The Killer Book of Cold Cases (4 page)

If the judge was scared or watchful, his behavior didn’t show that. His friend would later tell investigators that Crater was in positively jovial spirits. The dinner party broke up around 9:15 p.m., and Crater’s lawyer friend and mistress got a taxi together outside the restaurant. Later, they said they last saw Crater by himself, walking down the street, This idea contradicts the popular notion that Crater was the one getting into a cab and speeding away.

At that point, the mystery began. There was no immediate, explosive reaction to Judge Crater’s disappearance, but when he did not return to Maine for ten days, his wife began making calls to their friends in New York, asking if anyone had seen him. Only when he failed to appear for the opening of the courts on August 25 did his fellow justices become concerned. They started a private search but failed to find any trace of the judge. The police were finally notified on September 3, and after that, Crater was front-page news.

The story of Crater’s disappearance got into the public consciousness like few stories did, and a full-scale investigation was launched. Right away, detectives assumed that money was involved because the judge was believed to be carrying the $5,000 in cash in his pockets that evening. They also found that both his safe deposit box and the pair of briefcases that Crater and his assistant had taken to his apartment were missing.

Thousands of leads poured in, bogging down the investigation more than anything else, but several months later, there was a shocker. The judge’s money was not, in fact, missing. His wife found stocks and bonds and nearly $7,000 in cash in a desk drawer in the couple’s Fifth -Avenue apartment in January 1931, along with a note from Crater. According to Stella Crater, the note ended with: “I’m so weary. Love, Joe.” She took that to mean her husband expected to be killed, not that he had committed suicide.

In the fall of 1930, a grand jury began examining the case, eventually calling ninety-five witnesses and amassing 975 pages of testimony. 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.”

None of the investigations unearthed Crater’s whereabouts or why he had disappeared. Crater was officially declared dead “in absentia” on June 6, 1939, and his case—Missing Persons File No. 13595—was officially closed in 1979. Sally Ritz disappeared in September 1930 and was never seen again. Are the disappearances related? That, too, is unknown.

Many theories have been offered through the years about what happened to Judge Crater. Judges often have enemies—dangerous enemies—and Crater was no exception. One theory holds that he was killed so he couldn’t testify in the Tammany Hall corruption case, which involved Boss Tweed’s notorious crew. Another suggests that he was “executed” by a hit man ordered by gangster Legs Diamond when the judge didn’t pay an extortionist. Crater was also a womanizer, prompting some to believe he was murdered by a jealous lover or found dead in the arms of a prostitute, thereby leading to a cover-up. There has been talk of amnesia and suicide; and others believe he ran away with a showgirl.

But at least one theory has some credibility. In 2005, Barbara O’Brien found a letter from her grandmother, Stella Ferrucci-Good, that was to be opened after Stella’s death. In the letter, Stella claimed that Judge Crater had been murdered by New York City policeman Charles Burns and his brother, taxi driver Frank Burns, who buried Crater’s remains under the Coney Island boardwalk.

O’Brien found the letter in a metal box in her grandmother’s house in Queens. The box also contained old newspaper clippings about Crater’s disappearance, marked up with notes in the margins.

Skeletal remains were found under a section of the boardwalk that was removed in the mid-1950s as an aquarium was being built. The human remains were exhumed and re-interred in a mass grave on Hart Island. At the time, no science was available to positively identify the bodies. Some wonder why the public wasn’t told about the discovery of the remains until fifty years later. The discovery most likely received brief mention in the media at the time, but why would any editor make the connection to Crater?

The one missing element is motive. No one has yet offered a definitive motive for why someone would have wanted to murder Judge Crater. However, when the answer does come out—if it ever does—it most likely will seem simple. Jimmy Pavese, a former Suffolk County homicide investigator, once commented, “All crimes are simple once you know the answer.”

I’m old enough to remember the so-called “Mad Bomber” who terrorized New York City in the 1950s. I was a kid living in the Bronx—and that was one scary experience. Newspapers such as the
Daily News
and the
Daily Mirror
, one step above tabloid quality, capitalized on the terror that the Mad Bomber embodied, fanning the flames of anxiety. Not a day went by when New Yorkers were not aware that a bomb could go off, possibly killing them.

The Mad Bomber left pipe bombs that ranged in size from four to ten inches long and from one-half inch to two inches in diameter and that used timers constructed from flashlight batteries and cheap pocket watches. The bomber used wool socks to transport the bombs and hang them from railings, and investigators soon learned to look for socks as evidence.

The Mad Bomber planted his first bomb on November 16, 1940, leaving it on a windowsill at the Consolidated Edison power plant in Manhattan. The bomb was wrapped in a note signed “F.P.” that stated he had planted another, also at a Con Ed facility.

Shortly after the United States declared war on Japan and entered World War II, the police received a letter in block capital letters from the bomber stating that he would not set off any bombs during the war.

True to his word, the bomber planted no bombs between 1941 and 1945—and even in the years immediately following the war. Instead, he sent crank letters and postcards to police stations, newspapers, and private citizens. Investigators studied these penciled messages and found clues in the writing that hinted of a possible European education.

In 1951, the Mad Bomber started leaving bombs again. Investigators noticed a great deal of improvement when they compared the Mad Bomber’s new bombs to his old ones, leading them to suspect that he had spent time serving in the military during his hiatus.

For his new wave of bombings, he chose mainly public buildings, bombing several of them more than once over the next seven years. He left bombs in restrooms and storage lockers five times each at Grand Central Station and Pennsylvania Station, three times at Radio City Music Hall, and twice each at the New York Public Library and the Port Authority Bus Terminal, as well as at the RCA Building and in the New York City Subway.

Particularly terrifying to me as a boy were bombs left in phone booths and on subways, public places I frequented. The most notable bombs were left in movie theaters, where the bomber cut into seat upholstery and slipped his explosive devices inside. Before 1951, few of the bombs, though real, ever exploded and no one had been hurt.

That changed on March 29, 1951, when he placed a bomb in a cigarette sand urn in the Oyster Bar, the restaurant downstairs at Grand Central Station. The bomb exploded, but fortunately no one was injured. Nor was anyone hurt by the next bombs, which exploded without injury in telephone booths in the New York Public Library and in Grand Central Station. But the explosions were heard ’round the world, particularly in New York City, and anyone passing through any of the public facilities in New York would have to stop and carefully check to make sure no pipe bomb was ready to go off.