Justice Joseph Force Crater was appointed to the New York State Appellate Court and sworn in by Justice Victor J. Dowling on April 8, 1930. Just four months later, he vanished without a trace. His disappearance remains an unsolved mystery.
On August 6, 1930, in midtown New York, a stout, middle-aged man in a dark suit and Panama hat hailed a taxi outside a restaurant. As he departed, he waved to a friend. This man was the 41-year-old State Supreme Court Justice, Joseph Force Crater, who was never seen again.
The disappearance of Judge Crater remains a quintessential American mystery. Investigations costing over a quarter of a million dollars yielded no solid leads. He was reportedly sighted globally, from a New York iceman claiming Crater managed a tavern he supplied, to a policeman in Turkey. Although Crater was declared legally dead on June 6, 1939, efforts to solve this missing person mystery persisted. Even in the 1960s, a backyard in Yonkers, N.Y was excavated in search of his remains.
Read more [here.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Force_Crater)