by Peter Quinn
He was careful not to push beyond his surface impressions of the mug on the circular: a face can be a mask as well as a map. Hard to tell which until you know what’s behind it. When Dunne joined the police soon after returning from France in 1919, the emphasis was on learning to read mug shots for those elements—sloping forehead, weak chin, flat nose, etc.—indicating a “criminal nature.” A chart on the wall at headquarters identified certain physical aspects with specific crimes. The only one he remembered was crossed eyes for shoplifting. It was a cause for laughter in the first precinct he was assigned, on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx, where the convergent squint of the captain in charge, a ruthlessly honest cop exiled to the Bronx for his inability to abide even the most petty and innocuous venalities of subordinates and superiors, earned him the name Cross-eyes Sweeney.
That same lesson—the lack of any real connection between the eugenic notion of a “physiognomy of criminality” and real criminals—was driven home in Germany, in 1945. As an OSS representative, he sat in on the interrogation of two S.S. men the Brits had snagged at the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. One was a stumpy, thick-lipped corporal who wept when he described being dragooned into the S.S. only weeks before and his horror at what he saw when he’d entered the camp. His companion, a young sleek, tow-headed major—his clear-complexioned, boyishly beautiful face punctuated by luminously blue eyes that look as if they were lifted from a cherub on a holy card—refused to answer any questions. The Brits identified him as a long-time member of the staff and chief among its sadists, notorious for randomly sticking the barrel of his Lugar in an inmate’s ear, hesitating a moment to enjoy his terror before pulling the trigger.
Scrawled next to Crater’s picture in faded black ink was a one-line distillation of the facts: Last seen entering a tan cab on the evening of August 6, 1930, on W. 45th Street, between 8th and 9th Avenues. Event of yawn-provoking ordinariness no passer-by noticed or had reason to. Noted almost in passing, the cab was obviously a big part of the puzzle. The highly publicized search the police carried out failed to produce a single lead on the cab, its driver, what company it belonged to, where it came from or where it went.
Another piece of the puzzle was the date given for Crater’s disappearance, August 6th, and the date the circular was issued, September 8th. At the time, there was a major fuss about how long it took before anyone notified the authorities that Crater had vanished, but Dunne couldn’t recall the particulars.
The book the circular had slipped from was pasted thick with clippings from the trademark pink pages of the New York Graphic, which had taken to the Crater case like frenetic hyenas in the Frank Buck jungle movies that tore apart hapless, lumbering water buffaloes. As the search went on, the Graphic increasingly resorted to its famous (or infamous) practice of featuring faked photos—“composographs” the paper called them—in which the heads of real people were stuck on bodies posed in provocative re-creations of supposedly real incidents.
In one, Crater’s face had been cropped from the missing person’s circular and imposed on a black-robed figure, arms draped around two chorines in judicial-style robes opened to reveal black garters and stockings. The caption proclaimed: DISORDER IN THE COURT. JUDGE CRATER FLEES BENCH FOR LOVE NEST. The judge’s shadow of a smile now seemed a leer.
After flipping through more pages of the Graphic, Dunne put the volume aside. He decided to start with the Standard and follow the coverage it gave the case from start to finish. Seven thick volumes of clippings made it clear that, though not as imaginatively lewd as the Graphic, the Standard had outdone all its competitors in the extent of space it had devoted to the case.
Over the next several days, he read methodically through each volume and took extensive notes, looking for discrepancies among the various newspapers accounts, or the odd fact, unnoticed or unappreciated at the time, that might offer a possible opening for a new line of investigation. He noted, for example, the mention in the police circular that Crater’s finger had been somewhat mutilated, due to having been recently crushed. Did this indicate, Dunne wondered, that Crater had been in an altercation soon before he’d disappeared? The explanation in the newspapers turned out to be more prosaic. His driver had accidentally slammed the car door on it.
