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 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

YOUNG WOMEN LOST

The Indiana Dunes Disappearance of 1966

On a hot, sunny, summer Saturday, three young women in bathing suits left all of their belongings a crowded beach and climbed about a motorboat on Lake Michigan. It was noon on July 2, 1966 at Indiana Dunes State Park, about an hour around the lake from Chicago.

A couple whose beach blanket was beside the young women’s watched at the motorboat glided away, then waited all day for them to return. They didn’t know the girls, but thought it was odd that they would leave their purses unattended on a day when the park was packed with more than 9,000 holiday weekend sunbathers and swimmers. When the couple left at dusk, they pointed out the abandoned blanket to a park ranger. They told him that the young women had left on a boat that was operated by a young man with a headful of dark, curly hair. The ranger bundled up the belongings and store them away.

A day and a half later, on July 4, Park Superintendent Bill Svetic took a call from a Chicago man inquiring about his daughter, Patty Blough, 19. She had not been heard from since leaving home for Indiana Dunes with two friends Saturday morning. Svetic opened the blanket bundle that had been left on the beach and found Blough’s wallet, keys and clothing. He also found clothes and purses belonging to Blough’s friends, Renee Bruhl, 19, and Ann Miller, 21. Miller’s 1955 Buick was still sitting in the beach parking lot. Svetic assured Harold Blough that his daughter would turn up – she’d probably just had a little bit too much fun over the holiday weekend.

Three Women Lost: Patty, Renee and Ann

But Patty didn’t show up. And neither did her friends. An investigation began belatedly as scuba divers scoured the lake and searchers on foot and horseback combed the sprawling sands and woods of the park, which stretches along 45 miles of the Indiana coastline.

But no sign of the young women was ever found. In fact, they remain missing 48 years later and their fate remains one of the enduring unsolved mysteries of the region. What happened to the three young women? No one will probably ever know, but it’s possible that there are still some clues that might stand out when we trace their movements on the day of their vanishing – and even in the days that came before.

On the morning of July 2, Ann Miller drover her four-door Buick and picked up Patty Blough from her family’s home in Westchester, Illinois around 8:00 a.m. Patty told her mother that they planned to return home early in the evening since their friend Renee Bruhl was coming with them and she needed to be back in time to make supper for her husband. Ann and Patty picked up Renee from her home on West Fulton, on Chicago’s West Side, and then stopped at a drugstore to pick up some suntan lotion. The women arrived at the Indiana Dune State Park at approximately 10:00 a.m. Ann parked in the lot and the women hiked to a spot that was about 100 yards from the Lake Michigan shoreline.

The nearby couple stated that the girls left their belongings on the beach at noon and they entered the water together. The witnesses then saw them speaking to an unidentified man who was operating a 14- to 16-foot long white boat with a blue interior and outboard motor. They were unsure of the time when this man approached them. The couple described all this to the park ranger around dusk, when they noticed that the women’s belongings were still sitting on the beach. The women had gotten on the boat, they said, and had headed west with the driver.

The Indiana Dune State Park

Ann, Patty and Renee have never been seen again.

Renee Bruhl left a large beach towel, shorts, blouse, cigarettes, suntan lotion, 25 cents and her purse, which contained about $55 in checks, sitting on the beach. The other women also left clothing, purses and personal items in the sand. Those belongings were collected by the ranger on the night of their disappearance and stored in the park superintendent’s office until July 4, when Patty’s father called the park, searching for his daughter and her friends. The park rangers soon learned that missing person’s reports had been filed for all three women over the weekend in Illinois by their families. The rangers searched the park and located Ann’s Buick in the parking lot. Her car keys had been left with her purse on the beach, but other items of clothing and personal effects were still inside of the car. The car was still parked in its original spot from July 2 – no one had moved it.

The park rangers soon got other law enforcement agencies involved, including the U.S. Coast Guard. The search was in full swing by July 5, three days after the girls had vanished. Other witnesses who were in the park that day came forward with conflicting stories but authorities came to believe that the first witnesses’ reports were the most reliable – the three women were seen boarding a boat and they did not return to the beach.

