Joseph Force Crater - Mrs. Crater

Mrs. Crater

Judge Crater married Stella Mance Wheeler in 1917. Crater was her lawyer in her divorce action against her first husband; they married seven days after the divorce was finalized. During the initial phase of the private search and even after police were notified and began their nationwide search, Mrs. Crater remained at their vacation home in Belgrade Lakes, Maine, until January 20, 1931. It was then that she allegedly discovered checks, stocks and bonds and a note written by the Judge in a drawer that had been empty when police checked earlier. Without Crater's income, Mrs. Crater was unable to maintain residence at their fashionable Fifth Avenue apartment and was evicted. By July 1937, when she petitioned to have the Judge declared officially dead, the judge's apparent widow was impoverished and reportedly living on $12 per week (equivalent to approximately $194 in today's funds) she earned as a telephone operator in Belgrade Lakes, Maine.

It would seem that before the Judge was declared legally dead, Mrs. Crater remarried in Elkton, Maryland, on April 23, 1938, to Carl Kunz, electrical engineer, of New York. Kunz's first wife had hanged herself only eight days before the wedding. The Judge was declared legally dead in 1939 and Mrs. Crater then received $20,561 in life insurance (worth approximately $343,536 in today's funds). Mrs. Crater separated from Kunz in 1950, and died in 1969 aged 70. Her own account of the Crater case, in which she expressed her belief that Crater had been murdered, was written with Oscar Fraley, newspaperman and freelancer and published by Doubleday in 1961.