NOW YOU SEE HIM, NOW YOU DON'T...

The Vanishing of Ambrose Small

Out all of the people in history who vanished without a trace for no discernible reason at all, there are few who can compare to Ambrose Small. His disappearance on December 2, 1919 was so sensational and mystifying that it made a permanent mark on North American history. The marvelous and controversial showman would have undoubtedly wanted it no other way.

Ambrose Small was born in 1863 and at the age of thirteen went to work in his father’s modest establishment, Toronto’s Warden Hotel. As he grew older, he began managing the hotel bar and booking entertainment for the customers. With these minor musical acts, he realized that show business was to be his life’s work. In addition to working for his father, Small also took a part-time job as an usher at the Grand Theater. He slowly worked up the ranks to assistant manager and then booking manager, arranging florid and spicy melodramas for the venue. These programs met with much success and Small began to prosper. He began to buy interests in small theaters in and around Toronto. His ambition was to own the Grand Opera House, but his offers to buy it were frequently refused. This made him all the more anxious to possess it and he began to work harder than ever to amass the necessary wealth.

Small began to make a name for himself as a daring gambler. He was never afraid to bet huge sums on races and while he always paid off when he lost, he was not above being involved in fixed races either. He managed to win $10,000 in one fixed race and began making enemies in racing circles. He also gained a reputation with women. There were a number of rejected sweethearts and angry husbands who would have loved to see something bad happen to him. The short but handsome Small, with his luxuriant walrus mustache and fancy clothes, was often seen squiring young and beautiful women about town, especially the gorgeous showgirls who worked the local theaters. He left many a hopeful starlet feeling both used and disappointed when he moved on to another attractive lady. 

This is why it must have come as a great surprise when the rakish Small, just before his fortieth birthday, suddenly married the wealthy heiress to a brewing fortune. Whether or not Small loved his new wife, Teresa, or whether he simply loved her money is unknown. However, he did use her wealth to purchase scores of small theaters and to book the biggest-named talent that he could find into them.

Small now had his fortune and he finally realized his dream of owning the Grand Opera House. But within a few years, he began to grow tired of his marriage and his secure business life and he began gambling and seeing women again. In order to conduct his affairs discreetly, he ordered that a secret room be constructed to adjoin his office at the opera house. The room was fitted with heavy drapes to muffle sound, a deep Oriental carpet, a well-stocked bar and a gigantic bed with satin sheets and pillows. Many a beautiful young woman was willingly ravished in the clandestine chamber.

As his fortune grew, Small continued to make enemies. He made his prejudices well known to anyone who would listen, even strangers. He disliked children, Catholics and the poor and felt that making donations to charity was foolish. He continued to gamble, growing more and more daring with his wagers, and he began to win huge sums of money. Small was able to keep informed of the races at every track in the United States and he bet on most of them. He became more interested in wagering than in running his theatrical empire, which now included almost every theater in eastern Canada. He spent huge sums of money and treated his employees and business associates with disdain. Small placed much of his business dealings in the hands of his private secretary, John Doughty, who was well aware of his employer’s dark and secret habits. Doughty, though, had secrets of his own. 

By the late 1910s, the high life began to take its toll on Small. His hair had started to turn gray and to recede and his face was reddened by broken blood vessels, the result of too much drinking. While he was still gambling, his wagers were somewhat smaller and his womanizing was mostly confined to his long-time mistress, Clara Smith. He was also beginning to tire of the theater business and wanted out.

In 1919, he and Teresa began negotiating the sale of the Small chain of theaters to a British-owned firm, Trans-Canada Theaters Limited. The deal was concluded on December 2, 1919 and the Smalls received a check for one million dollars, with an additional $700,000 to be paid to them in installments over the next five years. The husband and wife endorsed the check and deposited it in their account at the Dominion Bank the next morning. That afternoon, Small told his lawyer, E.W.M. Flock, that he planned to inform his secretary John Doughty that not only had Doughty been retained by the new firm as a secretary and booking manager, but he would see a substantial increase in salary.

Attorney Flock saw Small again later that evening, around 5:30 p.m., at the Grand Opera House. Small was in a fine mood, laughing and smoking cigars to celebrate the sale of the chain. Flock spent a few minutes with him, but then left to catch a train. As he walked out of the front foyer of the opera house and into a driving snowstorm, he looked back and waved at Small. It was the last time that he would ever see his client.

A short time later, Small also left the opera house. Bundled up against the biting wind, cold and snow, he made with way to the corner of Adelaide and Yonge, ducking into the shelter of a newsstand operated by Ralph Savein. The newsstand owner knew Small well, as he habitually checked the racing results in the paper each day. Small always picked up the paper when it arrived by train, however on this day, the papers had not been delivered because the train had been delayed by a terrible snowstorm in New York. Savein said that Small cursed bitterly over the lack of the paper, which was something that he had never heard him do before. Small then trudged off into the snow and as he made his way down the block, Savein saw his form fade away into the blowing storm. He was the last person to report speaking with Ambrose Small.

Several days passed before anyone realized that Small had disappeared. His wife and friends were so used to his dalliances and gambling trips that they assumed he had simply gone out of town for a few days. They wanted to ignore his shortcomings so badly that they never dreamed he could have met with foul play. Once his disappearance became official, though, the authorities launched the biggest manhunt in Canadian history. Teresa Small offered a staggering $50,000 reward for information on her husband, inspiring every amateur sleuth and crackpot to join the hunt with the legitimate detectives already on the case. 

Meanwhile, the police were also seeking John Doughty, who had, coincidentally it turned out, vanished on the same day as Ambrose Small. The authorities learned that Doughty had not taken kindly to losing his position with Small and before leaving town, he had gone to the Dominion Bank and, using Small’s key to his safety-deposit box, had absconded with $100,000 in negotiable Victory bonds. Doughty was found one year later, working in a Portland, Oregon, paper mill under the name Charles B. Cooper. He was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison for the theft of the bonds but was cleared of having anything to do with Small’s disappearance.

As the hunt for Ambrose Small continued, many began to fear that the theater magnate had been murdered. A man named George Soucy, a publishing house employee, reported that he had seen Small being forced into a car on the evening of December 2. Also, on that same night, a caretaker named Albert Elson insisted that he had seen four men burying something in a ravine just a short distance from Small’s home. A cleaning woman, Mary Quigley, swore to police that she had seen a notice pinned to the wall in the Convent of Precious Blood, located on St. Anthony Street, which requested “prayers for the repose of the soul of Ambrose J. Small” several days before the public or the press knew that he had vanished!

These turned out to be some of the best leads that the police had but they were among the hundreds that actually came in. The authorities conducted a painstaking search for the missing man. Every business in Toronto was searched and all six cities where Small had theaters were scoured for clues. Toronto Bay was dredged several times and the basement of the Small mansion on Glen Road was excavated. The search continued for years and even as late as 1944, investigators were still digging up the basement of the Grand Opera House, hoping to find Small’s bones.

Teresa Small was interrogated several times about her husband’s disappearance. She was convinced that he had been done in by one of the countless women he had been involved with over the years. She knew all about his affairs but had ignored them for a long time. Finally, she ran across some obscene letters that Clara Smith had written to Small and Teresa demanded that her husband stop seeing her. She had placed the letters on the dining room table so that he would know that she had seen them. Small came upon the correspondence and destroyed it all, insuring his wife that his cheating days were over. This occurred in 1918 but Teresa did not know that her husband had continued seeing Smith up until the day that he vanished. In fact, he even had dinner with her on December 1. The police concluded that Smith knew nothing of her lover’s fate.

