment attorney who was one of the last people to see Joseph, was a bit more helpful. He told detectives he saw Joseph twice over those last few days. The first was on August 4, Williams said that he and Sally the showgirl, went out to dinner that evening, also at Hawes Chop House. They ran into Joseph there that night, too. That time, Joseph was in a great mood. He told William he was heading back to Maine the next day to spend the rest of the summer with his wife. And yet William said he saw Joseph again at the Chop House two days later. Clearly, he hadn't gone back to Maine. Not only that, but he didn't seem like himself. William told police how Joseph was hesitant to join them, only had one drink and didn't speak much during the meal. So what had happened between August 4 and August 6 that made Joseph so upset and forced him to rethink his plans? Police suspected it might have to do with Joseph's private life and the long evenings he spent partying with mistresses. Maybe he'd run away with the showgirl. It turned out one of Joseph's trips that summer had been a social one. When he told Stella he had to leave Maine in July, it was because he'd gone to Atlantic City to party. But that still left his trip on August 3rd unaccounted for. Although it was just a theory, at that point, the tabloids had a field day with his double life. When Joseph's colleagues were asked for comment, they acted like they were shocked by his escapades. Like Robert Wagner, these denials came from men who wanted to preserve their own reputations. Everybody knew about Good Time Joe, and nobody cared until it could affect their careers. Despite the intense public interest, the search stalled out within a week. Detectives were sent to Maine, upstate New York, Atlantic city and Washington, D.C. even Canada, anywhere the judge might have gone after Aug. 6. But nobody turned up anything concrete. On Sept. 15, a grand jury conducted an inquest into Judge Crater's disappearance. They wound up calling on 95 witnesses. Many of these witnesses repeated what they told the police and reporters. Robert Wagner and others continued to downplay their relationships with Joseph. At the end of the inquest, after 975 pages of testimony, the question of what happened to Joseph Force Crater was still a mystery and no official ruling was made. Stella Crater refused to attend the proceedings. She never gave any reason why. But it's possible it had something to do with another grand jury hearing going on at the same time as her husband's. In early September, before his disappearance was public knowledge, a subpoena arrived on Judge Crater's desk from the Attorney General's office. Attorney General Charles Tuttle had been investigating any and all links to Tammany hall corruption that Summer. And Joseph Forrest Crater was more than a person of interest in this case. He was a suspect in a conspiracy. Back In May of 1927, the mayor had appointed a man named George Ewald as a magistrate for the city. Like Joseph, he was a member of the Cayuga Club, an important branch of Tammany Hall. And within days of the appointment, George ewald had withdrawn $10,000 from the bank and transferred the funds to the personal bank account of Tammany hall leader, Martin Healy. This was clear evidence of corruption. The amount, $10,000, was equivalent to a year's salary for a magistrate, which confirmed that Tammany hall was still in the business of selling government jobs for money. And despite Joseph's attempts to distance himself from the organization, he was the master of ceremonies at the party celebrating George Ewald's new position. Not only that, but In May of 1930, three months before his disappearance, Joseph withdrew around $20,000 from his personal bank accounts. Attorney General Tuttle suspected this money was also going to Tammany Hall, a payout for the judicial appointment. But without a paper trail, the evidence was circumstantial. Still, it made people wonder. Had Joseph skipped town to avoid being implicated in Tuttle's investigation? The press thought so. For a while, the phrase to pull a crater became common slang for disappearing in the same way that we use ghosted today. But Joseph wasn't the only one pulling a crater. Later, in 1930, Sally Lou Rich, the showgirl who had dinner with Joseph on August 6, also went missing. This happened right after she gave her testimony to the grand jury. Many papers speculated the two had run off together. Now, there wasn't any evidence to confirm it, but it was possible the answer to Joseph's fate lied between the sheets. While some showgirls got away from powerful men unharmed, they weren't all so lucky. Six months after Joseph's disappearance, a woman named Vivian Gordon was in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons. Vivian told her clients she was a sex worker, but in reality, she was an informant. And around the same time that Tammany hall was under investigation, Vivian agreed to testify about corruption in New York City politics, with records of payoffs and names to go with them. But then, on February 25, 1931, she was found dead in a park. The rumor mill said that one of Joseph's jackets was found in her apartment and. And that the men who orchestrated her murder were involved with Tammany Hall. If they had her silenced before she could testify, who's to say they hadn't done the same thing to Joseph seven years later. Stella Crater herself alluded to this possibility. For the first time, she told the world why her husband had been called back to the city. On August 3, 1930, he'd gotten a call from Martin Healy, the head of Tammany Hall. Healy wanted Joseph to come back to New York immediately to discuss the Tuttle investigation. Democratic politics was at a turning point at the time. Not only was there an upcoming gubernatorial election that fall, but the presidential election was coming up after that, in 1932, Tammany hall was becoming a liability. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the governor of New York at the time, hoped to nab a seat in the White House, and he was already distancing himself from the organization. If he wanted to gain the popular vote of the country, he couldn't be associated with dirty politics. Politics. In fact, as early as 1931, he was taking charge of corruption investigations himself, which meant that Tammany was in fight or flight mode. And there's a good chance that people like Joseph Force Crater were faced with a testify against their corrupt colleagues or go toe to toe with the attorney general. If Joseph chose the first option, it's possible he paid with his life.
