Justice Crater Hails a Taxi

On the sixth of August, 1930, a New York State Supreme Court Justice spent the morning destroying files in his courthouse office, cashed two personal checks for an amount equal to nearly a year of his judicial salary, ate dinner with two friends at a chophouse on West Forty-Fifth Street, and hailed a taxicab. He waved to his friends from the back seat as the taxi pulled away.That was the last time anyone saw Joseph Force Crater.This is the story of the most famous vanishing in American history. The Tammany Hall machine that had paid for his judgeship. The wife who waited twenty-four days before reporting him missing. The two thousand pages of grand jury testimony that produced no answer. The expression "pulling a Crater" that entered American slang in 1930 and is still used today. And the letter found in a Queens widow's safe deposit box in 2005 — naming a New York police officer as the killer, and a Coney Island basement as the burial site.The case was formally closed by the NYPD that year. The body has never been found.Episode Twelve of The Quiet Files.Sources: New York County District Attorney's office grand jury records, September 1930 – March 1931; Vanishing Point: The Disappearance of Judge Crater, and the New York He Left Behind (Richard J. Tofel, 2004); NYPD case file closure notice, August 2005.