Divers searched Lake Michigan near the shoreline for any sign of the women

The search for the three women continued around the clock. It was extended to a six-mile stretch of beach west of the state park, near Ogden Dunes, later in the week. More witnesses came forward that substantiated the initial report that the women got into a boat with an unidentified man. Later accounts claimed that he was in his early twenties with a tanned complexion and dark, wavy hair. He was wearing a beach jacket at the time. A beach-goer who was taking home movies on July 2 offered his films to investigators. The search was narrowed down to two boats after the detectives watched the footage. One of them was a 16-foot runabout with a three-hulled design, which was operated by a man who fit the description of the man seen with the girls. Three women who matched descriptions of the missing girls were seen aboard the boat in the footage. The second boat was identified as a 26-foot cabin cruiser with three men and three women aboard. The cabin cruiser was seen at around 3:00 p.m., three hours after the women got aboard the smaller boat. After reports came in that Ann, Patty and Renee were seen walking on the beach and eating after this time, investigators came to believe that they had been dropped off on the beach west of the state park by the driver of the smaller boat while he drove back to retrieve his two male friends and the cabin cruiser.

Investigators looked over the belongings left behind, hoping for some clue

While on the second beach, the girls were reportedly approached by another unidentified man, who accompanied them to the cabin cruiser. Witnesses stated that this second boat was equipped with a radio / telephone antenna, but apparently did not have a name painted on its stern. This final sighting has never been confirmed, but the authorities did consider it reliable.

The search went on, but lead after lead went nowhere. A psychic that was brought into the case claimed to have a vision of a Lake Michigan cabin where the women’s bodies were buried. An extensive search of the property believed to be the place seen by the psychic did not uncover any evidence. However, detectives did point out that the shifting sand dunes may have buried any possible evidence deeply under the ground.

Investigators began looking into the backgrounds of the three women in an attempt to discover if their disappearances could have been voluntary – and it was there that things got ever murkier and stranger.  

In Renee Bruhl’s purse, the authorities found a letter addressed to her husband, Jeff. The couple had been married for just 15 months in July 1966, but in the letter she asked for a divorce. She said that she felt her husband spent too much time working on cars with his friends and didn’t seem to have time for her. Her husband, though, told the police that he was not aware of any problems in their marriage at the time of his wife’s disappearance. Her family agreed with the statement, telling investigators that they believed that Renee had written the note in a moment of anger and never gave it to Jeff because she had changed her mind about the divorce.

But that might not have been all there was to the story…

All three women were friends, drawn together by their love of horses. Patty and Ann met while boarding their horses at the same Illinois stable. Renee was a classmate of Patty’s at Proviso West High School in Maywood, Illinois and she had completed a one-year course in medical technology after graduation. The women often rode together and often met at a tavern in Hodgkins, Illinois after their outings. According to a theory created by Dick Wylie, a reporter and photographer who chased crime in northwest Indiana for the Gary Post-Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times during the 1950s and ’60s, the events leading to their disappearance began there.

Both Patty and Ann were single and Wylie believes that fell for married men they met at the tavern and both got pregnant. Later, statements from some of Ann’s friends claim that she was three months pregnant in July 1966 and mentioned going to a home for unwed mothers prior to her disappearance. But did she have plans to end the pregnancy? And what about Patty? Was she pregnant as well?

Abortion was illegal in Illinois in 1966. According to Dick Wylie, some Chicago women who found themselves in trouble visited a house just across the state border in Gary, where a husband-and-wife team, Helen and Frank Largo, performed backroom abortions. Wylie has linked the Largos, now dead, to a floating abortion mill that operated on a houseboat offshore in Lake Michigan. He believes Ann and Patty had arranged abortions on that boat on July 2, and they were ferried there by Ralph Largo, Jr., a nephew of Helen and Frank Largo. He was seen at the park that day and matched the description of the man last seen with the girls on the beach.

Wylie believes that the women got to the larger boat, but something went wrong with one of the procedures and the other two were killed so that no witnesses would be left behind. The girls had left their belongings on the beach because they expected to be back in 90 minutes, Wylie said. The theory has never been confirmed – the younger Largo died in 2009 – but it is plausible. However, unless a body turns up, it’s likely to always remain just a theory.

And it’s not the only one, of course. There have been many unconfirmed sightings of the three women over the years, but no solid leads have ever surfaced. The boats that they were allegedly on in July 1966 have never been located and the men operating them have never been solidly identified. But people have continued to speculate, especially when it comes to their connection with horses.

