I can not prove what happened to Judge Joe Crater on the night of August 6, 1930. I know he had enjoyed a dinner at The Chop House with a chorus girl and a male friend. Afterward he climbed into a taxi and seems to have simply disappeared from the face of the earth. But I have a pretty good theory about what became of him.
This story comes together from three separate sources; first from Stephen Ellis, the son of Emil Ellis, one of the lawyers who represented Mrs. Stella Crater in her lawsuits against the insurance companies; the second source is from a letter marked “Not to be opened until after my death”, left behind in the first decade of the 21st century by a 91 year old widow; and third source is from news stories published in the 1950’s. Each source is independent of the others, and although they would not pass muster in a court of law, in history research they are about as close as we are ever going to get to the truth. And at the center of all three is the infamous prohibition gangster, Legs Diamond.
The original Jack “Legs” Diamond was a thug, a sociopath and a killer and almost as famous for whom he betrayed as how he died. He got into big time crime working for “the Brain”, Arnold Rothstein, the man who fixed the 1919 World Series. By 1930, the year that Judge Crater disappeared, Jack’s web of speakeasies in lower Manhattan was under siege from the rapacious Dutch Schultz mob, based in Harlem. There had already been three attempts on Diamond’s life by the Schultz mob. In fact he earned his nickname "Legs" by avoiding these murder attempts.
Jack needed to reestablish control, and that included his control of the courts. And the usual method of controlling judges was to use women, in this case a showgirl named Connie Markus.
Connie Markus was one of a "chorus" of girls who worked for Jack Diamond. And she was also an occasional mistress of “Good Time Joe Crater”. Under instructions from Jack Diamond, it is alleged, Connie asked Judge Crater to reverse on appeal some lower court decisions which had hurt Jack Diamond.
According to the account by Stephen Ellis, it was papers related to those cases that Judge Crater went through in his office on August 6, 1930. Those papers had gone into the two locked brief cases he had left the office with that afternoon. And the $5,100 in cash he left with was meant as a payoff to Diamond. With the feds and reformers sniffing around, Judge Crater felt he could not decide the cases the way Diamond wanted them decided, not without drawing attention and raising suspicions.
That evening, when Connie told Diamond of Judge Crater’s attempt at a payoff, Jack could not afford to let the cases drop, not with the Schultz mob sniffing at his heels. At some point in the conversation Connie must have told Diamond about Crater’s plans to have dinner at the Chop House that night. And Jack decided to increase the pressure on the judge.
That evening, when Connie told Diamond of Judge Crater’s attempt at a payoff, Jack could not afford to let the cases drop, not with the Schultz mob sniffing at his heels. At some point in the conversation Connie must have told Diamond about Crater’s plans to have dinner at the Chop House that night. And Jack decided to increase the pressure on the judge.According to the letter and other documents left behind after her death, by Stella Ferrucci-Good of Queens, New York, when Judge Crater stepped into the cab on West forty-fifth street that night, the driver was a Murder Incorporated "button man" employed by Jack Diamond named Frank Burn. 
Just up the street the cab unexpectedly pulled over and two more men quickly climbed in. One was Charles Burn, a police officer and Frank’s brother. The other was Robert Good, Stella Ferrucci’s husband. Their intent was to scare the hell out of the judge, rough him up a little and let him know what would happen to him if he did not play ball with Diamond. But things did not work out that way. Crater thought it was a mugging and he fought to get out of the cab.
The two mobsters fought back, trying to keep Crater in the cab, and at some point in the struggle, Judge Joe Crater was killed. It is after the Judge was killed that the stories separate again. Stephen Ellis, relating the story he heard from his father, claims that the thugs drove Crater’s body to a crematorium in New Jersey, where it was disposed of, and that may be the truth. But I tend to believe the version recounted in Stella Frrucci’s letter, which says that Crater’s body was buried that night at the end of West Eighth Street, under the Coney Island boardwalk.
I believe that version because in 1956, while digging the foundation for the new New York City Aquarium, several human remains where uncovered under the Boardwalk near eighth street. Without DNA technology the remains were unidentifiable.
They were eventually reburied in pine coffins by inmates from Riker’s Island, just a few more of the 2,000 dead buried in the Potters Field on Hart Island each year, in unmarked mass graves; stacked three high and then two across, in rows of 25. To find Judge Crater’s bones and identify them now, if they are there, would be effectively impossible.
Jack “Legs” Diamond would die just a year later, on December 18, 1931. And this time the assassins were taking no chances. Jack was shot three times just behind his left ear. The gun barrel was pressed so close the blasts scorched his scalp. His connection to Judge Crater, Connie Markus, would end her days in the mental ward of Bellvue Hospital, catatonic from a drug overdose.
That same year, 1931, the homocidal cop, Charles Burn, found a new job, as the body guard for a thug nicknamed “Kid Twist”: real name, Abe Reles (above).
Ten years later, in 1941, Reles would become famous as “The canary who could sing but could not fly.” After testifying against another member of "Murder Incorporated", Kid Twist took a flyer out of a sixth floor window of the "Half Moon Hotel" on Coney Island, where police were supposedly guarding him. And one of the cops on duty at the Half Moon that night was Officer Charles Burn.