Dunne ended by reading an expansive series of articles in the Standard published in 1940, on the tenth anniversary of the disappearance, written by Stella Crater, the judge’s wife (and now, presumably, widow) “in order to set the record straight about my husband and me.” Though the flowery, melodramatic prose had undoubtedly been goosed by a hired pen ordered to portray her as an innocent Red Riding Hood lost in a forest of wily wolves, Stella Crater’s account made it immediately apparent that she didn’t merely view her husband through rose-tinted glasses, which might after all slip or be removed. Hers was a case of congenital blindness.
Her Joe—the name she used throughout—was White Knight and Captain Courageous, moral paragon and noble jurist, attempting to steer a course of righteous public service through the treacherous shoals and evil currents of Gotham’s toxic politics. There was an engaging lack of guile in the way she told her story. Where the newspapers quickly turned repetitious, each presenting and repeating essentially the same set of facts, her account had a refreshing novelty. Somewhere in it, he thought, might be buried some useful tidbit, an overlooked fact, a thread that no one had ever pulled.
Mrs. Crater refrained from accusing any specific person or persons of being behind Joe’s disappearance. In her morality play, it was the beast called New York that killed her all-American beau—an uncouth and corrupt alliance of “swarthy skinned gangsters,” pols with “beady eyes and leprous hearts,” and “women of the lowest possible character,” a triumvirate “antithetical to everything we call decent and Christian.”
The Standard, however, made sure that its readers knew lurking behind it all was the governor, Franklin D.—for “Deceiver”—Roosevelt, who if he didn’t carry out the crime, approved and blessed it, willing to do whatever necessary to hush up the tainted process of how judges were chosen in New York and preserve his chances of being elected president. It was for this reason, Dunne knew, and not just to mark the tenth anniversary of the case, that the Standard serialized her articles on the front page through the spring of 1940, the editors doing their part to fulfill Walter Ferris Wilkes’s determination to torpedo F.D.R’s ambitions for a third term.
“Joseph Force Crater,” the editors ventriloquized in Mrs. Crater’s introduction, “was incapable of deceit and immune to dishonesty. In any investigation of the courts of this state, there was no doubt that he would be a fearless champion of truth. This is why I remain rock certain that persons at the highest level of our government felt it necessary he be removed from the scene and why, once he was gone, such a concerted effort was made to besmirch his reputation and drag his name through the mud.”
The self-portrait that emerged from the version of events Stella Crater painted was of an ingénue from upstate, a Gretel who’d found her Hansel in Joe Crater. A former law professor and legal secretary to a State Supreme Court judge, Joe was an all-American boy from Pennsylvania who’d risen by his own merits. They met when he was fresh out of Columbia Law School and she was working as a bookkeeper in a “well-regarded millinery establishment” in which she had “little or no association with the foreign pieceworkers.” She soon quit her job, since Joe’s success in private practice allowed him to provide very nicely for his “dear Stell.” “Such terms of endearment,” in her telling, “Joe always employed in addressing me.”
Eventually, after his stint as a judge’s law secretary, he returned to private practice and they went from comfortable to rich, moved to a cooperative apartment on lower Fifth Avenue, employed a cook, maid and chauffeur, and purchased a “summer cabin in Maine amid the whispering pines that lined the peaceful shores around Lake Belvedere.”
Approached by the Governor about accepting an interim appointment to the bench, Joe wavered. The
salary of $22,500 was less than he was currently making. (An editor’s note pointed out that as recorded by the U.S. Department of Commerce the average annual wage in 1930 was $1,100.) But the attraction of public service proved irresistible. After assuring dear Stell that their drop in income wouldn’t materially affect their standard of living, Joe accepted. The Governor quickly sent a “basket of roses” and a note “which much to my regret I didn’t keep, expressing the expectation that this was but a steppingstone to Joe’s elevation to the highest court in the land.”
