10-02-2019, 04:01 PM (This post was last modified: 11-02-2019, 12:08 PM by Mark A. O'Blazney.)
Tom Scully Wrote:
Mark A. O'Blazney Wrote:
Dawn Meredith Wrote:
Lauren Johnson Wrote:I just bought the Kindle version on Amazon for $1.99. Looking forward to reading it and to the continued high level of conversation in this thread.
It's a real page turner Lauren. Opps I forgot Peter had read the book too, that's what I get for trying to post before court. (I miss stuff). And Peter and I are in total agreement.
Myth makes better reading than, well....... your turn, Jim. I wish Mr. Janney the best for the rest of his life, though. Hope he sells a lot of books by his publisher Skyhorse. He first went to Trine Day, but...... well.......
A toast in rememberance of Dovey, and her several contradictory versions of the status of alleged Crump alibi witness, Vivian. While we are at it, add a toast to those who
believe resident Trump is donating his time and effort to "save" our formerly great nation!
Chorus:
....Why do we never get an answer When we're knocking at the door? Because the truth is hard to swallow
Tom Scully Wrote: Peter, I am constrained by what I read. There are four different versions of this key component. It is not my fault, it is Dovey Roundtree's fault and it is disqualifying The contradictions make it impossible for a reasonable person to go where you are firm in positioning yourself, IMO.
..........Peter Janney confirms in his new book "Mary's Mosaic" that indeed Dovey Roundtree was able to locate and even talk to Crump's girlfriend Vivian. Roundtree told about Vivian during her 1992 interview with Leo Damore. (Mary's Mosaic, p. 95.) Although Peter Janney, Leo Damore, Nina Burleigh and Katie McCabe (author of Roundtree's autobiography) have been frequently in contact with each other related to their Mary Meyer research, none of them seemed to have the need to address this inconsistency regarding Vivian. That's really weird, for the interests are clearly there: Vivian's information is crucial for the analysis of Crump's whereabouts on the towpath that day. Peter Janney simply ignores the fact that Roundtree told Burleigh that she was never able to locate Vivian.
There is a pattern of this kind of spinning around Crump's activities on the towpath, in which lawyer Dovey Roundtree is definately involved. On page 94 of "Mary's Mosaic" Peter Janney states that Roundtree told Damore in 1990 that Crump knew about the location at the edge of the Potomac where Vivian and he went to. After falling into the river, Crump tried to "find his way out of the dang place." Next comes this quote: Quote: He wasn't familar with that area at all. And he sort of roamed around. And then he heard something like an explosion. That's quite a contradiction by Roundtree: was or wasn't Crump familiar with the area? According to most sources he was, for he went sometimes fishing there. Furthermore, Roundtree entirely avoids the issue of Crump's jacket and cap which were found in the river later on. Much more come on those items, for they are pivotal in Janney's murder scenario; why would Crump have thrown his jacket and cap in the river when he tried to get out of the area? However, much more suspicious is Roundtree's claim during her 1990 interview with Leo Damore that Crump actually heard "something like an explosion." "Like the backfire of a car," said Crump, according to Roundtree. This statement has one direct consequence for Crump's whereabouts on the towpath: he was already awake well before the shots were fired! This statement by Roundtree implies that the 2 shots [if any...] didn't wake up Crump: Crump was already roaming around in the area to find a way out before the shots were fired... Once again, Peter Janney basically ignores this fact. That's suspicious to say the least, for this "roaming around in the area" by Crump turns out to be crucial within the scenario "Mitchell shot Mary", promoted by Janney himself. See the coming posts. And now back to Dovey Roundtree, her 2009 autobiography "Justice Older Than The Law," page 192:....... ....
Mark, I hope you are enjoying your summer, stay well!
Enjoyed my summer immensely, Mr. Scully....... and you?
THE BRILLIANT BLACK WOMAN WHO DEFENDED THE ACCUSED KILLER OF JFK'S MISTRESS, PART 2
Peter, in your lengthy cut and paste I excerpted above,. the name William Mitchell is displayed 32 times! Kindly post proof
supporting what could possibly justify this over the top emphasis on William L Mitchell, considering that I demolished
Mr. Janney's original, sensational claims against Mitchell, and Ms. Roundtree's suspicions related to Mitchell?
This is an image of an email I received from author Janney's associate, Roger Charles. I believe it is self explanatory....
Quote:[URL="https://books.google.com/books?id=OGOCDwAAQBAJ&dq=peter+janney+mary%27s+mosaic+scully+georgia+law+professor&hl=en&newbks=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj36vjyzNzgAhUBLqwKHVYYB28Q6AEwAHoECAcQAg"]Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary ...
... Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace: Third Edition Peter Janney ... Discussing his critical post of Mary's Mosaic in an email to a University of Georgia law professor, Scully identified ...More
I naively assumed the UGA law professor would want to know he was publishing claims about Mitchell on a uga.edu webspace that
I knew to be contrary to verifiable facts! Nope!
Quote:[PDF][URL="http://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1152&context=fac_pm"]The Unsolved Murder of JFK's Mistress - Digital Commons @ Georgia ...
by DE Wilkes Jr - ‎2012 May 30, 2012 - Wilkes, Donald E. Jr., "The Unsolved Murder of JFK's Mistress" (2012). ... that the news photographer who took the pictures "found it odd ... (A July 27, 1965 newspaper article aboutMitchell's trial testimony was headlined,.
Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their ... by University of Georgia Law Professor Donald E. Wilkes, Jr.
....and this is an image of a comment posted by Doug Horne on amazon.com, seeming not exactly appreciative of new facts resulting from my 2012 Mitchell research.: (Peter, my reaction to Horne's "comment" is identical to my reaction to your post I linked to, above.: WTF ?)
Peter Janney's uncle was Frank Pace, chairman of General Dynamics who enlisted law partners Roswell Gilpatric and Luce's brother-in-law, Maurice "Tex" Moore, in a trade of 16 percent of Gen. Dyn. stock in exchange for Henry Crown and his Material Service Corp. of Chicago, headed by Byfield's Sherman Hotel group's Pat Hoy. The Crown family and partner Conrad Hilton next benefitted from TFX, at the time, the most costly military contract award in the history of the world. Obama was sponsored by the Crowns and Pritzkers. So was Albert Jenner Peter Janney has preferred to write of an imaginary CIA assassination of his surrogate mother, Mary Meyer, but not a word about his Uncle Frank.
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
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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 Timesput 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.
Dovey Johnson Roundtree
.
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.
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, 1964.32 Crump 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
.
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
.
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
.
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
.
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.
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"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
Part 1 of this two-part series presented significant scenes from Dovey Roundtree's childhood in the old south; some were as bad as you might expect. Hiding in the dark under the kitchen table while a screaming mob of Ku Klux Klansmen thundered by on horseback. Or the time she sat behind a trolley car driver to watch him work, and he said to her grandmother, "Get that pickaninny out of here! You know she can't sit there."
Education was the way out, and Roundtree worked three jobs to put herself through college. Eventually she went to law school. Her biographer, Katie McCabe, said of her passion for the law:
There was a simplicity about it, and an intricacy, and a logic. Closely reasoned opinions, precedents, constitutional principles these, woven together, made a kind of sense that imposed itself on the scattered reality of human existence.
Part 2 includes riveting scenes of Roundtree in action, demonstrating all of the above, including a few things she did not learn in school.