In 1939 Stella Crater remarried, to Mr.Karl Kunz. They took their honeymoon cruise on the French cruiser “Normandie”. Just two years later the ship burned at the New York docks as it was being refitted for war duty. And Stella’s marriage did not last much longer. In 1961 Stella Crater finally wrote a book about Joe’s disappearance, and about the man she now realized she had never really known, entitled “The Empty Robe”.
- 30 -
Villisca is a self proclaimed “community of pride where the rivers divide” (being the West and Middle branches of the Nordaway River), 80 miles southwest of Council Bluffs, Iowa. Montgomery County was settled in the mid 19th century mostly by people from the old Midwest, upstate New York and Pennsylvania, people with names like Bates and Bowman, Kennedy and Hoover, Powers and Preston and Wymore. They arrived on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy railroad, called by her customers just “The Q”. At the time our story takes place no community in Iowa was more than a few miles from an active rail line. Most of the residents of Villisca either sold services or equipment to the local farmers or worked for the railroad. And it is not likely that in 1912 the little town was much smaller that it is today, when the population is just about 1,000 souls.
On the morning of June 10th, 1912, inside the sad looking two story house (now at 323 East 4th.Street) were found the bodies of Mr. Josiah Moore, his wife Sara, daughter Katherine and sons Herman, Boyd and Paul, as well as the bodies of their overnight child guests, Lena and Ina Stillinger. The children were aged 5 through age 12. All the victims were found in their beds, with their heads covered with bedclothes. All had their skulls battered 20 to 30 times with the blunt end of an axe, which was found wiped clean in the downstairs sewing room/bedroom along with the bodies of the Stillinger girls. The ceilings in the parent's bedroom and the children's room upstairs showed gouge marks, apparently made by the upswing of the axe.
Downstairs little Lena Stillinger’s nightgown was pushed up, leaving her exposed. But doctors said there was no evidence of abuse. There was a bloodstain on her knee and an alleged defensive wound on her arm. A two pound slab of bacon was found, wrapped in a dishtowel, on the bedroom floor. On the kitchen table was a plate of uneaten food and a bowl of bloody water. The medical estimate was that all of the murders had occurred shortly after midnight.
In June 11th Mr. Sam Moyer was arrested for the murders. He was released on the 15th. On June 20th Mr. John Bohland was arrested. On July 5th, Mr. Frank Roberts (“a negro”) was arrested for the murders. On December 28th farmer and victim Sara Moore’s ex-brother-in-law, Mr. Lew Van Alstine, was arrested for the murders. On July 15th, 1916 Mr. William Mansfield was arrested for the murders. On July 21st he was released. On March 19, 1917, the Reverend J.J. Burris told a Grand Jury sitting in the county seat of Red Oak, that a mystery man had confessed on his death bed to the murders. And then, on April 30th, 1917 a warrant for the arrest of the Reverend George Kelly was issued. He arrived to surrender himself two weeks later, oddly enough on the No. 5 train.
Lyn George Jacklin Kelly (above, again with his wife) was the son and grandson of English ministers, who, as an adolescent, had suffered a “mental breakdown”. He had immigrated to America with his wife in 1904 and preached at a dozen Methodist churches across North Dakota, Minnesota, Kansas and Iowa. Preaching from the pulpit he was “...a confident, well-versed, and articulate speaker”. But in personal interactions the 5 foot, 119 pound minister displayed “...a nervous demeanor, shifty eyes, and often spoke so quickly that saliva would dribble down his chin”. 
He had been assigned as a visiting minister to several small communities north of Villisca, where he developed a reputation for odd behavior; late night walks, rumors that he was a peeping tom and unconfirmed stories that he had tried to convince young girls to undress for him. In 1914, while preaching in South Dakota he had advertised for a private secretary. One young woman who responded was informed by return post that Kelly wanted her to type in the nude. He was convicted of sending obscene material through the mail, and spent time in a mental hospital. While there he wrote to the Montgomery County D.A. that he expected to be arrested for the Villisca murders.
Finally, after investigating just about every other possibility, the Grand Jury indicted Kelly for the murder of Lena Stillinger. All through the summer of 1917, while in jail awaiting trial, Kelly was interrogated. The last interview was on August 30th , a marathon session that lasted all night. At 7AM on the morning of the 31st Kelly signed a confession to the murder, saying God had whispered to him to “suffer the children to come unto me.”
At trial he recanted and on Wednesday, September 26 the case went to the jury, which deadlocked eleven to one for acquittal. A second jury was immediately empanelled, and in November the Reverend Kelly was acquitted. No one else was ever tried for the murders. And the crime remains one of the most horrific, unsolved mass murders in American history, known simply as the Villisca Axe Murders.