By 1920, the case had become desperate and the police had resorted to following ridiculous stories and what turned out to be frequent hoaxes. That same year, though, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer who created Sherlock Holmes and who was known in England for helping the authorities with a number of seemingly unsolvable crimes, was touring the United States. A reporter asked him what he thought of the Small disappearance and he admitted that he was intrigued and had been following the story in the papers. He was asked if he might help out with it and Doyle agreed that if asked, he would consult on the case. Within days, newspapers in Canada and the United States were running headlines that cried “World’s Greatest Detective to Solve Small Case” and “Sherlock Holmes to Reveal Toronto Mystery.” For some reason, though, Doyle was never asked to consult and his interest in the case turned to other things.

And while the famous author was never asked to look into the case, the authorities were desperate enough in 1926 to contact a Vienna criminologist named Dr. Maximilian Langsner and to hire him to delve into the rapidly cooling affair. Langsner claimed that he was able to use psychic “thought processes” to find the missing man. While he was put up in the finest Toronto hotel, conducting seances and “astral trips”, he sent the police out to follow his divinations, digging up half the countryside and finding nothing. When the detectives complained, he replied that the policemen were clouding his vision and he would have to look more later. Public outcry sent Langsner packing and the police department was left with the huge bills that he had run up on the official tab.

Since 1919, Ambrose Small has been “spotted” in hundreds of places from owning a hotel in South America to living it up in France with a girl on each arm and a champagne bottle gripped in each fist. A psychic envisioned him buried in the Toronto city dump. An old friend claimed to catch a glimpse of him on the street in London. The magician Harry Blackstone swore that he spotted Small gambling in a Mexican cantina. 

Regardless, the courts pronounced him officially dead in 1923, so he has been placed in the “gone, but not forgotten” category from that point on. What really happened to the theater mogul is anybody’s guess and the mystery of Ambrose Small will undoubtedly live on for many years to come.

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF D.B. COOPER

One of America's Great Lingering Mysteries..

On this date in 1971, one of the most famous disappearances in the annals of American crime took place in thin air between Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington when a man since identified only as “D.B. Cooper” parachuted to an unknown fate. Despite an extensive manhunt and an ongoing FBI investigation, Cooper has never been found or even identified. The case remains the only unsolved air piracy in American aviation history. Hundreds of leads have been pursued over the years but no real evidence about Cooper’s whereabouts or identity have ever surfaced. In addition, the bulk of the ransom money that he received has never been found. Its whereabouts – like the true identity of D.B. Cooper – remains unknown. 

The skyjacking began mid-afternoon on Thanksgiving eve, November 24, 1971, at Portland International Airport in Portland, Oregon. A man carrying a black attaché case approached the flight counter of Northwest Orient Airlines. He identified himself as "Dan Cooper" and purchased a one-way ticket on Flight 305, a 30-minute trip to Seattle, Washington. Cooper boarded the aircraft and took a seat. He then lit a cigarette and ordered a bourbon and soda. Onboard eyewitnesses recalled a man in his mid-forties, between 5 feet 10 inches and 6 feet tall. He wore a black lightweight raincoat, loafers, a dark suit, a neatly pressed white collared shirt, a black necktie, and a mother of pearl tie pin.

Flight 305, approximately one-third full, took off on schedule at 2:50 pm, local time. Cooper passed a note to Florence Schaffner, the flight attendant situated nearest to him in a jumpseat attached to the aft stair door. Schaffner, assuming the note contained a lonely businessman's phone number, dropped it unopened into her purse. Cooper leaned toward her and whispered very politely, "Miss, you'd better look at that note. I have a bomb."

She looked at the note, printed in near, all-capital letters. It noted again that Cooper had a bomb and asked her to sit next to him. She asked to see the bomb. Cooper cracked open his briefcase long enough for her to glimpse eight red cylinders attached to wires, coated with red insulation, and a large cylindrical battery. After closing the briefcase, he dictated his demands: $200,000 in "negotiable American currency"; four parachutes (two primary and two reserve); and a fuel truck standing by in Seattle to refuel the aircraft upon arrival. Schaffner gave Cooper's instructions to the cockpit; when she returned he was wearing dark sunglasses.

Flight 305's pilot, William Scott, contacted Seattle-Tacoma Airport air traffic control, which informed local and Federal authorities. The 36 other passengers were informed that their arrival in Seattle would be delayed because of a "minor mechanical difficulty." Northwest Orient's president, Donald Nyrop, authorized payment of the ransom, and ordered all employees to cooperate fully with the hijacker. The aircraft circled Puget Sound for approximately two hours to allow Seattle police and the FBI time to collect Cooper’s parachutes and ransom money.

Schaffner recalled that Cooper appeared to be familiar with the local terrain; at one point, he remarked, "Looks like Tacoma down there," as the aircraft flew above it. He also mentioned, correctly, that McChord Air Force Base was only a 20-minute drive from Seattle-Tacoma Airport. Schaffner described him as calm, polite, and well-spoken, not at all consistent with the stereotypes (enraged, hardened criminals or "take-me-to-Cuba" political dissidents) popularly associated with air piracy at the time. Tina Mucklow, another flight attendant, agreed. "He wasn't nervous," she told investigators later. "He seemed rather nice. He was never cruel or nasty. He was thoughtful and calm all the time." He ordered a second bourbon and water, paid his drink tab (and insisted Schaffner keep the change), and offered to request meals for the flight crew during the stop in Seattle.

He was the most polite criminal since John Dillinger.

FBI agents assembled the ransom money from several Seattle-area banks—10,000 unmarked 20-dollar bills, many with serial numbers beginning with the letter "L" indicating issuance by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, most carrying a "Series 1969-C" designation —and made a microfilm photograph of each of them. Cooper rejected the military-issue parachutes initially offered by authorities, demanding instead civilian parachutes with manually operated ripcords. Seattle police obtained them from a local skydiving school.

At 5:24 pm, Cooper was informed that his demands had been met, and at 5:39 pm the aircraft landed at Seattle-Tacoma Airport. Cooper instructed Scott to taxi the jet to an isolated, brightly lit section of the tarmac and extinguish lights in the cabin to deter police snipers. Northwest Orient's Seattle operations manager, Al Lee, approached the aircraft in street clothes (to avoid the possibility that Cooper might mistake his airline uniform for that of a police officer) and delivered the cash-filled knapsack and parachutes via the aft stairs. Once the delivery was completed, Cooper permitted all passengers, Schaffner, and senior flight attendant Alice Hancock to leave the plane.

While the plane was being refueled, Cooper made plans with the cockpit crew about his escape. They would fly toward Mexico City at minimum airspeed with the landing gear down and at a low altitude so that the cabin remained unpressurized. The aircraft’s range was limited so they would have to take on more fuel before Mexico. Cooper and the crew decided that Reno, Nevada would be the perfect spot. 

At approximately 7:40 p.m. the plane took off again with only Cooper, pilot Scott, flight attendant Mucklow, copilot Rataczak, and flight engineer H. E. Anderson on board. After takeoff, Cooper told Mucklow to join the rest of the crew in the cockpit and remain there with the door closed. As she complied, Mucklow observed Cooper tying something around his waist. At approximately 8:00 p.m., a warning light flashed in the cockpit, indicating that the aft air stairs apparatus had been activated. The crew's offer of assistance via the aircraft's intercom system was curtly refused.The crew soon noticed a subjective change of air pressure, indicating that the aft door was open.

At approximately 8:13 p.m., the aircraft's tail section sustained a sudden upward movement, significant enough to require trimming to bring the plane back to level flight. At approximately 10:15, Scott and Rataczak landed the plane, with the aft air stairs still deployed, at Reno Airport. FBI agents, state troopers, sheriff's deputies, and Reno police surrounded the jet, as it had not yet been determined with certainty that Cooper was no longer aboard; but an armed search quickly confirmed that he was gone. Somewhere in flight, Cooper had vanished into history. 

