Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: And I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, have you ever heard
Speaker 1: someone thinking they were a comedian get on a p
Speaker 1: a like at a store and stage Judge Crater call
Speaker 1: your office? It rings a bell? Yeah, I have vague
Speaker 1: recollections of it, but it seems like weird things when
Speaker 1: I was very young or foe memory. But people who
Speaker 1: have heard that or didn't know that was a thing.
Speaker 1: It was a thing people would do. Comedians would also
Speaker 1: use that line, and it's actually a joke that's housed
Speaker 1: in a historical reference. Yeah. I think I thought it
Speaker 1: was from television, like I had something to do with
Speaker 1: Mrs Wiggins or something. No, So, the vanishing of Judge
Speaker 1: Joseph forced Crater is one of our most requested topics.
Speaker 1: Lots people want to hear about it, and it's considered
Speaker 1: one of the largest missing person cases in the US
Speaker 1: UH in history, and it was one of the biggest
Speaker 1: news stories of the nineteen thirties, probably second only to
Speaker 1: the Lindberg Baby, which happened a couple of years later.
Speaker 1: And it's actually feel decades of speculations about what exactly
Speaker 1: happened to this New York State Supreme Court justice, because
Speaker 1: there are a million question marks and as we'll talk
Speaker 1: about a little bit more later, and as we've talked
Speaker 1: about in many other episodes, a lot of contradicting accounts
Speaker 1: of what actually happened. So we'll do a very brief
Speaker 1: kind of biographical where he started, but really we're going
Speaker 1: to focus on his career in this vanishing. So he
Speaker 1: was born in Pennsylvania on the fifth of January eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty nine. His parents were Frank Ellsworth Creator and Layla
Speaker 1: Virginia Montague. And he was named for his grandfather. And
Speaker 1: he worked his way through Lafayette College and Columbia Law School.
Speaker 1: He took clerk jobs, uh, and you know, kind of
Speaker 1: tried to work in law offices as he was working
Speaker 1: on his education, and from day one he seemed to
Speaker 1: always cultivate professional and political connections. Uh. And he eventually
Speaker 1: opened his own law office at one twenty Broadway, and
Speaker 1: that was in what was, I believe at the time,
Speaker 1: one of the largest office buildings in the country, and
Speaker 1: it was a little bit prestigious. In nineteen sixteen, he
Speaker 1: represented Stella Wheeler in a divorce and later the they
Speaker 1: got married in nineteen seventeen, and that was a week
Speaker 1: after Wheeler's divorce was finalized. Kind of found love at
Speaker 1: the law off and married her divorce lawyer. Early on
Speaker 1: in his career, Crater joined the Cayuga Democratic Club, which
Speaker 1: was the seat of another group you may have heard of,
Speaker 1: which is the Tammany Society. Sometimes it's also called Tammany Hall,
Speaker 1: which was a New York political organization that had actually
Speaker 1: originated in the late seventeen hundreds, and as time went on,
Speaker 1: it came to be associated with corrupt voting practices, bribery,
Speaker 1: and other political corruption. Uh. The phrase vote early and
Speaker 1: vote often was heavily associated with the Tammany Society, particularly
Speaker 1: in the late eighteen hundreds, although I don't believe that
Speaker 1: is where originated, but the group continued to be linked
Speaker 1: to corruption well into the nineteen hundreds. So Creator was
Speaker 1: kind of joining in with this group of people that
Speaker 1: had some kind of seed connections. There's even a Doctor
Speaker 1: Seu's political cartoon from ninety one featuring the phrase vote
Speaker 1: early and vote often and a cat wearing a Tammany sweater.