( 
Dick Galatas ran gambling in Hot Springs, and he took the arrest of an underworld tourist in his territory, personally. The local cops, paid more by Galatas than by the taxpayers, threw up roadblocks on the highway back to Little Rock calling Frank a kidnap victim. So the FBI took their prisoner the other way, on the long drive west and then north to Fort Smith. There they intended to catch the 8:30 P.M. overnight train to Kansas City. They wired ahead to Special Agent in Charge of the F.B.I..’s KC office, R.E. Vetterli, to meet them at Union Station in the morning. But that train was late in arriving at Fort Smith, and a stringer for the Associated Press spotted the three men and their shackled prisoner in the waiting room. Shortly there after the story broke on the wires: “Frank Nash…was recaptured today at Hot Springs, by three Department of Justice agents…They revealed the identity of the prisoner for the first time here...” 
Galatas had already asked for help from Johnny Lazia (coatless), who ran the gambling and vice for the Pendegrast machine, which controlled Missouri politics and Kansas City. As a newspaper editor at the time described the level of mob activity, “If you want to see some sin, forget about Paris. Go to Kansas City.”
When J. Edgar Hoover took over the Bureau of Investigation in 1924 he commanded just 400 agents. He spent the next forty years battling small “r” republicans, who were suspicious of a big federal police agency. Hoover eventually overcame their resistance, sheepherding the growth of the F.B.I in both numbers and budgets. And yet, until 1963, Hoover denied the existence of a centralized crime organization in America, commonly called the mafia, even after the Appalachian Conference of November of 1957, where more than 60 criminal bosses from the U.S., Canada and Italy were detained by local cops in upstate New York. Hoover said, “The F.B.I has much more important functions to accomplish than arresting gamblers all over the country.” Hoover said, “Obviously we have neither the manpower nor the time to waste on such speculative measures.” Author Jeffreys-Jones has compared Hoover’s denial to Holocaust-denial. But whatever his reasoning, there is no justification for the law abiding men and women who paid with their lives for his denial. 
That July morning the three agents, Frank Smith, Joe Lackey and Oklahoma Chief Otto Reid, left the train heavily armed. According to research done by Pulitzer winner Bob Unger – “The Union Station Massacre: The Original Sin of the FBI” - agent Lackey inadvertently grabbed a pump action Winchester Model 1897 shot gun, which belonged to Chief Reid, who grabbed Lackey’s twelve gauge, also by mistake.
...and two K.C. detectives, Bill Grooms and Frank Hermanson (below). As the seven men moved through station, the third largest in the country, they formed a V, with prisoner Frank Nash sheltered in the center.
A two door Model T Ford were parked in front of the station. Nash was placed in the front bench seat, while Lackey, Smith and Reed sat in the back. As Agent Caffey was about to enter in the driver’s side door, Joe Lackey noticed three men appear from behind a green Plymouth parked next to their Ford. At least two carried machine guns. And, according to Bob Unger, Lackey now found himself holding the wild card
The Winchester 1897 was a WWI army surplus shotgun and lacked a safety feature most modern shotguns have – a trigger disconnect. In the slam mode this “trench sweeper” would automatically fire if the trigger is compressed and the action is pumped, forcing a round into the chamber. Unfamiliar with this feature, without even waiting to get his weapon up, Lackey pumped a first round into the chamber; as he did so the weapon went off and blasted load of shot a foot away, into the back of Frank Nash’s head (below), and a stray pellet also went “…right into the side of the head of agent Caffrey”
Panicked at the unexpected explosion, Lackey pumped the action on the shotgun a second time, and again the weapon immediately discharged. In an interview Bill Unger described what happened next. “Hermanson is in a direct line between Lackey and the machine gun wielders. Joe Lackey gets off a second shot, which takes of the left side of Frank Hermansons’ head…. So here we are in the first two seconds of shooting, and already Frank Nash – the top of his head is gone and he is dead, and Ray Caffrey is dying of a fatal wound….And Hermanson is dead. So far no one has fired a shot except Joe Lackey…At this point everyone begins to shoot, and there’s massive firings by machine guns, and so forth, and by the time all of this is over, Bill Grooms, the other Kansas City policeman, is also dead. And Reed in back seat….when they finally get to him, he has a fatal wound…”
The entire shootout took less than 30 seconds. When one of the gunmen finally reached the target car he glanced inside and shouted, “They’re all dead. Let’s get out of here.”
They weren’t all dead. Agent Lackey was wounded three times and barely survived. Agent Smith, having ducked as the shooting started, was uninjured. And that quickly the Kansas City Massacre was over. 
Of the men who could be proven to have been responsible for the shootout, Vern Miller was found murdered and mutilated, outside of Detroit, Michigan 5 months and two weeks later. And one week short of the first anniversary of the massacre John Lazia was gunned down out side of his hotel. Ballistics tests run years later indicated the gun which fired the bullets which cut down Lazia, had also been used in the massacre. As he lay dying in a Kansas Hospital, John Lazia asked the doctor, “Doc, what I can't understand is why anybody would do this to me? Why to me, to Johnny Lazia, who has been the friend of everybody?”
It was a question that Frank "Jellybean" Nash would probably have asked, if he’d had the time. 