Below is a compressed excerpt from Chapter 5, "Trial by Fire," 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 Chapter 4, which focuses mostly on Dovey Roundtree herself, please go here. (To see excerpts from the book posted earlier, please go here, here, here, here, and here. The last two are about who the real killer may have been.) On Monday, July 19, 1965, a 300-person jury pool convened in Courtroom 8, where the laborious process of jury selection would take all day. Dovey Roundtree and her defense team scored a partial victory with a jury of eight blacks and four whites; seven of the twelve jurors were women. There were also four alternate jurors. Before retiring for the day, the jury selected their foreman: Edward O. Savwoir, a forty-four-year-old African American program specialist at the Job Corps in the Office of Economic Opportunity in Washington.
The following morning, on a sweltering July day, the trial convened in the newly air-conditioned fourth-floor courtroom of Washington's US District Court Building. It was packed to capacity with onlookers. Many would return day after day for the duration of the trial. Also present every day was Martha Crump, Ray Crump's mother, always accompanied by members of her church community.
The court room's racial mix and class disparities reflected the divide between the murdered woman and the accused defendant, all interspersed with a noticeable number of unsmiling white men in impeccably tailored suits, reminding Roundtree of the significance of this case.
"So many men in gray suits showed up," she recalled in 1991. "They were government people. I knew that. But I could never understand why so many at the time."8
The news media was a significant presence in the courtroom. Sam Donaldson, a young broadcast news reporter for the CBS affiliate, WTOP-TV, in Washington, sat directly behind the defense team, as did two nuns. Roundtree had no idea who they were, but she recalled that at different times, both Donaldson and the nuns said something similar to her: "You'll pull it out… " Her response to all of them: "Well, you must know something I don't know."9
Indeed, Hantman's [prosecutor Alfred Hantman] long, thundering opening statement seemed to spell doom for the defendant he said had "deliberately, willfully, and maliciously shot and killed Mary Pinchot Meyer."10 In graphic terms, Hantman portrayed Crump in a violent struggle with the victim, insinuating, with no evidence to support his position, that the murder had been the result of a sexual assault gone awry.
Nothing about the victim, Hantman told the jury, would have attracted the attention of a thief, given that she carried no wallet and wore no jewelry.11 Crump had tried to take her by surprise from behind, Hantman maintained, but she had struggled so powerfully that he had been forced to resort to brutality shooting her in the head to subdue her, then dragging her 25 feet while she continued to struggle, before fatally shooting her again.
An effective storyteller, Hantman captured and held the jury's attention with his vivid portrayal of Mary Meyer on her knees, fighting for her life even with a bullet in her head, tearing the defendant's jacket and his trouser pocket.12 United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Photo credit: AgnosticPreachersKid / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Hantman continued in morbid detail: "We will show you that the blood stains on the tree were only two, two-and-a-half feet from the ground. We will show you that Mary Pinchot Meyer got away from the defendant. She ran back across the towpath toward the canal itself, away from the embankment; that she fell on that side of the towpath closest to the canal; that this defendant Raymond Crump, seeing the deceased getting away from him and believing that she might be able to identify him later, shot Mary Pinchot Meyer again right over the right shoulder."13 Designed for high-impact courtroom drama upon the jury, the Hantman delivery was intended to be as brutal as it was damaging.
Next, Hantman gave the police reconstruction of Ray Crump's alleged attempt to flee the murder scene after tow truck driver Henry Wiggins had spotted him standing over "the lifeless corpse." The government's prosecutor extolled the professionalism and alacrity of the police response in closing off all of the exits in the towpath area "within four minutes" of the broadcast bulletin about the murder.
Documenting that Crump was apprehended several hundred feet from the murder scene, but only after he "ran over the embankment, ran west 684 feet where he got rid of his light tan zipper jacket," and then, "426 feet beyond that, further west, [he] got rid of his plaid cap with a bill on it," Hantman maintained that Crump had "continued to run in a westerly direction towards Fletcher's Landing for some 1,750 feet beyond this, at which point he saw Officer Roderick Sylvis."
Crump had tried to escape, said Hantman, by swimming across the Potomac but realized he wouldn't be able to do so. Detective John Warner finally apprehended Crump, who then lied about having been fishing that morning, as well as about the clothes he had been wearing. The beige Windbreaker jacket and dark-plaid golf cap would be found not far from the murder scene.14
Concluding his statement, Hantman once again implied that Crump had acted out of a premeditated intent to commit a sexual assault, thus casting the murder of Mary Meyer not a spontaneous act, but a killing in cold blood, the result of an attempted rape that had been derailed by a particularly feisty victim.
Hantman made certain the jury knew that when Crump was apprehended, the fly on his pants was open, that his pant's pocket was torn, that he was soaking wet, that he had blood on his right hand, which was cut, and that he had a small cut or abrasion over one eye. All this could have only happened, Hantman maintained, from his struggle with Mary Meyer.
To bolster his contention that Crump's injuries must have resulted from his struggle with Mary Meyer, Hantman concluded his presentation with Lieutenant William L. Mitchell's statement to police the day after the murder.
Mitchell had jogged past Mary Meyer at approximately 12:20 p.m., he said, about four minutes before the first shot was fired. Two hundred yards after passing Meyer, Hantman read aloud, Mitchell had told police that he had run past a "Negro male dressed in a light tan jacket and dark corduroy trousers and wearing a dark plaid cap with a brim on it," and who was not carrying any fishing equipment.15 Ben Bradlee. Photo credit: Miguel Ariel Contreras Drake-McLaughlin / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The prosecutor's opening statement left Dovey Roundtree in a kind of legal and emotional quicksand. Not only had Hantman's recitation been convincing and thorough, he had promised the jury that his witnesses would dispel any doubt as to the defendant's innocence, in spite of the fact that no murder weapon had been recovered. Regardless of the fact that the prosecution's case was built entirely on circumstantial evidence, it would take a grueling, formidable effort on Dovey Roundtree's part to rescue her client.
"I was completely overwhelmed by what he promised the jury he was going to present," Roundtree recalled in 1992. "It sounded like a different case entirely. I was scared to death."16
If she had been staggered even a bit undone by Hantman's performance, Dovey Roundtree had not shown it. She decided to reserve her own opening statement, then implored Judge Corcoran to let the record show that Hantman's statement had been so inflammatory, so prejudicial, that it was grounds for a mistrial. The judge declined to do so. Roundtree then insisted on seeing "the bloodstained tree" that Hantman said he would be bringing into the courtroom. The judge agreed, saying he wanted to see it, too; but already the proceedings were spiraling out of control. In an effort to maintain decorum, Judge Corcoran ordered an immediate fifteen-minute recess.
At no time was Hantman aware that Mary Meyer had kept a diary, or that she had been romantically involved with President Kennedy. Ben Bradlee was well aware of both, but he wasn't about to reveal anything further.
The first witness to testify was Benjamin C. Bradlee, who was then the Washington, D.C., bureau chief for Newsweek. "Did there come a time when you saw Mary Pinchot Meyer in death?" Hantman asked. Bradlee recounted that he had gone to the D.C. morgue on the day of the murder "sometime after six o'clock in the evening,"17 accompanied by Sergeant Sam Wallace of the DC Metropolitan Police Department, where he had identified the body of his sister-in-law, Mary Pinchot Meyer. The inference of Bradlee's testimony was that it wasn't until Sergeant Wallace arrived at Bradlee's home that evening, just before 6:00 p.m., that Bradlee had any knowledge of the murder.
Strangely, Hantman never directly asked Bradlee when he had first learned of the event. Instead, he inquired whether Bradlee had, subsequent to Mary Meyer's death, made "any effort to gain entry to this studio that was occupied by Mrs. Meyer."