Aboard the airliner, FBI agents recovered 66 unidentified latent fingerprints, Cooper's black clip-on tie and mother of pearl tie clip, and two of the four parachutes. Witnesses were interviewed, composite drawings were made and investigators began questioning possible suspects. One of the first was an Oregon man with a minor police record named D. B. Cooper, contacted by Portland police on the off-chance that the hijacker had used his real name, or the same alias in a previous crime. His involvement was quickly ruled out; but an inexperienced wire service reporter (Clyde Jabin of UPI by most accounts, rushing to meet an imminent deadline, confused the eliminated suspect's name with the pseudonym used by the hijacker. The mistake was picked up and repeated by numerous other media sources, and the moniker "D. B. Cooper" became lodged in the public's memory.

A precise search area where Cooper jumped from the plane was difficult – even impossible – to determine. When he jumped from the plane, the aircraft was flying through a heavy rainstorm over the Lewis River in southwestern Washington. The best guess put investigators on the southernmost outreach of Mount St. Helens, a few miles southeast of Ariel, Washington, near Lake Merwin, an artificial lake formed by a dam on the Lewis River. Search efforts focused on Clark and Cowlitz Counties, encompassing the terrain immediately south and north, respectively, of the Lewis River in southwest Washington. FBI agents and Sheriff's deputies from those counties searched large areas of the mountainous wilderness on foot and by helicopter. Door-to-door questioning and searches of local farmhouses were also carried out. Other search parties ran patrol boats along Lake Merwin and Yale Lake, the reservoir immediately to its east. No trace of Cooper, nor any of the equipment presumed to have left the aircraft with him, was found. Later, this area would be called into question and numerous others were later suggested. In the end, no one really knew where to look. 

In late 1971 the FBI distributed lists of the ransom serial numbers to financial institutions, casinos, race tracks, and other businesses routinely conducting significant cash transactions, and to law enforcement agencies around the world. Northwest Orient offered a reward of 15 percent of the recovered money, to a maximum of $25,000. In early 1972 U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell released the serial numbers to the general public. A number of other rewards were offered by newspapers and remained in effect until Thanksgiving 1974, and while there were several near-matches, no genuine bills were found.

In 1976 discussion arose over impending expiration of the statute of limitations on the hijacking. Most published legal analysis agreed that it would make little difference, as interpretation of the statute varies considerably from case to case and court to court, and a prosecutor could argue that Cooper had forfeited immunity on any of several valid technical grounds. The question was rendered moot in November when a Portland grand jury returned an indictment against "John Doe, aka Dan Cooper" for air piracy and violation of the Hobbs Act. In effect, the indictment formally initiated prosecution of the hijacker that can be continued, should he be apprehended, at any time in the future.

In February 1980, an eight-year-old boy named Brian Ingram, vacationing with his family on the Columbia River about 9 miles downstream from Vancouver, Washington and 20 miles southwest of Ariel, uncovered three packets of the ransom cash, significantly disintegrated but still bundled in rubber bands, as he raked the sandy riverbank to build a campfire. FBI technicians confirmed that the money was indeed a portion of the ransom, two packets of 100 bills each and a third packet of 90, all arranged in the same order as when given to Cooper.

The discovery launched multiple new rounds of conjecture, and ultimately raised many more questions than it answered. Initial statements by investigators and scientific consultants were founded on the assumption that the bundled bills washed freely into the Columbia River from one of its many connecting tributaries – which confirmed the idea that, despite many theories, no one still had any idea where Cooper landed. 

Multiple alternate theories were advanced. Some surmised that the money had been found at a distant location by someone (or possibly even a wild animal), carried to the river bank, and reburied there. There was also the possibility that the money had been found on the riverbank earlier, perhaps before the dredging, and buried in a superficial sand layer at a later time. The sheriff of Cowlitz County proposed that Cooper accidentally dropped a few of the bundles on the air stairs, which then blew off the aircraft after he jumped, and fell into the Columbia River. One local newspaper editor opined that Cooper, knowing he could never spend the money, dumped it in the river or buried it there (and possibly elsewhere) himself. No hypothesis offered to date satisfactorily explains all of the existing evidence; the means by which the money arrived on the river bank remains unknown.

The D.B. Cooper case has never been forgotten and technically, is still being worked on by the FBI. Over the years, the FBI has periodically made public some of its working hypotheses and tentative conclusions about the case, drawn from witness testimony and the scarce physical evidence.

The official physical description remains unchanged and is considered reliable. Agents believe that Cooper was familiar with the Seattle area and may have been an Air Force veteran, based on testimony that he recognized the city of Tacoma from the air as the jet circled Puget Sound, and his accurate comment to Mucklow that McChord Air Force Base was approximately 20 minutes' driving time from the Seattle-Tacoma Airport —a detail most civilians would not know, or comment upon. His financial situation was very likely desperate: Extortionists and other criminals who steal large amounts of money nearly always do so, according to experts, because they need it urgently; otherwise, the crime is not worth the considerable risk. A minority opinion is that Cooper was "a thrill seeker" who made the jump "just to prove it could be done."

Agents theorize that he took his alias from a popular Belgian comic book series of the 1970s featuring the fictional hero Dan Cooper, a Royal Canadian Air Force test pilot who took part in numerous heroic adventures, including parachuting. Because the Dan Cooper comics were never translated into English nor imported to the US, they speculate that he may have encountered them during a tour of duty in Europe

The FBI task force believes that Cooper was a careful and shrewd planner: He asked for four parachutes to encourage the assumption that he might compel one or more hostages to jump with him, thus ensuring he would not be deliberately supplied with sabotaged equipment. The amount and form of the ransom appear also to have been carefully calculated in advance: 50- or 100-dollar bills would have drawn attention and been too difficult to pass, and a larger quantity of 20-dollar bills would have been too heavy and bulky for his jump.

Cooper was apparently quite familiar with the 727-100 aircraft: It was the ideal choice at the time, not only for its aft air stairs, but also the high, aftward placement of all three engines, allowing a reasonably safe jump without risk of immediate incineration by jet exhaust. In addition, Cooper knew that the aft air stairs could be lowered during flight—a fact never disclosed to civilian flight crews since there was no situation on a passenger flight that would make it necessary—and that its operation, by a single switch in the rear of the cabin, could not be overridden from the cockpit. He may even have known, particularly if he served in Vietnam or had friends who did, that the Central Intelligence Agency had been using 727s to drop agents and supplies behind enemy lines in Vietnam.

The Bureau feels strongly that he lacked crucial skydiving skills and experience and has argued that from the beginning that Cooper did not survive his jump. Even if he did land safely, agents contend, survival in the mountainous terrain would have been all but impossible without an accomplice at a predetermined landing point, which would have required a precisely timed jump, necessitating, in turn, cooperation from the flight crew. There is no evidence that Cooper had any such help from the crew, nor any clear idea where he was when he jumped into the overcast darkness.

Who was “Dan Cooper?” No one knows. Since 1971, the FBI has processed over a thousand "serious suspects" along with assorted publicity seekers and deathbed confessors, most of whom have been definitively ruled out. To this day, no serious contenders for the identity of D.B. Cooper have ever surfaced and it’s unlikely that he – and the rest of the ransom money – will ever be found. 

But like September 11, 2001… the D.B. Cooper skyjacking changed air travel forever. It marked the beginning of the end of unfettered and uninspected airline travel. Despite initiation of the federal Sky Marshal program the previous year, 31 hijackings were committed in U.S. airspace in 1972, 19 of them for the specific purpose of extorting money. (Most of the rest were attempts to reach Cuba) In 15 of the extortion cases the hijackers also demanded parachutes. In early 1973, the FAA began requiring airlines to search all passengers and their bags. Amid multiple lawsuits charging that such searches violated Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure, federal courts ruled that they were acceptable when applied universally, and when limited to searches for weapons and explosives. Our bags have been searched ever since and the Cooper skyjacking remained in the back of many minds until much more tragic events in 2001 changed things once again.

