Mary's Mosaic: Entering Peter Janney's World of Fantasy

[Mark A. O'Blazney]

Mark might have something to share about Damore interviewing Prouty.

Doyle and his Ralph Yates alter ego were certainly not bashful about linking me with CIA and neither was Horne.

Why are children of prominent CIA almost eagerly given the benefit of the doubt? Saint John Hunt comes
to mind. I would not host Chris Buckley for dinner, even if he had not married Donald Gregg's daughter!

Simkin made such a big deal about hospitality towards authors participating on his forum but under
Janney's influence, Simkin posted a reply to a post by Nina Burleigh accusing her book of being a CIA
!imited hangout and he was no more civil to Mel Ayton and certainly not to you.

In one of my last posts on the Ed Forum, more than nine months after Janney and Horne reacted to
my William Mitchell research, I pointed out to Albarelli that his post vouching for the reliability of his
alleged source claiming he still met occasionally with the Damore described William Mitchell would no
longer fly because it was a discredited claim. Simkin reacted to RCD's post
( http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/...ent-275587 )
by saying that was when I had accused Janney and not Albarelli of lying.

Janney was indeed lying, claiming he and his team discovered Mitchell graduated from Cornell.....

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/...ent=258105
Guest Tom Scully Posted August 11, 2012
........
See how this progressed?

Quote
Annual report to the president
books.google.com Cornell University. College of Engineering - 1961 - Snippet view
Spring Term only) Mr. William Mitchell (5th yr. B.M.E. Candidate. Fall Term only)
News and Notices - JStor
The Annals of Mathematical Statistics
Vol. 34, No. 3 (Sep., 1963), pp. 1133-1146
www.jstor.org/stable/2238500
Mitchell, William L., B.M.E., (Cornell University); Graduate Student, Operations Re- search, Harvard University; 70 Perkins Hall, Harvard University, Cambridge
New York mathematical society. List of members, constitution, by-laws
books.google.comAmerican Mathematical Society - 1964 - Snippet view
American Mathematical Society. MISARE ... AI Math., Computation Lab., Harvard Univ., Cambridge, Mass. ... MITCHELL, WILLIAM L. I Pentagon, OR Group, Systems Dept., USADSC, Washington, D. C. l500 Arlington Blvd., Apt. l022,
Combined membership list of the American Mathematical Society and ...
books.google.com American Mathematical Society, Mathematical Association of America, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics - 1965 - Snippet view
...... MITCHELL, WILLIAM L. I Pentagon, OR Group, Systems Dept., USADSC, Washington, D. C. 1500 Arlington Blvd., Apt. 1022, Arlington, Va. MITCHELL,

Edited August 11, 2012 by Tom Scully

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/...ent=274614
Guest Tom Scully Posted May 27, 2013

........
Last year, when Peter Janney was prone to mistakes, exaggeration, and pomposity , I did not expect Hank Albarelli to speak out to distance himself from Janney and to account for the statements Janney attributed to Albarelli in "Mary's Mosaic".
Now that Janney is in the business of making claims misleading to the point that they are deliberate lies, Albarelli's continued silence about what Janney has attributed to Albarelli in "Mary's Mosaic" is inexcusable.

Quote
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index....7&p=272667
................
Janney (at 37:30) "....In his testimony at trial, Mitchell attempts to frame Ray Crump."
Janney (at 38:30) "...That allegedly sparked a telephone conversation between the two at the end
of March, in 1993, where Mitchell told Damore how Mary Meyer had been
murdered in what he termed was a CIA operation. Despite many years of searching it was not until last summer that the trail of William L. Mitchell.... this is in August, 2012 now, had become known. I promptly brought this information to my chief intelligence researcher, Roger Charles, who enlisted the support of another Pulitzer nominated investigative reporter by the name of Don Devereaux. What we uncovered was that William L Mitchell entered Cornell University....

Edited May 27, 2013 by Tom Scully

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/...ent=274714

Guest Tom Scully Posted May 28, 2013
Or, Hank, you have another option. You can fully explain or distance yourself from the quotes related to Mitchell ("the assassin") attributed as sourced from you, and you
can agree there is a problem.


Janney's resorting in his April presentation to claiming that he and his "researchers" discovered background on William L Mitchell, (a Cornell undergrad. etc.) is not a problem of "disappearing" me and my work. It speaks to his broader disingenuousness. Here is some of what he leaves in his wake.:
Quote

5.0 out of 5 stars A Masterpiece of Biography and a Mesmerizing Detective Story, April 1, 2012
By Douglas (Falls Church, VA, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace (Hardcover)

Written by Douglas P. Horne,
author of "Inside the Assassination Records Review Board"
Web Page: insidethearrb
.......... Are you a third party surrogate (or a direct employee) working for the USG whose mission here is to attempt to discredit the confession of a hit-man? The readers of your book review here will not have forgotten that William L. Mitchell (or someone identifying himself as this person) confessed to author Leo Damore---William L. Mitchell himself told Damore that he was Mary Meyer's murderer. This event is well-documented in Janney's book.
Your attempt to suggest otherwise, via your citations, conveniently ignores this vital fact. Peter Janney has not identified Mitchell as Meyer's murderer "because Mitchell could not be found," as you claim; rather, he has identified Mitchell as Meyer's murderer because Mitchell confessed this to Damore. All the citations in the world will not erase this fact. ..... Unquote
And:
Customer Reviews
http://www.amazon.com/Marys-Mosaic-Consp...ewpoints=1
Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace
122 Reviews 5 star: (88)
Versus:
http://justiceforkennedy.blogspot.com/20...ation.html
audience member - (mocking Peter Janney's presentation ) Was it Bill or William?
(Big Laughter ) Ah, both.
Janney in the November interview with Jim Fetzer was still flustered. Now he seems fully committed to saving face. It is documented that Dovey Roundtree told enough conflicting stories about Ray Crump's alibi witness, Vivian, to seriously call into question the reliability of the case Janney made that Crump was "framed" and the mysterious
Crump trial witness, the "missing" CIA assassin of Mary Meyer, Janney's phantom and Leo Damore's fantasy, is actually a 73 years old, emeritus academic specializing in the management science of process controls, Dr. William L. "Bill" Mitchell, PhD.

Hank, you have an opportunity and responsibility to help the public have a better chance to learn what is closer to the truth, or you can stand by what Janney has published alongside your name.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/...ent-275626
John Simkin Posted June 17, 2013

In my original posting on this matter I gave a link to:
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=19016
The quote I had in mind was the following
Tom Scully, on 27 May 2013 - 7:24 PM, said:
"Last year, when Peter Janney was prone to mistakes, exaggeration, and pomposity , I did not expect Hank Albarelli to speak out to distance himself from Janney and to account for the statements Janney attributed to Albarelli in "Mary's Mosaic".
Now that Janney is in the business of making claims misleading to the point that they are deliberate lies, Albarelli's continued silence about what Janney has attributed to Albarelli in "Mary's Mosaic" is inexcusable."
Remember, these are the words of a moderator, whose role is apparently to people from posting abuse of fellow members. I have had numerous complaints from members over the past few months pointing out that Tom continually flouted the rules that he was supposed to be enforcing.

Tom Scully and Jim DiEugenio were not removed from this Forum for any individual breach of Forum rules. My decision was based on what I considered a long-term campaign into bullying members into not posting on this forum. ......

Up is down, truth is lies.....

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/...ent=258636
Guest Tom Scully Posted August 21, 2012 (edited)
........
I don't see that I've influenced John Simkin to post that Nina Burleigh's book was a "CIA limited hangout" or Doug Horne to "deduce" that a Professor Emeritus at California State, East Bay (formerly Cal. State Hayward) was operating in 1964 as, or was a 25 years long cover for a CIA assassin because Leo Damore left word that he was, and Peter Janney published it as fact.

Quote
http://www.amazon.co...Mx3RPYBNKYH5GNK..... Your postings have the odor to me of a disinformation/spin operation, designed to cast doubt, and to make readers forget the basic fact that a "William L. Mitchell" confessed to murdering Mary Meyer for the CIA, to author Leo Damore. Attorney Jimmy Smith's notes of his phone call with Leo Damore prove that. "

Have I done comparable damage here? Really?

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/...ent-237509

On ‎11‎/‎7‎/‎2011 at 9:35 AM, John Simkin said:
......
One of the important aspects of this book is that it will show that Nina Burleigh's book on the subject, "A Very Private Woman: The Life and Unsolved Murder of Presidential Mistress Mary Meyer" (1998) was a CIA limited hangout.

The rules here seem to be to ignore anything negative Janney, and others, have posted on this forum related to you, but to hone in on anything you've posted critical of Janney, and my "cardinal sin".
.....

Is this part of that True Crime Series, too, Tom? The rivets are starting to rust off, it would seem. And Prouty, like Hemming, had a habit of embellishing details, a form of puffery. Leo did a lot of puffing, too. And checkbook journalism.

[Peter Lemkin]

One comment left after this 1/3 parts on WWW:

In his 1996 autobiography, "A Good Life", WaPo news editor Ben Bradlee tells the story of finding Mary's diary (describing her affair), finding the CIA's James Angleton repeatedly trying to burglarize her property to get a hold of the diary, giving the diary to Angleton to keep/destroy, saying nothing to the investigating police, and basically perjuring himself at the murder trial. Why confess all of that in print in 1996? IMO, the reason is basically to say "Yes, I was a CIA guy and I'm proud that my loyalty was to the CIA, rather than the law or the news, or the police, or other civilians."[/FONT]

[Jim DiEugenio]

The diary part of the story is one of the real problems with the whole tale.

I spent three pages on it in Probe and The Assassinations. None of the participants can tell the same story on it, that is the Truitts, the Angletons, the Bradlees. And, in fact, the differences are in some ways irreconcilable. That is, people are lying about it. And it was not possible to determine who it was. For the simple reason that no such "diary" ever surfaced anywhere. And secondly, it was pretty clear that certain parties in the story had it out for others e.g. Truitt for Bradlee. In fact, that is how it all started in The National Enquirer. Truitt was going after Bradlee for firing him.

There is a serious question as to whether or not Kennedy's name was even in the so called diary. Or if such a diary was even really a diary and not simply notes on Mary's art studies. There are two indications of this. First, the fact that the Bradlees, both him and his former wife, told differing stories on this subject. And secondly, that Angleton--who allegedly had possession of the papers--never found any way to publicize them. So personally, I doubt that JFK's name was in there. Because if it was, Angleton would have found a way to get it into the press through one of his many allies.

Let me add one other point. One of the biggest myths in Washington that ever existed was that Bradlee and JFK were pals and allies. I examined this issue twice while doing Probe. Once in my relation to the Mary Meyer story, and once when I was studying the whole role of the Washington Post in the JFK case. The latter consisted in part of a close reading of Bradlee's book, Conversations with Kennedy.

I came to the conclusion that, in reality, this was more inside the beltway balderdash. And it was largely perpetuated and memorialized by Bradlee himself. It was simply not the case. If Bradlee had been a true friend of JFK and was fearful about going public with what his true policies were or what the circumstances of his death were, then he could have just sat it out in silence after his "friend" was murdered. But Bradlee did not do that. He did the contrary. He did all he could to distort Kennedy's record, and then to cover up the true circumstances of his assassination. Even to the point of working with David Phillips to discredit the Veciana story!

So, in other words, what you had were three groups of people--Truitts, Bradlees, Angletons--who had both common agendas, and also internecine rivalries, who were involved in this whole tale. Attached to that, you then had stenographers who, shall we say, were not all that trustworthy, involved in its evolution, e.g. The National Enquirer, Ron Rosenbaum, Leo Damore, Tim Leary, Gregory Douglas. This is why any kind of serious analysis of it is simply not possible. Because its like crossing a minefield.

To put it mildly, Janney did not proceed with caution across that minefield.

[Mark A. O'Blazney]

The diary part of the story is one of the real problems with the whole tale.

I spent three pages on it in Probe and The Assassinations. None of the participants can tell the same story on it, that is the Truitts, the Angletons, the Bradlees. And, in fact, the differences are in some ways irreconcilable. That is, people are lying about it. And it was not possible to determine who it was. For the simple reason that no such "diary" ever surfaced anywhere. And secondly, it was pretty clear that certain parties in the story had it out for others e.g. Truitt for Bradlee. In fact, that is how it all started in The National Enquirer. Truitt was going after Bradlee for firing him.

There is a serious question as to whether or not Kennedy's name was even in the so called diary. Or if such a diary was even really a diary and not simply notes on Mary's art studies. There are two indications of this. First, the fact that the Bradlees, both him and his former wife, told differing stories on this subject. And secondly, that Angleton--who allegedly had possession of the papers--never found any way to publicize them. So personally, I doubt that JFK's name was in there. Because if it was, Angleton would have found a way to get it into the press through one of his many allies.

Let me add one other point. One of the biggest myths in Washington that ever existed was that Bradlee and JFK were pals and allies. I examined this issue twice while doing Probe. Once in my relation to the Mary Meyer story, and once when I was studying the whole role of the Washington Post in the JFK case. The latter consisted in part of a close reading of Bradlee's book, Conversations with Kennedy.

I came to the conclusion that, in reality, this was more inside the beltway balderdash. And it was largely perpetuated and memorialized by Bradlee himself. It was simply not the case. If Bradlee had been a true friend of JFK and was fearful about going public with what his true policies were or what the circumstances of his death were, then he could have just sat it out in silence after his "friend" was murdered. But Bradlee did not do that. He did the contrary. He did all he could to distort Kennedy's record, and then to cover up the true circumstances of his assassination. Even to the point of working with David Phillips to discredit the Veciana story!

So, in other words, what you had were three groups of people--Truitts, Bradlees, Angletons--who had both common agendas, and also internecine rivalries, who were involved in this whole tale. Attached to that, you then had stenographers who, shall we say, were not all that trustworthy, involved in its evolution, e.g. The National Enquirer, Ron Rosenbaum, Leo Damore, Tim Leary, Gregory Douglas. This is why any kind of serious analysis of it is simply not possible. Because its like crossing a minefield.

To put it mildly, Janney did not proceed with caution across that minefield.

Don't forget Heymann, the worst of all sources, save Seymour.

[Jim DiEugenio]

Correct. I left out Heymann.

Probably because I would like to just forget him.

[Peter Lemkin]

Photo credit: The White House / JFK Library and Skyhorse Publishing
In Part 1 of this absorbing mystery, we saw some of the confounding facts that have made this event so incomprehensible, even after so many decades.
Mary Pinchot Meyer, mistress to John F. Kennedy, was shot twice while jogging in a deserted area in a Washington DC park. She was neither robbed nor raped. A witness who heard screams and shots ran to a wall overlooking the scene, arriving in time to see a man standing over the body, holding an object that appeared to be a gun. He described the gunman as a "negro male," between 5 feet 8 and 5 feet 10 inches, and weighing about 185 pounds.
Soon after, a black man was arrested but according to his driver's license, he was only 5 feet 3.5 inches, and weighed 130. Yet the witness positively identified him.
The witness, Henry Wiggins, Jr., had been sent to that area along with a mechanic to service a "broken down" Nash Rambler. Very soon after he had arrived, the screaming started.
Later that same day, the car disappeared and so did the all paperwork concerning the written record of the request to service the car. While this is also strange, it would not seem significant, not normally. But it appears to be part of an astonishing pattern that is eventually revealed in the latest edition of Peter Janney's book.
In Part 2 below, more anomalies are revealed.
Second excerpt from Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace: Third Edition (Skyhorse Publishing, 2016), by Peter Janney. For Part 1 of this three-part series, please go here.
Introduction by Milicent Cranor

---

WhoWhatWhy

"It looks like you got a stacked deck"

.