Contrary to what he would document in his 1995 memoir, Bradlee told the court that he had, in fact, entered Mary's studio that night with no difficulty, presumably alone, never indicating whether anyone else was with him.18
At no time was Hantman aware that Mary Meyer had kept a diary, or that she had been romantically involved with President Kennedy. Ben Bradlee was well aware of both, but he wasn't about to reveal anything further. More than 25 years later, in 1991, Hantman would remark to author Leo Damore that had he known these two facts, "it could have changed everything," because he was "totally unaware of who Mary Meyer was or what her connections were."19
Appearing to tread lightly, Dovey Roundtree began her first cross-examination. "Mr. Bradlee, I have just one question," she said.
Bradlee: Yes, ma'am.
Roundtree: Do you have any personal, independent knowledge regarding the causes of the death of your sister-in-law? Do you know how she met her death? Do you know who caused it?
Bradlee: Well, I saw a bullet hole in her head.
Roundtree: Do you know who caused this to be?
Bradlee: No, I don't.
Roundtree: You have no other information regarding the occurrences leading up to her death?
Bradlee: No, I do not.
Roundtree: Thank you, sir.20
Unaware of its far-reaching implications, Roundtree had asked the most important question surrounding the death of Mary Pinchot Meyer: "Do you have any personal, independent knowledge regarding the causes of the death of your sister-in-law?"
Ben Bradlee had withheld the fact that a group of Mary Meyer's intimates, including Bradlee himself, had immediately conspired to commandeer Mary Meyer's diary, letters, and personal papers and given the entire collection to CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton. Ben Bradlee playing with John F. Kennedy Jr. Atoka, Virginia, November 10, 1963. Photo credit: JFK Library
In addition, he omitted the single most important event surrounding the murder of his sister-in-law: the telephone call from his CIA friend "just after lunch" about four hours before her identity to police had been established. The same caller, the reader will recall, had also informed Cord Meyer in New York of Mary's demise later that afternoon again, before her identity was known to authorities.21
During the first morning of the trial, Deputy Coroner Linwood L. Rayford testified that he had pronounced the then-unknown victim dead at the murder scene at approximately 2:05 p.m. The victim had been shot twice, he said in his testimony:
"…the first [shot] was located an inch and half anterior to the left ear…. The second [shot] was located over the right shoulder blade about six inches from the midline." Rayford went on to delineate the path of each bullet. The first shot to the head, just anterior to the left ear and surrounded by a dark halo, traversed the skull across the floor of the brain, angling slightly from the back to the front. "In other words, going foreword from left to right, [it] struck the right side of the skull, fractured it and ricocheted back where the slug was found in the right side of the brain," he explained.
The second bullet wound, also surrounded by a dark halo, had been fired over the victim's right shoulder blade, traversing it and the chest cavity, perforating the right lung and severing the aorta. Hantman questioned the significance of the "two darkened halos" that surrounded each gunshot wound. "It is suggestive of powder burns," Rayford responded. "This means that the gun was fired from rather close proximity."22
Rayford went on to explain that the victim had "superficial lacerations to the forehead, abrasions to the forehead, to the left knee and the left ankle." Hantman wanted the jury to know that there had been a violent struggle before and after the first shot had been fired, that Mary Meyer had fought hard, and that she had been dragged "clear across the path," after she clung to a tree, leaving traces of her blood. Whoever the assassin was, Rayford's detailed account made clear, he had been able to overpower the 5 foot 6 inch victim, who weighed 127 pounds, from behind.23 In the midst of the struggle, the first shot, Rayford testified, would have produced "a considerable amount of external bleeding." The coroner's description of the precise angles of each shot implied that the assassin was likely ambidextrous and had expertise in the surgical use of a handgun. Mary Pinchot Meyer (left), Mary's Mosaic by Peter Janney (center), and James Jesus Angleton (right). Photo credit: JFK Library / Wikimedia (CC BY 3.0), Skyhorse Publishing, and National Counterintelligence Center / Wikimedia
Dr. Rayford's testimony gave Dovey Roundtree an opportunity. In her cross examination, she asked the coroner whether "a person firing a weapon at this range would be likely to have powder marks [actual powder burns and/or the presence of nitrates] on his hands or her hands?" Rayford's reply: "Likely, yes."24
There had been no evidence that Ray Crump had traces of nitrates on his hands. The lack of powder burns didn't prove Ray Crump's innocence, however; it only proved police negligence. In their zeal to pin the murder on Crump, and in their certainty that he was the man they were looking for, the police hadn't bothered to test his hands for traces of nitrates.
Yet no one except Dovey Roundtree seemed to question how a diminutive man such as Ray Crump, whose driver's license at the time of his arrest listed him as "5 feet 3½ inches and 130 pounds,"25 had been able to subdue a strong, athletic woman who was taller than he was and weighed about the same. Moreover, no one in Crump's family or community had ever seen him in possession of any firearm, much less use one with any skill or precision.
Crump, however, had in fact been weighed and measured at police headquarters on the day of the murder after his arrest. Police listed his height as 5 feet 5½ inches, weighing 145 pounds,26 but it wasn't clear whether he was wearing his 2-inch platform heel shoes at the time, or his wet clothes. In any case, Crump's height and weight, as well as his age according to both his driver's license and the police booking record were at a considerable variance from the "stocky 5 feet eight inches to five feet 10 inches, 185 pounds Negro in his 40s, with a weight of 185 pounds," listed on Police Form PD-251 and broadcast shortly after the murder, based on Henry Wiggins Jr.'s eyewitness account. The discrepancy would become the cornerstone for Crump's defense.
After the lunch recess, Alfred Hantman, despite Dovey Roundtree's objections, displayed a 55-foot-wide topographical map of the canal towpath and murder scene on the wall opposite the jury box. It was just one of fifty exhibits that Hantman would present at trial, including the bloodstained tree limb that Mary Meyer had clung to moments before she died. Such flamboyant displays by Hantman would eventually backfire, as the prosecution increasingly failed to fill the void of any real forensic evidence.
Hantman then called the map's creator, Joseph Ronsisvalle of the National Park Service, to the witness stand. "How many exits are there from the towpath between Key Bridge and Chain Bridge?" Hantman asked him. Ronsisvalle identified four: "There are steps to Water Street at Key Bridge. There's an underpass at Foundry Branch. There is an underpass at Fletcher's Boat House; and there are steps at Chain Bridge."27 Hantman asked about the distances between exits, and made a point of telling the court that within four minutes the police were guarding and closing off all four exits.
In her cross-examination of Joseph Ronsisvalle, Dovey Roundtree proved why her colleague had once called her "the world's greatest cross-examiner."
The many hours that Roundtree had spent combing and familiarizing herself with the towpath area were about to pay off. She not only revealed a fifth exit that Ronsisvalle had failed to mention, but also established through his testimony that there were many other places "where a person walking on foot could leave the area of the towpath without using any of the fixed exits."28 C&O Canal Towpath and Raymond Crump Jr. being arrested October 12, 1964. Photo credit: C&O Canal NHP / Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0) and Lets Roll Forums
Hantman became unsettled. Roundtree had raised doubts about Ronsisvalle's knowledge of the towpath area in fact, openly challenging his expertise.
"It would be possible, would it not, for a person to take a path which you have not indicated and which counsel, through his questions, has not asked about which you do not know; is that not true?"29 Hantman objected to her question, and Roundtree addressed Judge Corcoran: "I think that is a fair and proper question, Your Honor." The judge agreed, overruling Hantman. According to Judge Corcoran, Roundtree was "asking about his [the witness's] knowledge of the area. If he doesn't know, he doesn't know," said Corcoran.30
The judge's ruling helped Roundtree build the momentum she needed. She now revealed not only Ronsisvalle's complete unfamiliarity with many of the area's hidden exits, but also the fact that he had never himself walked along or explored the towpath, or any of the areas in question. It was a stunning revelation that undermined the prosecution's case, in addition to Ronsisvalle's credibility as an expert witness. Reasonable doubt was alive and well.