Speaker 1: So widely recognized as a little bit dicey political arena there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So in ninety State Supreme Court Justice Robert F. Wagner
Speaker 1: Senior appointed Creator as his secretary. And at this point
Speaker 1: Creator was also teaching law at Fordham and n y
Speaker 1: U as an adjunct professor. Yeah, so he was getting
Speaker 1: in with, you know, kind of the heavy hitters in
Speaker 1: the justice system at this point, and he you know,
Speaker 1: had various political appointments that came his way and opportunities
Speaker 1: that came his way, and they were you know, believed
Speaker 1: to be uh favor based or possibly bride based in
Speaker 1: many accounts. But the one interesting kind of counter to
Speaker 1: that is that even though people don't necessarily contradict that
Speaker 1: being the case, that they weren't always gotten through the
Speaker 1: most noble means. Uh. He was viewed as really quite
Speaker 1: a good lawyer and in fact, an excellent professor by
Speaker 1: many people. Uh. And even though he was doing all
Speaker 1: of these uh kind of favor appointments and you know,
Speaker 1: possibly corruptly gained positions, he was still making most of
Speaker 1: his income from actually practicing law. But his business was
Speaker 1: booming because he had all of these political connections. So
Speaker 1: there's kind of almost a um, there's a lot of interplay. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a lot. It's like the layers of an onion,
Speaker 1: but all the layers interconnect, sort of tests ract style,
Speaker 1: like they're all kind of feeding each other from different angles.
Speaker 1: On April eighth, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who at that point
Speaker 1: was the governor, appointed creator to a vacancy on the
Speaker 1: State Supreme Court. So there's already rumors going on that
Speaker 1: he actually bought his way into the position by paying
Speaker 1: off the Tammany bosses. There are stories that indicate that
Speaker 1: he had withdrawn twenty dollars from his bank just before
Speaker 1: the appointment. It's not completely confirmed, but if so, that
Speaker 1: would support the rumor that there was a big payoff
Speaker 1: going on. Yeah, and that was it a lot of money.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a lot of money for somebody now,
Speaker 1: but it was even more a lot of money thirty
Speaker 1: to just go pull out twenty dollars, Yes, a lot.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna jump right to his disappearance because it
Speaker 1: happened very shortly after he was appointed to the State
Speaker 1: Supreme Court. So in August three of ninety Judge Crater
Speaker 1: was on vacation in Maine with his wife, Stella Uh
Speaker 1: and there they had a vacation house there, and he
Speaker 1: abruptly left to return to New Yor York City. And
Speaker 1: he had done this previously a couple of weeks or
Speaker 1: a week before, and then came back, and so again
Speaker 1: he was kind of leaving abruptly, and he had promised
Speaker 1: her that he would return within the week so that
Speaker 1: they could finish out their vacation together. On the morning
Speaker 1: of August six, Joe Creator went through his office in
Speaker 1: the State Supreme Court chambers and he destroyed all kinds
Speaker 1: of documents and then also packed up other stuff into
Speaker 1: folders and briefcases, and he moved a lot of documents
Speaker 1: into his Fifth Avenue apartment. And he also directed his
Speaker 1: clerk to withdraw five thousand dollars from his bank, and
Speaker 1: he arranged for a ticket to that evening's Broadway performance
Speaker 1: of Dancing Partners, which was a show that had opened
Speaker 1: just the day before. That evening, Creator left Billy Hassa's
Speaker 1: chop House on West forty fifth Street after having dinner
Speaker 1: with a show girl named Sally lou Ritz and his
Speaker 1: friend and fellow lawyer, William Klein. He headed off allegedly
Speaker 1: going to the theater, and the theater ticket that he
Speaker 1: had booked earlier in the day was used, though witnesses
Speaker 1: said it was most definitely not Judge Crater who actually
Speaker 1: used it. And then he was never seen again. There's
Speaker 1: just four months after his appointment to the State Supreme
Speaker 1: Court and he had just vanished, yeah, completely into thin air.
Speaker 1: And then before we get to the investigation and kind
Speaker 1: of what has grown out of this vanishing, do you
Speaker 1: want to take a moment and talk about a new sponsor.
Speaker 1: So it will sound completely odd initially, and it is odd,
Speaker 1: but there's some sort of explanations for it. But Creater
Speaker 1: wasn't actually reported missing for almost a month. His wife,
Speaker 1: who he had left in Maine, thought he was in
Speaker 1: the city, and she didn't really grow concerned until uh
Speaker 1: the sixteenth, which point at which point it had been
Speaker 1: about ten days since she had seen him and she
Speaker 1: hadn't been able to contact him. And some of his
Speaker 1: friends and associates in the city initially thought he was
Speaker 1: still in Maine with his wife, so they weren't thinking
Speaker 1: there was anything amiss. But then uh, it became apparent
Speaker 1: that he was m i a when he didn't show
Speaker 1: up for court, when court was back in session. Uh.
