By Clive I. Morrick
Parts 1 and 2 revisited the infamous Judge Joseph Force Crater’s disappearance on August 6, 1930, and events in his life that may or may not have contributed to it. To conclude, a note on rumors and sightings.
In August 1936, Lucky Blackeit, a 65-year-old gold prospector in San Diego County’s Cuyamaca Mountains, told the local sheriff about his recent campfire meal with Joe Crater. Introducing himself as that missing judge from New York, “Crater” told Blackeit that in one more month “they’ll think I am dead.” Blackeit identified Crater from a photograph, as did Marie Elssenmuger, a storekeeper from whom, she claimed, Crater bought supplies. The sheriff abandoned his search when Blackeit ceased cooperating.
In 1954, Henry Kraus, a butcher in Yonkers, NY, told the New York City Police Department (NYPD) that he used to let City politicians use his home on weekends for … whatever. Crater was one. On August 8, 1930, he found blood on his kitchen floor. The NYPD declined to dig up Kraus’s yard. However, Life magazine did but found nothing.
But then a famous Dutch clairvoyant named Gerard Croiset got in on the act. Presented with the barest details of Crater’s disappearance, he drew a sketch and told Harper’s magazine writer Murray Teigh Bloom where Crater’s body was buried in Yonkers. After that lead did not pan out he did it again five years later, telling Bloom that the first dig was in the wrong place. (Croiset died in 1980 aged 71.) Westchester County Sheriff John E. Hoy supervised the second dig but ended it on June 26, 1964.
Croiset was the second psychic to send investigators on a wild goose chase. On June 8, 1931, the New York Evening Graphic reported that Gene Dennis, of Atchison, KS, a psychic of such powers that police forces nationwide had consulted him, claimed that Crater was in Honduras, having traveled from Wheeler Hot Springs, Ojai, CA, with bodyguards and cash after hiding out from losers in real estate deals.
The NYPD received over 16,000 tips about Crater—one from Canada caused a NYPD detective to go to New Brunswick. Perhaps after the $5,000 reward, Murray Shaw, a Moncton post office employee, wrote the NYC Board of Aldermen claiming that “Crater” stayed in Moncton on September 8, 1930. This was confirmed by Ms. A. Bourque, proprietor of the Foxcreek Inn, who told police that “Crater” had driven from Maine on his way to Nova Scotia. (There are two obvious problems with this account: Moncton is farther north than Nova Scotia, and Crater could not drive!)
As late as August 19, 2005, the New York Daily News published this headline: “Age-old Mystery Solved? Cops may soon find body of judge lost in 1930.” After a woman named Stella Ferucci-Good, 91, died, her relatives found a sealed letter in her safe deposit box in which she wrote that her father (some reports say it was her husband.) told her that cabbie Frank Burn killed Crater. He drove the cab Crater stepped into the night he disappeared. Burn and two confederates buried Crater under the Coney Island boardwalk.
The last word must go to The Grand Jury which investigated Crater’s disappearance. Nothing has changed since January 9, 1931, when it reported:
“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 a sufferer from disease in the nature of amnesia, or is the victim of a crime.”