Before the end of the first day, the prosecution called its star eyewitness: tow truck driver Henry Wiggins Jr., who, Hantman made a point of noting, had been "a specialist in the Military Police Corps" for over three years and had "specialized training in the careful observation of people."31 Roundtree objected to Hantman adding that detail, but Judge Corcoran allowed it.
On the witness stand, Henry Wiggins recounted having been sent by his manager, Joe Cameron, to pick up Bill Branch at the Key Bridge Esso Station, from which he proceeded to the north side of the 4300 block of Canal Road to service a stalled Nash Rambler sedan. Wiggins estimated that it was approximately 12:20 p.m. when he and Branch reached the stalled vehicle and got out of their truck. Branch, said Wiggins, went to the Rambler's passenger side to unlock it, while Wiggins himself started to remove his tools from the truck in preparation for diagnosing and fixing the stalled vehicle.32
As soon as Wiggins was out of the truck, however, he heard "some screams…. It sounded like a woman screaming." He said that the screams lasted "about 20 seconds… coming from the direction of the canal."33
When the screaming stopped, Wiggins testified, he "heard a shot," again coming from the direction of the canal. In response, he "ran diagonally across the road" toward the three-foot wall overlooking both the canal and the towpath on the southern side of the canal. In the midst of crossing Canal Road, Wiggins explained, he heard "another shot just as I was reaching the wall of the canal."
Hantman asked "how much of a time interval" had elapsed between the first and second shot, and Wiggins testified that it was only "a few seconds."34 (His partner, Bill Branch, would later testify he thought it was closer to ten seconds).
Peering over the wall, Wiggins testified that he observed "a man standing over a woman lying on the towpath. The man was standing behind the body, facing my direction. The man's head, was bent down a little; he wasn't crouched. He was standing."
Hantman wanted to know how much time had elapsed between Wiggins hearing the second shot and his seeing the man. "Just a fraction of a second," Wiggins testified. Hantman then asked what time of day it was when he had seen the man. In his testimony, Wiggins couldn't say for certain. "It was around 12:20 p.m., somewhere around there; it may have been later," he said.35
Henry Wiggins was certain about one point in particular: he had had a clear, unobstructed view of the man standing over the dead woman at a distance of 128.6 feet.36 He told the court that the man had "looked up towards the wall of the canal where I was standing."37
Hantman: Were you looking directly at him at that point?
Wiggins: I was looking at him.
Hantman: Then what happened?
Wiggins: I ducked down behind the wall at that time, not too long, and I came back up from behind the wall to see him turning around and shoving something in his pocket.
Hantman: Where was he holding this something that you speak of?
Wiggins: He was holding it in his right hand.
Hantman: Could you tell what the object was?
Wiggins: No, sir, I couldn't.
Hantman: Could you tell us whether it was light or dark or what particular color it was?
Wiggins: It was dark, I believe, some kind of hand object.
Hantman: And he put this hand object where, sir?
Wiggins: Into his right jacket pocket.
Hantman: After this individual put this dark object into right jacket pocket, what did you see him do?
Wiggins: [He] Just turned around and walked over straight away from the body, down over the hill.38
Next, Hantman asked Wiggins to describe what the man in question had been wearing. Wiggins recalled that the man wore a cap "that buttons onto the brim," with a light-colored jacket, dark trousers, and dark shoes, all of which the prosecution contended that Ray Crump had been wearing that day. Hantman introduced each article of clothing as government exhibits. The clothes did, in fact, belong to Ray Crump, who had been seen wearing them as he left his home the morning of the murder.
But according to Wiggins, he had only seen the man standing over the body for "around a minute," and he "didn't get a very good look at his face." He qualified this last detail by adding, "but I did get a glance at it." Hantman asked Wiggins to state the race of the man he had seen. "He was colored," Wiggins replied. "I think I would estimate his weight around 185 or 180. He was medium build."
"Were you able to determine how tall he was?" Hantman asked. "Well, I couldn't make an exact estimate to that," Wiggins responded.39
Dovey Roundtree would soon seize upon Wiggins's uncertainty. Hadn't the prosecution vaunted Wiggins's training "in the careful observation of people"?
The following morning, the prosecution's star witness would squander his credibility in less than an hour. Hantman needed Wiggins to identify the clothes Ray Crump was wearing on the day of the murder, and confirm the exhibited items. Roundtree knew where he was heading and objected. Judge Corcoran sustained her objection, saying, "I don't see how he [Wiggins] can say it was [Crump's actual clothing] unless he walked up to the defendant and took it off of him." His one concession to the prosecution was to "allow lookalike testimony" only.40
Hantman became irritated. "I don't see how the Court could strike it if that is the witness's testimony." Judge Corcoran's response was sharp and unequivocal: "If that is his testimony, it is subject to challenge."41
The irritation was mutual. That Hantman had been, for the second day, engaged in loud gum-chewing did not endear him to the judge. In fact, Judge Corcoran had taken his young clerk, Robert Bennett, into his chambers during one earlier recess and had admonished him "never to chew gum" when presenting in a courtroom.42
In spite of the fracas with the judge, Hantman pressed on with Wiggins, who appeared not to comprehend the significance of the exchange over the admissibility of his testimony about the clothing.
Hantman: All right. Now, when did you first see these articles of clothing?
Wiggins: I first saw these articles when they were being worn by the defendant when he was standing over the victim at the scene.
Hantman: According to your best recollection, Mr. Wiggins, are these the same ones or do they look like the articles you saw on the man bending over the body of Mary Pinchot Meyer?
Wiggins: They are the same articles which I saw.43
Again, the exchange was not lost on the defense. Wiggins had unintentionally started to dig his own grave. Dovey Roundtree would merely give him a bigger shovel to dig deeper.
Roundtree: Do you remember, Mr. Witness, that you also said you had only a glimpse of the person you saw at the scene?
Wiggins: I remember that.
Roundtree: This morning nevertheless, Mr. Witness, you are prepared to tell this court and this jury that these are the pants?
Wiggins: That's right.
Roundtree: Positively?
Wiggins: Positive.
Roundtree: You are prepared to say that this is the cap?
Wiggins: That is the cap.
Roundtree: And that these are the black shoes?
Wiggins: That is right.
Roundtree: And that this is the jacket?
Wiggins: That is right.44
Wiggins had already identified Ray Crump as the man he saw standing over the victim. Roundtree used this opportunity to highlight the discrepancy between what Wiggins had reported to the police and the actual size of the defendant.
Roundtree: Would that, then, be an accurate estimate of what you saw, the man you saw weighed 185 and was five feet eight?
Wiggins: That wouldn't be an accurate estimate, no, ma'am.
Roundtree turned to face the jury.
Roundtree: Well, now, are you telling us you gave them [the police] information which was not accurate?
Wiggins: Well, this information which I gave them at that time which I was looking across the canal down on the subject there, would not be very accurate but as close as I can give. I give it to them as close as I could remember.
Roundtree: And you gave them, though, what you thought you saw from across the canal?
Wiggins: I tried to do my best.
Roundtree: All right. A hundred eighty-five pounds; five feet eight.
Wiggins: That's right.45
If Wiggins was beginning to squirm, the increasingly exasperated, gum chewing Hantman had to have been agitated. His star eyewitness, and his case,were crumbling on the second day of the trial. During his redirect, Hantman asked Wiggins again whether his view of the murder scene had been obstructed in any way. Wiggins reiterated that nothing had blocked his view. Yet Wiggins had contradicted his own testimony.
Hantman had opened a problematic door. Dovey Roundtree merely walked Wiggins through it. Seeking to bolster Wiggins's credibility regarding Crump's clothing, Hantman had attempted something similar with Wiggins's description of the suspect's height and weight both of which in no way matched Crump's.
