THE EMPTY ROBE

This is Stella Crater's both before-and-after story of her life with Joe Crater, the New York State Supreme Court Justice who-during an August heat wave some 30 years ago stepped into a tan taxicab and vanished. If Stella has no personal explanation, evidence, or even a guess to offer- she is still today an admiring and trusting wife of the man who is no longer there, sure that he was both ""righteous and aboveboard"", and equally sure that none of the smears (chorus girls, political payoffs, murder, etc.) his disappearance occasioned are true. Stella met and married Joe Crater when he was still an ambitious young lawyer, watched him swing into politics, develop a taste for higher living, but otherwise remain unchanged, devoted, sensitive and honest (even though he never brought his office problems home). His disappearance, which was timed at the start of the Seabury investigation of Tammany (and Crater was close to the democratic organization) suggests the most likely link in the case which left her the real victim, plagued by the continuing notoriety of the case, without funds, and because of it- unable to make a go of a late second marriage.... She tells her story simply and it has a continuing curiosity value.