List of People Who Disappeared Mysteriously - 1930s

1930s

• 1930 – Joseph Force Crater (41), an associate justice of the New York Supreme Court, was last seen on August 6 after a meal at a restaurant. Judge Crater was never seen or heard from again. (His mistress, Sally Lou Ritz (22), was said to have disappeared a few weeks later; however, this is false, as she was interviewed by police as late as July 1937.) Crater's disappearance, which prompted one of the most sensational manhunts of the 20th century, was the subject of widespread media attention and a grand jury investigation. Crater was declared legally dead in 1939 and his missing persons file was officially closed in 1979; however, Cold Case Squad detectives have investigated new leads as recently as 2005. To "pull a Crater" became slang for a person vanishing.
• 1934 – Wallace Fard Muhammad (43), founder of the Nation of Islam, left Detroit and was never heard from again.
• 1934 - Everett Ruess (20), young American artist travelling through the deserts of Utah.
• 1935 – Charles Kingsford Smith (38), Australian pioneer aviator, and co-pilot Tommy Pethybridge disappeared during an overnight flight from Allahabad, India, to Singapore, while attempting to break the England-Australia speed record. Eighteen months later, Burmese fishermen found an undercarriage leg and wheel (with its tire still inflated) on the shoreline of Aye Island in the Andaman Sea, 3 km (2 mi) off the southeast coastline of Burma, which Lockheed confirmed to be from their Lockheed Altair, the Lady Southern Cross. Botanists who examined the weeds clinging to it estimated that the aircraft itself lies not far from the island at a depth of approximately 15 fathoms (90 ft; 27 m). A filmmaker claimed to have located Lady Southern Cross on the seabed in February 2009.
• 1937 – Amelia Earhart (39), famous American aviatrix; she was the first woman to try a circumnavigational flight of the globe. During the attempt she and her navigator, Fred Noonan (44), disappeared over the central Pacific in the vicinity of Howland Island, July 2.
• 1937 – Sigizmund Levanevsky (35), famous Soviet aviator, together with his five crew and their Bolkhovitinov DB-A aircraft, disappeared in the vicinity of the North Pole after reporting loss of power from one of their four Mikulin AM-34 engines while attempting to prove a transpolar route between Asia and North America commercially viable .
• 1937 – Theodore Cole and Ralph Roe (24 & 28) escaped from Alcatraz prison in the U.S. state of California and disappeared. Authorities presumed that they drowned, but no bodies were ever recovered.
• 1938 – Ettore Majorana (31), Italian physicist, disappeared during a boat trip from Naples to Palermo.
• 1938 – Andrew Carnegie Whitfield (28), nephew of U.S. steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, disappeared during a solo morning flight in a small light aircraft from Roosevelt Field, New York, on Long Island, to an airfield at Brentwood, approximately 22 miles away.
• 1939 - Barbara Newhall Follett (25) was an American child prodigy novelist. Her first novel, The House Without Windows, was published in 1927 when she was thirteen years old. Her next novel, The Voyage of the Norman D., received critical acclaim when she was fourteen. In 1939, aged 25, she became depressed with her marriage and walked out of her apartment with just thirty dollars. She was never seen again.
• 1939 – Lloyd L. Gaines (28) was the central figure in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938), one of the most important court cases of the U.S. civil rights movement, though the movement did not truly begin until 1954. On the evening of 19 March, Gaines left his Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity house in Chicago, having told the housekeeper he was going to buy some stamps, and was never seen or heard from again, forcing the NAACP to drop the case. It was another decade before MU admitted a black student. MU awarded Gaines an honorary posthumous law degree in 2006. Some accounts suggest he was living in New York or Mexico City in the late 1940s.
• 1939 – Richard Halliburton, missing at sea since March, 1939 after trying to sail Sea Dragon (a gaudily decorated, 75-foot Chinese junk) across the Pacific Ocean. In 1945, some wreckage identified as a rudder and believed to belong to the Sea Dragon washed ashore in California.