Ray Crump Jr. was sticking to his story. During the drive to police headquarters, he kept asking Crooke, "What did I do?" Each time, Crooke replied, "You tell me what you did."
Crump would say only that he had been drinking. He had been fishing from some rocks and had fallen into the river. He was still shivering in his wet clothes, and Crooke suggested that he might be more comfortable if he took off his wet sweatshirt. In a white T-shirt that clung to his narrow chest, Crump appeared frail and childlike, much younger than his twenty-five years. A press photographer was waiting for the arrival of the black man suspected of murdering a white woman on the towpath. Crump bowed his head to avert the glare of flashbulbs as the photographer captured his arrival at police homicide headquarters.
Detective Crooke led Crump to a windowless interrogation room. Just a few months earlier, on June 22, 1964, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren had ruled in a 5-4 decision that a suspect had the right to have an attorney present during questioning. The ruling emanated from Escobedo v. Illinois and became known as the Escobedo Rule. Crooke was well aware of the ruling but chose not to inform Crump of his right to an attorney. The Miranda decision, which would have required Crooke to notify Crump, prior to questioning, of his right to an attorney, would not be decided for another two years.
"I think he's the guilty person," Bernie Crooke would later explain by way of justification for ignoring Crump's rights. "Not for any piece of evidence against him, but because of that other sense you develop about witnesses and defendants. You sort of know."26
Crooke may have had an additional motivation to prove his suspect's guilt. One year earlier, a judge ruled in a defendant's favor arguing that the confession that Crooke had extracted from him was no good. "The judge said [Crooke] practiced very sophisticated methods of psychological brutality," a colleague said of the case. "Bernie couldn't even spell the words he used. And here he was, just a poor cop, trying to make a living."27 Crooke apparently didn't want to suffer the humiliation of losing again.
Detective Crooke ordered Crump to put on the jacket that had just been fished out of the Potomac. It was a perfect fit. "It looks like you got a stacked deck," Crump said, close to tears. Crooke patted him on the back, and Crump began to cry.28 By the time Crooke returned to the interrogation room, Crump appeared to have pulled himself together. He had stopped crying and was staring at his shoes. Crooke decided to leave him to set up the lineup. Part of the preparation would involve instructing Henry Wiggins, his only eyewitness, what to do. "He told me to go right up to [Crump], put my hands on him, and say, This is the guy. That's him,' so there's no doubt in my mind, no ifs' or anything," Wiggins recalled years later.29
Ray Crump was easy to pick out in the lineup. "The lineup isn't that close as far as the other guys being Crump's type, so he really sticks out," Wiggins recalled. Crump didn't react when Wiggins identified him. "He didn't act concerned, like he isn't bothered about anything. He looks like he knows what to do: just keep your mouth shut and don't say anything," Wiggins later said.30 What Henry Wiggins didn't remember that day was that he and twentyfive- year-old Ray Crump Jr. had been classmates, first at Briggs Elementary in Washington, then in junior high school, from which they had graduated in 1954.
Neither school at the time was integrated, but Wiggins had gone on to Western High School and had graduated. Crump had given up on school after junior high. A friend of Wiggins's had reminded him that he knew Crump after Wiggins had identified him.31
Key Bridge over C&O Canal Georgetown, Washington, DC.
Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Daniel Lobo / Flickr (CC0 1.0)

Wiggins gave a formal statement about what he had observed that day, and Crooke showed him the windbreaker that had been found near the shoreline of the Potomac. "That looks like the jacket," Wiggins said, referring to the one worn by the man he had seen standing over the dead woman on the towpath. Henry Wiggins was "satisfied" that he'd made law enforcement's case against Ray Crump. Even so, he knew that rumors had already begun to cloud the facts. "One of the detectives was saying they found Crump knee-deep in water in a shallow part of the river in a little inlet," Wiggins said. According to this version of events, Crump had said that "he was trying to retrieve his fishing rod," said Wiggins. Another version had it that Crump was in the water to wash the victim's blood off, while still another held that Crump was apprehended while he hid behind some rocks in the woods that bordered the river.32 Most of the speculation, however, centered on the identity of the beautiful dead woman. Who was she? And what was she doing on the towpath? Some parts of the canal, such as the concrete abutment and first arch supports of Key Bridge, had acquired unsavory reputations as havens for vagrants, truants, and dealers who supplied the affluent of Georgetown with recreational drugs. Henry Wiggins overheard one officer speculate that the murdered woman might have flirted with her killer. Wiggins didn't buy it. "She wasn't any bum or some old drunk like you'd expect down there," he said. "This woman you could tell was a lady."33
Detective Crooke gave Wiggins his card and told him not to talk to the press or anybody else about the case. Wiggins, who had once fancied himself cop material, apparently enjoyed his status at the center of this murder investigation; in fact, he had hoped to become a police officer in Washington, D.C., after his discharge from the Army. He had done some coursework "in psychology, search and seizure, all that stuff" and had passed the written exam, even dieted to meet the weight requirements, but "they still wouldn't take me," he said. He suspected that the color of his skin had something to do with his rejection.34 In those days, the D.C. Metropolitan Police force was largely white. In any event, even though he hadn't passed muster as a potential police officer, Wiggins a black man pointing the finger at another black man seemed to be the ideal witness.
That afternoon, Ray Crump had been fingerprinted, photographed, weighed, and measured, but he wasn't tested for gunpowder burns or residue, which would have indicated whether he had recently fired a handgun. "His hands had been in water," Chief Detective Art Weber explained later at Crump's trial. "That would have washed away any nitrates that were present. The paraffin test wasn't what it's supposed to be. The FBI doesn't think much of it either, so we don't use it."35Lacking forensic evidence that would have linked Crump to the crime, police resorted to using his height and weight to help make their case. According to the intake documents, at the time of his arrest, Crump stood 5 feet 5½ inches and weighed 145 pounds two inches taller and 15 pounds heavier than his driver's license indicated.36 It was never clarified whether Crump had on his shoes with their 2-inch platform heels when he was measured, or whether he had been wearing wet clothes when he was weighed. Still, he was significantly smaller than the original description of the wanted man listed on Police Form PD-251: 5 feet 8 inches to 5 feet 10 inches tall and 185 pounds.
The Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia had been alerted to Ray Crump's arrival. Legal Aid public defenders typically represented indigent clients at preliminary criminal hearings, at coroner's inquests, and at mental health hearings. "We were right there on the fourth floor of the courthouse, room 4830," said George Peter Lamb, a former defense attorney. "Our offices would be notified if someone was being brought in. It wouldn't be too long after the arrest. D.C. had the most restrictive laws on preliminary hearings of any federal court in the United States. Police were required to bring an arrested person before a magistrate as soon as it was feasible. To dillydally and hold a suspect in jail and interrogate the hell out of him was one sure way to result in the suppression of all evidence."37
Mary Pinchot Meyer (far left) with John Kennedy, 1962. Raymond Crump Jr. being arrested in 1964. Foundry Branch Tunnel under the C&O Canal.
Photo credit: Kiko's House, Lets Roll Forums and C&O Canal National Historical Park

Lamb was one of five new lawyers brought into the office by Edward "Ted" O'Neill, the sharp-tongued, indefatigable public defender. Lamb had been working in the Public Defender's Office of the Legal Aid Society for just one month when he met Ray Crump. A graduate of American University's Washington College of Law, Lamb had accepted a cut in pay to take the job, with an annual salary of just $6,900. It wasn't much, he later joked, for "a dyslectic with ulcers, married with two kids."38 But he was fired up about the work. "What made it an incredibly exciting time to be a criminal lawyer was that the Warren Court was in full swing," he recalled in 1990. "Decisions were coming down that were upsetting long-established procedures that had been used as evidence in American courts for centuries." Lamb considered himself part of the revolution that was taking place in criminal law to balance the inherently unequal contest between the individual and the state.
As a public defender, Lamb reserved particular admiration for Judge David Bazelon of the U.S. Court of Appeals. "He was the bane of the conservatives," Lamb recalled. "He'd invite all these young lawyers into his chambers and tell us how to be better, and he would talk about what the responsibility of a public defender was: Whatever could be done for the richest of the rich, it was our job to do for the poorest of the poor. We spared no effort in that respect, and that was pretty thrilling, and really very exciting."39 That afternoon, Lamb had hurried to the basement stockade to interview the new prisoner and to discern whether he met the criteria for a court-appointed lawyer.
He did. At the time of his arrest, Ray Crump had only $1.50 in his pocket. He didn't have a bank account. He didn't own real estate, an automobile, or any other valuable property, nor did his wife, Helena, his parents, or any other person who might have been able to assist in paying the costs of his defense. Lamb conducted a background check on his new client and found that he was married with five children. He had been twice arrested for disorderly behavior and he had served sixty days for shoplifting.
Years later, Lamb recalled how scared Crump had been. "He had to know when he was arrested that he would be charged with first-degree murder. You can be sure that during the time he went through the booking procedure at Homicide, the police were beating him up trying to get a confession out of him not physically, because that was pretty much a thing of the past in this town." Crump was crying, Lamb said. He repeatedly told Lamb that he didn't know what had gone on at the canal, that he hadn't killed anybody, and that the police had arrested the wrong man.40
Lamb explained to Crump the first step: In a first-floor hearing room, the police would try to establish before a magistrate that there was enough evidence to hold him for a grand jury. Crump would either be charged or released. What Lamb didn't tell his client was that with U.S. Commissioner Sam Wertleb presiding a "curmudgeon," in Lamb's opinion the chances were slim that Crump would be let go.
"It wasn't possible to get a fair hearing from him," Lamb said. "Wertleb almost always accepted the word of a police officer against that of a defendant, especially a black defendant."41 Wertleb did inform Crump, however, of his right to counsel and to a preliminary hearing, but he declined to schedule the hearing.
"I don't know why I'm here," Crump blurted out. "I was down there fishing and lost my rod. I almost got shot myself."42 Crump was held without bail. "The way to get around granting bail was to say Crump was a danger to the community by reason of what he's been charged with," Lamb recalled. "So denial of bail was purely on the basis of the heinousness of the crime. When, in fact, the only evidence the government had at this point was whatever Detective Bernie Crooke said it was." With bail denied, "you've got to move quick to try to prevent the government from bringing an original indictment," Lamb said. "We went straight to the Court of Appeals on the bail issue and denial of a preliminary hearing the next morning with Ted [O'Neill] and I leading the charge.
Already there was some strong heat coming down on this case from somewhere we didn't know where. That's why we were in court so damn fast, to try to set up a preliminary hearing. The reason you wanted a prelim, it was the only chance you had to cross-examine witnesses and find out what the police had for evidence. So you freeze the case in a timeline so that it never gets any better, unless the police find something new. And all they had was Crump being in the vicinity of the murder. He was just somebody who'd been identified as being there."43
Shackled and under heavy guard, Crump was taken by federal marshals to the D.C. jail and placed in isolation. Crump changed into prison denims but kept his shoes. The guard urged him to confess, saying that if he did, he would get the help he was entitled to, possibly even a deal with the prosecutor, but Crump remained confused. "What was going on down in that place?" he wanted to know. The officers who arrested him hadn't told him anything. When he had been escorted in handcuffs past the bloodied body of the dead woman on the towpath, Crump had asked Detective Crooke, "You think I did that?" Crooke hadn't answered.
Meanwhile, something weighed heavily on the freshly minted public defender, George Peter Lamb. Though new to his job, he was savvy enough to know that it was highly unusual for Assistant U.S. Attorney Donald Smith to be representing the government at Ray Crump's hearing. "That was unheard of to send a senior man to one of these things," Lamb said. "Usually, a very inexperienced criminal assistant would be there just to observe the proceedings. So right away, we knew there was some Mickey Mouse' stuff going on."44
Donald Smith's presence signaled that somewhere within the corridors of the U.S. Department of Justice an alarm had sounded. But why? Surely not because of Ray Crump, who wouldn't have merited such high-level attention. It had to be the murder itself and the murder victim. Given the crime's location right in the heart of Washington's elite Georgetown enclave was it that the dead woman was one of them, a person of consequence in her Georgetown milieu? But the police had not yet determined her identity.
Detective Bernard Crooke, on arriving at the D.C. morgue, was immediately granted access to an autopsy room where Randolph M. Worrell, the morgue technician, had already logged in the body of a white female, name and address unknown. Worrell had taken a sample of blood that would be delivered for classification to the FBI the following day. He had prepared the body for examination by removing her clothes in the presence of Deputy Coroner Dr. Linwood L. Rayford.
The autopsy officially began at 3:45 p.m. For Dr. Rayford, a tall, light-skinned black man with a military bearing and a handsome face, medicine had been a second career choice. As a student at Marquette University during World War II, Rayford had tried to enlist. "I wanted to be the first black Marine in the history of the Corps," he recalled. "But they wouldn't take me. I got turned down on account of my color."45 Now a surgeon, Rayford had performed more than four hundred autopsies on gunshot victims, but none had been as disturbing as this one.
"Things were not at all like they were supposed to be," he would say years later. The woman was five feet six inches tall and weighed 127 pounds. She was a beautiful corpse. Dr. Rayford had lifted the woman's arms and rotated them across her torso to determine the degree of muscular rigor. The limbs were relatively supple. He touched her thigh, stomach, and chest; the pale, almost translucent skin was cool, which told him that she had been dead only a few hours. Her blue-green eyes bore an expression that revealed that death had come as a complete surprise.46
The woman had been shot twice: once in the head and once in the back. Both entry wounds were a quarter of an inch in diameter and bore dark halos typical of powder burns. "The gun was fired from close range," Rayford would later testify. "It wouldn't be possible to produce these smoke deposits on a person's skin at anything but contact or near contact firing."47 The FBI later confirmed this.
The victim's head wound was located an "inch and a half anterior to the left ear." The first bullet had entered the left side of the skull, "traversed into the right temporal lobe, fractured it, and ricocheted back where the slug was found in the right side of the brain," where Rayford recovered it. The second entry wound "was located over the right shoulder blade, about six inches from the midline." The bullet had passed through the shoulder blade "into the chest cavity perforating the right lung and the aorta, the largest vessel from the heart." The trajectory "had been angled from right to left and slightly downward."48
The woman likely survived the first shot to her head, but Rayford said that such a wound's attendant hemorrhaging and brain lacerations would probably have rendered her unconscious. Blood from the head wound would likely have splattered the assailant. In contrast, the second wound would have produced more internal than external bleeding because of its position under the shoulder blade.49
The second gunshot had been fired with particular precision: The bullet pierced the right lung and severed the aorta. Death would have been instantaneous. That bothered Rayford. The degree of expertise suggested the work of a professional. He had seen some messy gangland-style slayings, but nothing like the neat accuracy of the wounds inflicted on this victim.
"Whoever assaulted this woman," Rayford said years later, "intended to kill her."50
For Part 1 of this three-part series, please go here.

