Joseph Force Crater

Crater's dinner companions gave differing accounts of his departure from the restaurant. Klein initially testified that "the judge got into a taxicab outside the restaurant about 9:30 p.m. and drove west on Forty-fifth Street."[22] This account was initially confirmed by Ritz: "At the sidewalk Judge Crater took a taxicab."[23] Klein and Ritz later changed their story and said that they had entered a taxi outside the restaurant, but that Crater had walked down the street.[24]

Crater's disappearance did not elicit any immediate reaction. When he did not return to Maine after ten days, his wife began making calls to their friends in New York, asking whether anyone had seen him. Only when Crater failed to appear for the opening of the courts on August 25 did his fellow justices become alarmed. They started a private investigation but failed to find any trace of him. The police were finally notified on September 3, and after that the missing judge was front-page news.[25][26]

Once an official investigation was launched, the case received widespread publicity.[27] Detectives discovered that the judge's safe deposit box had been emptied and the two briefcases that Crater and Mara had taken to his apartment were missing. These promising leads were quickly lost amid the thousands of false reports from people claiming to have seen the missing justice.[19][28][29][30]

Crater enjoyed the city's nightlife and had been involved with several women. In the aftermath of the case, two of the women he had been involved with left town abruptly and a third was murdered. Sally Lou Ritz, the showgirl who had dined with Crater the evening that he vanished, left New York in August or September 1930.[31] She was found in late September 1930, living in Youngstown, Ohio, with her parents. Ritz said that she had left the city suddenly because she had received word that her father was ill. She was still being subjected to interviews by police investigating the Crater case in 1937, by which time she was living in Beverly Hills, California.[32][33]

Showgirl June Brice had been seen talking to Crater the day before he disappeared. A lawyer acting for Crater's wife believed that Brice had been at the center of a scheme to blackmail Crater (thus explaining why he had taken cash out of the bank) and that a gangster boyfriend of Brice had killed the justice. Brice disappeared the day that a grand jury was to convene on the case. In 1948, she was discovered in a mental hospital.[34]

Vivian Gordon, a third woman, was involved in high-end prostitution and linked to madam Polly Adler. Gordon had liaisons with a large number of influential businesspeople, and was the owner, on paper at least, of a number of properties believed to be fronts for illegal activity. She was also seen around town with gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond, with whom Crater was rumored to socialize. Crater had known Diamond's former boss, organized crime figure Arnold Rothstein, and had been extremely upset at Rothstein's murder.[24][35]

On February 20, 1931, Gordon was angry about a conviction that had resulted in her losing custody of her 16-year-old daughter. She met the head of an official inquiry into city government corruption (launched in the wake of Crater's disappearance) and offered to testify about police graft. She was murdered five days later. The publicity surrounding Gordon's killing led to the resignation of a policeman whom she had accused of framing her, and the suicide of her daughter.

Tammany Hall's hold on the city was largely eliminated in the ensuing scandal, as it had already been weakened by Rothstein and the conflict over his former empire. The scandal also led to the resignation of Mayor Jimmy Walker.[24][35]

In October, a grand jury began examining the Crater case, calling 95 witnesses and amassing 975 pages of testimony. Crater's wife refused to appear.[36] The conclusion was that "the evidence is insufficient to warrant any expression of opinion as to whether Crater is alive or dead, or as to whether he has absented himself voluntarily, or is the sufferer from disease in the nature of amnesia, or is the victim of crime".[37][38]

On January 20, 1931, six months after his disappearance, Crater's wife found envelopes containing checks, stocks, bonds, and a note from the justice in a dresser drawer which had been empty when searched earlier by police. The discovery led to new but ultimately inconclusive leads, and no further trace of Crater was ever found.[24] The case was officially closed in 1979.[39]

Crater met Stella Mance Wheeler in 1917 when he served as her divorce lawyer, and they married seven days after her divorce was finalized.[8] Mrs. Crater remained at their vacation home in Maine during the search for her husband, until her discovery of the hidden envelopes.[8] Without Crater's income, Mrs. Crater was unable to maintain the couple's Fifth Avenue apartment and was evicted.[36] She petitioned to have the justice declared officially dead in July 1937; she was reportedly living on the $12 per week (approximately $239.26 in 2022) that she earned as a telephone operator in Maine.[40]

Mrs. Crater married Carl Kunz, a New York City electrical contractor, in Elkton, Maryland, on April 23, 1938.[41] Kunz's first wife had hanged herself only eight days before the wedding.[39] Crater was finally declared legally dead in 1939 thanks to Mrs. Crater's lawyer, noted New York attorney Emil K. Ellis.[42][43] She received $20,561 in life insurance (approximately $430,751.46 adjusted in 2022). Mrs. Crater separated from Kunz in 1950 and died in 1969 at age 70.[36]

Mrs. Crater expressed her belief that her husband had been murdered in her own account of the case, The Empty Robe, which was written with freelance writer and journalist Oscar Fraley and published by Doubleday in 1961.[44][45]

On August 19, 2005, authorities revealed that after Queens resident Stella Ferrucci-Good's death at age 91, they had received notes she wrote in which she claimed that her husband, NYPD detective Robert Good, had learned that Crater was killed by Charles Burns, an NYPD officer who also worked as a bodyguard of Murder, Inc. enforcer Abe Reles, and by Burns' brother, Frank. According to the letter, Crater was buried near West Eighth Street in Coney Island, Brooklyn, at the current site of the New York Aquarium.[46][47][48][12] Police reported that no records had been found to indicate that skeletal remains had been discovered at that site when it was excavated in the 1950s.[46] Richard J. Tofel, the author of Vanishing Point: The Disappearance of Judge Crater and the New York He Left Behind, expressed skepticism of Ferrucci-Good's account.[46]