Two months after Joe ascended the bench, when Memorial Day weekend arrived, Stell departed for their annual stay at Lake Belvedere. This time, however, she went alone, but not before Joe answered her complaint about his staying behind with a short sermon about his new responsibilities and “the exceedingly crowded calendar before him in the court.” For anyone even slightly familiar with the operations of the State Supreme Court, that line was good for a laugh. The pace of proceedings, somewhere between stately and glacial, came to a complete halt once summer settled in. But off Stell went, “hurried along by a playful spank from Joe and the firm directive to get a good rest.” With a maid, a cook and a chauffeur, it was unclear to Dunne what she was supposed to get a rest from. Fred Kipps, their driver and a retired cop, drove her up. “He was a most responsible man,” she wrote, “despite the one time he inadvertently crushed Joe’s finger in the car door, an unfortunate accident which Joe was quick to forgive.” Kipps left the car with her and “went off on a vacation of his own.”
Two weeks later, “tired and care-worn, though filled with pent-up affection,” Joe arrived by train. The following days were “an idyll of blue skies and summer breezes, as carefree as anything Joe and I had known since the bucolic days of youth.” A small ripple stirred the placid waters of the lake on a Sunday morning in early July, while Joe lazed in his hammock and Stell paged through the week’s supply of newspapers from the city. She read to him an item announcing that the Manhattan D.A. was opening a full-scale investigation into what some alleged was a widespread practice on the part of unnamed politicians to sell appointments to the bench.
Joe’s only reaction was to move his hand “in the manner of a man nonchalantly shooing away a mosquito. Without opening his eyes, he said in a drowsy voice, ‘If the allegations be true, it’s a good thing such underhanded machinations are brought to light. But they’re of no concern to us, dear Stell.’”
Another ripple stirred two days later when a telegram arrived for Joe. Telegrams were a minor event at Lake Belvedere, but this one was of no consequence, or so Joe “casually responded” when Stell “idly inquired.” He picked up the poker next to the fireplace and stabbed the telegram, put a match to it, and used the poker to scatter the blackened remains. He told her it was “a message from a judicial colleague advising him to get a good rest before the new term started on August 25th.” If she questioned why one judge needed the urgency of a telegram to tell another judge to relax—a telegram he then burned and obliterated—she made no mention.
It was obviously not Stell’s style to question anything Joe did, and she remained in character two days later when he announced that he thought it would be a good idea if they left Lake Belvedere for a car trip to Quebec. She quickly packed and off they went on a “romantic interlude” tucked inside their “relaxing vacation,” stopping at small inns where they enjoyed, being legally able, a cocktail with dinner. Joe showed no sign of stress or worry, although several times, “we stopped at out-of-the-way service stations, because he felt it necessary to make use of the phone to call his broker to ask about fluctuations in the stock market, which were often of a distressingly dramatic nature in what was for our nation a dark and uncertain period.”
The markets were distressed, but not Joe “who whistled as he drove, more than once putting an arm around me to draw me close, as if we were a pair of spooning lovebirds.” Returned to their nest on Lake Belvedere, Joe found another telegram waiting. This one wasn’t an encouragement to relax “but a plea from several colleagues to join them in Atlantic City for a private discussion of confidential matters related to the functioning of the court in the upcoming term.” Reluctant to stray once more from the side of dear Stell, “Joe was constitutionally incapable of putting personal pleasures ahead of his responsibilities to the public, his colleagues and the court.” As before, he burned the telegram in the fireplace.
Joe drove to Atlantic City, but didn’t come right back to Maine. Instead, he continued to New York City where he “saw to last-minute business in the court, checked on our finances and bid bon voyage to his old boss, a former judge, now United States senator, who was leaving for his annual summer visit to his native Germany.”
Professional and personal obligations fulfilled, he departed New York on the early evening of August 1st, sure he wouldn’t return until the opening of the new term at month’s end. Driving all night, “he outraced the Bar Harbor Express and, though tired when he arrived, took me in his arms, as effusive as ever in his affections. He expressed his delight at the prospect of the several weeks of uninterrupted peace and quiet.” The weeks turned out to be a day. The next morning, Sunday, August 3rd, he woke early and proposed they walk into town and have their breakfast at the village diner.
As they finished their breakfast, the Methodist Church across the way let out, the worshippers mingling with members of the Congregationalist Church from around the corner who’d also just ended their service. Each Sunday when services were done, the village general store, a combination grocery, dry goods and post office, opened for an hour, not for the convenience of the God-fearing natives, who stayed away in observance of the Sabbath, but for the heathen summer folk, who always seemed in need of something. Joe said he felt like a thick steak and some potatoes for dinner that night. They went into the store where she did the grocery shopping and he browsed about.