End Notes

26. Unnamed colleague of Detective Bernard Crooke, interview by Leo Damore,
Washington, D.C., October 28, 1990.

27. Ibid.

28. Rosenbaum and Nobile., "Curious Aftermath," p. 24.

29. Wiggins, interview.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

35. Trial transcript, pp. 455456.

36. Ibid., p. 634.

37. George Peter Lamb, interview by Leo Damore, Washington, D.C., December
20, 1990.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid.

42. "Laborer Is Charged in Slaying of Artist; Mrs. Meyer Shot to Death on
Towpath," Evening Star, October 13, 1964, p. B-1.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid.

45. Dr. Linwood L. Rayford, interview by Leo Damore, Washington, D.C.,
February 19, 1991.

46. Ibid.

47. Trial transcript, pp. 7175.

48. Ibid., pp. 7172.

49. Ibid., pp. 7175.

50. Rayford, interview.

[Peter Lemkin]

OCTOBER 23, 2017 | PETER JANNEY

THE MURDER OF JOHN KENNEDY'S MISTRESS, PART 3

Excerpt from Mary's Mosaic THIRD Edition, by Peter Janney

Mary Pinchot Meyer. Photo credit: JFK Library / Wikimedia (CC BY 3.0) and National Park Service / Wikimedia
The highly anticipated release of long-withheld US government documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is scheduled for this Thursday, October 26. In the runup to this event, the media has devoted more attention to this history-altering political murder than at any time since the Oliver Stone film "JFK" came out in 1991.
On Saturday, President Trump tweeted: "Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened." Although it remains to be seen whether some files will continue to be withheld by the president, this sounds like good news.
As one of the outlets digging deep into the tragedy, WhoWhatWhy has pointed out that many questions remain unanswered and many key issues are yet unresolved. Accordingly, we are dedicating more articles to the topic leading up to the highly-anticipated data dump, and have put together a crack team to analyze the documents once they are released.
WhoWhatWhy Staff

---

In Part 3 of this mystery, the case against the black laborer, Ray Crump, for the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer continues to build, despite the lack of physical evidence, and despite the lack of an obvious motive. She was neither robbed nor raped.
To make matters worse for Crump, a new witness comes forward William L. Mitchell, an Army lieutenant stationed at the Pentagon. He claimed that, shortly before the murder, he passed a "negro male" who was following the victim "about two hundred yards" behind her. His description of the man's clothes matches what Crump had been wearing when arrested.
This clean-cut white man seemed like an ideal witness. At the time of the 1965 trial, a Washington Star reporter wrote that Mitchell, by then no longer on active duty with the Army, was now a mathematics instructor at Georgetown University,
But in subsequent chapters of the Peter Janney book Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace: Third Edition the author reveals a number of things that are wrong with Mitchell's story. And what Janney found out about the man himself is even more disturbing:
His address happens to have been that of a CIA safe house.
Georgetown University had no record of such a person.
In the 1960s, CIA operatives frequently used faculty positions at that university as covers.
"Any trail of Mitchell's identity or subsequent whereabouts, however, appeared to have vaporized," wrote Janney after spending years trying to locate him. The rest of the book vividly details his quest to find this man and what happens when that day comes.
Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace: Third Edition (Skyhorse Publishing, 2016). To see Part 1, go here; for Part 2, go here.
Below, we present the last of this three-part series.
Introduction by Milicent Cranor

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And the Killer Walked Calmly Away

.

Crooke took possession of the two bullets and the victim's clothing. He would deliver them to the FBI Crime Lab for testing the next day, but first he inspected the clothes for some kind of mark that might identify the victim. He found one. On the silk lining next to the fraying Mark Cross label inside one of the blood-soaked gloves, the name "Meyer" had been written in blue ink. By telephone from the morgue, Crooke instructed the desk officer at the Seventh Precinct at Volta Plac in Georgetown to call all the Meyers in the Washington telephone directory. The dead woman could well be visiting from another city, he remembered thinking, but it was more likely that she was a local resident on an afternoon stroll not far from her home.51
Crooke left the morgue and drove to Southeast Washington to retrace the bus route that Ray Crump said he had taken that morning, supposedly to go fishing on the Potomac. Anacostia was another Washington, a world apart from Georgetown. It was a crime-ridden ghetto of dilapidated houses where the majority of residents were black. Crooke knocked on the door of 2109 Stanton Terrace, S.E., and was invited into a tidy, spare living room by Helena Crump, a slender young woman who held the youngest of her five children, a baby, in her arms. Her eyes instantly reflected fear and anger, and with good reason. To the black community, the police represented both a threat and indifference. Crime festered in poor neighborhoods like Anacostia, mainly because law enforcement officials allowed it to do so.
Helena Crump had learned about her husband's arrest from a neighbor who had heard it on the radio. Ray Crump had been working as a day laborer at the Brown Construction Company's building site at Southeast Hospital. Construction was the best-paid job that an unskilled worker could get. It was better than hustling trash or the other menial work available to uneducated black men. The work was seasonal, and strenuous: unloading heavy bags of cement, mixing mortar, and pushing loaded wheelbarrows. It was backbreaking work for someone as slight as Crump. He had recently told his coworker Robert Woolright that he didn't think he'd be able to keep it up.
Woolright had driven to Crump's house to give him a ride to work on the morning of the murder. "Most of the time off and on, I pick him up whenever we was on a job together," Woolright had recalled.52 He parked in front of Crump's house at 7:25 a.m. and waited for him to come out. Instead, his wife came out. She had been arguing with her husband, who'd said he was too tired to go to work that day and was "tired of hearing all that shit" about money. Helena handed Woolright a set of keys to the work shed at the construction site and returned to the house. Woolright drove away.
A half-hour later, Crump announced that he was going out. Helena didn't know where he was going, but, she told Detective Crooke, he wasn't going fishing. She opened a closet door to show Crooke a fishing rod and tackle box packed in the corner. She also identified the damp Windbreaker that Crooke had brought with him in an evidence bag. It had been a Father's Day present from her and the children the preceding June.53
Ray Crump also smoked Pall Mall cigarettes, "the same as I do," said Elsie Perkins, Crump's neighbor. "I open mine from the bottom; he opens his from the top. That's how we can tell the difference in our cigarettes," she told Crooke, who had knocked on her door after leaving Helena Crump. Good-humored and garrulous, Perkins told Crooke that she was close with the Crumps and that she and Helena Crump maintained an informal security system. "It's just habit. She watched who came in my house and who went out. And I would look out to see who was coming out or coming in her house." That's how she happened to see Ray Jr. leaving his house around eight in the morning. "I just wanted to see who was coming out of the house."54
Crump got as far as the tree at the end of the sidewalk, then turned around, Perkins said. "That's how I happened to see the front of him, when he walked back to the house for something." Crump had been wearing a yellow sweatshirt, a half-zipped beige jacket, dark trousers, and dark shoes, she said. "He had on a white T-shirt because you could see it from the neck of his sweat shirt. And he had on a kind of plaid cap with a bill over it." When the Crumps' door closed again, Perkins had looked out "to see whether or not that was him coming out or his wife." She had watched Ray Jr. until he got halfway down to the bend that led over to Stanton Road. Crump wasn't carrying any fishing gear, although on previous occasions she had seen him with a fishing pole, "and he'd carry a dark little box with his fishing tools."55
Fletcher's Boat House on the C&O Canal.
Photo credit: Josh / Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Might Crump have been carrying a gun with him when he left the house? Perkins didn't think so. "I didn't see his pockets bulge like he was carrying a weapon," she told Crooke. She had never seen Ray Jr. with a gun in his possession, or known him to have one. Nor had anyone else in Crump's family or the community.56
A motive for the murder was proving elusive. Had Ray Crump gone to Georgetown intending to commit a robbery? An emerging version of events went like this: Crump accosted a well-dressed white woman walking along on the C & O Canal towpath. When she resisted, he panicked and shot her in the head without killing her. Still conscious, she had broken free and made it to the other side of the towpath at the top of the embankment, where Crump grabbed her, dragged her some twenty-five feet back to the edge of the canal, and pressed a gun to her back, this time issuing a fatal shot.
But had it been Crump that Henry Wiggins had seen standing over the dead woman, or was it someone dressed like him? The police maintained that it was Crump, who, they alleged, had fled the murder scene by descending the embankment to the Potomac,

Might Crump have been carrying a gun with him when he left the house? Perkins didn't think so. "I didn't see his pockets bulge like he was carrying a weapon," she told Crooke. She had never seen Ray Jr. with a gun in his possession, or known him to have one. Nor had anyone else in Crump's family or the community.56
A motive for the murder was proving elusive. Had Ray Crump gone to Georgetown intending to commit a robbery? An emerging version of events went like this: Crump accosted a well-dressed white woman walking along on the C & O Canal towpath. When she resisted, he panicked and shot her in the head without killing her. Still conscious, she had broken free and made it to the other side of the towpath at the top of the embankment, where Crump grabbed her, dragged her some twenty-five feet back to the edge of the canal, and pressed a gun to her back, this time issuing a fatal shot.
But had it been Crump that Henry Wiggins had seen standing over the dead woman, or was it someone dressed like him? The police maintained that it was Crump, who, they alleged, had fled the murder scene by descending the embankment to the Potomac, where he disposed of the murder weapon, as well as the hat and the jacket on the basis of which Wiggins had identified him. Because of their quick response in getting to the scene and cutting off all of the park's exits, the police believed they had trapped the assailant who they now believed was Crump.
The police claimed that Crump had tried to swim away since the river had been the only means of escape, but that the river's dangerous current had stopped him. Several people had, indeed, drowned there over the years. So, the police speculated that Crump had taken to the woods, trying to avoid capture. Discovering the exit at Fletcher's Boat House blocked by police, then momentarily being spotted by police officer Roderick Sylvis, he had made his way back eastward toward Key Bridge, where he was finally encountered by Detective Warner.
Police suspicions were bolstered by the fact that Crump had lied about going fishing. And he had lied about what he was wearing on the morning of the murder. The circumstantial evidence, the police believe, was mounting against him. What they didn't know was that Ray Crump couldn't swim. In fact, he was terrified of being in water over his head.
But what wasn't clear was how a panicked mugger, in the wake of a botched holdup, could have killed a woman with the cool dispatch of a professional assassin. According to Henry Wiggins, it had been a quick kill: Two shots were fired, the second of which came about eight to ten seconds after the first.
Yet Wiggins had not witnessed the murder; he had only heard the shots and observed a man standing over the victim in the aftermath. And he had watched that man walk calmly away from the scene. The viciousness of the attack and the calm of the assailant were hard to square with the demeanor of the frightened, meek Raymond Crump Jr. By the end of the day, the murder weapon had not been recovered; and in its absence, the police had only Henry Wiggins's inconclusive account to link Crump to the murder.
Benjamin C. Bradlee, Jacqueline Kennedy, Tony Bradlee and President John F. Kennedy in the White House Family Living Room.
Photo credit: The White House / JFK Library

October 12, 1964, had finally unfolded into an Indian summer gem with a temperature that rose into the low sixties. By the time the late afternoon sun had begun to set, every Meyer in the Washington telephone directory, save one, had been contacted. The one remaining Meyer lived in a modest two-story house, 1523 Thirty-Fourth Street, N.W., in Georgetown. Homicide Detective Sergeant Sam Wallace located number 1523, wedged into a narrow lot amid a cluster of houses. There were no lights on when he pulled up out front at about 5:30 p.m. A locked car was parked in the driveway. A hand-lettered sign at the door advertised "Free Kittens. Ring bell or call."
Neighbors identified the house as belonging to Mary Pinchot Meyer. They also disclosed that Mary's sister, Tony, and her husband, Ben Bradlee, lived around the corner at 3321 N Street, N.W. The block was familiar territory to the Seventh Precinct police because they had assisted the Secret Service in protecting President-elect John F. Kennedy until he moved from the neighborhood into the White House in 1960. Ben Bradlee had been close to the senator from Massachusetts, who lived in a red brick, three-story townhouse several doors down from his own.
Detective Wallace knocked on Bradlee's door and identified himself. Increasingly certain by process of elimination that the victim was Bradlee's sister-in- law, Wallace asked him if he would come identify the woman murdered earlier that day on the C & O Canal towpath. "Sometime after six o'clock in the evening," according to Bradlee, he identified Mary Meyer "with a bullet hole in her head" at the D.C. morgue. He would repeat the process for Deputy Coroner Rayford the following morning in the presence of his friend and pharmacist, Harry Dalinsky.57
The Evening Star ran a front-page, one-column story that evening: "Woman Shot Dead on Canal Tow Path." The article identified neither Mary Meyer nor the lead murder suspect, Ray Crump Jr. The article did note, however, that "police found a white jacket, possibly worn by the slayer, on the bank of the canal some distance from the scene about an hour later."58 In fact, the jacket had been found along the Potomac River shoreline, not the canal. The inaccuracy aside, it wasn't known how or from whom the press acquired the detail about the jacket. Its inclusion in the article, however, seemed to support the emerging narrative that had Crump ditching his jacket before trying to flee the scene by swimming away from it.
By the following morning, Tuesday, October 13, the national print and television

media had latched onto the story. In Washington, both the Evening Star and the Washington Post ran front-page stories that featured photographs of Mary Pinchot Meyer and Ray Crump, the latter shown in handcuffs at police headquarters.
Shock waves reverberated throughout the tiny Georgetown enclave in which Mary had been so vivid a presence. With Bradlee's confirmation of her identity, the newspapers informed their readers that Meyer was the niece of former two-term Pennsylvania governor Gifford Pinchot, as well as "a Georgetown artist with a hundred thousand friends."59
Her ex-husband, Cord Meyer, was identified either as "an author and government employee" or "presently employed by the Federal Government."60 Neither paper mentioned his real work as a high-level operative within the CIA's Directorate of Plans, though in Mary's obituary in the New York Times the following day, Cord was said to be employed in New York by the Central Intelligence Agency.61
Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Elvert Barnes / Flickr (CC BY 2.0) and Jeremy Riel / Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).