Inadvertently, Hantman had damaged the credibility of his star eyewitness so badly that his case would never recover. The description Wiggins had given police just minutes after the murder took place "five feet eight, medium build, 185 pounds" would be reiterated by nearly every one of the twelve policemen and detectives called to testify at the trial, except for two who remembered the height as "five feet 10 inches."
With nearly each of the prosecution's 27 witnesses, Dovey Roundtree would become a heat-seeking missile: If there was a weakness or discrepancy to be exploited, she would find it and expose it to the jury.
This was the description, they all testified, of the man they were told to look for, and it didn't come close to describing the defendant. Ray Crump shared just one physical feature with the man described on the police radio broadcast on the day of the murder: He was black.
By mid morning of day two, the defense strategy of reasonable doubt had started a crusade. With nearly each of the prosecution's 27 witnesses, Dovey Roundtree would become a heat-seeking missile: If there was a weakness or discrepancy to be exploited, she would find it and expose it to the jury.
Bill Branch, Henry Wiggins's tow truck assistant on the day of the murder, took the stand right after Wiggins. Branch had told police that after Wiggins left the murder scene to call police, he, Branch, was too afraid to keep watch over the wall that overlooked the canal towpath. Instead, he sat in the stalled Nash Rambler and waited. Yet on the witness stand, he testified that he had remained at the wall overlooking the murder scene until Wiggins returned with police. Roundtree confronted Branch with the report he had given to police:
"I [Bill Branch] didn't see anyone around her [the murder victim] at that time, I went back to the car."46 His tail now between his legs, Branch finally took refuge in a convenient loss of memory "I don't remember."47
It now appeared that Hantman, who had painstakingly rehearsed and written out the testimony of each of his 27 witnesses,48 had coached Branch to alter his statement to police. Surely, Hantman was aware of Branch's written police statement that he had stayed in the car, and not remained at the wall overlooking the towpath. Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Elvert Barnes / Flickr (CC BY 2.0) and Jeremy Riel / Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
In addition to exposing Branch's charade, Roundtree had also managed to reveal one very important fact: Between the time that Wiggins had left and returned with the police, no one had been monitoring the murder scene.
After the day two lunch recess, the trial proceeded with the testimony of two police officers, patrolman Roderick Sylvis and Detective John Warner. A puzzling question had now been pushed to the foreground: if the man Henry Wiggins had seen standing over the corpse of Mary Meyer wasn't Ray Crump, then who was it? Together, the testimony of Roderick Sylvis and John Warner would reveal one of the most important facts never before understood: Someone else was eluding capture by police.
Hearing the police radio broadcast at 12:26 p.m., police officer Roderick Sylvis and his partner, Frank Bignotti, sped to Fletcher's Boat House to close off the exit.49 They arrived, Sylvis told Hantman, at "12:30 p.m. or 12:29 p.m.," having driven their patrol car through the narrow underpass beneath the canal itself. Now facing north, with the towpath and canal in full view and the shore of the Potomac River behind them, they waited for "about four or five minutes."50
Anyone attempting to leave the entire C & O Canal towpath area would either have to walk through the narrow underpass or cross the canal in an old leaky rowboat that was attached to a rope and pulley on each side of the canal. In fact, that meant there were two exits at Fletcher's Landing two entirely different ways to exit the area that offered immediate access to Canal Road and beyond.51
After waiting "about four or five minutes," no longer content, the two officers hatched a plan: Sylvis would walk along the towpath toward the murder scene, while Bignotti would walk through the woods adjacent to the railroad tracks parallel to the towpath, both heading east toward the murder scene.
Leaving the entire Fletcher's Boat House area unattended, they risked allowing the killer to walk out unnoticed. Yet even that oversight paled to what was about to unfold, positioning themselves for their eastward trek toward the murder scene. As soon as they started out, "maybe 50 feet at the most" from Fletcher's Boat House, Sylvis testified, they spotted a young white couple walking westward on the railroad tracks.
The two officers approached the couple, informing them "that there had been a shooting on the canal." Sylvis inquired as to whether they had seen anyone leaving the area. "They did not observe anyone," Sylvis recalled during his testimony.52
How long had the interrogation of the couple taken? The question had not been asked during his testimony. However, reviewing his testimony in an interview for this book in 2008, Sylvis was adamant that he had asked the young white couple a number of questions, and it had taken "at least five minutes, probably more."53
That meant the time had to be approaching 1:00 p.m. before the two policemen began bushwhacking their way eastward toward the murder scene, a measured distance of 1.6 miles away. "I remember I proceeded very cautiously," Sylvis recalled, adding that he had been "taking a lot of time to be observant."54 Fletcher's Boat House inset over Google map of C&O Canal towpath. Photo credit: Josh / Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0) and Google Maps
Walking slowly and vigilantly for "approximately a mile east on the towpath," Sylvis told the court, he observed "a head jut out of the woods momentarily, just for a second, and went back. A head of a man, somebody stuck their head out of the woods, and were looking up at me, and pulled back again."
From a distance of "about 150 or 160 feet," Sylvis identified the head to be that of a "Negro male." He didn't remember the man wearing a cap of any kind.55 Sylvis then "proceeded very slowly towards the spot," sure the man had seen him. He yelled to his partner Bignotti for assistance, but Bignotti didn't respond, so Sylvis tried to "wave down someone on Canal Road" to assist him.
That meant that it took him even longer to arrive at the spot where the "Negro male" had peeked out from the woods.56
It wasn't clear whether Dovey Roundtree, or even the jury, had grasped the full implications of Detective John Warner's testimony, which was simply this: Ray Crump was not the only black man in the towpath area on the day of the murder.
How long had it actually taken officer Sylvis to walk "approximately a mile" before he saw the head of a "Negro male" jut out of the woods? Conservatively, it had to have been at least fifteen minutes or more. During his testimony, Sylvis told Hantman that it took him "approximately 10 or 15 minutes" additionally to reconnect with his partner after he had seen the mystery "Negro male."
Reunited, Sylvis and Bignotti spent even more time searching the area together. "We stayed there for a few more minutes and looked around the area where I had seen the head, and then proceeded on back toward Fletcher's [Boat House]," testified Sylvis.57
Hantman: Approximately what time was it when you saw this unidentified person about a mile down the towpath?
Sylvis: I'd say about ten or fifteen minutes. Let me see it would be about, about 1:45 or 1:50 [p.m.].58
Officer Roderick Sylvis's answer to Hantman's inquiry was very likely accurate. The problem, however, was that he had blown the answer he had rehearsed with Hantman, and Hantman knew it.
At this very moment, the government's case against Ray Crump was in peril, and about to be pushed off the edge of a cliff. Why? Because it had already been established during the trial that Ray Crump had been arrested at 1:15 p.m. In fact, Crump had been in the company of Detective John Warner at a location of one-tenth of a mile east of the murder scene for a period of at least ten to fifteen minutes before he was arrested at 1:15 p.m. The significance of this detail was that the "head" of the "Negro male" seen by patrolman Roderick Sylvis could not have been Ray Crump's.
Hantman, apparently aware he was standing in quicksand, tried another tactic: He asked Sylvis another rehearsed question.
Hantman: All right, sir. How long, all told, do you recollect your scout car was in the vicinity of Fletcher's Boat House that day?
Sylvis: I'd say about forty-five minutes.59
Forty-five minutes. This was the answer that appeared to lift Hantman out of the jam. If Sylvis and Bignotti arrived at Fletcher's Boat House at approximately 12:30 p.m. and they returned to their patrol car by 1:15, they came back just in time to conveniently hear the police radio broadcast that a suspect had been arrested.