"DRINKING THE FLAVOR-AID IN JONESTOWN"

The Mad Final Days of Jim Jones: 38 Years Later

On November 18, 1976, U.S. Representative Leo Ryan from California (along with four others) was killed near Jonestown, Guyana by members of the People’s Temple, a church run by a madman named Jim Jones. The murders were followed by a night of mass murder and suicide – one of the most chilling nights in history.

The story galvanized 1970s America and stunned people who never believed that something like that could happen. Phrases like "drinking the Kool-Aid" became synonymous with brainwashing, suicide and horror. The cult’s settlement in Guyana, known as Jonestown, was a place of voluntary slavery. Each day with filled with backbreaking labor and trauma for all but Jones and his closest henchmen. The inhabitants were too busy slaving away in the fields to realize what was happening to their lives. Jones was their leader, high priest, king and god. He had total control of his follower’s lives. 

New members gave all income and property to the church and to Jones, who had them believing that he was Jesus Christ reincarnated. In truth, he was nothing more than a charismatic criminal, who demanded that his people call him “Father” or “Dad” and worship him as a living deity. Whatever Jones decided was the rule of the day. Those members of the cult with no self-esteem, and who had a desperate need to belong, found life at Jonestown more than just bearable. For the others, there was no escape. Many believed in Jones’ claims to be able to do anything from placing fatal curses on his enemies to bringing the dead back to life. He was an expert at manipulation and there were enough members under his spell to keep any malcontents from fleeing.

But how did a bizarre cult from America end up in the jungles of South America? And how did the commune become known as one of the great mass suicides in history?

Jim Jones was born on May 13, 1931 in the small town of Crete, Indiana, near the Indiana-Ohio border. His parents, Jim and Lynetta Jones, were instrumental in starting him off on the strange path where he ended up. Lynetta believed that she was the reincarnation of Mark Twain and told family and friends that her departed mother had come to her in a dream and proclaimed that she would give birth to the world’s savior. She often re-told this story to her young son and obviously, Jim would never forget his rather dubious “destiny.” 

Jones’ father worked for the railroad but spent most of his time on disability. His life was plagued by alcoholism and depression, mostly due to his poor health after World War I. He had returned from the service with his lungs nearly destroyed by mustard gas. As his son was growing up, he could usually be found in local taverns, trading war stories for drinks and offering his spare time to the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Jones family did not stay in Crete long after the railroad rerouted through Lynn in 1934. They moved into a small house along the tracks on the south side of Lynn. Young Jim became known as the town’s version of St. Francis, always followed by a collection of stray dogs, cats and other animals. At first, he was happy to let them run free but soon he built cages for them in his family’s barn. As the captive animals slowly disappeared one by one, everyone bemoaned Jim’s loss ---- never imagining that the creatures could have met a chilling fate.

As a young man, Jones attended religious services with his family at a local Church of the Nazarene but soon began attending a more spirited congregation on the west side of the city, the Gospel Tabernacle. Here, the churchgoers yelled, raved, screamed, spoke in tongues and passed out on the floor under the influence of the “holy spirit”. The minister soon turned Jones’ talent for foul-mouthed rants into a child preacher with a tendency toward fire and brimstone.

Outside of church, Jones would baptize his friends on a nearby creek and preside over funerals for pets and animals in the neighborhood that died. While most kids were playing hide and seek, Jones was setting up altars in his barn and preaching to the other kids, attracting his “congregation” by offering lemonade and punch during the hot summer months. While it didn’t seem odd at the time, he once locked some of his friends in the hayloft when they threatened to leave his “church”. 

Jones also had a passion for science and used the barn as a laboratory between church services. He often set up a microscope to show insect specimens to his friends and performed bizarre experiments, like the time he tried to graft a chicken leg onto a duck. He also liked to combine his interests, reviving supposedly ailing rabbits and chickens through religious fervor. 

After Jones’ parents separated when he was in high school, he began attending Richmond High. In order to earn some extra cash, he took a job as an orderly at Reid Memorial Hospital and it was here that he met Marceline Baldwin, his future wife. Marceline was a nurse at the hospital and inexplicably attracted to the high school boy. 

After they were married, Jones and Marceline began making a big impression on Indianapolis during the 1950s and 1960s. They arrived in the summer of 1951 and the couple brought along their pet chimpanzee, very little money and a burning desire to minister to the poor. Jones started out as a student pastor at the south side’s Somerset Methodist Church but refused to take orders or be an assistant to anyone. Jones wanted his own church --- and he wanted to run it his own way.

He soon began his own ministry, Community Unity, on Randolph Street and moved into a bungalow on nearby Villa Street. To raise funds to fix up the church, he and Marceline sold South American monkeys door-to-door at $29 each, grossing over $50,000. He was also invited to be a guest minister at the nearby Laurel Street Tabernacle, where he became known for miraculous healings that included yanking “cancerous blobs” from supposedly sick parishioners. Marceline helped with the act, providing prayers, music and plenty of “hallelujahs”. 

Laurel Street never brought Jones into the church full-time, mostly because he was actively recruiting African-Americans into the Community Unity church, so in 1956, he headed to the north side to starter a new, larger church. He christened it “Wings of Deliverance”, a name he soon changed to “The People’s Temple”. His message attracted many poor and liberal followers. He opened food and clothing banks, created soup kitchens, took poor children to the zoo and delivered free heating coal to shut-ins. He also helped to integrate at least one Indianapolis hospital. Their message was so successful that, a year later, Jim and Marceline moved the congregation to a former synagogue and purchased a duplex on North Broadway.

Even with all of these seeming good works, it soon became apparent to even the most devoted that Jim Jones had a dark side. When he felt that his congregation was not being attentive enough, he would throw his Bible on the ground and spit on it, raging that “too many people are looking at this and not at me!” He also devised an elaborate scheme where People’s Temple members ran local businesses that channeled money back into the church, a plan that would eventually send him west to California.

In 1961, the governor appointed Jones director of the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission. He used the position to draw more attention to himself but unfortunately for him, a lot of that new attention came from tax investigators and creditors. Terrified that his recent financial dealings would be discovered, he announced in 1965 that his congregation was moving to Ukiah, California. The reason, he explained, was to escape from an upcoming holocaust unleashed by nuclear war. He believed that Ukiah was naturally protected from any sort of nuclear fallout.

Jones led a procession of about 100 of the Indiana faithful to the San Francisco area. He took more than $100,000 with him but managed to leave more than $40,000 in debts behind in Indianapolis.

Once in California, Jones began looking for new sources of income for the People’s Temple. Although already accepting donations from his members, as well as their slave labor in businesses that financed the church, he now began requiring that the members of the congregation turn over their life savings, social security and pension checks when they joined the church. In the city and state known as a “capital for kooks” at the time, hundreds of believers joined the cult. Those who had nothing to start with or had already given everything they owned to the People’s Temple were usually allowed to defect without much trouble. But when a member who still had a substantial source of income became disillusioned with the sect, Jones would use a considerable amount of persuasion to retain their membership. When that failed, dire circumstances followed. Some died mysteriously while others simply vanished.

Tax deductible contributions received by the People’s Temple were meant to enhance the lifestyle of its members. But instead, the funds were used to bribe, coerce, bargain and buy positions of power and political influence for Jim Jones. However, when citizens and honest politicians became suspicious of what Jones and the People’s Temple stood for, the business end of the cult became less profitable. Jones began to encounter serious legal problems too and was advised to move away from northern California and elude possible arrest. He and his closed men began relocating the cult members to the country of Guyana, where an agricultural commune had been established to protect the Temple from constant scrutiny. 

Few of the cultists were aware of the hardships to come. The first to arrive were not allowed to communicate with the members in California about the miserable conditions they were forced to endure. All mail was censored and only Jones’ closets lieutenants were allowed to travel to Georgetown, the capital of Guyana. 