With no murder weapon found, Chief Detective Art Weber returned to the towpath to direct a search that would become unprecedented in its scope and manpower. Weber led forty Metropolitan Police officers, assisted by members of the U.S. Park Police, on a foot-by-foot search of the towpath area. Park Service police also closed a canal lock upstream from the murder scene. As the waters receded, two U.S. Navy scuba divers entered the canal. Six more Navy divers entered the Potomac River adjacent to the shoreline where Crump's jacket had been found the day before. Harbor police probed the river with grappling hooks and dragged the bottom with magnets in an area near the site of Crump's capture.
They found a brimmed golf cap at the water's edge in the area where Crump had said he'd been fishing. The FBI Crime Lab would later link a single hair found on the cap to Crump. Detective Weber was buoyed by the find and felt certain that Ray Crump must have also disposed of the gun in that vicinity. The searches ended at dusk and resumed the following morning, "when we returned with more men," Weber recalled. "We had mine detectors sweep over and around the forest in the woods." But two days of intense searching still did not produce the .38-caliber pistol that had ended the life of Mary Meyer. Nevertheless, Weber remained confident: "If the gun's here, we'll find it."62 In fact, the gun would never be found.
In the absence of a murder weapon and with the attempted robbery theory seeming less likely, the police next considered sexual assault as the motive. Hadn't Ray Crump's zipper been undone when he was apprehended? But forensic evidence didn't support this theory, either. Four days after the murder, on October 16, 1964, the FBI Crime Laboratory delivered its forensic report to Chief Robert V. Murray at the Metropolitan Police Department (see appendix 1). This report, illegally withheld from Crump's defense attorneys for nearly nine months, was finally produced for the defense at the time of the trial in July 1965. Had it been available subsequent to October 16, when it was first delivered to police, Ray Crump Jr. would likely have been released for lack of evidence. The FBI Crime Lab report documented that
1. there was no evidence that any "recently discharged firearm had been placed into one of these [Crump's alleged jacket] pockets";
2. "no semen was identified on the clothing of the victim [Mary Meyer] and suspect [Ray Crump]";
3. "no fibers were found on the suspect's [Crump's] clothing that could be associated with victim's [Mary Meyer's] clothing";
4. "no Negroid hairs were found in the debris removed from specimens Q5 through Q9 [clothes Mary Meyer was wearing]. No Caucasian hairs were found in the debris removed from specimens Q12, Q13, and Q14 [Crump's beige jacket recovered after the murder, his yellow sweatshirt, and his T-shirt]"; and, finally,
5. "the examination of specimens Q13 and Q14 [Crump's yellow sweat shirt, and T-shirt] disclosed no indication of the presence of blood on these specimens." There had been two small "faint red smears" on the back of Crump's alleged jacket, which the FBI Crime Lab report had analyzed as having "a wax like appearance when viewed microscopically" and therefore concluded they were not blood stains, but possible "lipstick smears."63
In fact, the police had no real evidence against Ray Crump at all, other than his being in the vicinity of the crime. There was no blood, hair, semen, saliva, urine, or fibers from Ray Crump's clothing no forensic evidence whatsoever that linked Crump to Mary Meyer or the murder scene. Given the quantity of blood found at the scene and on the victim, it seemed unlikely that Crump had he administered the gunshots that killed her would have escaped without a single drop of her blood on his skin or clothing. It also seemed unlikely that Ray Crump, shorter than Mary Meyer and weighing not much more than she, would have been able to drag her twenty-five feet across the towpath in the midst of an intense struggle.
If not robbery or sexual assault, what had been the motive behind the murder of Mary Meyer? Why, in possession of only limited circumstantial evidence against Crump, had D.C. law enforcement officials not looked for other suspects? To be sure, Crump had denied wearing the Windbreaker and golf cap, and he had lied about going fishing the morning of the murder both of which had severely damaged his credibility. But without a murder weapon and any forensic evidence linking him to the crime, police lacked sufficient evidence to hold him. Nonetheless, despite this evidentiary void, it seemed as if Crump's fate was being quickly sealed.

A New Witness

.

The morning after the murder October 13 the case against Ray Crump received an unexpected boost. While Detective Crooke was delivering evidence to the FBI Crime Lab, a U.S. Army lieutenant named William L. Mitchell arrived at police headquarters. Introducing himself to Captain George R. Donahue of the Homicide Squad, Mitchell said that he had read about the woman's murder that morning and believed that he had passed her while running on the towpath the day before. Stationed nearby at the Pentagon, Mitchell explained, he ran on the towpath most days at lunchtime.
According to police, Mitchell "described in detail the clothes worn by Mrs. Meyer." He said she was crossing the narrow wooden footbridge, walking west "away from Key Bridge," when he had come to a complete stop to allow her to cross before him.
About two hundred yards later, he said, he passed "a Negro male" wearing a dark cap and a light-colored Windbreaker jacket with dark trousers and dark shoes. The clothing description was almost identical to that given by Henry Wiggins in his recollection of the man he had seen standing over the dead body at the murder scene, noted the Evening Star two days after the murder.64
US Army Lt. William L. Mitchell
Photo credit: Peter Janney / Mary's Mosaic

"Today's surprise witness impressed homicide detectives with the detail of his description of both Mrs. Meyer's apparel and that of the man he saw following her," said a reporter for the Washington Daily News.65 In the public mind, the gallows for Ray Crump was already being prepared.
Mitchell's account, however, left a few details unexplained, and the police didn't seem to want to consider them. If Mitchell's timing was correct, could he really have run the distance to Key Bridge without hearing gunshots?
And if Ray Crump had been "two hundred yards" behind Mary only a few minutes before the crime was committed more than a tenth of a mile away, after Mitchell passed him, he would have had to run with the strongest of intention to subdue Mary by the time Henry Wiggins claimed to have seen him standing over the body.
However foreboding, Mitchell's intrusion into the landscape boded ill for the poor, black day laborer Ray Crump. His account was enough to convict Crump in the minds of police, the public, and the media. The archetypical racial subtext of a downtrodden black man sexually assaulting an aristocratic white woman had immediately ignited the subliminal racial bigotry of Washington's elite corridors of power.
The Army lieutenant, Mitchell, presented himself as a model citizen: He was a military officer, serving his country at the Pentagon. He was also white, and like it or not, his statement and credibility carried more weight than that of a black tow truck driver named Henry Wiggins Jr., though it further legitimized Wiggins's account as well. With no other leads, and certainly no other suspects, Mitchell's and Wiggins's statements taken together were enough to support a murder charge against Ray Crump, regardless of the dearth of real evidence.

End Notes

.

51. Although Detective Edwin Coppage testified at the trial that the gloves were removed at the murder scene by Detective Bernie Crooke, Dr. Rayford testified that he remembered the victim had been wearing the gloves at the murder scene. Trial transcript, p. 67, p. 79, p. 81, p. 90, p. 669. Crooke had already left the murder scene with Ray Crump before Rayford arrived at approximately 2:00 p.m. Rayford, interview. Rayford specifically remembered that the gloves were removed at the autopsy and given to Crooke after 3:45 p.m on the day of the murder.

52. Dovey Roundtree, interviews by Leo Damore, 19901993. During these interviews, Dovey Roundtree shared numerous documents relating to her defense of Ray Crump, including the account given to her by Robert Woolright the morning he came to pick up Crump for work.

53. Ibid. In a discussion with Leo Damore regarding the testimony of Elsie Perkins, Dovey Roundtree mentioned that Crump's jacket had been a Father's Day present given to him by his wife, Helena, and their children the preceding June. See also the testimony of Elsie Perkins, trial transcript, pp. 485507.

54. Trial transcript, p. 468, pp. 485507.

55. Ibid., p. 486.

56. Ibid., pp. 467505. Also, Dovey Roundtree told Leo Damore during several interviews that no one in Ray Crump's family, church community, or anyone she interviewed ever recalled Ray Crump with a firearm of any kind. Ray's brother, Jimmy Crump, had at one time years earlier owned a .22-caliber rifle, but that was the extent of any firearm noted in Crump's immediate a


57. Trial transcript, pp. 4347.

58. "Woman Shot Dead on Tow Path," Evening Star, Washington, D.C., October 12, 1964, p. A-1.

59. Alfred E. Lewis and Richard Corrigan, "Suspect Seized in Canal Slaying; Woman Dies in Robbery on Towpath," Washington Post, October 13, 1964, p. A-1.

60. "Laborer Is Charged," p. A-1.

61. Ben A. Franklin, "Woman Painter Shot and Killed on Canal Towpath in Capital," New York Times, October 14, 1964.

62. Trial transcript, pp. 438449.

63. Report of the FBI Laboratory, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington, D.C., October 16, 1964, addressed to Mr. Robert V. Murray, Chief, Metropolitan Police Department, Washington, D.C., DB 72000, HO.64.2623, pp. 14. See Appendix 1.

64. "Rape Weighed as Motive in Death of Mrs. Meyer," Evening Star, October 14, 1964, Metro sec., p. B-1.

65. "Meyer SlayingPolice Have Mystery' Witness," Washington Daily News, October 14, 1964.

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[Peter Lemkin]

DECEMBER 5, 2017 | PETER JANNEY

ANATOMY OF A CIA ASSASSINATION: HOW IT WENT DOWN

Excerpt from Mary's Mosaic THIRD Edition, by Peter Janney

Photo credit: CIA
Was Mary Pinchot Meyer killed in an intricate, CIA-conducted operation like something out of the old television show, Mission Impossible?
Did Meyer, who was President John F. Kennedy's mistress, know too much about his assassination, and about the organization she believed was involved? Her own husband, Cord Meyer, was in charge of a CIA division that was involved in, among other things, assassinations, according to Peter Janney.
Janney, who has spent nearly a lifetime researching the murder of this woman, came upon the most intriguing stories from alleged witnesses, and these stories create a plausible picture of not only why she was murdered but how. The excerpt below is about the how.
We don't know if this is what really happened to Meyer, but we think it possibly could have, and that is grimly fascinating.
Much has been written about the kinds of chicanery US intelligence agencies have been up to, so I see no need to elaborate here. But I do want to share with you one of the more bizarre tricks they planned, but never had the occasion to execute: Operation Dirty Trick which was revealed by declassified documents in 1997. As described by the Washington Post,
the idea was to provide irrevocable proof that, should the MERCURY manned orbit flight fail, the fault lies with the Communists et al Cuba.' This could be accomplished, the planners suggested in a Feb. 2, 1962, memo, by manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans.'
If the Agency had been able to manufacture "irrevocable proof" that Castro caused the space flight to fail then it's not so hard to believe they could manufacture "proof" that a poor black laborer murdered Mary Meyer, a troublesome woman who was asking too many questions about the Kennedy assassination.
The excerpt below is from Chapter 12 of Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace, Third Edition(Skyhorse Publishing, 2016). (To see Part 1 of chapter 12, please go here. To see excerpts from Chapter 2 which we posted earlier, please go here, here, and here.)
-WhoWhatWhy Introduction by Milicent Cranor

Anatomy of a CIA Assassination

.

"An operation… standard CIA procedure" was what the person professing to be [William L.] Mitchell called the murder of Mary Meyer.36
[Leo] Damore's notes asserted that "Mitchell" had been assigned sometime in September 1964 to a surveillance team that was monitoring Mary Meyer. At some point the precise date is unknown the order was given to "terminate" her.
It was to be done in a public place, then made to look like something it wasn't.
From their surveillance, the team knew Mary's routine of taking walks around noon on the C&O Canal towpath, that she would typically walk out to Fletcher's Boat House and then return, a distance of about four miles in total. Within that venue, a designated kill zone had to be selected where Mary would be accessible.
By choosing an outside location, rather than her home, the planners wanted to create the impression of a wanton, random act of violence, unrelated to Mary's identity or political connections. It had to be skillfully executed with Mission Impossible precision beyond the intersection of where Canal Road intersected the busier Foxhall Road.
The ideal time for such an operation was determined to be a weekday, when the towpath was less frequented. The operation's planners very likely were prepared to carry out their mission on any number of days, depending on certain variables including the availability of an appropriate patsy. These were the kind of painstaking calculations and details that were involved in the extensive planning of professional assassinations.
There were any number of challenging factors to control and overcome; any significant mistake or oversight could be disastrous. As little as possible could be left to chance including the whereabouts that day of Mary's ex husband, Cord Meyer. Was it just coincidence Cord would conveniently be out of town in New York on CIA business on the day of his ex-wife's murder?
The team put into place to conduct this operation likely consisted of at least five operatives, not including the actual architects of the plan itself, or the ancillary adjacent personnel dispatched to monitor and control other important operational details. In addition, in order to execute an operation of this nature, there had to be some kind of "command center" around the C&O Canal area to coordinate logistics, which would have included radio communication capacity.
The operational plan of "standard CIA procedure," similar in design to what had taken place in Dallas, albeit on a much smaller scale and within a shorter time sequence, called for a patsy someone who could be unknowingly and immediately easily framed. Such an operation required the use of disguises and/or costumes, an absolute necessity. No other entity on earth had resources like the CIA's Technical Services Division (TSD) under the direction of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. They could do almost anything, and quickly from preparing lethal poisons that left no trace, to procuring articles of clothing and undetectable disguises on short notice.37
Photo credit: eltpics / Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Ray Crump Jr. had been picked up by his girlfriend, Vivian, in her car "very early that morning," shortly after eight.38 Crump was playing hooky from work. That morning, Crump and Vivian didn't have enough money for a motel room. Crump had likely been spotted by the CIA team early that morning, as he and Vivian began walking out from the Georgetown entry point of the towpath to some predetermined area he was familiar with from earlier fishing trips to the area.
It was still probably two to three hours before the murder would take place. There may have been more than one candidate for patsy the team was monitoring that morning before a decision was made. Eventually, someone was assigned with a radio to keep tabs on Crump and his whereabouts. Whoever the designated patsy, the operation would have immediately had to procure clothing similar to what he was wearing. In Crump's case, that meant generic dark shoes, dark pants, a light beige-colored Windbreaker and a dark-plaid golf cap easily and quickly obtainable from the CIA's Technical Services Division (TSD) personnel, who were likely standing by as support personnel.
A specialized team from the CIA's TSD had the capability of transforming almost anyone into whatever was called for, including changing someone's race from white to black if necessary. But there was a problem not even the elite TSD could overcome on such short notice: immediately finding someone on the operational team that day who had a build and stature as slight as Ray Crump's. So they had to make do with what was available the man they used for the stand-in, the Ray Crump look-alike, was larger than Crump.
That discrepancy would, in the end, create enough reasonable doubt to enable a masterful attorney, Dovey Roundtree, to thwart one of the key elements of the mission: railroading Ray Crump into being convicted for Mary Meyer's murder, thereby enabling the cover-up.39 And so the man Henry Wiggins witnessed the Ray Crump look-alike standing over Mary's body after the second fatal gunshot was significantly taller and heavier than Ray Crump.
Until Mary exited her studio that morning and started walking toward the canal, the CIA operation to eliminate her would not have been "green-lighted" to begin positioning themselves. A member of this operation, someone with a radio, had to be assigned to monitor her whereabouts from the moment she left her house and arrived at her studio earlier that morning.
When it was clear around twelve noon that she was headed for her daily walk on the canal towpath, all operational parameters would have been initiated. The mysterious, stalled Nash Rambler had likely already been placed adjacent to the designated kill zone on the canal. The Rambler could have been set up earlier that morning or several mornings in a row before the operation was finally given green-lighted-to-go status. At some point the key(s) to the stalled vehicle would be delivered to the Key Bridge Esso station with a request for someone to fix the vehicle.
Henry Wiggins was operating the station's tow truck that morning. "I was sent from the station where I normally work," testified Henry Wiggins, "to the other Esso station [at Key Bridge] owned by my employer to pick up a man there and go start a disabled vehicle on Canal Road, approximately seven blocks" away.40
Mary's surveillance likely began three weeks before her death, maybe even longer. The team already would have had a good idea how fast she walked, and approximately how long it would take her to reach the wooden footbridge, a place where the vegetation around the towpath area became denser. Her assassination would eventually take place exactly 637.5 feet west of the footbridge.
There were two sets of spotters, according to Damore's 1993 caller, "a couple walking together" and another runner wearing Bermuda shorts, both of whom were tracking Mary's whereabouts on the towpath and likely communicating by radio to a concealed command center in the area. Immediately prior to the murder, the entire team was in place.
The assassin, whoever he was, and the dressed-up Ray Crump look-alike were likely positioning themselves on a stand-by status waiting for the arrival of whoever was going to be servicing the stalled Nash Rambler to show up (and unknowingly play the role of "witness"), and waiting for Mary Meyer to approach the designated "kill zone."
Meanwhile, another member of the operational team had to be monitoring the whereabouts of the real Ray Crump and reporting his activity to the command center. The team had to know where Crump was situated and when he and Vivian reached the spot on the Potomac where their tryst would take place. Even if Crump and Vivian had arrived at the towpath entrance in Georgetown as late as 10:30 a.m., that still gave the team close to two hours to set up, orchestrate, and carry out the assassination of Mary Meyer. It had likely been rehearsed many times.
The story Ray Crump told attorney Dovey Roundtree was that he and Vivian had gone to a particular spot on the bank of the Potomac that he was familiar with, having fished there before. They did some drinking, he said, then "fooled around a little," at which point Ray passed out on some rocks at the water's edge.41Disoriented, perhaps a bit intoxicated, Ray slipped into the river, quickly coming to his senses as the cold water engulfed him. He couldn't swim; he panicked and struggled to climb out, likely tearing his trousers and cutting his hand in the process.
Vivian had disappeared, however, while Ray was passed out from intoxication. Why she had just abandoned Ray was mysterious. Had she been deliberately lured away after Ray had passed out? If Ray was being monitored and set up as a patsy, then Vivian's mere presence an alibi for Ray was an obstacle the operation had to surmount. Was it just serendipity that Vivian decided on her own to walk away when she did? Or had she, in some way, been forced to move out of the area shortly before, or immediately after, the murder before Ray awoke from his stupor? The terrified Vivian would never testify, even with Ray's life hanging in the balance. She told Roundtree she feared "being killed by her husband," should he discover her affair.42 Whether Vivian was more forcibly threatened by something else will probably never be known.
C&O Canal at intersection of Canal Road and Foxhall Road. Photo credit: Google Maps