Ann, Patty and Renee often rode at the Tri Color Stables in Palatine, Illinois, which were owned by George Jayne and his brother, Silas Jayne, who were involved in fraudulent activities, murders and worse in the mid-1960s. Cheryl Ann Rude, a young woman associated with the horse market, was killed at the Tri Color Stables in June 1965 by a car bomb that had been meant for George Jayne. George had asked Cheryl to move his Cadillac from the stable entrance and the bomb exploded. Some believe that perhaps Patty, Ann and Renee (or one or any combination of them) may have witnessed the bomb being planted. However, this does not explain why anyone would have waited an entire year before silencing them. Or does it? In March 1966, Patty received a facial injury that she never explained. One of her friends claimed she made an off-handed remark about it and mentioned trouble with “syndicate people.” But no proof of any trouble exists.

One of several of the stables that were owned by the Jayne brothers and mixed up in illegal activities in the Chicago suburbs

There was a connection between the Jaynes and the missing women, though. Both men’s telephone numbers were found in their belongings after their disappearance. There is no question that the two men were deeply involved in crime. George was shot to death in 1970 and Silas was later convicted of conspiracy in his brother’s murder and sent to prison. He died in 1987. He is also a suspect in the disappearance and probably murder of candy heiress Helen Brach (See my blog about this unsolved case by following this link). In 1997, a man named James Blottiaux was charged with planting the 1965 car bomb that killed Cheryl Ann Rude at the Jaynes’ stables, but neither he, nor the Jaynes, have been positively linked to the disappearances of Ann, Patty and Renee.

It’s hard not to speculate, though, that any of them might have been involved in some way. Silas Jayne reportedly told a sheriff that he had three bodies buried beneath his residence after the 1966 disappearances. Investigators took his claim seriously and planned to search the property, but the sheriff involved was killed in a farming accident before the search took place. For whatever reason, it was not pursued after that, leading some to wonder if the claim was true.

What happened to three pretty young women in July 1966? We’ll likely never know. The case is not unsolvable, but without any bodies or any solid new leads, it’s unlikely that the truth will ever be known.

THE MAN IN THE GREEN PAJAMAS

LAST SEEN AT THE SANDMAN MOTEL....

One of the most disturbing unsolved disappearances of the last half century occurred in the town of Jacksonville, Illinois in 1959 when a man named Bruce Nelson Campbell stumbled out of his hotel room one night, dressed only in a pair of green pajamas, and was never seen again. What happened to the New England stockbroker has never been determined – he simply vanished without a trace.

In April 1959, Bruce Campbell, age fifty-seven, and his wife, Mabelita, drove to Illinois from Northampton, Massachusetts. The reason for their visit was meant to be a happy one. They had traveled to see their newly born first grandson, son of Bruce, Jr., who was an assistant professor of chemistry at MacMurray College, in Jacksonville.

For some reason, the long drive to Illinois was especially hard on Campbell and he began feeling sick while he was in the car. The stock investment counselor became confused and disoriented and when they arrived in Jacksonville, Mrs. Campbell checked them into the Sandman Motel, a small, family-owned establishment that was typical of motor lodges of the day. It was located on the northwest side of town, on Walnut Street, where a Casey's store now stands. Each room had a door that opened to the outside and parking was located right outside the guest’s room. Campbell was put immediately into bed after they checked into the motel. Bruce, Jr. arranged for a doctor to visit his parents and Campbell was treated for two days before he started to show some improvement.

The Sandman Motel in Jacksonville in 1959

On the evening of April 14, Campbell visited with his family and Bruce, Jr. later recalled that his father was “rational but still disoriented” during his last visit with him. Twice, later on that night, Mrs. Campbell said her husband asked her if their station wagon, which was parked outside of their room in the motel’s parking lot, was locked up. She told him that it was, shortly before going to sleep.

She later woke up at 2:15 a.m. and saw that the other double bed in the room was empty – her husband was gone. She immediately got out of bed to look for him and when she realized that he was not in the bathroom, hurried to the door of the room, which was unlatched. There was no sign of him in the parking lot and the desk clerk on duty said that he had not seen anyone walking past the office. The Campbells’ car was still sitting in the lot. The doors were locked and it was undisturbed.

Because of her husband’s weakness and disorientation, Mrs. Campbell quickly called the police. When officers arrived at the motel, she offered a description of the tall, balding man with a slight limp and explained that when he left the motel room he was wearing only a pair of bright green pajamas, a wrist watch and a ring with the Delta Upsilon fraternity crest on it. His wallet containing all his money, his shoes, his eyeglasses  and his car keys were still in the motel room.