In spite of Jones’ security measures, word did get back to California about the brutal conditions and the fact that members who wanted to leave were literally being held captive. When California congressman Leo J. Ryan heard about what was going on, he began an immediate investigation, the result of which convinced him that he needed to personally visit Guyana and Jonestown.

When news of Congressman Ryan’s impending trip to South America was released, a number of news reporters asked and were allowed to accompany him. It was one of these reporters, Sammy Houston of the Associated Press, who was instrumental in getting Ryan to Jonestown. Houston and his wife, Nadyne, told Ryan what had happened to their son, Robert, a one-time member of the People’s Temple. Robert had been forced to work two jobs, with the railroad and as a probation office, in order to keep up his $2,000 monthly contribution to the church. He was later found guilty of breaking church rules and was found dead in 1976, just hours after defecting from the Temple. When the cult moved, his widow was convinced by Jones to relocate with her two children to Guyana. Nadyne Houston would later accompany Ryan to Jonestown in hopes of bringing her two grandchildren back to California.

Arriving in Guyana with his contingent of newsmen and aides, Ryan was not happy with what he found. Many People’s Temple members wanted to defect. Families were divided with some wanting to leave and others to stay. When Ryan, his party and some of the defectors left Jonestown for the Kaituma airfield on November 18, Jones sent a heavily armed hit squad to wipe them out. Ryan and three newsmen were among those killed. Cameraman Bob Brown managed to keep his camera going until the moment that he was shot down. The developed film would show the assassins advancing on their victims in vivid, horrific color.

But not everyone was killed. When word reached Jones that the hit squad had botched the job, and that some of the victims had escaped, the cultists were all gathered together at the meeting hall, where they found Jones seated on his familiar green throne. As his ring of armed guards, which he called “Angels.” surrounded the congregation, a debate began after Jones told his followers about the killing of Congressman Ryan and members of his entourage. The subject of mass suicide was discussed --- something that had been rehearsed many times since the cult’s arrival in the Guyana jungles. 

“Now, we must die with dignity,” Jones told them. “The GDF (Guyanese Defense Force) will question you. Then they will torture you. They will castrate you. They will shoot you. I can’t leave any member of my family behind.”

Those who protested were simply told again that Jones was “unable to leave them behind”. If they chose not to die with dignity, he told them that they would die anyway. Then the guards, armed with rifles, pistols and bows and arrows moved in and pushed the crowd into a tighter group. 

He ordered the nurses to prepare a powerful “potion” that was added to a large tub of strawberry flavored Flavor-Aid (a generic version of Kool-Aid) and then instructed the cult that the babies were to be brought up first. Babies were carried to the podium, and while still in their mother’s arms, had their mouths forced open and poison squirted inside. Some of the children were torn from the hands of hesitant mothers and dragged to the front by nurses and guards. As their sobbing parents watched, the babies endured painful spasms and died in minutes.

Then, the previously practiced “white night” suicide ritual started going awry from the earlier rehearsals. What was never part of the plan was when the first victims began gagging, retching and twisting in horrible pain. A number of the cultists, realizing that this was no rehearsal but the real thing, began resisting and refusing to willingly drink the poisoned juice. Guards and other members had to hold them down while the liquid was forced down their throats. Some of the more violent resistors were injected with the poison, as were those who didn’t seem to be dying fast enough from ingesting the drink.

Screams of agony and tortured moans echoed through Jonestown as the dying lay on the ground, writhing with unspeakable pain. Seeing his follower’s experiencing such a torturous death, Jones decided that he, himself, would die quicker and with less pain.

When authorities, who had been alerted by the few survivors who managed to escape the massacre and run off into the jungle, arrived at Jonestown, they were appalled by the already decaying bodies. Many of the dead were contorted in agony. Only Jones seemed to be at peace. He had been felled in his green throne with a bullet to the brain. 

The final body count reached 912 but this did not include those who escaped into the jungle but succumbed to the deadly snakes, scorpions, quicksand and whatever other dangers the remote area offered. The count also didn’t include those in Congressman Ryan’s party who were murdered at the airfield. The bodies at Jonestown were found lying in piles as high as 30 deep and were so badly decomposed from the brutal heat that they were falling apart by the time that Guyanese authorities arrived at the compound. Many of the soldiers and policemen, who witnessed death on an almost daily basis, retched and vomited when they saw the carnage. 

Even after the corpses were taken away by body removal teams with gas masks from the U.S. Army, the stench of death remained in the air at Jonestown. Jones’ bloodstains around his green throne and podium remained, no matter how much effort was expended to remove them. As perplexing at these bloodstains turned out to be, the authorities were even more baffled by the discovery of the gun that had killed Jim Jones. The weapon was found in a building some distance away from the spot where the cult leader was killed.

Did Jones succumb to cowardice when it came his turn to die? Did he admonish his followers to “die with dignity” and then fail to do so himself? There seems to be no way that Jones could have committed suicide, placed the gun where it was found and then return to his throne, where the body was discovered --- and yet somehow, it happened. 

To this day, the terrible events at Jonestown remain shrouded with mystery and also linger as a horrific example of the evil that some men do.

THE REAL-LIFE "FUGITIVE"

The Unsolved Mystery of the Sam Sheppard Case

On November 16, 1966, Dr. Sam Sheppard was acquitted at his second trial for the murder of his wife, Marilyn, in 1954. The case was one of the most famous – and controversial – of the 1950s and went on to inspire the TV show and film of THE FUGITIVE (even though the creators denied) it and Stephen King’s story and the film THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION. 

Samuel Sheppard was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the youngest of three sons of Dr. Richard Allen Sheppard. He attended Cleveland Heights High School where he was an excellent student and was active in football, basketball, and track; he was class president for three years. Although several small Ohio colleges offered him athletic scholarships, Sheppard chose to follow the lead of his father and two older brothers and pursued a career in osteopathic medicine. He enrolled at Hanover College in Indiana, studied at the Western Reserve University in Cleveland and then finished his medical education at the Los Angeles Osteopathic School of Physicians and Surgeons. He completed his internship and residency in L.A. but a few years after marrying Marilyn Reese in February 1945, Sheppard returned to Ohio and joined his father's growing medical practice.

What seemed a promising life was shattered when Sheppard was arrested – and then convicted – for murdering his then-pregnant wife Marilyn in their home in the early morning hours of July 4, 1954. Sheppard claimed his wife was killed by a “bushy-haired man” who also attacked him and twice knocked him unconscious. The Sheppards' lakefront home was located in Bay Village, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, just west of the city.

Sheppard was brought to trial in the autumn of 1954. The case is notable for its extensive publicity and what the U.S. Supreme Court called a "carnival atmosphere." Newspapers across the country vilified Sheppard in print and were obviously biased against the doctor with their inflammatory coverage of the case. Sheppard was portrayed as the only suspect in the case. One headline from Cleveland even read: “Why Isn’t Sam Sheppard in Jail?” His suspect – the one-armed man… ooops, the bushy-haired man – was dismissed by investigators and reporters alike as a fanciful concoction. 

The high-profile nature of the case proved to be a boon to lead prosecutor John J. Mahon, who was running for a seat on the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas as the trial began. Mahon won his seat, and served until his death on January 31, 1962.

But things did admittedly look bad for Sheppard. It was revealed during the course of the investigation and trial that Sheppard had a three-year-long extramarital affair with Susan Hayes, a nurse at the hospital where Sheppard was employed. The prosecution argued that the affair was Sheppard's motive for killing his wife.