Speaker 1: And initially his friends that had already realized that he
Speaker 1: wasn't immediately available, they kind of started to investigate themselves,
Speaker 1: and they chose not to tell his wife because he
Speaker 1: didn't want to alarm her. Yeah, this seems bizarre to
Speaker 1: like a really modern ear because now cell phones are ubiquitous. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but landline phones were not ubiquitous at this point. Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: so you would go days and days without hearing from someone.
Speaker 1: There were many many households that didn't even have phones
Speaker 1: in them, So it's not completely unheard of that a
Speaker 1: person would be used to not hearing from their partner
Speaker 1: for that long. The very thought is terrifying to me.
Speaker 1: I don't get a text from my husband by a
Speaker 1: certain point in the day and I start freaking out,
Speaker 1: like something bad has happened. Uh. And it wasn't until
Speaker 1: August a four moal investigation began, so at that point
Speaker 1: it had been about twenty days. And even then it
Speaker 1: didn't really hit the newspapers and become public knowledge until
Speaker 1: September three, And at that point the news was broken
Speaker 1: that Judge Crater was officially missing, so the official investigation
Speaker 1: started and once that was made public all kinds of
Speaker 1: less than noble things, a lot of which had been
Speaker 1: rumored for a really long time came to light. He
Speaker 1: was involved in brokering deals to buy and sell judge ships,
Speaker 1: and he definitely had a taste for dalliances with show girls,
Speaker 1: although a lot of people characterize his marriage to Stella
Speaker 1: as being very devoted. So yeah, and I never know
Speaker 1: how much of that is, um, people kind of trying
Speaker 1: to paint a nice picture of this guy that they
Speaker 1: knew and they were friends with, or how much of
Speaker 1: it really is that he seemed to have, you know,
Speaker 1: both a very steadfast devotion to his wife and a
Speaker 1: tendency to have affairs on the side, which I suppose
Speaker 1: is possible. Yeah, I would say that, especially for someone
Speaker 1: in a position of power. Uh, you know, he would
Speaker 1: certainly have available to him a lot of options, a
Speaker 1: temptation rich environment, so to speak. Uh. There was also
Speaker 1: a news story that ran briefly in September of nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: so just a little while after Judge Crater vanished that
Speaker 1: Sally lou Ritz, who remember was the show girl that
Speaker 1: he had dinner with the night he vanished, had also disappeared. Uh,
Speaker 1: and this caused people to immediately speculate that she had
Speaker 1: been killed by someone to keep her quiet. But apparently
Speaker 1: uh that report was published in haste because of all
Speaker 1: reporters couldn't locate her for a day or two. It
Speaker 1: soon turned out that she was in fact in her
Speaker 1: parents home in Ohio, perfectly safe, and she was interviewed there.
Speaker 1: So initially there was an even seedier thing that people
Speaker 1: thought was coming to light, and then it turned out
Speaker 1: to be nothing. But on a similar story, June Bryce,
Speaker 1: who was room to be his favorite show girl, did
Speaker 1: vanish in late nineteen thirty but she resurfaced later in
Speaker 1: an insane asylum and that's where she lived for the
Speaker 1: rest of her life. In early nineteen thirty one, so
Speaker 1: still just a few months after Judge Crater had vanished,
Speaker 1: his wife Stella allegedly found a two inch thick envelope
Speaker 1: in a bureau in the couple's Fifth Avenue apartment, and
Speaker 1: this envelope contained insurance policies and six thousand dollars in cash,
Speaker 1: as well as a letter that was written by Joe
Speaker 1: Crater which listed out people who owed him money. Uh
Speaker 1: and and was very insistent that this information was confidential,
Speaker 1: and presumably, according to many people's assessment of the situation,
Speaker 1: he had left this information for Stella so that she
Speaker 1: could collect on these debts to support herself and maintain
Speaker 1: her lifestyle. And this raised all kinds of other questions,
Speaker 1: like how did the police miss this envelope during their
Speaker 1: searches of the apartment when they were investigating, right like
Speaker 1: during a missing person investigation, to do pretty thorough combing
Speaker 1: of their personal effects, one would think that they looked
Speaker 1: in the bureau, but apparently not, so it could have
Speaker 1: been overlooked, but they're The Other thing that rang very
Speaker 1: oddly to Creator's friends about this discovery of this envelope
Speaker 1: was that they insisted that the judge always carried his
Speaker 1: insurance policies and his other important documents on his person.
