The Man Who Never Returned

by Peter Quinn

  I also made the acquaintance of William Kennedy, whose novel Legs added another level of nuance to the era. (Both Legs Diamond and Crater were known to frequent the Club Abbey, on West 54th Street). I soon got sidetracked and ended up going down the path that led me to write Banished Children of Eve, a novel set in Civil War New York.

  In January 2005, after I’d finished my second novel, Hour of the Cat, I had lunch with Paul Browne, a fellow Bronx native and acquaintance from Albany, where he’d been bureau chief of the Watertown Times. Browne, who served as NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Public Information in both the Dinkins and Bloomberg administrations, is a fellow devotee of New York City history and political folklore.

  Amid a discussion of the latest recrudescence of judicial corruption, I made a passing reference to the plus ça change nature of New York politics and mentioned I’d once considered writing a book about Crater. Paul needed no explanations about who Crater was or what happened to him. Most people born and raised in New York City before 1960 have at least a passing familiarity with Crater. For geezers like Paul and me, he’s a subject of enduring fascination.

  I wondered aloud whether the police records from the case still existed. Paul said he’d look into it, which he did. He put me in touch with Lieutenant Eamon Deery, head of the NYPD Missing Persons Squad (it was a bureau in Crater’s day). Bright, savvy and college-educated, Lt. Deery had none of the hard-boiled gruffness of the sterotypical Irish cop; and, true to his demographic—he was born after 1960—he’d never heard of Judge Crater. Although he doubted the records of the case still existed, he promised to have a look and get back to me.

  After about a week, when I’d heard nothing, I presumed Lt. Deery had come up empty-handed and returned to the urgent business of tracking down persons who’d gone missing more recently than Crater. That’s when Lt. Deery called to report he’d made a discovery. The case had been officially closed in 1979, just shy of its golden anniversary. But instead of tossing the files, the person in charge had done only half the job, removing them from the drawers but leaving them atop the cabinet. There they sat for the next 26 years, three thick accordion files, gathering dust.

  Whether as historian or historical novelist, I’ve always found research to be the most satisfying part of the enterprise (far more than writing). To come across firsthand accounts that have been long neglected and unexamined is a special thrill. The police files were no exception. They offered an intimate and immediate view into the pressures and frustrations endured by the men of the Missing Persons Bureau as they struggled with a case that, if they solved it, could cause a political explosion; and, if they didn’t, would bring accusations of incompetence and, worse, corruption.

  I extracted a few leads I considered tantalizing, which suggested avenues of investigation the police, in the hurry and confusion of the moment, hadn’t pursued. But with the principals of the case as well as the investigators long dead, I didn’t see much hope for turning up any definitive and final answers. It came as an utter shock, then, when on the morning of August 16, 2005, I exited the rear of Grand Central Terminal and saw the front page of the New York Post, with a picture of the Judge and the headline “I KILLED JUDGE CRATER.”

  The long-missing break came, the Post reported, in a sealed envelope left by a recently deceased Queens woman to her daughter. Inside was a note in which the woman claimed that her husband had been a drinking buddy of a former cop who’d confessed that he and his brother, a cabbie, had picked up Crater on the evening of August 6th and murdered him. They supposedly stashed the body on Coney Island, under the boardwalk near the present site of the New York Aquarium. Their motive was unclear.

  The NYPD Cold Case Squad confirmed that the note had prompted a reopening of the case. Over the next several weeks, newspapers in New York and across the country ran follow-up stories. It seems that several sets of bones had been turned up during the excavation for the Aquarium in the 1950s but significantly predated Crater’s demise. The cop’s story of Crater’s end seemed more barroom braggadocio than heartfelt confession. The investigation quickly fizzled out.

  The previous year, in 2004, Richard Tofel had published Vanishing Point: The Disappearance of Judge Crater, and the New York He Left Behind. An eminently readable, worthwhile account of the case that summarized the existing evidence, the book broke no new ground and ends with the unsupported—and unsupportable—conjecture that Crater died in flagrante in the midtown brothel of the famous madam Polly Adler.

  A critical but often overlooked aspect of the case—Crater’s relationship to William Klein, head lawyer for the Shubert Brothers, and one of the last two people to see Crater alive—is brought to light in Foster Hirsch’s fine history, The Boys from Syracuse: The Shubert’s Theatrical Empire. Though Crater isn’t Hirsch’s main subject, the book lays bare the tangle of sex and politics in the Broadway world that was Crater’s playground. It’s indispensable for understanding what might have happened to him.