Police officers searched the surrounding area, the darkened streets and the Jacksonville downtown area, but there was no sign of Campbell. The next morning, a request was put out for information and theories of murder, suicide and amnesia led searchers to local creeks, farm buildings and wells. No body was ever found.

The search for Bruce Nelson Campbell, the man in the green pajamas, continued for days and weeks and then it stretched into years. His family refused to give up hope that he would be found alive until 1967, when he was finally declared legally dead.

What became of Campbell? No one knows. He simply walked away into the darkness of a quiet Illinois town and was never heard from again. 

The story of "The Man in the Green Pajamas" will be featured in a longer version in the upcoming book, HAUNTED JACKSONVILLE by Troy Taylor & Lisa Taylor-Horton -- coming in fall 2014!

"THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE"

THE UNSOLVED MYSTERY… THAT WASN’T

What do we make of people who simply disappear one day and are never seen again? That’s long been of particular interest to me – so interesting that I’ve penned several books on the subject. As I’ve long noted, there are numerous reasons why people vanish – murder, abduction, suicide and voluntary escapes from reality among them. And then there are the more unnerving cases, where no rational explanation seems to exist. How, or why, do such things happen?

Are they incidents linked to the supernatural, or could there be more mundane explanations for many of them? Over the years, I’ve collected dozens of stories of disappearances that seemed the strangest to me, the most inexplicable and in many cases, the most disturbing. I certainly do not claim to have collected every unsolved disappearance in history (far from it, which is disturbing in itself) and some readers will notice the glaring lack of inclusion in any of my writings for what some believe is a prominent paranormal disappearance mystery spot – the Bermuda Triangle.

The fact that the Bermuda Triangle is missing from all of my books was not an accident on my part. While the area of the Triangle is certainly marked by a number of strange occurrences, I don’t believe there is anything paranormal to it at all. In fact, after years of collecting stories of unsolved vanishings, it become readily apparent that Triangle boasts no more disappearances that other parts of the world’s oceans.

The Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil's Triangle, is a region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean in which a number of aircraft and surface vessels are alleged to have disappeared in mysterious circumstances which fall beyond the boundaries of human error, piracy, equipment failure, or natural disasters. Popular culture has attributed some of these disappearances to the paranormal, a suspension of the laws of physics, or activity by extraterrestrial beings, but in many cases, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Documentation shows that many of the incidents have been inaccurately reported or embellished by later authors – something that happens far more often than most of us care to admit.

Of course, this is not to say that there have not been strange disappearances in the area, or that unsolved disappearances don’t exist, it’s just that the mythos surrounding the area is much greater than it deserves to be. 

The boundaries of the Bermuda Triangle are allegedly from the Atlantic coast of Florida to San Juan, Puerto Rico, and on to the mid-Atlantic island of Bermuda. Most of the alleged disappearances are concentrated along the southern boundary around the Bahamas and the Florida Straits.

But just how dangerous is this area? Apparently, not very…

The area is one of the most heavily-sailed shipping lanes in the world, with ships crossing through it daily for ports in the Americas, Europe, and the Caribbean Islands. Cruise ships are also plentiful, and pleasure craft regularly go back and forth between Florida and the islands. It is also a heavily flown route for commercial and private aircraft heading towards Florida, the Caribbean, and South America from points north. If this was some sort of paranormal “wormhole,” wouldn’t disappearances occur much more often?

That would certainly seem to be the case, so how did such stories get started in the first place? The seeds of the Bermuda Triangle legend were first planted by an Associated Press dispatch on September 16, 1950, in which reporter E.V. Jones took note of what he characterized as “mysterious disappearances” of ships and planes between the Florida coast and Bermuda. Two years later, in a FATE magazine article by George X. Sand recounted “a series of strange marine disappearances, each leaving no trace whatever, that have taken place in the last few years” in a “watery triangle bounded roughly by Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico.”

M.K. Jessup picked up some of the stories for his 1955 book, The Case for the UFO, which suggested that aliens were responsible for the disappearances, an idea that was echoed by other authors. It was Vincent H. Gaddis who actually coined the catchphrase that entered popular culture when he wrote an article for the February 1964 issue of Argosy called “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle.” Soon, nearly every new book on true mysteries included chapters on the Bermuda Triangle and claims began to be made that the area was populated by an intelligent, underwater civilization, which was stealing ships, plans and people from our world.