Speaker 1: Uh so if he had been snatched theoretically, which sounds
Speaker 1: completely bizarre to me. But I'm laughing, and that's why
Speaker 1: you're saying that, because I'm laughing at this idea. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just I can't imagine carrying important documents with me everywhere.
Speaker 1: I'm like, that's not safe at all. I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: have my birth certificate on my person at the time,
Speaker 1: So they're uh you know. Assertion is that if he
Speaker 1: had truly been you know, kidnapped or plucked from his
Speaker 1: normal goings on, he would have had those documents with
Speaker 1: him and not tucked carefully in an envelope left for
Speaker 1: his wife. And so this fact, as well as the
Speaker 1: discovery of several other small personal effects and the Fifth
Speaker 1: Avenue apartment that Creator was known to carry on his
Speaker 1: person at all times, uh, and they were just sitting
Speaker 1: in the apartment. So this fed the theory that Judge
Speaker 1: Creator had in fact chosen to vanish rather than having
Speaker 1: been the victim of a crime. So his wife had
Speaker 1: this ongoing struggle to collect on the insurance policies, and
Speaker 1: as a result of that, in nineteen thirty nine, Joseph
Speaker 1: Creator was legally declared dead. In nineteen seventy nine, the
Speaker 1: missing person's case was officially closed. Yeah, it's without him
Speaker 1: being declared dead, life insurance policies would not pay out
Speaker 1: because he could just show up again and it could
Speaker 1: all have been a scam I soap plot. Well it
Speaker 1: kind of was. There was a whole other trial but
Speaker 1: went on with Stella that really dragged on, and it
Speaker 1: sounds just miserable uh So. An interesting point in terms
Speaker 1: of how Stella handled things after the disappearance and long
Speaker 1: after she had settled these life insurance issues, is that
Speaker 1: for more than three decades, so every anniversary of her
Speaker 1: husband's disappearance, Stella Crater would walk into a bar and
Speaker 1: Greenwich village and she would order to drinks and she
Speaker 1: would toast good luck, Joe, wherever you are, and she
Speaker 1: would drink one of the drinks and she would leave
Speaker 1: the other drink untouched and then leave, which in a
Speaker 1: way sounds very sort of wistful and sand and romantic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it makes me feel a little teerious. But then the
Speaker 1: part of me that wonders if she long suspected or
Speaker 1: even knew that he had arranged his own vanishing, if
Speaker 1: it's not kind of a like, wherever you are, a jerk,
Speaker 1: I'm drinking in your honor um. But that might just
Speaker 1: be my cynical side coming out. So we have lots
Speaker 1: of theories about what happened, and yeah, which is what
Speaker 1: happens with missing persons. Yeah, so there are so called craterists,
Speaker 1: and these are unsolved mystery enthusiasts who study all these
Speaker 1: pieces of this puzzle to try to come up with
Speaker 1: the most logical explanation for what happened, and they have
Speaker 1: come up with a lot of explanations throughout the years,
Speaker 1: and even people who don't identify as part of that group.
