Finding Judge Crater by Stephen J. Riegel

Author:Stephen J. Riegel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2022-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

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As expected, District Attorney Crain waited until after Election Day to release the “Preliminary Report of the Grand Jury” investigating the disappearance of Joseph Force Crater, though the front cover of the document was dated a few days before the election. Crain no doubt realized that the inconclusiveness of the grand jury report would have been only more fodder for Tuttle and his campaign’s theme of Tammany’s cover-up of its corruption. The document itself, however, seemed to contradict its “preliminary” nature, for it was printed and issued with the caption of the proceeding of the Court of General Sessions of the County of New York on its front. While the names of the twenty-three grand jurors appeared at its end (which was unusual given the secrecy traditionally accorded to a grand jury proceeding), the report most likely was authored by Crain’s office. The Crater grand jury would continue to sit for another two months, but the report appeared to be the final word on its investigation.

The Preliminary Report began with a statement of the obvious purpose of the grand jury — to learn “the whereabouts of Justice Crater and the circumstances connected with his disappearance” and whether “such disappearance was attributable to any criminal act within the County of New York.” It did concede at the start that Crater had no apparent reason to voluntarily disappear “because the justice in question was a man in the prime of life, in good health, serving under an appointment by the [g]overnor, and considered in the light of recognized political precedent a probable nominee by the dominant political party for the office of Justice of the Supreme Court to be voted for at the election to be held on the 4th of November of this year.”27

The self-proclaimed thorough efforts and great expense of the grand jury’s investigation were exhaustively catalogued: to date, the grand jury had sat for eighteen days; ninety-five witnesses had been called in person and several of them recalled; the grand jury and District Attorney Crain had interrogated “members of Crater’s family, his relatives, his connections, his friends, his acquaintances, his associates, his dentist, his doctors, his brokers, his servants, some of his debtors, some of his creditors, with hotel managers, club officers, hospitals, sanitariums, the police, municipal officials, state officials and federal officials”; the record of testimony ran 975 typewritten pages; sixteen statements from persons not called before the grand jury were taken; the judge’s city residence and judicial chambers were visited; and subsidiary inquiries were instituted by the police in Maine, Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, upstate New York, Westchester County, Havana, Cuba, and Nova Scotia, Canada.28

The bulk of the report consisted of a chronology of Crater’s physical whereabouts as observed by others from July 21 until August 6, 1930. Its chronology is striking in the very neutral recitation of the facts. It made no effort to assess, weigh or emphasize some facts as being more probative of what happened to the missing man than others. Nor

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