But there was just one problem with this version of events: There were no police radios at the crime scene or adjacent to the site of Crump's arrest. Someone would have had to walk back to a police vehicle at the Foundry Underpass to make the call, but no such call if one ever took place was ever mentioned in the trial transcript or any police report. Dovey Roundtree seized on the discrepancy in patrolman's Roderick Sylvis's testimony in her cross-examination:
Roundtree: Mr. Witness, do you know what time the defendant, Ray Crump was arrested?
Sylvis: I know it was approximately 1:15 when it came over the air.
Roundtree: Now, then, 30 minutes after that time you saw a man stick his head out?
Sylvis: Pardon?
Roundtree: Thirty minutes after Ray Crump, Jr. has already been arrested, you saw an unidentified Negro male stick his head out of the woods?60
Hantman immediately objected, stating that what Roundtree had alleged had not been Sylvis's testimony, in spite of the fact that it had been. This may have been one of the few moments during the trial where Dovey Roundtree missed a significant opportunity. Why didn't she ask Judge Corcoran to have the stenographer read back Sylvis's testimony, confirming that Sylvis had just testified that it had been "1:45 or 1:50 [p.m.]" when he saw the mystery "Negro male"?
Sylvis, for his part, must have realized that he had been "off message," because in the next instant he corrected his testimony and said that he first saw the head of the man poking out of the woods at "approximately 12:45 [p.m.]."61
That would have been physically impossible. Having already testified that he had arrived at Fletcher's Boathouse at "12:30 p.m. or 12:29 p.m.,"62 then waited "about four or five minutes," before deciding on a plan with his partner, only to then spend "at least five minutes, probably more" interrogating the young white couple before beginning to vigilantly walk "a mile east on the towpath," Sylvis would have had to have been a world-class runner to spot the mystery "Negro male" man at 12:45 p.m.
It was, in fact, accurate that about an hour later, "about 1:45 [p.m.] or 1:50 [p.m.]," Sylvis's initial response to Hantman that he spotted the head of the mystery "Negro male," who could not have possibly been Ray Crump.
When Roundtree confronted Sylvis with the discrepancy, he had to have realized that by first telling the court that it was 1:45 p.m. when he saw the "Negro male," he had risked sabotaging the prosecution's case against Crump. Sylvis now wanted the court to believe that it had occurred at 12:45.
But his initial answer to Hantman's inquiry of "about 1:45 or 1:50 [p.m.]" was the correct answer, and he confirmed that with me in 2008.63 Crump, it will be shown, was already in the custody of Detective John Warner east of the murder scene as early as 1:00, which could only mean there was a second "Negro male" on the towpath that day and that he had eluded capture as well as the attention of the court proceedings.
Indeed, a cornerstone of the prosecution's case was that the man Sylvis had spotted was, in fact, the fleeing Ray Crump. Prosecutor Hantman hammered that point home repeatedly throughout the trial. Should that assertion be successfully challenged, the case against Crump would crumble. That was about to happen, although it would again elude the scrutiny of the defense and remain hidden in the trial transcript until now.
Detective John Warner, scheduled to testify after Sylvis, had not been in the courtroom during Sylvis's testimony. It was customary to keep witnesses from hearing other testimony in order to reduce the possibility of collusion and fabrication. Warner was therefore unaware of the various conflicting timestamps that had jeopardized the prosecution's case.
Warner testified that he had arrived at the Key Bridge entrance of the canal towpath at 12:29 p.m. with his partner, Henry Schultheis. They waited there until 12:40, he said, at which point Warner decided he "was going to cover the area between the railroad tracks and the towpath in the wooded area," while his partner would cover "the area to the left of the railroad tracks to the [Potomac] river bank."64 C&O Canal from Francis Scott Key Bridge, Georgetown, Washington, DC. Photo credit: cp_thornton / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Warner proceeded to walk westward toward the murder scene through the woods adjacent to the railroad tracks for what he estimated had been "forty five minutes" before discovering the wet, somewhat disoriented Ray Crump more than one-tenth of a mile east of the murder scene itself.65
If Warner's recollection was accurate, he would have come across Crump at approximately 1:25, ten minutes later than the official time stamp of Crump's arrest at approximately 1:15.
Under direct examination by Hantman, Warner proceeded to alter his testimony, saying that it had been 1:15 p.m. when he first saw Crump at a location one-tenth of a mile east of the murder scene. Hantman appeared to be irritated with Warner for not following the script, so Warner, under cross-examination by Roundtree, eventually changed his testimony again to 1:14 p.m.
(In their testimony during the trial, several detectives and police officers had already established that Detective Bernie Crooke had arrested Ray Crump on the railroad bed directly below the murder scene at approximately 1:15 p.m.)
The government's case was slowly spiraling out of control, yet the Roundtree defense team appeared to be missing another critical moment. Detective John Warner's testimony was undermining the prosecution's case. Warner told Hantman that he stopped Crump on the railroad tracks and identified himself as a police officer, and Crump took out his sodden wallet and handed over his D.C. driver's license. Crump, Warner testified, hadn't been running when he discovered him; "he was walking."66
Warner had looked at the name and photograph on the license to confirm Crump's identity. He hadn't needed to read the physical description five feet three and one-half inches and 130 pounds to realize that Crump wasn't a match for the general broadcast, which had put the height of the suspect, according to Warner, at five feet 10 inches, though he wanted to maintain during the trial that he hadn't noticed Crump's physical description on his license. In the unlikely event that that were true, why wouldn't he have arrested Crump immediately?
Hantman: Did you at any time say anything to him or did he say anything to you?
Warner: Yes, sir. I identified myself as a police officer. I asked him who he was, and he replied, "Ray Crump." He took his wallet out, and when he took his wallet out, water dripped out of his wallet as he handed me his D.C. driver's license. I asked him then if he had heard any pistol shots. He replied no. I said, "How did you get so wet?" He says, "Well, I was fishing from a rock, and I fell into the river and went to sleep, fell off the rock, fell into the river." I said, "Well, where is your fishing equipment?" He said it went into the river, too. I said, "Your rod and everything?" He said yes. I said, "Well, where are your fish?" He said they went into the river too. I said, "Who were you fishing with?" He said, "No one." I asked him then if he would point out the spot as to where he was fishing from, I would help him, see if I could retrieve his fishing gear for him. And he says, "Yes, sir." And he led us back up in a westerly direction, up the railroad tracks.
Hantman: About what time was this when you first saw the defendant standing 32 feet in front of you soaking wet?
Warner: This was 1:15 p.m., sir.
Hantman: 1:15?
Warner: p.m., sir.67
Warner was asking an entire courtroom to believe that in the space of literally no time at all, he had spotted Crump, who "was walking," at "1:15 p.m." and at a distance that would be measured to be 532 feet east of the murder scene,68 whereupon he proceeded to ask Crump a series of seven questions, with Crump giving his answer to each question, before the two then began to walk along the railroad tracks in the westerly direction toward where Crump said he had been fishing only to then find themselves one-tenth of a mile later (532 feet) immediately parallel and below the murder scene, where Crump was supposedly interrogated and arrested at 1:15 p.m. by Detective Bernie Crooke.
Warner's testimony was as ludicrous as it was dishonest. Under cross-examination, he changed the time when he first came upon Ray Crump; it was now "1:14 [p.m.],"69 an obvious attempt to reconcile with what previous police testimony had officially established as Crump's time of arrest of 1:15 p.m.
This incensed Dovey Roundtree, who discerned in Warner's conflicting testimony further evidence of prosecutorial shenanigans. Yet in spite of a second demand for a mistrial a demand Judge Corcoran rejected it wasn't clear whether Dovey Roundtree, or even the jury, had grasped the full implications of Detective John Warner's testimony, which was simply this: Ray Crump was not the only black man in the towpath area on the day of the murder.
