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Joseph Force Crater (January 5, 1889 – on or after August 6, 1930) was a judge in New York City who disappeared on the night of August 6, 1930. He was last seen leaving a restaurant on 45th Street. He had stated earlier that he was planning to attend a Broadway show. His disappearance became one of the most famous in American history and pop culture, and earned him the title of "The Missingest Man in New York".

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, Stella married her attorney. By all accounts, they appeared to be a happy and devoted couple.

In the summer of 1930, Judge 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 but instead of dealing with business, he made a trip to Atlantic City in the company of a showgirl instead. 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.

The investigation was at a standstill and most assumed that the judge had ducked out just one step ahead of someone who was looking for him. 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. But if the judge did go into hiding with a trunk load of cash, how do we explain what Sally Crater discovered in her apartment in January 1931? Hidden in a bureau, she found several uncashed checks, stocks, bonds, three life insurance policies and a note from Judge Crater himself. The note listed his financial assets and then added: “I am very whary (weary). Joe.” If the judge had simply run off, wouldn’t he have cashed these checks and have cashed in the stocks? And why would he have made his disappearance seem like a man who was depressed was carrying it out?

Emil K. Ellis, who represented Stella Crater in litigation against her husband’s insurance company, argued that Crater had been murdered in a blackmail scheme engineered through June Brice, a showgirl. Ellis said the large sum of money her husband had withdrawn the day before he disappeared was probably a payoff. He believed a gangster friend of the showgirl then killed the judge when he refused to give her more money. One incident lent this plausibility: on the evening of his disappearance, Judge Crater had been seen talking to Brice, who vanished the day before the grand jury had convened. In 1948, investigators working for Ellis tracked her to a Long Island mental hospital: she was hopelessly demented. Others tied Crater to Vivian Gordon, a prostitute and blackmailer found garroted in the Bronx’s Van Cortlandt Park on Feb. 26, 1931. As seems to be often the case, the tabloids suggested that "a red hot diary" found in her apartment listed her wealthy politician and businessmen friends, including Joe Crater.

In August 2005, 75 years to the month after Crater disappeared, a new wrinkle surfaced with the death of 91-year-old Stella Ferrucci-Good in New York City.

Among her belongings in a safe-deposit box was a letter marked for opening only after her death. The letter said that, over drinks long ago, her husband had heard the names of Crater’s killers. She named them (investigators have followed up with varying results), and said Crater was buried under the Boardwalk, beneath the current site of the New York Aquarium.

Maybe he sleeps with the fishes after all.