Sheppard's attorney, William Corrigan, argued that Sheppard had severe injuries and that those injuries were inflicted by the intruder. Corrigan based his argument on the report made by noted neurosurgeon, Dr. Charles Elkins, M.D., who examined Sheppard and found that he had suffered a cervical concussion, nerve injury, many absent or weak reflexes (most notably on the left side of his body) and injury in the region of the second cervical vertebra in the back of the neck. Dr. Elkins stated that it was impossible to "fake" or simulate the missing reflex responses. The defense further argued that the crime scene was extremely bloody, and except for a small spot on his trousers, the only blood evidence on Sheppard was transfer bloodstains on his watch. Corrigan also argued that two of Marilyn's teeth had been broken, and the pieces had been pulled out of her mouth, suggesting she had bitten her assailant. He told the jury that Sheppard had no open wounds. 

Sheppard took the stand in his own defense. He testified that he had been sleeping downstairs on a daybed when he woke to his wife's screams. He told a vague story, saying, "I think that she cried or screamed my name once or twice, during which time I ran upstairs, thinking that she might be having a reaction similar to convulsions that she had had in the early days of her pregnancy. I charged into our room and saw a form with a light garment, I believe. At that time grappling with something or someone. During this short period I could hear loud moans or groaning sounds and noises. I was struck down. It seems like I was hit from behind somehow but had grappled this individual from in front or generally in front of me. I was apparently knocked out. The next thing I knew, I was gathering my senses while coming to a sitting position next to the bed, my feet toward the hallway." 

He further said, "I looked at my wife, I believe I took her pulse and felt that she was gone. I believe that I thereafter instinctively or subconsciously ran into my youngster's room next door and somehow determined that he was all right, I am not sure how I determined this. After that, I thought that I heard a noise downstairs, seemingly in the front eastern portion of the house." He ran back downstairs and chased what he described as a "bushy-haired intruder" or "form" down to the Lake Erie beach below his home, before being knocked out again. The defense called eighteen character witnesses for Sheppard, and two witnesses who said that they had seen a bushy-haired man near the Sheppard home on the day of the crime.

The jury was not convinced. On December 21, 1954, it found Sheppard guilty of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison. Soon after his conviction, Sheppard twice received devastating family news: on January 7, 1955, his mother committed suicide (gunshot); 11 days later, his father died of a bleeding gastric ulcer. In both cases, he was permitted to attend the funerals but was required to wear handcuffs.

After more than six years of appeals, Corrigan died on July 30, 1961. Months later, F. Lee Bailey took over as Sheppard's chief counsel. Family tragedies also continued during this period: On February 13, 1963, his late wife's father, Thomas S. Reese, committed suicide in an East Cleveland, Ohio, motel.

Sheppard served 10 years of his sentence. After several appeals were rejected, his petition for a writ of habeas corpus was granted by a United States district court judge on July 15, 1964. The State of Ohio was ordered either to free Sheppard or to grant him a new trial. The case was reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Sheppard v. Maxwell. The Court held that Sheppard's conviction was the result of a trial in which he was denied due process. The decision noted, among other factors, that a "carnival atmosphere" had permeated the trial, and that Edward J. Blythin, the trial judge, had refused to sequester the jury, had not ordered the jury to ignore and disregard media reports of the case, and when speaking to newspaper columnist Dorothy Kilgallen shortly before the trial started said, "Well, he's guilty as hell. There's no question about it."

At his new arraignment on September 8, 1966, Sheppard loudly pleaded "not guilty" with his attorney, F. Lee Bailey, by his side. Jury selection got under way on October 24, and opening statements began eight days later. Unlike in the original trial, neither Sheppard nor Susan Hayes took the stand, a strategy that proved to be successful when a "not guilty" verdict was returned on November 16. The trial was very important to Bailey's rise to prominence among American criminal defense lawyers. It was during this trial that Paul Kirk presented the bloodspatter evidence he collected in Sheppard's home in 1955 which proved crucial to his acquittal.

After his acquittal, Sheppard helped write a book which presented his side of the case and gave insight into his years in prison. He also returned briefly to medicine in Youngstown, Ohio, but was sued twice for medical malpractice by the estates of dead patients. After that, his life went into a tailspin. He never really recovered from the trial, accusations and prison years. He worked briefly as a professional wrestler, going by the name “The Killer,” and became a raging alcoholic. He died of liver failure on April 6, 1970. By the end of his life, Sheppard was reportedly prone to drinking "as much as two fifths of liquor a day." He was buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Gardens in Columbus, Ohio.

But his story was not over yet. In 1997, his remains were exhumed for DNA testing as part of the lawsuit brought by his son to clear his name. Sheppard's son, Samuel Reese Sheppard, has devoted considerable time and effort towards clearing his father's reputation. In 1999, he sued the State of Ohio in the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas for his father's wrongful imprisonment. At the trial, attorney Terry Gilbert, who had been retained by Sheppard, suggested that Richard Eberling, an occasional handyman and window washer at the Sheppard home, was the likeliest suspect in Marilyn's murder, after a ring that had belonged to Marilyn Sheppard was allegedly found in his possession. Eberling died in an Ohio prison in 1998, where he was serving a life sentence for the 1984 murder of an elderly, wealthy, Lakewood, Ohio, woman, Ethel May Durkin, a widow who died without any immediate family. Durkin's murder was uncovered when a court appointed review of the woman's estate revealed that Eberling, Durkin's guardian and executor, had failed to execute the decedent's final wishes, which included stipulations on her burial. Durkin's body was exhumed, and additional injuries were discovered in the autopsy that did not match Eberling's previous claims of in-house accidents, including a fall down a staircase in her home. Coincidentally, both of Durkin's sisters, Myrtle Fray and Sarah Belle Farrow, had died under suspicious circumstances as well. Fray was killed after being "savagely" beaten about the head and face and then strangled; Farrow died following a fall down the basement steps in the home she shared with Durkin in 1970, a fall in which she broke both legs and both arms. In subsequent legal action, both Eberling and his partner, Obie Henderson, were found guilty in Durkin's death.

DNA testing of Richard Eberling's blood in connection with the Sheppard investigation, to see if there was a match with the blood found at the murder scene, was inconclusive. Prosecutors argued that the blood evidence had been tainted in the years since it was collected, and that it potentially placed 90% of all Americans on the crime scene (blood collected from a closet door in Marilyn Sheppard's room was Type O, while Eberling's blood type was A).

Eberling had admitted having been in the Sheppard home, and stated he cut his finger while washing windows and bled while on the premises. This has been cited as evidence of Eberling's involvement in the murder, although some questioned why Eberling would account for his blood being in the house.

Though Eberling denied any criminal involvement in the Sheppard case, a fellow convict reported that Eberling confessed to the crime. Kathie Collins Dyal, a home healthcare worker for Durkin, also testified that Eberling had confessed to her in 1983. The credibility of both witnesses was seriously called into question during the 2000 civil trial.

F. Lee Bailey, Sheppard's attorney during his 1966 retrial, insisted in his testimony in the 2000 civil lawsuit that Eberling could not have been the killer. Instead, Bailey suggested that Esther Houk, wife of Bay Village mayor Spencer Houk, had killed Marilyn in a fit of jealous rage after finding out that Marilyn and her husband had had an affair. The Houks were neighbors of the Sheppards
.
Cuyahoga County prosecutor William D. Mason led the State of Ohio's trial team, which included assistant prosecutors Steve Dever, Kathleen Martin, and Dean M. Boland. They argued that Sheppard was the most logical suspect, and presented expert testimony suggesting that Marilyn Sheppard's murder was a textbook domestic homicide. They argued that Sheppard had not welcomed the news of his wife's pregnancy, wanted to continue his affairs with Susan Hayes and with other women, was concerned about the social stigma that a divorce might create, and killed Marilyn to get out of his marriage. Prosecutors asked why Sheppard hadn't called out for help, why he had neatly folded his jacket on the daybed in which he said he'd fallen asleep, and why the family dog—which several witnesses had testified (in the first trial in 1954) was very loud when strangers came to the house—had not barked on the night of the murder (recalling the famous Sherlock Holmes remark about "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time," with its implication that the dog knew the criminal).