As soon as Henry Wiggins and Bill Branch arrived at approximately 12:20 p.m., the operation to terminate Mary Meyer would have been fully green-lighted by radio communication. Mitchell would have been signaled by radio that the "witnesses" Wiggins and Branch were in place. According to Wiggins's trial testimony, "less than a minute" after his arrival, he heard what "sounded like a woman screaming." Mary's screams from the canal lasted "about twenty seconds," Wiggins said, before the first gunshot rang out.
As Mary walked westward into the predetermined "kill zone," coordinated with the location of the stalled Nash Rambler, the killer would emerge from the embankment area and approach Mary from behind. In a full embrace, pinning Mary's arms at her side, he now needed Mary to scream in order to attract the attention of whoever was servicing the Rambler.
As a highly trained, skilled assassin, he could have easily, and very quickly, shot Mary before she was even aware of what was occurring. Or, he could have picked her off with a high-powered rifle from behind an adjacent tree as she walked by. Why didn't he? Because Mary's screaming, her cries for help, were essential to drawing in any bystander to observe the so-called "random, senseless murder" that had quickly taken place thereby motivating whoever was attending the stalled vehicle to run across Canal Road and witness the Ray Crump look-alike standing over her body.
Whether the assassin underestimated Mary's strength and lost his grip, or whether he let go of her because he expected she would just fall to the ground, fatally wounded, after his first shot, isn't known. But Mary managed to break away, and moved toward an escape over the embankment, grabbing a birch tree limb with her saturated, blood-soaked glove in order to steady herself.
That wouldn't do for the gunman, or the operational intent of the mission. Mary had to be positioned close, or right next to, the canal itself where the murder scene would be clearly visible to someone looking across from the Canal Road wall.
So he quickly grabbed Mary again and dragged her some twenty-five feet from the embankment to the canal's edge, where, with a perfectly placed shot under her right shoulder blade angled slightly to the left, he killed her instantly. Also executed with extreme precision was the murderer's escape, quickly and easily accomplished by slipping into the woods, as the Ray Crump look-alike rapidly assumed his position, standing over the now slain body of Mary Pinchot Meyer.
Almost immediately after hearing the first gunshot, Wiggins started moving toward the wall of the canal across the street from the stalled vehicle that he and his partner had come to fix. While he was running "diagonally [to the right] across the [Canal] road," he then recounted, "I heard another shot just as I was reaching the wall of the canal."43
Peering over the wall and looking to his right on an angle,44 he witnessed the Ray Crump look-alike standing over Mary's body, dressed as Crump himself had been dressed that day dark shoes, dark pants, a light-colored windbreaker, and a dark-plaid brimmed golf cap someone Wiggins would repeatedly describe as having a "medium build" who was about "5 feet 8 inches" and weighed "185 pounds."
While the assassin had no trouble eluding police, the reader will recall that a man thought to be a "Negro male," very possibly the Ray Crump look-alike, had been momentarily spotted by officer Roderick Sylvis west of the murder scene more than an hour after the murder had occurred. This "Negro male," as Sylvis described him during the trial, would also elude capture, disappearing and staying hidden, as he had no doubt been trained to do.
By all accounts, Ray Crump was arrested sometime between 1:15 and 1:30 p.m.45Yet when he was first spotted by Detective Warner at least ten to fifteen minutes approximately 1:00 p.m. before his actual arrest by Detective Crooke, Crump wasn't wearing a light-colored beige jacket or any cap.
Only after Crump was under arrest now approaching 1:30 p.m. did Wiggins remark to Detective Crooke that Crump looked like the man he saw standing over the body, but he wasn't wearing any hat or jacket.46
Indeed, if Crump wasn't in possession of his jacket or cap when first spotted by Detective Warner, nor at the time of his arrest sometime around 1:15 p.m. or a few minutes later, how could Harbor Precinct policeman Frederick Byers have received a radio call at "about one o'clock" to look for a "light colored beige jacket?"47
Who made the call to Harbor Precinct to initiate the jacket search? How did they know that Crump wasn't wearing a jacket or a golf cap at the time? How did they know he'd had one on before then? Why was it so important?
The answer, of course, was that the CIA operation was in control of everything. Once Crump had become the designated patsy, the team knew where he was and what he was doing at all times, and especially what he was wearing. They had gone to great lengths to duplicate his clothing for the man standing over the body, who was to be seen by Wiggins. They also knew, from their surveillance of Crump, that he had jettisoned his jacket and cap, or perhaps lost them when he had inadvertently slipped into the Potomac. It had taken Byers less than forty-five minutes to locate Crump's jacket. How did he know where to look along the Potomac River shoreline?
Likely because he was given enough direction by the CIA's operating team. Ultimately, without these two critical pieces of Crump's clothing the jacket and the cap there would be no circumstantial evidence against Ray Crump. But with their recovery, there was enough to begin framing Crump for the murder.
By 2:00 that afternoon, Deputy Coroner Linwood Rayford had arrived at the murder scene, and he pronounced Mary Meyer dead at 2:05 p.m. Meanwhile, Crump was in handcuffs and still at the murder scene. He didn't leave the scene immediately after he was arrested because too many police cars were blocking the exit at the Foundry Underpass. Crump was finally escorted away from the area sometime between 2:00 and 2:15 p.m. and taken to police headquarters.48 His jacket would be delivered to Detective Crooke "around 3:00 p.m."
In handcuffs, wearing a white T-shirt, Ray would be photographed and paraded around police headquarters. Before the end of the day, the media would begin drilling Crump's guilt into the public psyche. The "trial by newspaper" had begun.
The only thing left to do was to establish Mary's identity for police, but in a controlled manner. A detail such as this was critically important and would be carefully managed; it was part of the CIA's "operation."
Here, I must interject an episode that took place in the course of my own exploration of this mystery. By 2006, after several years of painstaking research, I had not yet fully grasped how comprehensive an "operation" Mary's murder had been. There were still too many unanswered questions, too many lingering details I wasn't able to resolve, and I had nowhere to go for answers.
Early one morning, hours before dawn in February 2006, I awoke disoriented, soaking wet as if sick with a fever in a night sweat. With darkness all around, I struggled to make sense of my current disposition. Had I been dreaming?
No, not exactly. I felt as if I'd been talking to someone in another dimension, almost sensing some lingering presence in my bedroom with me. But I could see no one. Increasingly anxious, I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing. Like a waterfall, rainbows of cascading images and thoughts from months of intensive study and research tumbled through my awareness. And then it happened. A horrid insight suddenly gripped me, though not yet fully comprehended or understood.
A veiled form of the clue had actually been in public view for years, since 1980 in fact, but I hadn't noticed it then, or even when it appeared more dramatically in 1995. That February morning, I realized the "master key" was in Ben Bradlee's 1995 memoir, A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures.
A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures by Ben Bradlee. Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA by Cord Meyer. Photo credit: Simon & Schuster and Harper & Row

There, having waited more than thirty years, Bradlee revealed that the person who had first alerted him to his sister-in-law's demise on the day of her murder had been none other than my father, Wistar Janney: "My friend Wistar Janney called to ask if I had been listening to the radio. It was just after lunch, and of course I had not. Next he asked if I knew where Mary was, and of course I didn't. Someone had been murdered on the towpath, he said, and from the radio description it sounded like Mary."49
The reader may recall in an earlier chapter the mention of the telephone call that Ben Bradlee received "just after lunch" from his CIA friend. The truth was, Bradlee never revealed that his "friend" Wistar Janney was a high level career CIA officer in this passage.50 This had been the very first moment, Bradlee claimed, when he had learned that something might have happened to his sister-in-law, Mary Meyer. His next sentence reads: "I raced home."
My father, the reader will also recall, had been a career officer of the CIA since 1949, almost from the Agency's inception. While not officially titled in clandestine services or the Agency's covert Directorate of Plans, his responsibilities had moved him through any number of different directorates in the Agency during the 1950s and 1960s, including the Office of Current Intelligence (OCI), as it was named at the time, and then the newer directorate Science and Technology (S&T).
What time of day did "just after lunch" actually represent? "Probably sometime after two o'clock, two-thirty, somewhere in that region or so," Bradlee said, in an interview for this book in 2007. That, of course, was the time frame when the coroner had arrived (2:00 p.m.) at the murder scene and had pronounced the victim dead (2:05 p.m.). Her identity was still unknown. Ray Crump, it will be remembered, was just leaving the murder scene in handcuffs on his way to police homicide headquarters.52 The only thing left to do for the "operation" was to establish the victim's identity. The terrible, lingering question, its stench still as foul today as it was on the afternoon of Mary's murder, was how much did Ben Bradlee really know about what was actually taking place? And when did he first know it?
How uncannily convenient that Wistar Janney just happened to be "listening to the radio" in his CIA office, where he allegedly heard a "radio description" about a murder that had just taken place on the canal. And of course the very first thought that popped into his mind was that it had to be Mary Meyer. For what possible reason would Wistar Janney think that an unidentified murder victim was Mary Meyer?
Furthermore, Mary's outspoken, disapproving comments against the CIA not only drew resentment and outright hostility from other CIA wives, it also infuriated men like my father, whose blood boiled at the slightest criticism of his beloved CIA from anyone. Why would Wistar Janney, a trusted friend of Cord Meyer's, have been thinking about Mary Meyer that day (or any other day)? Was it possible that his call to Ben Bradlee "just after lunch" was designed not only to notify him of the event, but begin the final piece of the "operation" establish the identity of the murder victim?
Everything else had been completed. Mary Meyer had been successfully assassinated. The patsy, Ray Crump, had been arrested and was in custody. A conveniently placed eyewitness had identified Crump, standing over the victim just seconds after the fatal second gunshot. The media would soon proclaim him guilty in the public mind.
"William L. Mitchell" would show up at police headquarters the next day to reinforce the Wiggins eyewitness account. Crump was about to be convicted in the media in a matter of hours. Game, set, and match.
Peter Janney's father, Frederick Wistar Morris Janney. Photo credit: Peter Janney / Wikimedia

