On the evening of August 6, 1930, New York Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater finished dinner at a West 45th Street chop house, said goodbye to two companions, and walked out of the historical record. The police weren’t told for 28 days. The case stayed open for nearly 50 years.

Tonight’s story follows the documented trail: Crater’s rise through Tammany Hall’s Cayuga Democratic Club, his appointment to the bench by Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt just four months earlier, and the hurried final days in which he destroyed papers, moved files, and cashed checks totaling $5,150. We look at the dinner at Billy Haas’s with a Schubert lawyer and a showgirl, and at how the familiar image of Crater stepping into a taxi rests on thinner evidence than the legend suggests.

Then the aftermath: the month-long delay in reporting him missing, a grand jury that gathered roughly 2,000 pages of testimony and reached no conclusion, a flood of sightings, and the four envelopes Stella Crater found in a bureau drawer months later, including a handwritten note that can be read more than one way.

Finally, the theories, graded by what actually supports them: a voluntary disappearance or suicide, a political killing tied to Tammany Hall and the judgeship scandals, a blackmail plot, a gangland connection, and a sealed 2005 letter naming a spot under the Coney Island boardwalk. Evidence first, speculation clearly labeled.

Sources include Richard Tofel’s Vanishing Point, the New York Sun, the Saturday Evening Post, the Daily News, the Charley Project, and Lafayette College’s archive. The full source list is in the show notes.

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• jared K
• Lisa Mooney
• Jamie Mcconnell

On December 12, 1910, Dorothy Arnold, a 25-year-old Bryn Mawr graduate and aspiring writer from a prominent Manhattan family, left home to go shopping. A little before two that afternoon, she spoke with a friend outside Brentano’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue. The friend waved goodbye from the corner. No one has been documented seeing Dorothy Arnold since.

Her family waited roughly six weeks to go public. The search that followed spanned Pinkerton agents, transatlantic cables, a confrontation in Florence, and the dragging of Central Park ponds. Over the decades, five explanations have survived, and a handful of false leads, hoaxes and claims have come and gone. This episode walks through the documented record, presents the evidence for and against each theory without ranking them, and flags the places where historical sources disagree.

Sources: Allen Churchill, “The Girl Who Never Came Back,” American Heritage (1960); Rosemary Counter, National Geographic (2024); The Charley Project; period newspaper reporting.

The Charley Project maintains the public case file for Dorothy Arnold and thousands of other missing persons: charleyproject.org

Midnight Mystery Archive is a research-driven show with an evidence-first, no-speculation standard. New episodes bi-weekly.

• jared K
• Lisa Mooney
• Jamie Mcconnell

This is the final episode of the Midnight Mystery Archive.

In Part 1, we covered who Kerryn Tate was and what happened on December 29, 1979: a 22-year-old woman hitchhiking southeast of Perth, a deliberately set fire, a body found in bushland near the Canning Dam catchment. 45 years of the case staying open. And the biological evidence recovered at the scene in 1979 that police kept, year after year, waiting for science to catch up.

This is Part 2. The science caught up.

In 2023, Western Australia Police handed that biological evidence to their investigative genetic genealogy team — a unit WA Police has described as leading the world in this methodology. The team uploaded the DNA to a public genealogy database, the same kind people use to find their cousins and trace their ancestry. The database returned genetic matches: not to the offender, but to their relatives. From those relatives, the team built a family tree. Ten thousand people. Constructed from birth certificates, death records, census data, genealogical archives, and genetic connections. Every branch narrowed the pool. At the end of that tree was one name.

Terrence John Fisher.

Fisher had died in 2000 at the age of 50, of natural causes, while living with his father in Manning, Perth. He had never been charged. His name had never appeared in the original 1979 investigation. He had lived his life — working as a carpenter with the WA Public Works Department, sailing at the Fremantle Sailing Club, frequenting pubs in Carlisle and Victoria Park and Manning — and had died without ever facing a single consequence.

When WA Police named Fisher publicly in March 2025, they also said this: if Fisher were alive, he would be a person of interest in the deaths of two other Western Australian women — Barbara Western, murdered in 1986, and Carrie Turner, murdered in 1991. That is not an accusation. It is a statement of investigative significance. Police do not name dead men as persons of interest in other murders without a reason. The reason is not publicly detailed. What it means is that investigators looked at those three deaths and saw something worth pursuing.

Terrence John Fisher cannot be arrested. He cannot be tried. He cannot be convicted. Whatever he did on December 29, 1979, he died having never faced it.

Kerryn Tate's sister Anne-Marie Tate said publicly: "I strongly urge anyone who's had even a slight suspicion about Terrence Fisher to please come forward to police." She is still asking. The family is still building the picture of who he was. So is WA Police. And the investigative genealogy team that identified him is still working.

Kerryn Tate was 22 years old. She would be 68 today. This case, and this show, are for her.

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• jared K
• Lisa Mooney
• Jamie Mcconnell