The first book to be written about the Triangle was a self-published work called Limbo of the Lost by John Wallace Spencer. It was re-published as a Bantam paperback in 1973 and attracted a huge audience, as did the 1970 documentary, The Devil’s Triangle. Bermuda Triangle fever peaked in 1974 with the publication of The Bermuda Triangle, a major bestseller by Charles Berlitz and J. Manson Valentine. Two other paperbacks, The Devil’s Triangle, by Richard Winer, and No Earthly Explanation, by John Wallace Spencer, also racked up impressive sales.

The heart of the Bermuda Triangle mystery seemed to revolve around the alleged “scores” of vessels that had vanished in the region. Among the most notable were:

Flight 19

United States Navy Flight 19 was a training flight of TBM Avenger bombers that went missing on December 5, 1945 while over the Atlantic. The squadron's flight path was scheduled to take them due east for one hundred and twenty miles, north for seventy-three miles, and then back over a final one hundred and twenty-mile leg that would return them to the naval base. The flight, however, never returned. The impression is given that the planes encountered unusual phenomena and anomalous compass readings, and that the flight took place on a calm day under the supervision of an experienced pilot, Lt. Charles Carroll Taylor. Adding to the intrigue is that the Navy's report of the accident was ascribed to "causes or reasons unknown." Adding to the mystery, a search and rescue Mariner aircraft with a thirteen-man crew was dispatched to aid the missing squadron, but the Mariner itself was never heard from again. Later, there was a report from a tanker cruising off the coast of Florida of a visible explosion at about the time the Mariner would have been on patrol. While the basic facts of this version of the story are essentially accurate, some important details are missing. The weather was becoming stormy by the end of the incident, and naval reports and written recordings of the conversations between Taylor and the other pilots of Flight 19 do not indicate magnetic problems.

Mary Celeste

The mysterious 1872 abandonment of the brigantine Mary Celeste is often but inaccurately connected to the Triangle (perhaps in an effort to give credibility to the Triangle by placing a real-life mystery there), the ship having been abandoned off the coast of Portugal. The event is possibly confused with the loss of a ship with a similar name, the Mari Celeste, a paddle steamer that hit a reef and quickly sank off the coast of Bermuda on September 13, 1864.

Ellen Austin

A ship called the Ellen Austin supposedly came across an abandoned vessel and attempted to salvage it in 1881. A crew was placed on board and the derelict was sailed for New York. According to the stories, the derelict disappeared while en route. A check of Lloyd's of London records proved the existence of a ship called the Meta, built in 1854. In 1880, the Meta was renamed Ellen Austin. There are no casualty listings for this vessel, or any vessel at that time, that would suggest a large number of missing men placed on board a ship that later disappeared.

USS Cyclops

The incident resulting in the single largest loss of life in the history of the United States Navy, not related to combat, occurred when USS Cyclops, under the command of Lt Cdr G. W. Worley, went missing without a trace with a crew of three hundred and nine men, sometime after March 4, 1918, after departing the island of Barbados. Although there is no strong evidence for any single theory, many independent theories exist, some blaming storms, some capsizing, and some suggesting that wartime enemy activity was to blame for the loss.

Theodosia Burr Alston

Theodosia Burr Alston was the daughter of former United States Vice President Aaron Burr. Her disappearance has been cited at least once in relation to the Triangle. She was a passenger on board the Patriot, which sailed from Charleston, South Carolina, to New York City on December 30, 1812, and was never heard from again. Both piracy and the War of 1812 have been offered as explanations and her ship was well outside the Triangle when it vanished. Once again, a prominent personality was included in the stories of the Triangle in order to give the location more credibility.

Joshua Slocum

The same thing was done with Joshua Slocum and his famous ship, the Spray. The once-derelict fishing boat was refitted as an ocean cruiser by Joshua Slocum and used by him to complete the first ever single-handed circumnavigation of the world, between 1895 and 1898. In 1909, Slocum set sail from Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts, bound for Venezuela. Neither he nor the Spray were ever seen again. There is no evidence they were in the Bermuda Triangle when they disappeared, nor is there any evidence of paranormal activity.

Carroll A. Deering

A five-masted schooner built in 1919, the Carroll A. Deering was found hard aground and abandoned at Diamond Shoals, near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, on January 31, 1921. Rumors at the time indicated the Deering was a victim of piracy, possibly connected with the illegal rum-running trade during Prohibition.