After ten weeks of trial, 76 witnesses, and hundreds of exhibits, the case went to the eight-person civil jury. The jury deliberated just three hours on April 12, 2000, before returning a unanimous verdict that Samuel Reese Sheppard had failed to prove that his father had been wrongfully imprisoned.

On February 22, 2002, the Eighth District Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that the case should not have gone to the jury, as a wrongful imprisonment claim could be made only by the person actually imprisoned, and not by a family member such as Sam Reese Sheppard. Legal standing to bring such a claim, the court of appeals found, died with the person who had been imprisoned. In August 2002, the Supreme Court of Ohio affirmed the appeals court's decision.

The Sheppard case continues to be a mystery to this day. Technically, unsolved, it’s unlikely that we will never know for sure who killed Marilyn Sheppard in that Cleveland lake house.

"THE MOST MISSINGEST MAN IN NEW YORK"

The Case of Judge Crater

Perhaps no disappearance in American history has created as much speculation as that of New York Supreme Court Associate Justice Joseph F. Crater. For many years, he was known simply as “the most missingest man in New York.” He was last seen on the evening of August 6, 1930, walking out of a New York restaurant. Crater was a tall, heavyset man and an avowed clothes horse. He was especially dapper that evening as he stepped out of the restaurant, waved goodbye to a couple of friends and then climbed into a taxicab. His friends would remember his double-breasted brown suit, gray spats and a straw Panama hat over his smoothed-down iron grey hair for it was the last outfit they ever saw him wear. After that final glimpse, Crater was never seen again. But how was it possible for a man as powerful and prominent as a Supreme Court judge to disappear forever?

Judge Crater’s career was unquestionably successful. He was born and raised in Easton, Pennsylvania, and later graduated from Lafayette College and Columbia University Law School. In 1913, he began practicing law in New York and got involved in local politics. He soon became president of the Democratic Party Club in Manhattan and saw his law practice flourish thanks to his connections to the corrupt Democratic leadership at Tammany Hall. In April 1930, he was appointed to the New York Supreme Court. He had withdrawn $20,000 from the bank just days before his appointment. The sum was close to a year’s salary but that was the standard Tammany payoff for the lucrative post. It was not a poor investment either, according to investigators who later looked into his role as a receiver of a bankrupt hotel. Crater sold it to a bond and mortgage firm for $75,000 and two months later, the city agreed to buy it back for a planned street widening at a condemned property price of almost three million dollars.

Crater did just as well in his private life. In 1916, a woman named Stella Wheeler retained him in a divorce trial and the next year, right after her divorce became final, Crater married her. By all accounts, they appeared to be a happy and devoted couple.

Vanished Judge Joseph F. Crater

In the summer of 1930, forty-one-year-old Crater and his wife were vacationing at their summer cabin at Belgrade Lakes, Maine. In late July, he received a telephone call and he offered no information to his wife about the content of the call, other than to say that he had to return to the city “to straighten those fellows out.” The following day, he arrived at his Fifth Avenue apartment. Instead of dealing with business, though, he made a trip to Atlantic City in the company of a showgirl. On August 3, he was back in New York and on the morning of August 6, he spent two hours going through his files in his courthouse chambers. He then had his assistant, Joseph Mara, cash two checks for him that amounted to $5,150. At noon, he and Mara carried two locked briefcases to his apartment and he let Mara take the rest of the day off.

Later that evening, Crater went to a Broadway ticket agency and purchased one seat for a comedy that was playing that night called Dancing Partners at the Belasco Theater. He then went to Billy Haas’ chophouse on West 45th Street for dinner. There, he ran into two friends, a fellow attorney and his showgirl date, and he joined them for dinner. The lawyer later told investigators that Crater was in a good mood that evening and gave no indication that anything was bothering him. The dinner ended a little after 9:00 p.m., a short time after the curtain had opened for the show that Crater had a ticket for. The group went outside and as Crater stepped into the taxi that he hailed down, he waved goodbye to his friends. His next, and likely final destination, remains a mystery.

Strangely, there was no immediate reaction to Judge Crater’s disappearance. When he did not return to Maine as scheduled on August 9, Mrs. Crater grew concerned. Nevertheless, she waited six days before dispatching Kohler, the family driver, to New York to see if he could learn anything. When Kohler arrived at the Fifth Avenue apartment, the maid told him that Judge Crater’s bed had not been slept in since August 8. Kohler next began telephoning Crater’s friends. They were all excessively reassuring about the welfare of the judge, believing that no harm could have come to him. All of his friends were acutely aware that any hint of a mysterious disappearance might hurt Crater’s chances for re-election in November. They were anxious that any odd behavior on Crater’s part be kept hidden from the voting public.

In addition, they wanted to make sure his extramarital sex life was carefully hidden, as well. Crater had always confined his interest to night club parties, one-night stands and prostitutes, but suppose the middle-aged man had come across a young woman that he had fallen for and he had taken her off on an extended trip? If that was the case, his cronies were anxious to soft-pedal his disappearance.

So Kohler returned to Maine on August 20, relieved that no harm had come to the judge. He informed Mrs. Crater that her husband must surely be safe, though no one seemed to have any idea where he might be. He was sure that he would return on August 28, when he was scheduled to preside over the first session of the special term.

But when Crater didn’t make an appearance for this important session, word began to circulate that something was amiss. Stella Crater, her worst fears apparently justified, hurried to New York. She began calling her husband’s friends, including Martin J. Healy, who was summering on Long Island. Healy later stated that Mrs. Crater became hysterical when he could not tell her anything. Healy, along with others, strongly advised her to return to Maine. Against her better judgment, she did.

An unofficial search was started for Crater, led by a city detective named Leo Lowenthal, who often acted as a bodyguard for one of Crater’s political friends. He visited the judge’s chambers and learned of the two briefcases believed to be filled with personal papers that the judge and his assistant had carried out of the office. Lowenthal next went to the Fifth Avenue apartment but found no trace of the papers, nor any charred remains to indicate that they had been burned. He noted with interest that Crater’s vest was in his bedroom, but found nothing else unusual.

With no trace of the judge to be found, the police commissioner was finally notified of the disappearance on September 3.

After that, the case of the missing judge became front page news. The story captivated the nation and a massive investigation was launched. Had Crater been killed, or had he simply disappeared on his own? Those were the questions that everyone wanted answers to, from police detectives to shady business partners to the average man on the street. The official investigations started off in a hurry, but quickly slowed down. Detectives discovered that the judge’s safe-deposit box had been cleaned out and the two briefcases that Crater and Mara had taken to his apartment were missing. These promising leads were quickly bogged down by the thousands of false reports that were coming in from people who claimed to have seen the missing man.

The District Attorney centered his investigation on Mrs. Crater while the police began delving into his financial and sexual affairs. It was found that he had a safe deposit box at the Empire Trust Company, but it turned out to be empty.

Detectives looking into Crater’s love life were far more successful and they found that for years, Crater had been on friendly terms with Constance Braemer Marcus, a raven-haired woman in her middle thirties. Lovely and vivacious, she had been a worker for the Cayuga Democratic Club in 1922, when she had met Crater during an election campaign. She liked him and later retained him – as Mrs. Crater had done – during her divorce. They became involved in a long-time affair.

Over the years, Crater visited Connie Marcus several times a week and paid her rent at the Hotel Mayflower on Central Park West. In the daytime, Connie Marcus worked as a salesgirl at Milgrim’s and other upscale shops along Fifty-Seventh Street. 