Speaker 1: Some of the theories have included that he was a
Speaker 1: victim of a hit because of a mob connection and
Speaker 1: some sort of deal gone wrong, ran off with a
Speaker 1: show girl. Yeah, since it it was at this point,
Speaker 1: you know, once he disappeared, it became very public knowledge,
Speaker 1: and in fact, he had had a lot of affairs
Speaker 1: with show girls, So perhaps he are you in n
Speaker 1: O F T right? Uh? The other one, this one
Speaker 1: I kind of find hilarious and I don't know why,
Speaker 1: because it's very silly. It's far fetched. There are some
Speaker 1: the assert that he somehow became amnesia, like he had
Speaker 1: amnesia and couldn't remember who he was or what he
Speaker 1: was doing. Because soap opera, Because soap opera, which so
Speaker 1: much of the actual story is very soapished, you can
Speaker 1: see where people might land there. There's also the theory
Speaker 1: that he committed suicide. Yeah. Uh. There's also a theory
Speaker 1: that he was maybe killed by a blackmailer for not
Speaker 1: being them off. There's also a theory that he landed
Speaker 1: at Polly Adler's brothel, so allegedly, according to these early
Speaker 1: drafts of a memoir that Adler wrote much later, she
Speaker 1: wrote that Crater died in her bordello and then she
Speaker 1: had had his body removed by friends. Um, we don't
Speaker 1: really have these alleged drafts though, right. Uh, we're kind
Speaker 1: of taking someone's word for it that they, Oh, I've
Speaker 1: seen these drafts, but I cannot. But now they're gone
Speaker 1: and destroyed. Uh, so we don't know. That's another that's
Speaker 1: another kind of soap operated one that people like to
Speaker 1: talk about, that he died in the arms of a
Speaker 1: prostitute and then there was a big cover up. And
Speaker 1: for decades, the New York Police Department received letters and
Speaker 1: phone calls from people all over the US and the
Speaker 1: world claiming to have seen Judge Crater, and particularly as
Speaker 1: important anniversaries of the disappearance, would you know be coming
Speaker 1: up or just passed, so, like at the twenty year mark,
Speaker 1: they get a ton of these calls. At the thirty
Speaker 1: year mark, to get a ton of these calls. And
Speaker 1: he's been reported as being seen everywhere from walking down
Speaker 1: Park Avenue on jets to other countries, prospecting in California,
Speaker 1: hurting sheep in the Pacific Northwest. I guess someone thought
Speaker 1: maybe he had a n for a simpler life. Uh
Speaker 1: in a mental hospital in Missouri, playing dice in Atlanta,
Speaker 1: running small time casino games in North Africa. Uh, just
Speaker 1: hanging out in Havana in the South Pacific, in Shanghai,
Speaker 1: basically anywhere and everywhere on the planet, doing any possible
Speaker 1: thing you could be doing. He has been reported as
Speaker 1: having been witnessed doing and being that thing in that place,
Speaker 1: and he's like a judicial Elvis. Yes, that's exactly what
Speaker 1: I was thinking. But I was reading all of these
Speaker 1: weird accounts that people have reported through the years. So
Speaker 1: there have even been some staged hopeses. There was one
Speaker 1: in the nineteen seventies where police were called to a
Speaker 1: bar on New York's East Side and they found a
Speaker 1: man dressed as Creator as he had appeared when he
Speaker 1: vanished in nine thirty. And there are lots of video cameras. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the person that was playing Creator in this staged
Speaker 1: hoax also looked like Creater would have looked in the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties, so it was clearly not the same person
Speaker 1: when we get into the time traveler theory, he was
Speaker 1: a doctor. Um. Uh. So before we get to another
Speaker 1: development that happened in the two thousands, much more recent thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we will pause for just a moment for a word
Speaker 1: from our sponsor. Yes. So now we get to a
Speaker 1: very interesting letter. In April two thousand five, Stella Ferrucci,
Speaker 1: Good of Belle Rose, New York, died at the age
Speaker 1: of nine. And this would have been a completely unremarkable circumstance,
Speaker 1: but she left behind a letter that reignited the Judge
Speaker 1: Crater case. And in an envelope that uh she had
Speaker 1: left behind that said do not open until my death. Uh,
Speaker 1: Ferruci had left a note that claimed that her late
Speaker 1: husband had learned the actual truth about what had happened
Speaker 1: to Creator and who had murdered him. According to this note,
Speaker 1: a New York Police Department policeman named Charles Burns and
Speaker 1: Burns taxi driver brother Frank, conspired with other people to
Speaker 1: kill the judge and bury his remains under the boardwalk
Speaker 1: in Coney Island near West eighth Street. And one interesting
Speaker 1: point of note, uh, and this comes up a lot,
Speaker 1: particularly as we're looking through some of this information that
Speaker 1: was revealed in the note is that various media reports
Speaker 1: of the contents of this note, even though this is
Speaker 1: a fairly modern event UH, as well as other aspects
Speaker 1: of the creator disappearance that have been reported through the years,
Speaker 1: have been consistently inconsistent. UH. In some stories about the
Speaker 1: Ferruci Good note UH, it's reported that her husband was
Speaker 1: actually involved in the murder, and in other reportings of
Speaker 1: this note they say that her husband was simply told
Speaker 1: about it by Charles Burns while they were having drinks
Speaker 1: in a bar. So Frank Burns allegedly picked Crater up
Speaker 1: in his cab from the chop house that we referenced
Speaker 1: earlier on West forty fifth Street, then stopped a few
Speaker 1: blocks later, and two more men got into the cab.