Detective Warner had clearly first come upon the defendant well before 1:15 p.m. and at a distance of more than a tenth of a mile east of the murder scene. His methodical, seven-question interrogation of Crump, followed by their walk together, had to have taken at least ten, maybe even as long as fifteen, minutes before the two eventually found themselves parallel to, and beneath the murder scene, the place where Crump would be, by all accounts, officially arrested at approximately 1:15 p.m.
If Crump was in the physical presence of Detective Warner at a distance of a tenth of a mile east of the murder scene sometime around 1:00 p.m., he could not have possibly been the same "Negro male" that officer Roderick Sylvis spotted approximately six-tenths of a mile west of the murder scene well past 1:00 p.m. Detective Warner's testimony had, therefore, inadvertently corroborated the fact that a second, unidentified "Negro male" had eluded police capture.
More policemen were called to testify the following day. Collectively, their testimony offered nothing in the way of incriminating evidence against Crump and, instead, expanded the grounds for reasonable doubt. A neighbor of Crump's testified that she saw Ray leaving his house the morning of the murder wearing his light-colored beige jacket and golf cap. In fact, some facsimile of a light-beige Windbreaker jacket seen by eyewitnesses Henry Wiggins and allegedly by Lieutenant William L. Mitchell on the "Negro male" each of them saw was the most conspicuous evidence that, according to the prosecution, identified the killer. For Henry Wiggins in particular, it had been the distinguishing piece of clothing, and it was a jacket very similar to the prosecution's exhibit that lay before the court. So important was the jacket as evidence, its very existence including its location and whereabouts seemed to have a life of its own.
The implication of Byers's testimony is inescapable: Someone, other than police, was monitoring the murder scene and the events unfolding around it.
And so, before the end of day three of the trial, a fascinating element its real significance never realized during the trial, or afterward was revealed. It involved possibly the most critical piece of evidence: the light-colored beige windbreaker jacket, allegedly worn by the defendant.
Harbor Precinct policeman Frederick Byers was called to testify. Under direct and cross-examination, Byers was adamant: He had received a radio call at "about one o'clock or a little after" to search in his patrol boat for a "light colored beige jacket," which he would eventually find at "about 1:46 p.m." at a distance of 1,110 feet southwest of the murder scene.70
How did he know where to look? Moreover, neither the defense nor the prosecution questioned the time "about one o'clo
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
Part 1 of this two-part series presented significant scenes from Dovey Roundtree's childhood in the old south; some were as bad as you might expect. Hiding in the dark under the kitchen table while a screaming mob of Ku Klux Klansmen thundered by on horseback. Or the time she sat behind a trolley car driver to watch him work, and he said to her grandmother, "Get that pickaninny out of here! You know she can't sit there."
Education was the way out, and Roundtree worked three jobs to put herself through college. Eventually she went to law school. Her biographer, Katie McCabe, said of her passion for the law:
There was a simplicity about it, and an intricacy, and a logic. Closely reasoned opinions, precedents, constitutional principles these, woven together, made a kind of sense that imposed itself on the scattered reality of human existence.
Part 2 includes riveting scenes of Roundtree in action, demonstrating all of the above, including a few things she did not learn in school.
Below is a compressed excerpt from Chapter 5, "Trial by Fire," 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 Chapter 4, which focuses mostly on Dovey Roundtree herself, please go here. (To see excerpts from the book posted earlier, please go here, here, here, here, and here. The last two are about who the real killer may have been.) On Monday, July 19, 1965, a 300-person jury pool convened in Courtroom 8, where the laborious process of jury selection would take all day. Dovey Roundtree and her defense team scored a partial victory with a jury of eight blacks and four whites; seven of the twelve jurors were women. There were also four alternate jurors. Before retiring for the day, the jury selected their foreman: Edward O. Savwoir, a forty-four-year-old African American program specialist at the Job Corps in the Office of Economic Opportunity in Washington.
The following morning, on a sweltering July day, the trial convened in the newly air-conditioned fourth-floor courtroom of Washington's US District Court Building. It was packed to capacity with onlookers. Many would return day after day for the duration of the trial. Also present every day was Martha Crump, Ray Crump's mother, always accompanied by members of her church community.
The court room's racial mix and class disparities reflected the divide between the murdered woman and the accused defendant, all interspersed with a noticeable number of unsmiling white men in impeccably tailored suits, reminding Roundtree of the significance of this case.
"So many men in gray suits showed up," she recalled in 1991. "They were government people. I knew that. But I could never understand why so many at the time."8
The news media was a significant presence in the courtroom. Sam Donaldson, a young broadcast news reporter for the CBS affiliate, WTOP-TV, in Washington, sat directly behind the defense team, as did two nuns. Roundtree had no idea who they were, but she recalled that at different times, both Donaldson and the nuns said something similar to her: "You'll pull it out… " Her response to all of them: "Well, you must know something I don't know."9
Indeed, Hantman's [prosecutor Alfred Hantman] long, thundering opening statement seemed to spell doom for the defendant he said had "deliberately, willfully, and maliciously shot and killed Mary Pinchot Meyer."10 In graphic terms, Hantman portrayed Crump in a violent struggle with the victim, insinuating, with no evidence to support his position, that the murder had been the result of a sexual assault gone awry.
Nothing about the victim, Hantman told the jury, would have attracted the attention of a thief, given that she carried no wallet and wore no jewelry.11 Crump had tried to take her by surprise from behind, Hantman maintained, but she had struggled so powerfully that he had been forced to resort to brutality shooting her in the head to subdue her, then dragging her 25 feet while she continued to struggle, before fatally shooting her again.
An effective storyteller, Hantman captured and held the jury's attention with his vivid portrayal of Mary Meyer on her knees, fighting for her life even with a bullet in her head, tearing the defendant's jacket and his trouser pocket.12 United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Photo credit: AgnosticPreachersKid / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Hantman continued in morbid detail: "We will show you that the blood stains on the tree were only two, two-and-a-half feet from the ground. We will show you that Mary Pinchot Meyer got away from the defendant. She ran back across the towpath toward the canal itself, away from the embankment; that she fell on that side of the towpath closest to the canal; that this defendant Raymond Crump, seeing the deceased getting away from him and believing that she might be able to identify him later, shot Mary Pinchot Meyer again right over the right shoulder."13 Designed for high-impact courtroom drama upon the jury, the Hantman delivery was intended to be as brutal as it was damaging.
Next, Hantman gave the police reconstruction of Ray Crump's alleged attempt to flee the murder scene after tow truck driver Henry Wiggins had spotted him standing over "the lifeless corpse." The government's prosecutor extolled the professionalism and alacrity of the police response in closing off all of the exits in the towpath area "within four minutes" of the broadcast bulletin about the murder.
Documenting that Crump was apprehended several hundred feet from the murder scene, but only after he "ran over the embankment, ran west 684 feet where he got rid of his light tan zipper jacket," and then, "426 feet beyond that, further west, [he] got rid of his plaid cap with a bill on it," Hantman maintained that Crump had "continued to run in a westerly direction towards Fletcher's Landing for some 1,750 feet beyond this, at which point he saw Officer Roderick Sylvis."
Crump had tried to escape, said Hantman, by swimming across the Potomac but realized he wouldn't be able to do so. Detective John Warner finally apprehended Crump, who then lied about having been fishing that morning, as well as about the clothes he had been wearing. The beige Windbreaker jacket and dark-plaid golf cap would be found not far from the murder scene.14
Concluding his statement, Hantman once again implied that Crump had acted out of a premeditated intent to commit a sexual assault, thus casting the murder of Mary Meyer not a spontaneous act, but a killing in cold blood, the result of an attempted rape that had been derailed by a particularly feisty victim.