When news of Crater’s disappearance went public, Marcus added to the chaos by disappearing herself. It seemed a logical assumption that Crater and his mistress had run off together and the police investigation stalled. Then Connie returned to the city alone, explaining that she had left town merely to avoid the publicity. She was questioned closely by investigators but they became convinced that Marcus knew nothing of the judge’s whereabouts.

The police also learned that Crater frequented a Broadway nightclub and speakeasy called the Club Abbey. The Abbey was owned by gangland figure Owney Madden and was frequented by mobsters like Jack “Legs” Diamond, Dutch Schultz, Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll and others. A number of murders had occurred on the premises and it was definitely not the sort of spot that should have been a favorite hangout for a New York Supreme Court Justice. But this is where Crater went in search of a diversion, although he tried to convince patrons that his name was “Joe Crane.” However, since so many other politicians frequented this unsavory nightspot, false names were a waste of time.

At the Abbey, the judge had been especially friendly with a chorus girl named Elaine Dawn. Police questioned her, along with Sally-Lou Ritz, who had been at Crater’s table for dinner on the night he disappeared, and Marie Miller, his Atlantic City party girl date. None of these lovely ladies were able to offer a clue as to his location.

The search for Judge Crater ground to a halt, even though he had been reported in Canada, the Adirondacks, Nova Scotia, Cuba, California, Mexico City and even Africa. Most assumed that the judge had ducked out just one step ahead of someone who was looking for him. A 1947 movie called “The Judge Steps Out,” starring Alexander Knox, follows the lighthearted exploits of a judge who becomes weary of his responsibilities and leaves his family to become a short-order cook. For decades after his disappearance, his name was a slang term for dodging one’s responsibilities and “to pull a Crater” was to slip away permanently.

In October, a grand jury convened to look into the disappearance. Mrs. Crater refused to come to New York and participate in the hearings. Nevertheless, the grand jury called ninety-five witnesses and amassed nine hundred and seventy-five pages of testimony. After all of that, the conclusion was: “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 the sufferer from disease in the nature of amnesia, or is the victim of crime.”

In late January 1931, Mrs. Crater finally returned to New York. From the apartment on Fifth Avenue, she announced an amazing discovery. In a bureau drawer often used by the judge, she found a large manila envelope containing $6,690 in an assortment of denominations, along with three small checks that had been made out to Crater and signed by him. There was also a second envelope that contained stocks and bonds and a binder with three insurance policies. A memo in Crater’s handwriting listed the names of men who owed him money, along with the amounts owed by each man. The note was signed with the words, “I am very whary, Joe.” It is believed the misspelled word was likely meant to be “weary.”

The discovery caused an uproar. Cops had searched the apartment four times and never would have missed the bulky envelopes and the insurance binder. Detective Leo Lowenthal, who had made the first unofficial search, maintained that the envelopes had not been in the drawer in August. Had someone --- perhaps Crater himself – placed them there? Had his killers – if he had been murdered – felt compassion for his widow and placed there in the bureau? Or had Mrs. Crater brought them back with her from Maine?

No one knows, but this was the last dramatic development in the case. The search continued throughout 1931 but no trace of the judge was ever found.

There have been many theories put forward to answer the mystery of Judge Crater. Mrs. Crater and many of his close friends believed that he was the victim of foul play. Stella Crater stated that he was murdered “because of something sinister connected to politics.” And she may have been right given his involvement in bribery, back-door dealing with Tammany Hall politics and questionable real estate deals. She also did not believe that the judge would have voluntarily vanished, insisting, “Joe Crater would not run away from anybody but would meet his problems directly, whatever they were.”

In 1937, Mrs. Crater sued the three insurance companies for double indemnity on her husband’s life insurance policies. During the trial, her attorney, Emil K. Ellis, advanced her murder theory, but left politics out of the mix. He claimed that Judge Crater had been blackmailed by a Broadway showgirl and he had paid her off. When she demanded more money and Crater refused to pay, a gangster friend of the showgirl had killed him, perhaps accidentally. The attorney’s theories did not impress the court and they denied the double indemnity claims.

   

On June 6, 1939, Judge Crater was officially declared dead but sightings continued for years, as did the theories as to what happened to him. Possible exits of the judge have included his murder by political cronies just before he could testify against them in a graft investigation and a cover-up of his death in the arms of his mistress or a prostitute. Some believe he was killed in a dispute over a payoff or that he decided to drop out and start a new life in Quebec, Europe or the Caribbean.

   

Stella Crater remarried in 1939 but the marriage didn’t last. In 1961 she wrote a book entitled, The Empty Robe: The Story of the Disappearance of Judge Crater. Although her book concludes she didn’t know her second husband very well at all, she seemed to retain fond memories of him; either that or she had an ironic sense of humor. Every year on the August 6 anniversary of her husband’s disappearance until her death in 1969, Mrs. Crater visited a Greenwich Village bar and ordered two drinks. After downing one, she would raise the other glass and toast, “Good luck, Joe, wherever you are.”

Crater’s case -- Missing Person’s File 13595 – was officially closed in 1979.

A possible answer to the fate of “Good-Time Joe” Crater came to light in April 2005, when Stella Ferrucci-Good died in Bellerose, Queens, leaving behind what may be a key to the mystery. While going through Mrs. Ferrucci-Good’s possessions, her granddaughter, Barbara O’Brien, discovered a metal box that contained handwritten letter in an envelope marked, “Do not open until my death.” In the letter, Mrs. Ferrucci-Good claimed that her late husband, Robert Good, told her that a New York City cop named Charles Burns, and the cop’s brother, a cab driver named Frank Burns, were responsible for Crater’s death.

Robert Good was a New York City Parks Department supervisor and lifeguard who died in 1975.

In her account, Mrs. Ferrucci-Good wrote that her husband told her that he learned over drinks with one of both of the Burns brothers that they, along with several other men, killed the judge and buried him on Coney Island, under the boardwalk at West Eighth Street. That location is the current site of the New York Aquarium.

According to Mrs. Ferrucci-Good’s account, her husband told her that when Crater stepped into the cab on West Forty-Second Street that night, the driver was Frank Burns, a Syndicate hitman employed by Jack “Legs” Diamond. Diamond was allegedly angry at Crater’s refusal to reverse on appeal some lower court decisions that hurt the mob boss. Burns picked Crater up in his cab and then drove a few blocks to where his two accomplices jumped in the vehicle. They drove to Coney Island, where they were joined by two more men. Their intent was to rough Crater up a little and scare him into playing ball with Diamond, but in the judge’s struggles to escape the cab, he was accidentally killed.

In her letter, Mrs. Ferrucci-Good said that officer Burns was one of the cops guarding notorious Murder Inc. hitman Abe “Kid Twist” Reles when the gangster and mob informant somehow plummeted to his death from a sixth-floor Coney Island hotel window in 1941. Reles’ death came hours before he was to testify against mob boss Albert Anastasia. Reles became immortalized in New York tabloids as “the canary who could sing but couldn’t fly.” Also in the box left by Mrs. Ferrucci-Good were yellowed newspaper clippings about Crater’s disappearance with written notations in the margins. 

Police sources confirmed that a man named Charles Burns served with the NYPD from 1926 to 1946 and that he spent part of his career assigned to the 60th Precinct in Coney Island. Police also confirmed that several skeletal remains were found at the location named by Mrs. Ferrucci-Good in 1956, when the foundation for the aquarium was being dug. Decades prior to the advent of DNA technology, the remains could not be identified. They were reburied in pine coffins made by inmates at Rikers Island prison in an unmarked mass grave in New York City’s Potters Field on Hart Island.

Mrs. O’Brien and her family say Mrs. Ferrucci-Good never mentioned the Crater case to them They were baffled by the contents of the letter and thought it was a joke but they turned it over to the police, just to be sure. Police were unable to verify or disprove in the letter, leaving the fate of “the missingest man in New York” an ongoing mystery.

From the book WITHOUT A TRACE by Troy Taylor