Where have all the mysteries gone?

By Matt Crenson

updated 5:16 p.m. ET June 5, 2005

So now we know.

Deep Throat, the enigmatic source who helped two young reporters bring down a president, turns out to have been Mark Felt, the FBI’s second in command during Watergate. At 91, the man who aired the Nixon administration’s dirty laundry during clandestine meetings in a dingy parking garage now lives with his daughter in Santa Rosa, Calif.

“Deep Throat has become this living legend, like Camelot. And now it isn’t anymore,” lamented writer Sally Quinn, who is married to former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee.

Another one bites the dust. One by one, history’s most intriguing unknowns are succumbing to the ravages of time, a relentless onslaught of forensic science advancements, Cold War declassifications and the voracious appetite of the 24-hour news cycle.

Other solved mysteries
Did Thomas Jefferson father a child by his slave, Sally Hemings? DNA evidence says yes.

Did Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in 1953 for espionage, really pass atom bomb secrets to the Soviets? Intelligence intercepts made public in 1995 indicate that Julius was guilty and Ethel at the very least knew about his activities.

Was Jesse James shot in the back by a member of his own gang? You bet he was, pardner.

How do they know? They dug him up.

It seems like people just can’t keep themselves hidden any more. Eric Robert Rudolph, the serial bomber who dodged the law for five years in the mountains of North Carolina, was caught in 2003. He recently received four life sentences without parole. Unabomber Ted Kaczynski has been behind bars for almost a decade.

In Wichita, Kan., the accused BTK killer — who terrorized and murdered at least 10 people between 1974 and 1991 — gave himself away a few months back because he couldn’t resist getting in touch with the media and police more than a decade after his last crime. In Georgia, runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks ran out on her fiancee four days before their nuptials ... but she couldn’t even stay gone until the wedding date.

The only remaining question mark there: Who’s going to play her in the TV miniseries?

What about Jimmy Hoffa?
It didn’t used to be like this. There was a time not so long ago when it was a lot easier to keep a secret, perpetrate a hoax or disappear without a trace.

Or make somebody disappear without a trace.

AP file Jimmy Hoffa, the former Teamsters union president, disappeared in July 1975 from the parking lot of a restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.

Jimmy Hoffa naturally comes to mind. It’s been 30 years since the Teamsters president was last seen alive, standing in the parking lot of a restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. He planned to meet a pair of old acquaintances there, Detroit mobster Anthony Giacalone and New Jersey Teamster boss Anthony Provenzano.

Hoffa had clashed with both men during his long career in the Teamsters Union, and both of them had good reasons to want him dead. So it’s not such a stretch to assume that Hoffa was the victim of a mob hit.

Even so, his body has never been found. Investigators never came up with enough evidence to charge the two men, or anybody else, in Hoffa’s disappearance.

The case of the missing judge
Judge Joseph Crater had some organized crime connections, too. He was last seen getting into a taxi on Aug. 6, 1930, after having dinner with two friends at Billy Haas’ chophouse on West 45th Street in New York City. One of the two friends was a fellow attorney named William Klein. The other was a showgirl named Sally Lou Ritz. She went missing a few weeks after the judge did.

Crater’s disappearance became New York’s obsession. For months, the tabloids bulged with false leads, farfetched theories and the occasional real development. Some people naturally assumed that Crater ran off with showgirl Ritz. Others preferred the theory that both had been murdered by gangsters due to their awareness of some underworld malfeasance.

Crater’s assistant testified that the day he disappeared, the judge cashed two checks for a total of $5,150 — about $55,000 in today’s money. Crater’s assistant also helped the judge lug several portfolios of documents from the judge’s chambers to his Fifth Avenue apartment.

$6,000 in cash and a note
Nearly six months after Crater disappeared, his wife Stella found a note from him in a hidden dresser drawer, along with more than $6,000 in cash, several life insurance policies and a list of people who owed the judge money. The note said, “Am very weary. Love, Joe.”

Crater sightings were all the rage for years after his disappearance. Various reports put him in California, prospecting for gold in Alaska and serving in Africa with the French Foreign Legion.

But none of those leads ever panned out, and Crater was legally declared dead in 1939.

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