At the Janney family home during the evening of Mary's murder, a bit of veiled intrigue was occurring. Away at boarding school that fall, I was unaware of what took place. However, my younger brother, Christopher, fourteen at the time, was living at home. During the course of my research, I asked him to recollect what happened that evening. Christopher recalled that during dinner there had been absolutely no mention of Mary Meyer's murder. But sometime after dinner, "it had to be quarter to eight, if not eight, Dad was sitting at his desk in the den paying bills," he said, "listening to music, when the phone rang on his desk."
Christopher was in his bedroom nearby with his door open doing homework. Our mother, he remembered, was in the master bedroom, most likely either reading or working at her desk.
"Dad picked up the phone in the den," said Christopher. The next thing he remembered was hearing our mother, hysterically crying out, "Oh no! Oh no!" He rushed into the den, wanting to know what happened. "Mary Meyer has been shot," he remembered our father saying.
Christopher further recollected it had been "the police" who had called our father "because they couldn't reach Cord, so Dad was next on the list, something like that." Both parents were upset, Christopher recalled. "Dad was more calm. Mom was more hysterical, but that was the first they'd heard about it."53
During the seven-year period I worked on this book, my mother volunteered on two separate occasions and with no prompting from me her own recollections of that evening. I made a point of not leading her in any direction; I just listened and let her talk. On both occasions, she distinctly remembered the phone call that evening. "That was the first we'd heard about it," she said repeatedly.
Shortly after "the police" phone call that evening, my father and Steuart Pittman who had been married to Mary's sister, Tony, before Ben Bradlee, and who remained close to Mary's ex-husband, Cord Meyer drove to National Airport to pick up Cord upon his return from New York.
Had the telephone call to Wistar Janney that evening come from "the police," or from someone from CIA coordinating the operation? Since Wistar answered the call, it was his assertion alone.
What was clear was that it was time to create another illusion: the grieving ex-husband, Cord Meyer, needed the appearance of being comforted.
Recall another extremely critical detail: Sometime during the afternoon of Mary's murder, after calling Ben Bradlee, Wistar Janney had called Cord Meyer in New York, informing him of what had occurred. Feigning surprise and incredulity in his 1980 book, Facing Reality, Cord acknowledged it had indeed been his friend Wistar who had called him that afternoon:
In October of 1964, I was in New York City attending a meeting when I received a call from an old friend, Wistar Janney. As gently as he could, he broke the news that Mary had been found dead on the towpath along the canal that borders the Potomac, apparently murdered that afternoon by an unknown assailant. To my incredulous questions, he assured me that there could be no mistake. I flew back to Washington immediately to learn all that there was to know… Mary's friends had identified her body."54
Once again, "the cat was out of the bag" as early as 1980: Wistar Janney had known, during the afternoon of the murder, the identity of the unidentified' murder victim. Yet he had played ignorant when he arrived home to his family, and said nothing until the mystery phone call took place. Cord Meyer, like Bradlee fifteen years later, would conveniently omit the fact in the previous description that his "old friend, Wistar Janney," was, like himself, a high-level CIA official.
How could my father have known anything whatsoever about Mary Meyer's death that day, unless, of course, he had been involved? How had he been able to inform both Ben Bradlee and Cord Meyer about it hours before the police had identified the victim? Recall that Mary's identity hadn't been established officially until Ben Bradlee identified her in the D.C. morgue, "sometime after six o'clock in the evening," in the company of Sergeant Sam Wallace of the Metropolitan Police Department. Given the facts established, the only logical explanation was that Wistar Janney was part of the CIA operation to "terminate" Mary Pinchot Meyer, as was Cord Meyer himself, although peripherally and indirectly.
But why would Cord Meyer risk identifying Wistar Janney in 1980 as the "old friend" who had called him on the day of the murder? The same question might be asked of Ben Bradlee, especially considering the incriminating time frame of the Janney phone call ("just after lunch") in Bradlee's account. There are several possible reasons for their statements. First, neither Cord Meyer nor Ben Bradlee wanted to be accused of withholding critical information in their respective memoirs as to how they had first learned of Mary's death. Since Cord had, it seemed, safely revealed this fact in 1980 with no repercussions, Bradlee may have thought in 1995 that it was safe for him to do so, given the longer span of time that had elapsed.
Yet Bradlee's 1995 revelation of the phone call from Wistar Janney was, and still is, potentially more damaging because his entire memoir account contradicts his 1965 trial testimony. Furthermore, had it been revealed at the trial that CIA official Wistar Janney had called Bradlee to inform him of Mary's death "just after lunch" in other words, less than two hours after the murder took place, with Mary's identity still unknown to police attorney Dovey Roundtree might have nailed Bradlee as a possible accessory to murder. The trial would have been over as soon as it had begun.
Still another lingering question was whether the prosecution at any time knew about either of Wistar Janney's calls to Cord Meyer or to Ben Bradlee. If prosecuting attorney Alfred Hantman knew and withheld that information, he could have been disbarred for suborning perjury. The courtroom proceedings would have been exposed as nothing but a sham (as some believed they had been all along), engineered to convict Ray Crump as part of a greater cover-up, not only of Mary Meyer's assassination, but of President Kennedy's as well.
Finally, a more obvious reason that both Cord Meyer and Ben Bradlee felt it safe to reveal their respective calls from Wistar Janney was simply this: By 1980, Wistar Janney was dead; he died suddenly in January 1979 of a heart attack while playing squash with his friend Jack Oliver, just after lunch at the Metropolitan Club in Washington.
And so, on the evening of Mary's murder, Wistar Janney feigned his entire reaction to his wife and youngest son. Six weeks later, home from boarding school for Thanksgiving, I would sit at our family dinner table and listen to my mother reveal the murder of Mary Meyer earlier that fall. During her explanation, some part of me would also observe my father vacantly staring off into space. It would take more than forty years to finally realize that it had been his ghostly, eerie silence that evening that had so deeply haunted my psyche.
In the post-Watergate era of the late 1970s, the CIA had experienced a slow walk through hell. The Agency was in tatters, its reputation in shambles. As it was, the CIA feared annihilation in the Church Committee hearings, though ultimately, thanks to the machinations of Richard Helms, it had managed to fend off the ultimate, well-deserved verdict for having instigated America's first and only coup d'état: President Kennedy's assassination and its subsequent cover-up.
To make matters worse for Wistar Janney, investigative reporting was fast becoming a career choice for talented young journalists. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, under the ironic tutelage of Ben Bradlee and Washington Post owner Katharine Graham, had raised the bar. The Post's Watergate exposés had made the prospect of journalism glamorous again. Revealing "deep politics" and "secret history" was becoming a national obsession.
Cord Meyer's 1980 memoir, Facing Reality, would reveal Wistar's knowledge of Mary's identity long before the police knew. How long would it take before some hotshot journalist would actually read and study the Crump trial transcript, only to then connect the dots buried in Ben Bradlee's testimony, and possibly persuade Bradlee to reveal Wistar's call to him that day before Mary's body was even cold?
Or would it be Seymour Hersh himself already having sacked the venerable CIA sacred cow James Jesus Angleton in 1975 who would finally bring down the hammer on Wistar's head? Perhaps Wistar thought a graceful, grand exit from the play of life would spare everyone never realizing that eventually, one way or another, the sins of the father would be visited upon the son.
During the last two years of his life, Wistar Janney was living his own private version of hell. His beloved Agency had fallen into disrepute, and with it the reputation of many of those who had been there at the beginning. Retirement at age sixty loomed ominously on the horizon, and he wasn't at all happy about it, nor did he have any substantive plans as to how he might occupy himself.
Even a doctoral graduate student in clinical psychology such as myself could see he was intermittently agitated, still drinking heavily, sneaking cigarettes whenever he could. His depression, coupled with an ongoing heart condition and no regular exercise, created an ideal prescription for an acute, made-to-order coronary event.
What, indeed, had Wistar Janney been thinking that dreary winter day in January 1979 at the Metropolitan Club? After eating his typical high-caloric, saturated-fat lunch, accompanied by a generous side order of martinis, Wistar went upstairs and played his predictably aggressive game of squash. It was, as the Beatles song lyric echoed, "a ticket to ride," but one with no return.

Endnotes

.

36. Smith, interview. See also pages 46 in Appendix 3.

37. Joseph J. Trento, The Secret History of the CIA (Roseville, CA: Prima, 2001), p. 89. Nowhere is the capacity of the CIA's Technical Services Division better explained than in H. P. Albarelli Jr.'s book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2009).

38. McCabe and Roundtree, Justice Older Than the Law, p. 195. See also trial transcript, p. 493. Crump's neighbor, Elsie Perkins, testified that she saw Crump leave his house that morning "between five minutes of eight and eight o'clock."

39. Trial transcript, p. 140.

40. Ibid., pp. 129130.

41. McCabe and Roundtree, Justice Older Than the Law, p. 195.

42. Ibid., pp. 195196.

43. Trial transcript, p. 134.

44. Ibid., p. 259.

45. Ibid., p. 425.

46. Ibid., p. 569.

47. Ibid., pp. 407408.

48. Ibid., p. 608, p. 649.

49. Benjamin C. Bradlee, A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 266.

50. In passing, Bradlee did reference Wistar Janney earlier in his memoir (p. 118), but the page reference was not part of Wistar Janney's heading in the index of the Bradlee memoir. The passage read as follows: "Socially our crowd consisted of young couples, around thirty years old, with young kids, being raised without help by their mothers, and without many financial resources. The Janneys Mary and Wistar, who worked for the CIA; the Winships Leibe and Tom who worked for Senator Lev Saltonstall of Massachusetts…"

51. Ben Bradlee, interview by the author, Washington, D.C. January 31, 2007.

52. Trial transcript, p. 608, p. 649.

53. Christopher Janney, interview by the author, February 20, 2010.

54. Cord Meyer, Jr., Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 143.

[Mark A. O'Blazney]

So where does all this stand today? Does it really matter? Janney is STILL a 'senior member' of Ralph Cinque's OIC. And the list is getting longer. Ralph Thomas is the latest addition, so Ralph crows. And what of Judy's OzzFest coming soon in the D.C. area? Oh, Lordy !! Deja vu all over again.

[Peter Lemkin]

JUNE 20, 2018 | PETER JANNEY

THE BRILLIANT BLACK WOMAN WHO DEFENDED THE ACCUSED KILLER OF JFK'S MISTRESS, PART 1

An Excerpt from Mary's Mosaic

Dovey Johnson Roundtree (left). Raymond Crump Jr. being arrested on October 12, 1964 (upper right). Mary Pinchot Meyer murder scene (bottom right). Photo credit: Megavoice / Wikimedia and Lets Roll Forums
Not long ago, on May 21, the African-American lawyer Dovey Johnson Roundtree died. She was 104 years old, and a remarkable human being. Despite staggering odds, she won a seemingly impossible case. Her client was Raymond Crump Jr., who was accused of murdering Mary Pinchot Meyer mistress of the late John F. Kennedy. The New York Times put the case in context:
Mr. Crump, who had been found near the crime scene, was black and poor. The victim was white, glamorous and supremely well connected. The country, in the summer of 1965, seethed with racial tension amid the surging civil rights movement….
Ms. Roundtree's defense, which hinged partly on two forensic masterstrokes, made her reputation as a litigator of acuity, concision and steel who could win even the most hopeless trials.
To learn more about this fascinating mystery, please go here, here, here, here and here to see excerpts published earlier by WhoWhatWhy from Peter Janney's book, Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace: Third Edition (Skyhorse Publishing, 2016).
Janney made it his mission in life to track down the man he considered Meyer's real killer. In Chapter 4 of his book, which we present below (somewhat compressed), he wrote about Dovey Roundtree herself. He also wrote a riveting chapter on the Crump trial, which we will post in the near future.
Introduction by WhoWhatWhy staff.

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Dovey Johnson Roundtree

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Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. Thomas Jefferson 1
Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play. Joseph Goebbels (Hitler's propaganda minister)
While the most intense grief attended Mary Pinchot Meyer's funeral at the National Cathedral on Wednesday, October 14, the Reverend Jesse A. Brown also consoled a member of his own congregation at the Second Baptist Church in Southwest Washington, DC, only a few miles away in distance, yet worlds apart in social class and community. Martha Crump had been undone by Mary Meyer's murder, too. Her son, twenty-five-year-old Raymond Crump Jr., was in police custody, charged with committing the crime. …
Shortly after Ray Crump's arrest, Reverend Brown had been trying, through ministry channels, to reach attorney Dovey Johnson Roundtree, someone he often referred to as a "righteous lawyer" and something of a legend already in the black community…. She was an attractive, petite woman with delicate features, and a complexion that belied her fifty years. The only hints of her age were the strands of gray that streaked her hair.
Behind her graceful appearance was a will of iron. "Her voice, like her demeanor, was kind, deliberate and thoughtful," recalled attorney George Peter Lamb in 1991. "But she's all business. She likes to look you square in the eye. There was something impossibly appealing about her. It's difficult not to like this woman."2
Dovey Roundtree had seen up close the failings and abuses of power in an American legal system rife with racism. Born Dovey Mae Johnson on April 17, 1914, in Charlotte, North Carolina, she never forgot the night her grandmother, Rachel Bryant Graham, pushed her, her mother, and her sisters under the kitchen table as members of the Ku Klux Klan approached.
Grandma Rachel extinguished the kerosene lamp, closed all the shutters, and braced her daughter and crying grandchildren for the worst. Like an approaching freight train, howling men on horseback galloped past their house. Grandma Rachel clutched a broom in case she needed a weapon, and her husband, the Reverend Clyde L. Graham, kept vigil through the slats of a shuttered window.
After Dovey's father died during the influenza epidemic of 1919, Grandma Rachel brought her daughter's family to live with her and her husband in the parsonage attached to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, where he pastored. To the white bankers in Charlotte, Rachel Graham was just the Negro woman who did their laundry and ironed their shirts. To her granddaughter, "she was a force of nature." Darkness didn't scare her. Neither did the weather. While Grandpa Clyde took cover from summer thunderstorms, Grandma Rachel went out to the front porch to shake her fist at the lightning.
The way she saw it, it was Mother Nature who was scaring her family, and that just wouldn't do.3

"Get that pickaninny out of here!"

.

Grandma Rachel's courage had left an indelible impression on the young Dovey Mae Johnson, perhaps never more so than the day the pair took a trolley to downtown Charlotte. The inquisitive little girl wanted to see how the driver steered the vehicle and punched the tickets, so she took the seat behind him. "Get that pickaninny out of here!" the white driver yelled. "You know she can't sit there."
Grandma Rachel took her granddaughter by the hand, yanked the stop cord, and, once descended, walked with her the entire way into town and back again. She was very quiet until much later that evening, when, with her family gathered at the table, she announced,
"Something bad happened to Dovey Mae today." They listened by the light of the kerosene lamp, the family Bible open in front of Grandpa Clyde. "The mean old conductor man on the trolley car called her a bad name," she said. "I want to tell you all something. Now hear me, and hear me good. My chillun is as good as anybody."4 During the years of struggle that followed, Dovey never forgot her grandmother's words that night.

That day was a galvanizing moment for Dovey Mae. Many years earlier, her grandmother had had a galvanizing moment of her own. When she was still a girl, Rachel had been attacked by the white overseer of a Greensboro farm where her parents had been slaves. "He was meanin' to bother me," she told her granddaughter. "I ran and fought, and he stomped on my feet to keep me from runnin' for good, he said. But I kept runnin'. He wasn't going to have his way with me."5
The broken bones in Rachel's feet never set correctly, and every night after that, she had had to soak her feet and massage them with a homemade salve of mutton tallow and turpentine, just to be able to endure the discomfort of wearing shoes. When Dovey learned this about her grandmother a few years after the incident on the trolley, she better understood something her grandmother used to always say: "No matter what any sign said, what anyone whispered or shouted at you, if you walked tall, no one could bring you down."6
Grandma Rachel was Dovey Johnson's beacon. Dovey listened carefully to what her grandmother told her, and she heard loud and clear that the path forward was one of education. Rachel had regaled her grandchildren with stories of her friend, author and educator Mary McLeod Bethune, who had worked her way from the cotton fields of South Carolina to found a black women's college in Florida. She would go on, during the 1930s, to be appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as special adviser for minority affairs and director of African American Affairs in the National Youth Administration.
When Dovey was in seventh grade, Mary McLeod Bethune came to speak at Charlotte's Emancipation Day celebration. Grandma Rachel took the entire family to the event. "Mary, I want you to meet my grandchildren," she said to her old friend. After the event, Grandma Rachel took her granddaughter Dovey aside. "She's somebody," Grandma Rachel told Dovey, referring to her friend Mary Bethune, "and you can be somebody too."7
Dovey Mae Johnson attended Spelman College, where she worked three jobs, juggled majors in English and biology to prepare her for the medical career she envisioned, and edited the school newspaper. While there, she met Bill Roundtree, a student at Morehouse College, Spelman's brother school.
The approaching war and other circumstances would keep them from marriage until some years later.8
Dovey Johnson graduated from Spelman in 1938. In 1941, she became Mary McLeod Bethune's personal assistant in Washington, DC. The job blew open the young woman's horizons, introducing her to the day's leaders, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. With the onset of World War II, Bethune selected her young protégé as one of the 40 black women to train in the first class of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC).9
"You are not doing this for yourself," Bethune told Dovey. "You are doing it for those who will come after you." Despite her initial ambivalence, Dovey distinguished herself in the fight for a racially integrated WAAC regiment. The experience set her on a path to pursuing a career in justice and legal protection for those who needed it most. Law would become her life's focus and passion so much so, it overshadowed her short-lived marriage to Bill Roundtree, which ended in divorce in 1947.10
Studying law at Howard University was an awakening for Dovey Roundtree. As her biographer, Katie McCabe, wrote of Dovey's passion for the law, "There was a simplicity about it, and an intricacy, and a logic. Closely reasoned opinions, precedents, constitutional principlesthese, woven together, made a kind of sense that imposed itself on the scattered reality of human existence."11 She passed the DC bar exam in December 1950 and was sworn in a few months later, in April 1951. She immediately set about developing a private law practice. Many of her clients came from her church. She allowed the poorest among them to barter for her legal services. In the ten years during which Dovey practiced with her law partner, Julius Robertson, before his untimely death in 1961, the two established a thriving practice.
Dovey Johnson Roundtree, Washington DC, 1963. Photo credit: Dovey Johnson Roundtree / Good Black News

