City's oldest mystery remains unsolved...
BY ROCCO PARASCANDOLA
Newsday Staff Writer
Posted August 18 2006
There may be an arrest in the JonBenet Ramsey slaying, but New York's most notorious case -- the 1930 disappearance of Judge Joseph Crater -- looks like it might forever remain a mystery.
Police sources said the NYPD investigation of the 75-year-old case, revived last year after the discovery of a letter linking the judge's death to a rogue cop and his brother, has petered out.
"All leads have been exhausted," said one source familiar with the probe. "It's still an open investigation, but there is nothing new with the case."
Crater, a dapper man about town known for his taste for showgirls and his ties to corrupt Tammany Hall politics, vanished mysteriously in 1930.
The bizarre disappearance triggered one of the most intense manhunts in American history, but all leads went nowhere and Crater was declared legally dead in 1939. But the case lived on in city lore and in the public's imagination.
"Pulling a Crater" became shorthand for disappearing without a trace, and even today comics refer to it as much as to Jimmy Hoffa's equally mysterious disappearance.
But a seemingly major development last year raised the possibility the mystery might finally be solved.
Shortly after a Bellerose woman, Stella Ferrucci-Good, died on April 2, her granddaughter, Barbara O'Brien of Valley Stream, made a startling discovery, police said.
She found in her grandmother's personal papers a letter in which Ferrucci-Good claimed her late husband blamed a cop named Charles Burns, and the cop's brother, Frank Burns, a cabbie, for Crater's death.
Crater, the letter said, was buried in Coney Island, under the boardwalk where the New York Aquarium now stands. Later, one of the brothers made the startling confession to Ferrucci-Good's husband over drinks, according to the letter.
The letter sent the NYPD digging -- through files, if not the boardwalk.
New York Aquarium spokesman Fran Hackett said the NYPD has not asked for any assistance.
But sources said police have turned up no records indicating a dead unidentified male had been found while the aquarium was being built.
Even if the case is eventually solved it would appear unlikely anyone would be prosecuted, as virtually anyone connected to the case by one theory or another has died.
O'Brien said she'd heard nothing new about the case from police and two of Crater's brother's grandchildren did not return calls left at their Seattle homes.
Another person linked by the letter to the Crater case, Mary Burns, said she was heartened by recent developments relayed to her by police. Burns' father, Charles Burns, was a cop from 1926 to 1946.
Early media accounts embarrassed her and her family, Mary Burns said, because they pointed an accusatory finger at her father, suggesting he was the only cop of that name on the force when Crater disappeared.
In fact, sources said, two other cops with the same name were on the force when Crater disappeared and a third Charles Burns had retired in 1927.
Mary Burns, 55, a nurse in Marlton, N.J., said she has learned from police that one of the other cops named Charles Burns had been linked to rogue activity during his career.
"I don't think the case is ever going to be solved," she said, "but I still would like to clear my father's name."
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