  Barring the unlikely discovery of Crater’s remains, the final truth about Crater’s fate will never be known. But that won’t halt the speculation. Today, a hard core of history buffs, mystery fans and cold-case aficionados continues to search for new leads and spin new theories. Maybe the Judge has appeared in his last headline, but as long as people are fascinated by sex, crime, politics and the big city, Crater will continue to be of interest.

  For my part, I confess that on more than one occasion, I’ve retraced Crater’s steps on the evening of August 6, 1930, as he went from the Arrow Ticket Agency (long gone) on the corner of 45th Street and Broadway, where he reserved a ticket to a play he never attended (although it appears someone used the ticket), to Billy Haas’s Restaurant (long gone) off Eighth Avenue, for what would turn out to be his last meal (that we know of, anyway). Unconsciously, I suppose, I was hoping for some spirit to whisper in my ear. But the ghosts stayed silent.

  Like the half-remembered chorus of an old, familiar song, I could never get Crater entirely out of my head. Sometimes, walking the New York streets or riding the subways, I find myself wondering if maybe Crater hadn’t outfoxed everyone and hidden in plain sight, living out his days cloaked in the mass anonymity of the city.

  I reread John O’Hara’s novel BUtterfield 8, with its evocation of New York in the early 1930s as the leaden atmosphere of the Depression descended. O’Hara’s book is built around party girl Starr Faithfull (Gloria Wandrous in O’Hara’s telling) and her mysterious demise, which followed Crater’s by a mere nine months. I wondered what magic he might have wrought if he’d made Crater the subject of his novel.

  One day, sorting out old books (I have a lot of them), I came across a brown and brittle paperback copy of Stella Crater’s 1960 memoir—written with Oscar Frawley—The Empty Robe: The Story of the Disappearance of Judge Crater. It had belonged to my father. I’d read it years before. Now I reread it. Poor Stella was hopelessly blind to her husband’s womanizing, but I was moved by the strength she displayed in the face of the shameful abuse and manipulation that she was subjected to by her husband’s so-called friends as they scurried for cover.

  Her account of events is mostly dismissed by students of the case as the deluded notions of a betrayed spouse unable or unwilling to face the truth. I wasn’t so sure. I thought there were facets of her account that might be a good starting point for a novelist, especially in conjunction with evidence in the files of the Missing Persons Bureau. I went ahead and made up a memoir that puts her back at the center of the case.

  Encouraged by my nonpareil publisher, Peter Mayer, who has seen all three of my previous books into print, I decided to bring Fintan Dunne, the detective-protagonist from Hour of the Cat, out of retirement and put him on the case. Dunne, it seemed to me, could go where the historian couldn’t, far offstage, into the shadows, away from the spotlight in which the main players strut and fret.

  My Judge Crater never makes an appearance in these pages. The reader only sees him through the eyes of other charact
ers, all of whom are fictitious. If there’s a distinct New York tone to their voices, it’s because it’s the tone of a city I love and regard as part of my birthright as a native son of the Bronx. These whole-cloth creations are meant to speak for the unspoken for, those whose existence usually goes unnoticed and unrecorded. It’s their lives—their aspirations, evasions, elations, deflations, truths, lies and regrets—that are the subject of The Man Who Never Returned.

  PETER QUINN

  Hastings-on-Hudson

  June 1, 2010

  “It is through [Fintan Dunne] that Mr. Quinn approaches his true subject: not the cloudy facts of an old vanishing act, but rather its tenacious hold on the collective imagination of New York.”

  —THE NEW YORK TIMES

  ON THE SULTRY EVENING OF AUGUST 6, 1930, in the first summer of the Great Depression, Joseph Force Crater, recently appointed a justice of the New York State Supreme Court by Governor Franklin Roosevelt, bid two dinner companions good night and hailed a cab. Off he went into history, myth, and urban legend. Judge Crater’s disappearance remains the most enduring and fascinating unsolved mystery in the chronicles of Gotham.

  In The Man Who Never Returned, Peter Quinn brings back Fintan Dunne, the relentless, skeptical ex-cop/detective from Hour of the Cat, and puts him on the Crater case. In a search full of unexpected twists, Dunne uncovers the shocking and menacing truth.

  “Gripping from the first page to the last, Peter Quinn creates a unique and utterly believable world, part history, part fiction. He is an enviably wonderful writer.”

  —GABRIEL BYRNE

  PETER QUINN is the author of Hour of the Cat, Looking for Jimmy, and Banished Children of Eve, and previously served as a speechwriter for two New York governors. After years as the corporate editorial director for Time Warner, he is now a full-time writer. He lives in New York.