After Robertson's death, Dovey, who had led the vanguard of women ordained to the ministry in African Methodist Episcopal Church that same year, went on to make a name for herself as a one-woman legal aid society and a force to be reckoned with. By the fall of 1964, Dovey Roundtree was a sought-after defense attorney.
So when Reverend Brown contacted her in October 1964 and asked if he could bring a member of his church to her office, attorney Dovey Roundtree had already formed an opinion about the "Towpath Murder" from the front-page newspaper accounts that she had read. "The case sounded cut and dried and all but decided, what with all these so-called eyewitnesses," she recalled in a 1990 interview by the late author Leo Damore.
She had read the newspaper reports that a tow truck driver near the scene, Henry Wiggins, had identified Ray Crump as the man standing over the corpse. She had also read about the jogger, Lieutenant William L. Mitchell, who had come forward the next day and told police he'd seen a black man dressed like the man Wiggins had described, trailing Mary Meyer as she walked along the canal.
"I met Crump's mother and his wife," Roundtree told Damore. "They were all fearfully upset and very worried that something was going to happen to Ray Jr. His mother just worried me to death. She called me day and night. She was afraid there was going to be a killing in the DC jail which eventually became one of my concerns. He was in the DC jail, and they had predominantly white guards in those days. And those in charge, the captains of the supervisors, were all white men."12
On her very first trip to the D. C. jail to meet Ray Crump, Dovey found him to be a diminutive little man. "He was no taller than me I'm five feet four inches and maybe 140 pounds," she recalled in 1990. "I never saw anybody as frightened as this man was! Crump was crying; he was pitiful. And to me, he was in a stupor. He asked me that question many times: What was really going on?' He didn't know what happened. I had to tell him. He didn't know a woman had been murdered."13 She asked him to try to remember everything he did on the day of the murder.
But Crump couldn't remember very much, and what he did remember he had a hard time expressing. Roundtree was patient. Eventually, a story emerged. Crump had had a fight with his wife, Helena, that morning and he had refused to go to work. Instead, he had met up with a girlfriend named Vivian, whose last name was never made public. Both Crump and his mother, Martha, had finally offered that last bit of information, but Ray hadn't wanted to reveal his paramour's identity for fear of repercussions with his wife and the woman's husband.14
Crump then told Roundtree that he had taken a bus from his house on Stanton Road to a point where he met Vivian in her car. The couple stopped to buy beer, a half pint of whiskey, a bag of potato chips, and some cigarettes.
The $1.50 left over was hardly enough to rent a motel room. "They were trying to figure out where it would be a good place to go," Roundtree told Leo Damore in 1990. "He'd been fishing on the river on occasion. So it was someplace he knew about."
"I was goofin' around," Crump eventually disclosed.
"And I fully understood what he meant," Roundtree explained in 1990.
"He had sex the usual thing. He was drinking and he fell asleep. And the girl left. The next thing he knew he was trying to get himself together and he slipped and fell into the water. That scared him. He almost drowned. He didn't know how to swim. He was really trying to find his way out of the dang place. He wasn't familiar with that area at all. And he sort of roamed around. And then he heard something like an explosion."15
Newspaper clipping, October 13, 1964 (top left). Mary Pinchot Meyer murder scene, October 12, 1964. (top right). Mary Pinchot Meyer standing to the right of John F. Kennedy, 1962 (bottom left). Foundry Branch Tunnel under the C&O Canal (bottom right). Photo credit: Google Newspaper Archive, Mind Over Mystery, Kiko's House, C&O Canal National Historical Park

"I tried to pin him down," Roundtree continued. "I asked him, Well, what did it sound like?' Crump said he heard something like the backfire of a car,' but he paid no attention to it. He said he was afraid."
"Well, what were you afraid of?" Roundtree had asked him.
"I don't know. I was trying to get out of there and I couldn't get myself together," she remembered him responding.
"Well, you were half drunk," Roundtree replied.
"I had to get home," Crump had told her. "And then, all hell broke loose. Police all around. I didn't know what was going on."
"Do you own a gun?" Roundtree wanted to know. Crump said no. He never owned a firearm. His brother Jimmy had a .22 rifle because Jimmy used to go hunting, but not Crump. He didn't like hunting. He had never owned a gun and wouldn't have one with five children in his house, Roundtree recalled.
"That made sense to me, so I didn't pursue it," said Roundtree. "He wasn't given to armed robbery. He didn't have a record like that. He had a job. He was hustling the best way he could. He wasn't going out to rob anybody."16
But Crump did have a misdemeanor record: two drunk and disorderly charges and a conviction for petit larceny. Convicted of shoplifting, he'd been sentenced to sixty days in jail, a substantial sentence for a first offense.
"But it was at the whim of the judge," Roundtree said in 1990. "We didn't have dialogues about sentencing like we do now. And it may well have been, according to what Ray told me, that he was drinking at the time. And that could have made the judge angry, that would have aggravated it."17
Toward the end of their first interview at the DC jail, the bewildered Ray Crump again asked Roundtree, "What was really going on down there?" And again, Roundtree tried to explain that a woman had been murdered and that he had been arrested for the crime. Crump was already withering under the stress of being in prison. He was withdrawing and was increasingly unable to help with his own defense. That vulnerability convinced Roundtree to take his case.
"Instantly, I felt this man was being used as a scapegoat. The crime just didn't fit him at all," she recalled. Roundtree believed that Crump didn't have the temperament to be a killer. "He wouldn't have the nerve. He was of such meekness, I came to know him to be frightened half out of his wits in fear of his life. And I was afraid for him."18 So afraid, in fact, that Roundtree did what she had never done for any client: She visited him in jail every day.
But Crump had lied to police about going fishing, and he had lied again about what he had been wearing the day that he was apprehended. Trying to conceal his affair with Vivian, he had put himself in jeopardy with police. For Roundtree, the immediate priority was to find Vivian, his only alibi. She did so with the assistance of her private investigator, Purcell Moore.
Key Bridge over C&O Canal Georgetown, Washington, DC. Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Daniel Lobo / Flickr (CC0 1.0)

But Vivian made it clear from the outset she didn't appreciate Dovey Roundtree's out-of-the blue telephone call to her home. Vivian did, however, corroborate Ray Crump's story right down to the details about the beer, potato chips, whiskey, and cigarettes. Her version of events lined up with Crump's. They had walked out the towpath to a spot adjacent to the Potomac River, she told Roundtree. They drank a little, had sex on some rocks, and Crump fell asleep.
She left without waking him. The corroborating details offered Roundtree her first glimmer of hope. But unfortunately, like Crump, Vivian feared the repercussions of exposing her extramarital affair she believed her husband might kill her if he learned of it. She refused to testify in court. Only after Roundtree explained that Crump would likely face the death penalty did Vivian agree to sign an affidavit verifying she'd been with Crump the entire morning of the day of the murder, and that he had carried no gun.
But without an appearance at trial, the affidavit was all but worthless. Crump's fabrications to police would then form the only cornerstone of the government's case against him. The noose around his neck was tightening.19
When Ray Crump was moved to a cellblock with other prisoners, guards taunted him at night. "How you doing, Crump? You know, it would be a lot easier on you if you just come out and tell what you did."
Dovey Roundtree believed the guards were trying to extract a confession from Crump. "And I made him promise me. No matter what goes on, you tell the guards: Get my lawyer here.' Don't say anything else. I don't want them beating you up or messing with you. You just say: You get Mrs. Roundtree here.' And you say it loud, so that somebody in the other cells can hear you. That's what you've got to do. You got to fight fire with fire."20
Convinced of Ray Crump's innocence, Roundtree contacted the two attorneys in the Public Defender's Office of the Legal Aid Society who had been representing him George Peter Lamb and Ted O'Neill. Even before her formal court appearance on Crump's behalf on October 28, Roundtree had begun her own investigation.21 She learned that her client-to-be was a high school dropout who had married at seventeen. A father of five, Crump had sustained injuries in a serious automobile accident a few years earlier, and then had been beaten up and robbed by a gang in 1962. During his convalescence from both events, he had become addicted to alcohol. He was dirt poor he didn't have a bank account and didn't own stocks, bonds, real estate, a car, or other valuable property, nor did his wife, parents, or any other person who might be able to assist him in paying the costs of his defense. He was an easy scapegoat. His defense, Roundtree believed, would require a Herculean effort.
Roundtree decided to visit Georgetown, "to familiarize myself with that community," she explained years later. "I wanted to get a feeling for that place." The house that Mary Meyer had lived in was still sealed. "Police were still conducting their investigation. They were still around but I had no conversation with them, though I'm sure one of the police officers recognized me, knew who I was. I went out there at least twice within that vicinity, to see what I could see or hear." While looking at Mary's studio, Roundtree felt "an unfriendliness there." A black postman making his rounds, she recalled, "wanted to know what I was doing in the area."22
C&O Canal at intersection of Canal Road and Foxhall Road. Photo credit: Google Maps

Retracing Mary Meyer's route on the day of her murder, Roundtree approached the intersection of 34th and M Streets at the base of the steep hill, where she came upon Dixie Liquors, a small package store adjacent to Key Bridge, known at the time for selling alcohol to the underage well-to-do children of Northwest Washington. Had Crump and his girlfriend stopped there, she wondered, to buy their provisions before walking out on the towpath?
Turning west on Prospect Place, Roundtree approached the picturesque bridge over the C & O Canal to the towpath. She crossed the bridge and followed Mary Meyer's westerly route, tracing the path that, according to the press, had been Mary Meyer's daily routine. She passed under the aqueduct from the first column of Key Bridge, and from there she headed toward Fletcher's Boat House, a total distance of just over two miles. About a half a mile west, she would cross the wooden footbridge and continue to walk the 637.5 feet westward (just over a tenth of a mile) to the exact spot where Mary Meyer's life had ended.23
The C & O Canal fell under the jurisdiction of the US Park Police, some of whom had taken part in searches for the murder weapon that had killed Mary Meyer. The towpath was usually well patrolled, with Park Police cruisers covering the area from Georgetown to Seneca, Maryland, a tour of 22 miles.
Mounted police on horseback usually covered the four miles from Georgetown to Chain Bridge, patrolling the towpath and the woods between the canal and the Potomac River. Park Police officer Ray Pollan knew the area under the Key Bridge well. He had come to know the regulars who gathered there drinking cheap wine out of paper bags, but he had never seen Ray Crump among them. Pollan had been off-duty the day that Mary Meyer had been killed. Had he been on duty that day, he told Leo Damore, "[t]here probably wouldn't have been a murder, because I would've been there."24
Had the killer chosen a day when the towpath was relatively unattended?
Even before she became Ray Crump's attorney, Roundtree was aware of the "heavy heat" coming down on Crump's case. The young, ardent public defender, George Peter Lamb, had been keeping her informed after she expressed interest in the case. At the time, Lamb was focused on preparing for the preliminary hearing to which Crump was entitled to, regardless of innocence or guilt. Typically, a "prelim," as public defenders referred to it, would establish the evidence that the police had to support their charge of first-degree murder. Most important for a defendant, the preliminary hearing would afford the accused an opportunity to learn in advance the basis of the charges against him, as well as to allow his attorney to argue a lack of probable cause for his continued incarceration. Without significant evidence, particularly forensic evidence linking a defendant to the crime, there would be no legal basis for further detention. The defendant would, therefore, have to be released.
But it wasn't an "accident" or "oversight" that the Public Defender's Office hadn't been made aware, as they legally should have been, of the FBI Crime Lab report (see appendix 1) that had been delivered to police chief Robert V. Murray on October 16, just four days after the murder.
Had this occurred, there would have been no further grounds to detain Ray Crump. The report clearly documented the lack of any forensic evidence linking Crump to the murder scene or the victim.
Compounding that travesty of justice, not only was Ray Crump being denied a preliminary hearing, but the coroner's inquest was conducted with an unusual lack of protocol. In 1964 in Washington, the inquest was typically held in a room at the DC morgue. While the inquest carried no actual legal authority, its outcome might influence a judge on matters involving bail or extended incarceration. Most lawyers didn't even bother to attend a coroner's inquest, but attorneys in the Public Defender's office usually attended because it was an opportunity to find out what the government actually had in terms of evidence against their client. The entire proceedings were entered into the court record. "You could nail down to some extent what facts and evidence were known at the time," recalled George Peter Lamb. "This generally gave you a good opportunity for early discovery."25
But on the morning of October 19 before the scheduled eleven o'clock coroner's inquest into the murder of Mary Meyer a grand jury had indicted Ray Crump for first-degree murder. This was a considerable departure from legal procedure: Grand juries were usually convened after completion of a coroner's inquest. It was, in the view of Crump's Legal Aid attorneys Jake Stein and George Peter Lamb, a deliberate attempt by the government to circumvent a preliminary hearing for Crump. At the inquest itself, Crump's attorneys asked for a continuance in order to subpoena additional witnesses. The coroner denied the request and proceeded with the inquest over their objections.
Raymond Crump being escorted into DC Police Headquarters, October 12, 1964. Photo credit: Peter Janney / James Fetzer

Asserting that inquest protocol had been violated and that Crump deserved a preliminary hearing, both Stein and Lamb refused to participate in the hearing. "The conniving that went on around this case was astounding," remembered Lamb.26
In spite of the objections, the coroner's inquest found that there was sufficient evidence to bring Ray Crump Jr. to trial for the murder of Mary Meyer.
With Crump's attorneys absent, only one witness was called: Detective Bernie Crooke. His testimony amounted to hearsay. He alleged that the government's eyewitness, tow truck driver Henry Wiggins, had seen Ray Crump standing over the body of Mary Meyer "from a distance of nearly three quarters of a mile."27 This was not only a physical impossibility, it was factually incorrect.
The distance128.6 feet, to be exacthad already been measured by police the day after the murder.28 The all-white six-man jury, many of who were retired government employees, never even questioned the discrepancies.
With the government's case fortified by both the grand jury's indictment and the outcome of the coroner's inquest, Commissioner Sam Wertleb not only denied the defense's request for a continuance, but also its motions to subpoena six witnesses. Wertleb argued that the grand jury indictment had dispensed with any need for a preliminary hearing. In a separate case (Blue v. United States, 342 F.2d 894 [DC Cir. 1964]), decided only six days later on October 29, the DC Court of Appeals upheld a defendant's right to a preliminary hearing, arguing: "The denial of an opportunity for a defendant to consider intelligently the value of a pretrial hearing cannot be swept under the rug of a Grand Jury indictment."29
Without a preliminary hearing, the government could continue to conceal the FBI Crime Lab report from Crump's defense (see Appendix 1). This appeared to be their strategy. Had Crump been given a preliminary hearing, as he should have been, the FBI Crime Lab report would legally have to have been produced, and it freely acknowledged the holes in the government's case. Ray Crump would have undoubtedly been released. For nine months, the report would be buried, until finally a frustrated Dovey Roundtree demanded it be delivered. This was clear-cut malfeasance on the part of the government to manipulate the case.
"Despite police spokesmen repeatedly giving out provocative and inflammatory information to the press, all tending to point to the defendant's guilt," George Peter Lamb recalled, "they had very little evidence to back it up. They did everything possible to prevent any of the real details of the case being made public. The standard device in hot cases like this was to avoid the discovery process in a preliminary hearing or a coroner's inquest, and they got away with it. They didn't want to leave their case against Crump dangling in the wind, and they would do whatever was necessary to keep the defense from being able to see what little real evidence they had."30
Lamb's representation of Ray Crump Jr. had left him with an indelible memory. "There was something in Ray Crump that made me from the very beginning believe he wasn't guilty," Lamb said more than forty-five years later.
"My measure of him in the cellblock and in the courtroom was that he didn't do it, and it had to do with how Crump dealt with me, how he answered my questions, how he looked me in the eye. I was a believer in Crump's innocence and so was Ted O'Neill, who ran the Public Defender's Office."31
Dovey Roundtree filed her appearance in the defense of Ray Crump Jr. on October 28, 1964.32Crump appeared for his arraignment on his indictment for murder two days later, and entered a plea of not guilty. A trial date was set for January 11, 1965.
Roundtree, who had been in contact with Crump's former defense team, was aware of the prosecution's strategy. Her first move was to request bond for her client so that he could return to his work and his family. Roundtree hoped that she might have a sympathetic ear in federal district court judge Burnita Shelton Matthews a Truman appointee who had been a supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment since its inception in 1923 and was active in the suffrage movement. But Judge Matthews had a record of siding with the prosecution.
As far as George Peter Lamb was concerned, "Judge Matthews believed all blacks were guilty, and the reason they were guilty was because they were indicted, and therefore they should plead guilty. Anything that a defense lawyer did to slow the process was interfering with justice."33 True to form, Judge Matthews denied Ray Crump's bond on the grounds that the government had determined that he was "dangerous" and a "danger to the community."
An innocent man was being railroaded, Roundtree believed. Sorrow over the death of her grandmother Rachel just five days into her representation of Ray Crump only intensified her commitment to justice for her downtrodden client. The day of Ray Crump's arraignment, Roundtree had already filed a writ of habeas corpus on his behalf. Rather than attack the validity of the indictment, Roundtree charged that police had beaten Crump following his arrest on October 12, and that there had been a number of irregularities in the legal proceedings, chief among them the denial of a preliminary hearing.
"If there had been an orderly preliminary hearing with some leeway for discovery, we could have raised quite a bit of doubt with respect to probable cause…The government would have proceeded to the grand jury anyway and come back with an indictment, but I believe we could have established a great deal of doubt."34
The DC district judge denied the writ of habeas corpus on November 9, 1964. Anticipating as much, Roundtree had already begun preparing an appeal for the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. It was a shrewd move: She knew that the appeal wouldn't be decided for months, and the delay would afford her legal team much-needed time to prepare for trial. She also hoped that the media scrutiny focused on her client would abate in the intervening months.