Speaker 1: The car then headed to Coney Island, where they were
Speaker 1: joined by two more men, and that's when the judge,
Speaker 1: according to this letter, was killed and buried. And this
Speaker 1: is where we need to point out another inconsistency in
Speaker 1: the various accounts of the last time that Judge Crater
Speaker 1: was seen. If you look through any of the various
Speaker 1: uh you know, books about it, and there have been
Speaker 1: many newspaper accounts, etcetera. Some report that witnesses saw him
Speaker 1: getting into a cab, which at least sort of connects
Speaker 1: to the idea that Frank Burns could have picked him
Speaker 1: up in a cab, but others insists that there is
Speaker 1: no such witness testimony that he walked away from the
Speaker 1: chop house and did not get into a cab. So
Speaker 1: that's another kind of pebble to turn over in your
Speaker 1: mind on this about how inconsistent everything is. Although we've
Speaker 1: talked about lots of different motives that people could have
Speaker 1: for wanting to kill a judge who was involved in
Speaker 1: the various activities, there was no motive mentioned in the note. UH.
Speaker 1: There was for fact checkers, Charles Burns that was on
Speaker 1: the police force from ninety uh and he was assigned
Speaker 1: to the sixtieth Precinct, which was in Coney Island. So
Speaker 1: there is some substantiation of some of the information in
Speaker 1: this note, But then other things are a lot murkier. Right.
Speaker 1: There are some reports that indicate that in the fifties,
Speaker 1: when the New York Aquarium was being built, remains were
Speaker 1: found under the boardwalk. Other sources say that there's no
Speaker 1: such evidence and that this is just a rumor, and
Speaker 1: since there hasn't been any kind of big announcement that
Speaker 1: creators remains were found. Either way, the case remains unsolved.
Speaker 1: If there had been a body unearthed in the fifties,
Speaker 1: you would think the first person that most people would
Speaker 1: think of would have been that it was the famous
Speaker 1: missing judge. Yeah, that's another one that news outlets will say,
Speaker 1: like there were, uh, there was a body found in
Speaker 1: the fifties. We've called the police for confirmation, and others
Speaker 1: will say there are rumors that there was a body
Speaker 1: found there in the fifties, but we've called the police
Speaker 1: and they firmly deny this. So it's kind of interesting
Speaker 1: and a little bit confusing. In the words of Simon Rifkin,
Speaker 1: who was a lawyer who worked with Joe Crater and
Speaker 1: I think some degree viewed him as a mentor, and
Speaker 1: Rifkin actually signed the form that formally opened the investigation
Speaker 1: into the disappearance, uh, he described him as saying, quote,
Speaker 1: Judge Crater was a man of such commanding appearance he
Speaker 1: couldn't possibly get lost in a crown. And Rifkin is
Speaker 1: not alone in that sort of description. This was a
Speaker 1: man who was very dapper. He was always well dressed.
Speaker 1: Many people would have called him handsome, uh you know,
Speaker 1: a tall, commanding presence, not someone who could just vanish.
Speaker 1: One of the problems it's ongoing in this whole mystery
Speaker 1: is that there's all kinds of obfuscation and spin that's
Speaker 1: been put on the case through the years. As many many,
Speaker 1: many authors and different people who have a little part
Speaker 1: in the mystery have published their own accounts of the disappearance. So,
Speaker 1: as with any event, I witness accounts also contradict each other.
Speaker 1: And there's also the possibility that people are purposefully bending
Speaker 1: the truth. Uh yeah, I mean it's one of those
Speaker 1: things where no, no, my account is the correct account.
Speaker 1: I am writing the new version of what really happened,
Speaker 1: and it's supported by these things. But there's always something different.