On their walk home, Stell noticed Joe’s mood had changed. He was “unusually quiet and seemed burdened.” When she asked if anything was wrong, “he stopped on the roadside, put down his bag of groceries and took me tenderly in his arms.” Joe had a confession to make. While she’d been shopping in the front of the store, he’d slipped to the back and made a call on the village’s sole public telephone to ensure that all was in order in the court and that he could truly relax. Alas, duty called again. Joe didn’t mention the identity of the person on the other end of the phone or the nature of the business so urgent that it required him to head back to New York, which he’d just left.
Stell accepted the news of this departure as she had the ones before. “I knew the kind of man Joe was, the day I married him. As devoted as he was to me, I never doubted I would have to share him with his work.” They had an early dinner. He’d decided to take the train and leave the car with her. She drove him to the station. “He was resigned but certainly not depressed. As the train pulled out, I looked up. His face was framed in the window above. The steam swirling from the engine made it seem for an instant as though he were looking down on me from a cloud. He beamed that wide, beneficent smile of his, and its radiance shone on me like a blessing. No matter the calumnies spoken and written about him, or the pain of losing him, that blessing has never gone away.”
The smile might have remained (and though she didn’t say so, its broad, bright beam might have owed something to his artificial choppers), but that was the last Stell ever saw of him.
Joe said he would be back by Wednesday, but the day passed with no sign of him. Ditto Thursday and Friday. Stell was annoyed. Joe’s dedication to his work was crossing into wanton disregard for her feelings. Saturday was her birthday, and she was so sure he’d be on the morning train, she drove to meet it. Joe wasn’t among the load of passengers who detrained.
That night some acquaintances, a Boston lawyer and his wife, stopped by to wish her happy birthday. Surprised that Joe hadn’t returned from New York, “the lawyer tried to be reassuring. ‘If more of our public servants had your
husband’s spirit of selfless dedication,’ he said, ‘this great country wouldn’t be in the fix it is today.’ His wife told him to mind his own business, and I silently concurred.”
Sunday, August 10th, marked a week since Joe’s departure. Instead of driving into town alone to use the public telephone, she trekked two miles to the lawyer’s cabin in a “gray mizzling rain that dampened my sagging spirit even more.” He’d already left for Boston, but his wife was comforting and accommodating. She retired to the kitchen to brew a pot of tea while Stell made her call.
Stell tried their New York apartment. As the phone rang and rang, she realized that “this was why I had taken so long to take so obvious a step: I dreaded there would be no answer.” Pondering whether or not to call the police, she hesitated for fear of somehow hurting Joe’s reputation (one way or another she had to know by now that he wasn’t detained by work). She decided to phone Sylvester Berind, a political insider and secretary to Joe’s old boss, the ex-judge, now senator.
Berind saw no cause for alarm or involving the police: “‘You know how conscientious your husband is, and don’t forget, he’s facing an election this fall.’” To put her mind to rest, he promised to see what was up with Joe and prompt him to get in touch with her.
Declining the offer of a lift, Stell walked home. “The rain stopped and the sun appeared. The branches atop the pines glistened. I felt reassured.” Her fears reignited when two full days went by and there was no telegram from Berind or Joe. The next morning, August 13th, Fred Kipps, their chauffeur, arrived back to Lake Belvedere.
Suddenly, without warning, her pent-up fears poured out. She wept as she explained that Joe had been called to the city and that she hadn’t heard from him in nine days. He patted her on the shoulder, a small gesture but one she appreciated: “Out-wardly gruff in the manner of many hardened veterans of the New York police, Fred had a kind heart. He poured a shot of whisky from his silver flask and made me consume it in a single gulp. He insisted it would help, and for a short while it did.” She said that she wanted him to drive her to New York, but he convinced her that it would be easier for him to scout around for Joe if he were alone. He left in their car on August 15th.