Dovey Roundtree had another, more immediate situation that needed remedy. Her client was coming undone. His already fragile mental state was unraveling.35 Deteriorating mentally and emotionally, exhibiting signs of paranoia, chronic terror, and increasing despondency, Crump believed his food at the jail was being poisoned. During Roundtree's daily visits, he cried uncontrollably. "He was pitiful and completely scared, as an innocent man would be," recalled Roundtree. "He didn't have a murderer's temperament."36
The Roundtree remedy was a flash of brilliance: She filed a motion on November 12, 1964, for a mental examination of Ray Crump. "It was more than just for delay," she explained years later. "I had difficulty communicating with Crump. He was so withdrawn I came to know that really he was scared half to death."37 Wondering whether her client was fit to stand trial, Roundtree also feared that brutality and taunting by prison guards would undo Crump completely.
Later that November, Ray Crump underwent a sixty-day psychiatric evaluation at St. Elizabeth's Hospital. Having already established that Crump had been robbed and severely beaten in 1962, Roundtree underscored that Crump had endured a head trauma that had never been properly evaluated or diagnosed.
He suffered from excruciating headaches and had been known to have blackouts from binge drinking. He had been drunk the day of his arrest.38 In spite of this, in January 1965, Dr. Dale Cameron, superintendent of St. Elizabeth's, found Crump competent to stand trial, stating "that [Ray Crump] is not now, and was not, on or about October 12, 1964, suffering from a mental disease or defect."39
Having removed her client from the perils of the DC jail, if only briefly, Dovey Roundtree awaited word on her appeal of Crump's denial of a preliminary hearing. The appeal, handed down on June 15, 1965, was denied by a 2-1 decision. Dissenting DC circuit court judge George Thomas Washington sided with Roundtree, arguing "that a defendant is entitled to a preliminary hearing even after an indictment," and that "a coroner's inquest was no substitute for a preliminary hearing."
Judge Washington also noted that only one witness, Detective Bernie Crooke, had been called, and that he "gave mostly hearsay testimony," and that he was not subjected to cross-examination. Washington also expressed his skepticism on the record regarding Crooke's claim that "the government's chief eyewitness [tow truck driver Henry Wiggins] saw the defendant standing over the body from a distance of nearly three quarters of a mile."40
A dissenting opinion was better than a unanimous decision, but it would do little for Ray Crump's defense or mental equilibrium.

A Sense of Being Watched

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It was now inevitable that Ray Crump would stand trial for the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer. Already, Dovey Roundtree had begun to acquaint herself with the neighborhoods where Mary Meyer had lived and painted.
She had explored the C & O Canal towpath. As the trial date approached, Roundtree redoubled her efforts to retrace the dead woman's and her client's steps. "On most Saturday afternoons, or whenever we got the chance," recalled Roundtree's first cousin, Jerry Hunter, a student at Howard University's law school at the time, "we went out to Georgetown and the canal. There wasn't a blade of grass we didn't know about."41
C&O Canal from Chain Bridge at the base of the Palisades. Photo credit: David / Wikimedia (CC BY 2.0)

It was during this time that Roundtree became aware that there were many more entrances and exits than the four that the government maintained they had guarded on the day of the murder. On one exploration of the canal towpath, Roundtree and Hunter ran into Detective Bernie Crooke, who wanted to know why they were bothering to investigate the area. "You know he's guilty," Roundtree remembered Crooke saying. "Why are you doing this?"42
Someone else was also bothered by Roundtree's investigations of the towpath. Almost from the beginning, she received phone calls around midnight.
"The caller never spoke," she wrote in her 2009 autobiography, Justice Older Than the Law, "yet he or she stayed on the line, breathing into the phone until I hung up. Days would pass, and then once again would come the dreaded ring." She continued:
The calls, it became clear, were tied to my visits to the crime scene. I often had the sense, there, that I was being watched. The sun shone, the park and towpath echoed with the shouts and laughter of runners and picnickers and fishermen on the autumn afternoons when we visited, but I could not shake off the sense of something sinister.
The more we visited the crime scene, the more persistent the calls became, but I kept returning to the towpath area with George and Jerry because I was so absolutely convinced that only by memorizing the area, every tree and blade of grass, would I be fully prepared for anything the prosecution might bring up at trial.43

A False Clue

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In December 1964, Detective Bernie Crooke suddenly informed Roundtree that police had recovered Crump's hair from the sweater that Mary Meyer had been wearing when she was murdered.44
This was a complete fabrication; the police had recovered no such forensic evidence. But they launched a crusade to permit them to take a sample of Crump's hair. Eventually, and against his will, they did, and it yielded a match of hair found inside the brimmed golf cap that had been recovered on the day after the murder on the shore of the Potomac River 684 feet west of the murder scene. Given the eyewitness reports of Henry Wiggins and Lieutenant William Mitchell, both of whom claimed to have seen a "Negro male" wearing a dark-brimmed golf cap, the government, with nothing better to go on, would extol this alleged match as proof that Crump was the cold-blooded killer.
The witnesses' statements, however, proved only that Crump had lied about wearing the cap. That wasn't good, but it didn't amount to murder.

Roundtree Senses Something Strange

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In its zeal to pin Mary Meyer's killing on Crump, the prosecution ignored an entirely plausible scenario: that Crump had actually told the truth about falling into the river. After all, his cap and Windbreaker had been found in the area where Crump claimed to have slipped off some rocks.
The jacket had been retrieved by police two-tenths of mile west of the murder scene and the cap 416 feet east of where the jacket had been found. At that juncture on the Potomac River shoreline, any attempt to swim the quarter mile across the dangerous river current and undertow would have been daunting even for an accomplished swimmer, let alone someone who was terrified of being in water over his head.45
Who was Mary Pinchot Meyer, Roundtree wanted to know? She was familiar with the newspaper accounts that identified the slain woman as an up-and-coming artist, the niece of former Pennsylvania governor Gifford Pinchot, and a friend of former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy's. Roundtree knew also that Mary had been divorced, though she was not yet aware that she had only obtained the divorce after granting Cord control over her sons' education.
Mary Pinchot Meyer at JFK's 46th birthday Party. Photo credit: JFK Library / Wikimedia (CC BY 3.0)

Roundtree was puzzled. Police had reported finding nothing of significance when they searched Mary Meyer's house. She concluded that someone must have gotten there before them and wiped the place clean. "There was nothing to see; they didn't even see pictures of her children," Roundtree remembered.
"I would have certainly expected something connecting her with somebody or with something, because there was precious little found in her dwelling. Nothing could connect her to anybody."
Unaware of Mary Meyer's affair with the late President Kennedy, her diary, or her relationship with psychedelic guru Timothy Leary, Roundtree's instinct told her that something suspicious had taken place, and that this was not some random murder.
Less than two months into the case, she and her defense team had begun to wonder, "Could [Mary Meyer] have been murdered and taken [to the C & O Canal towpath] with everything staged to look different?" She was troubled by something else: What had happened to the stalled Nash Rambler that Henry Wiggins had been called to fix? She pressed her private investigator, Purcell Moore, to find a repair order for the car, or the car's owner, but he came up dry on both counts.46 Justice was not color-blind, however, and that was one reason she believed that Ray Crump had the deck stacked against him that, and the fact that the prosecution had no other suspect.
"I thought we had enough evidence to go to trial," recalled former US attorney David Acheson in an interview for this book in 2008. Acheson had been the Justice Department's US attorney at the time of Crump's arrest.
In fact, Acheson, son of former secretary of state Dean Acheson, had the distinguished pedigree typical of Mary Meyer's Georgetown neighbors. He had personally known Mary well, and had attended Yale in the same class as her ex-husband. He was fully aware that Cord was not the generic "government clerk" that Washington newspapers had made him out to be.
"The prevailing wisdom in the office at the time was that Ray Crump was guilty," recalled Acheson, "and we had to prosecute somebody. In a murder case like this where you have a plausible suspect, and you don't have enough evidence to go against anybody else, you really have to go to trial. You've gotta show the public you didn't just kiss the case off."47
Without Dovey Roundtree's commitment to Ray Crump's defense, Mary Meyer's murder might well have been relegated into history as a random sexual assault gone awry, a twist of fate for a woman who had been so fortunate in so many respects up to that point. Yet Roundtree was committed not just to the defense of her client, of whose innocence she was convinced, but also to the heart and soul of justice itself the principle of equal protection under the law. And so, before the end of 1964, Dovey Roundtree was prepared to stake her entire professional reputation as well as her own financial resources on one of the biggest trials ever to take place in Washington.
Next: Trial By Fire

References

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1. "History, Hume, and the Press," Letter to John Norvell Washington, dated June 14, 1807, The Letters of Thomas Jefferson: 17431826. (Located at the University of Virginia Electronic Text Center). See the following: http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/pub...fLett.html

2. George Peter Lamb, interview by Leo Damore, May 23, 1991.

3. Katie McCabe, "She Had a Dream," Washingtonian, March 2002, pp. 5260, pp. 124130.

4. Ibid., p. 55.

5. Ibid., p. 56.

6. Ibid., p. 55.

7. Ibid., p. 56.

8. Ibid., p. 60.

9. Ibid., pp. 5758.

10. Katie McCabe and Dovey Johnson Roundtree, Justice Older Than the Law: The Life of Dovey Johnson Roundtree (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), p. 90.

11. McCabe, "She Had a Dream." p. 60.

12. Dovey Roundtree, interview by Leo Damore, Washington, DC, November 4, 1990.

13. Ibid.

14. The fact that Ray Crump had been with a girlfriend named Vivian on the towpath at the time of Mary Meyer's murder was revealed to attorney Dovey Roundtree by both Ray Crump himself and by his mother, Martha Crump. Dovey Roundtree, interview by Leo Damore, Washington, DC, April 4, 1992. See also McCabe and Roundtree, Justice Older Than the Law, pp. 195.

15. Dovey Roundtree, interview by Leo Damore, Washington, DC, April 4, 1992.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.; Dovey Roundtree, interviews by Leo Damore, Washington, DC, February 23, 1991, and April 4, 1992. Roundtree's conversations with the woman named Vivian are also covered in some detail in Justice Older Than the Law, pp. 195196.

20. Roundtree, interview, February 23, 1991.

21. Roundtree, interview, November 4, 1990.

22. Ibid.

23. The distances mentioned were taken from the trial transcript, United States of America v. Ray Crump, Jr., Defendant, Criminal Case No. 930-64, United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Washington, DC, July 20, 1965, p. 119, pp. 710711. The distances were measured again by the author on February 6, 2008, using GPS portable technology and found to be accurate within ten feet.

24. US Park Police officer Ray Pollan, interview by Leo Damore, Washington, DC, December 19, 1990.

25. Lamb, interview, May 23, 1991.

26. Ibid.

27. Crump v. Anderson, June 15, 1965, 122 US App. DC, 352 F.2d 649 (DC Cir. 1965). Circuit Judge George Thomas Washington pointed this out in his dissent during Crump's appeal for a writ of habeas corpus, which was denied.

28. Trial transcript., p. 710.

29. Blue v. United States of America, 342 F.2d 894 (DC Cir. 1964), p. 900. The case was argued on May 18, 1964, and decided on October 29, 1964.

30. Lamb, interview, May 23, 1991.

31. George Peter Lamb, interview by the author, May 12, 2010.

32. US v. Ray Crump, Jr., US District Court for the District of Columbia, Criminal No. 930- 64. CJ# 1317-64. "The Clerk of said Court will please enter the appearance of Dovey J. Roundtree and George F. Knox, Sr. as attorneys for defendant in the above entitled cause." George Peter Lamb and the Legal Aid Association withdrew from the Crump case on November 3, 1964.

33. Lamb, interview, May 23, 1991.

34. Roundtree, interview, November 4, 1990.

35. Ibid.; Dovey Roundtree, interviews by Leo Damore, Washington, DC, September 26, 1990, May 25, 1991, and April 4, 1992. In each of the interviews, Roundtree made it clear that her client, Ray Crump, was deteriorating mentally soon after entering his plea. She continued to believe that he was being abused by prison guards, in spite of daily visits from her and his family.

36. McCabe and Roundtree, Justice Older Than the Law, p. 193.

37. Ibid.

38. US v. Ray Crump, Jr., United States District Court For The District of Columbia. Criminal No. 930-64. Motion for Mental Examination. Filed November 12, 1964. Harry M. Hull, Clerk. The motion also supports Detective Bernie Crooke's statement to Dovey Roundtree that he had smelled beer when he arrested Crump at approximately 1:15 p.m. on October 12, 1964.

39. Superintendent Dale C. Cameron, MD, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Washington, DC, to Clerk of the Criminal Division for the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, January 13, 1965.

40. Crump v. Anderson, pp. 4259. The transcript of the coroner's inquest on October 19, 1964, is no longer available.

41. Jerry Hunter, Esq., interview by Leo Damore, Washington, DC, November 6, 1990.

42. Roundtree, interview, February 23, 1991.

43. McCabe and Roundtree, Justice Older Than the Law, p. 197.

44. Roundtree, interview, February 23, 1991.

45. River Patrolman police officer Frederick Q. Byers of the Harbor Patrol testified on three different occasions that he retrieved a jacket alleged to have belonged to Crump at 1:46 p.m on the afternoon of the murder. Trial transcript, p. 408, p. 409, p. 413. The distance computed to Three Sisters Island was from a GPS navigation instrument and Google Earth maps.

46. Both Wiggins and Branch would testify at the murder trial that they had no knowledge of the ownership, the work ticket, or the ultimate disposition of the stalled Nash Rambler sedan or who owned the vehicle. Trial transcript, p. 254, pp. 312313.

47. David Acheson, interview by the author, Washington, DC, December 10, 2008.