Speaker 1: So what really happened to Judge Crater in n I
Speaker 1: would say at this point it's a safe bet we
Speaker 1: will never actually know. For all we know he lived
Speaker 1: out his life somewhere very happily elsewhere, or he's been
Speaker 1: at the bottom of a body of water for a
Speaker 1: long time, or any number of other things. I just
Speaker 1: don't know. So yes, that's the Judge creator disappearing. That
Speaker 1: kind of leaves more questions than answers, unfortunately. But sometimes
Speaker 1: when so many people really want us to talk about something,
Speaker 1: we get pretty invested in wanting to deliver on that,
Speaker 1: even though we don't wind up at a satisfactory mystery
Speaker 1: solving conclusion. Yeah, there isn't any I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people that were very into the case. We're probably
Speaker 1: so excited in two thousand five when that letter appeared,
Speaker 1: possibly solved it, but it really didn't unfortunately. Yeah, do
Speaker 1: you have some listener mail go along with this episode.
Speaker 1: It doesn't really go along with this episode, but it's
Speaker 1: a fun listener mail and it is from our listener John.
Speaker 1: He says, Hello, ladies, I write to you from Australia,
Speaker 1: where I have just listened to your podcast on Zenobia.
Speaker 1: What first attracted my interest is that my grandmother, who
Speaker 1: lives in the city of Perth on the West Coast,
Speaker 1: lives near as Enobia Street. This was the only other
Speaker 1: time I had heard the name before, so naturally I
Speaker 1: thought there might be a connection. You can imagine my
Speaker 1: growing excitement as I learned that not only was it
Speaker 1: the same Zenobia, but this was confirmed by the fact
Speaker 1: that all surrounding st It's where other historical figures from
Speaker 1: her era Aurelian, Solomon, and Cleopatra. The icing on the
Speaker 1: cake was to learn that the ancient colony she ruled
Speaker 1: over is also the name of the suburb where these
Speaker 1: streets are found, Palm my Ira. After many decades of
Speaker 1: walking these streets in this suburb, I had no idea
Speaker 1: of any of their significance or historical connection until now.
Speaker 1: I've already passed on zenobious story to most of my
Speaker 1: family members. Not only was this stuff we missed in
Speaker 1: history class, but stuff we certainly missed on our GPS
Speaker 1: as well. I love that me too. Uh. If you
Speaker 1: would like to write us about discovering the streets near
Speaker 1: you have historical names or anything else, or if you
Speaker 1: know what, if you know where Judge Crater is, you
Speaker 1: can do that at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. Uh.
Speaker 1: You can also connect with us in many other ways. Uh.
Speaker 1: You can connect with us on Facebook dot com, slash
Speaker 1: missed in History. We're still on Twitter at missed in History.
Speaker 1: We're available at missed in History dot tumbler dot com.
Speaker 1: And we have a whole new pinterest at pinterest dot
Speaker 1: com slash missed in History with many many boards that
Speaker 1: have many, many different categories of historical things to look at.
Speaker 1: Obviously we had one board on the how stuff Works page.
Speaker 1: Now we have many boards, heard of boards any board.
Speaker 1: If you would like to learn something sort of related
Speaker 1: to our podcast today, you can go to our website
Speaker 1: and type in the words missing person and one of
Speaker 1: the articles you will get is how to volunteer for
Speaker 1: missing persons. So YouTube could become part of a group
Speaker 1: that helps investigate and search for clues. If you would
Speaker 1: like to learn more about that, or almost anything else
Speaker 1: you can think of, you can do that at our website,
Speaker 1: which is how stone works dot com for more on
Speaker 1: this and thousands of other topics. Because it how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com. This episode of stuff you Missed in
Speaker 1: History classes brought to you by Linda dot com. You
Speaker 1: can learn at it Linda dot com and on line
Speaker 1: learning company with more than seventy seven thousand video tutorials
Speaker 1: that teach software, creative and business skills. Membership starts at
Speaker 1: twenty five dollars a month and provides unlimited seven access
Speaker 1: to top quality video courses topped by expert instructors. With
Speaker 1: real world experience. Listeners of stuff you missed in history
Speaker 1: class can trial Inda dot com free for seven days
Speaker 1: by visiting Linda dot com slash history stuff