Douglas DC-3

On December 28, 1948, a Douglas DC-3 aircraft, number NC16002, disappeared while on a flight from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Miami. No trace of the aircraft or the thirty-two people onboard was ever found. From the documentation compiled by the Civil Aeronautics Board investigation, a possible key to the plane's disappearance was found, but barely touched upon by the Triangle writers: the plane's batteries were inspected and found to be low on charge, but ordered back into the plane without a recharge by the pilot while in San Juan. Whether or not this led to complete electrical failure will never be known.

Star Tiger and Star Ariel

G-AHNP Star Tiger disappeared on January 30, 1948 on a flight from the Azores to Bermuda and G-AGRE Star Ariel disappeared on January 17, 1949, on a flight from Bermuda to Kingston, Jamaica. Both were Avro Tudor IV passenger aircraft operated by British South American Airways.

SS Marine Sulphur Queen

The Marine Sulphur Queen, a T2 tanker converted from oil to sulfur carrier, was last heard from on February 4, 1963 with a crew of thirty-nine near the Florida Keys. The Marine Sulphur Queen was the first vessel mentioned in Vincent Gaddis' 1964 Argosy Magazine article, but he left it as having "sailed into the unknown," despite the Coast Guard report that not only documented the ship's badly-maintained history, but declared that it was an unseaworthy vessel that should never have left port. Other authors embellished the story even further, making it a part of Triangle lore.

Raifuku Maru

One of the more famous incidents that allegedly occurred in the Triangle took place in 1921, when the Japanese vessel Raifuku Maru went down with all hands after sending a distress signal which allegedly said, "Danger like dagger now. Come quick!" or "It's like a dagger, come quick!" This has led writers to speculate on what the "dagger" was, with a waterspout being the likely candidate. In reality, the ship was nowhere near the Triangle, nor was the word "dagger" a part of the ship's distress call, which was actually “Now very danger. Come quick.” The ship actually left Boston for Hamburg, Germany, on April 21, 1925 and got caught in a severe storm and sank in the North Atlantic with all hands.

Connemara IV

This vessel was a pleasure yacht that was found adrift in the Atlantic south of Bermuda on September 26, 1955. It is usually stated in the stories that the crew vanished while the yacht survived being at sea during three hurricanes. The 1955 Atlantic hurricane season lists only one storm coming near Bermuda towards the end of August, hurricane "Edith;" of the others, "Flora" was too far to the east, and "Katie" arrived after the yacht was recovered. It was confirmed that the Connemara IV was empty and in port when "Edith" may have caused the yacht to slip her moorings and drift out to sea.

Unfortunately, the articles and books on the subject showed little evidence of original research and it was obvious that each of the chroniclers were merely re-writing each other’s work. In 1975, Lawrence David Kusche, a research librarian from Arizona State University, published a devastating debunking of the Triangle with a book called The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved! He called it a manufactured mystery and did the archival digging that many other writers had neglected. Weather records, reports of official investigators, newspaper accounts and other sources showed that Triangle literature had played very loose with the evidence. 

In the book, he concluded that the number of ships and aircraft reported missing in the area was not significantly greater, proportionally speaking, than in any other part of the ocean. Also, in an area often hit by tropical storms, the number of disappearances that did occur was not disproportionate, unlikely or mysterious. Oddly, though, most of the Triangle writers failed to mention such storms.  He also found that the number of disappearances had been exaggerated by sloppy research. A boat listed as missing would be reported, but its eventual (if belated) return to port may not have been mentioned. Other disappearances that were cited never occurred at all. For example, one plane crash was said to have taken place in 1937 off Daytona Beach, Florida, in front of hundreds of witnesses but a check of the local papers revealed nothing.

Other, official sources supported Kusche’s findings. In April 1975, Lloyd’s of London noted that, according to their records, four hundred and twenty eight vessels had been reported missing throughout the world since 1955. “Our intelligence service,” officials at the legendary insurance company wrote, “can find no evidence to support the claim that the ‘Bermuda Triangle’ has more losses than elsewhere. This finding is upheld by the United States Coast Guard whose computer-based records of casualties in the Atlantic go back to 1958.”

In the wake of these statements, only silence was heard from the proponents of the Bermuda Triangle mystery. They were unable to mount a credible defense and because of this, the claims that the area was an authentic anomaly began to suffer. Despite occasional reappearances in supermarket tabloids and the long memories of paranormal buffs who read about the region when they were first getting interested in the unexplained as children, the Bermuda Triangle survives as only a footnote in the history of passing sensations.

Or at least that’s how it should be…