Hantman made certain the jury knew that when Crump was apprehended, the fly on his pants was open, that his pant's pocket was torn, that he was soaking wet, that he had blood on his right hand, which was cut, and that he had a small cut or abrasion over one eye. All this could have only happened, Hantman maintained, from his struggle with Mary Meyer.
To bolster his contention that Crump's injuries must have resulted from his struggle with Mary Meyer, Hantman concluded his presentation with Lieutenant William L. Mitchell's statement to police the day after the murder.
Mitchell had jogged past Mary Meyer at approximately 12:20 p.m., he said, about four minutes before the first shot was fired. Two hundred yards after passing Meyer, Hantman read aloud, Mitchell had told police that he had run past a "Negro male dressed in a light tan jacket and dark corduroy trousers and wearing a dark plaid cap with a brim on it," and who was not carrying any fishing equipment.15 Ben Bradlee. Photo credit: Miguel Ariel Contreras Drake-McLaughlin / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The prosecutor's opening statement left Dovey Roundtree in a kind of legal and emotional quicksand. Not only had Hantman's recitation been convincing and thorough, he had promised the jury that his witnesses would dispel any doubt as to the defendant's innocence, in spite of the fact that no murder weapon had been recovered. Regardless of the fact that the prosecution's case was built entirely on circumstantial evidence, it would take a grueling, formidable effort on Dovey Roundtree's part to rescue her client.
"I was completely overwhelmed by what he promised the jury he was going to present," Roundtree recalled in 1992. "It sounded like a different case entirely. I was scared to death."16
If she had been staggered even a bit undone by Hantman's performance, Dovey Roundtree had not shown it. She decided to reserve her own opening statement, then implored Judge Corcoran to let the record show that Hantman's statement had been so inflammatory, so prejudicial, that it was grounds for a mistrial. The judge declined to do so. Roundtree then insisted on seeing "the bloodstained tree" that Hantman said he would be bringing into the courtroom. The judge agreed, saying he wanted to see it, too; but already the proceedings were spiraling out of control. In an effort to maintain decorum, Judge Corcoran ordered an immediate fifteen-minute recess.
At no time was Hantman aware that Mary Meyer had kept a diary, or that she had been romantically involved with President Kennedy. Ben Bradlee was well aware of both, but he wasn't about to reveal anything further.
The first witness to testify was Benjamin C. Bradlee, who was then the Washington, D.C., bureau chief for Newsweek. "Did there come a time when you saw Mary Pinchot Meyer in death?" Hantman asked. Bradlee recounted that he had gone to the D.C. morgue on the day of the murder "sometime after six o'clock in the evening,"17 accompanied by Sergeant Sam Wallace of the DC Metropolitan Police Department, where he had identified the body of his sister-in-law, Mary Pinchot Meyer. The inference of Bradlee's testimony was that it wasn't until Sergeant Wallace arrived at Bradlee's home that evening, just before 6:00 p.m., that Bradlee had any knowledge of the murder.
Strangely, Hantman never directly asked Bradlee when he had first learned of the event. Instead, he inquired whether Bradlee had, subsequent to Mary Meyer's death, made "any effort to gain entry to this studio that was occupied by Mrs. Meyer."
Contrary to what he would document in his 1995 memoir, Bradlee told the court that he had, in fact, entered Mary's studio that night with no difficulty, presumably alone, never indicating whether anyone else was with him.18
At no time was Hantman aware that Mary Meyer had kept a diary, or that she had been romantically involved with President Kennedy. Ben Bradlee was well aware of both, but he wasn't about to reveal anything further. More than 25 years later, in 1991, Hantman would remark to author Leo Damore that had he known these two facts, "it could have changed everything," because he was "totally unaware of who Mary Meyer was or what her connections were."19
Appearing to tread lightly, Dovey Roundtree began her first cross-examination. "Mr. Bradlee, I have just one question," she said.
Bradlee: Yes, ma'am.
Roundtree: Do you have any personal, independent knowledge regarding the causes of the death of your sister-in-law? Do you know how she met her death? Do you know who caused it?
Bradlee: Well, I saw a bullet hole in her head.
Roundtree: Do you know who caused this to be?
Bradlee: No, I don't.
Roundtree: You have no other information regarding the occurrences leading up to her death?
Bradlee: No, I do not.
Roundtree: Thank you, sir.20
Unaware of its far-reaching implications, Roundtree had asked the most important question surrounding the death of Mary Pinchot Meyer: "Do you have any personal, independent knowledge regarding the causes of the death of your sister-in-law?"
Ben Bradlee had withheld the fact that a group of Mary Meyer's intimates, including Bradlee himself, had immediately conspired to commandeer Mary Meyer's diary, letters, and personal papers and given the entire collection to CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton. Ben Bradlee playing with John F. Kennedy Jr. Atoka, Virginia, November 10, 1963. Photo credit: JFK Library
In addition, he omitted the single most important event surrounding the murder of his sister-in-law: the telephone call from his CIA friend "just after lunch" about four hours before her identity to police had been established. The same caller, the reader will recall, had also informed Cord Meyer in New York of Mary's demise later that afternoon again, before her identity was known to authorities.21
During the first morning of the trial, Deputy Coroner Linwood L. Rayford testified that he had pronounced the then-unknown victim dead at the murder scene at approximately 2:05 p.m. The victim had been shot twice, he said in his testimony:
"…the first [shot] was located an inch and half anterior to the left ear…. The second [shot] was located over the right shoulder blade about six inches from the midline." Rayford went on to delineate the path of each bullet. The first shot to the head, just anterior to the left ear and surrounded by a dark halo, traversed the skull across the floor of the brain, angling slightly from the back to the front. "In other words, going foreword from left to right, [it] struck the right side of the skull, fractured it and ricocheted back where the slug was found in the right side of the brain," he explained.
The second bullet wound, also surrounded by a dark halo, had been fired over the victim's right shoulder blade, traversing it and the chest cavity, perforating the right lung and severing the aorta. Hantman questioned the significance of the "two darkened halos" that surrounded each gunshot wound. "It is suggestive of powder burns," Rayford responded. "This means that the gun was fired from rather close proximity."22
Rayford went on to explain that the victim had "superficial lacerations to the forehead, abrasions to the forehead, to the left knee and the left ankle." Hantman wanted the jury to know that there had been a violent struggle before and after the first shot had been fired, that Mary Meyer had fought hard, and that she had been dragged "clear across the path," after she clung to a tree, leaving traces of her blood. Whoever the assassin was, Rayford's detailed account made clear, he had been able to overpower the 5 foot 6 inch victim, who weighed 127 pounds, from behind.23 In the midst of the struggle, the first shot, Rayford testified, would have produced "a considerable amount of external bleeding." The coroner's description of the precise angles of each shot implied that the assassin was likely ambidextrous and had expertise in the surgical use of a handgun. Mary Pinchot Meyer (left), Mary's Mosaic by Peter Janney (center), and James Jesus Angleton (right). Photo credit: JFK Library / Wikimedia (CC BY 3.0), Skyhorse Publishing, and National Counterintelligence Center / Wikimedia
Dr. Rayford's testimony gave Dovey Roundtree an opportunity. In her cross examination, she asked the coroner whether "a person firing a weapon at this range would be likely to have powder marks [actual powder burns and/or the presence of nitrates] on his hands or her hands?" Rayford's reply: "Likely, yes."24
There had been no evidence that Ray Crump had traces of nitrates on his hands. The lack of powder burns didn't prove Ray Crump's innocence, however; it only proved police negligence. In their zeal to pin the murder on Crump, and in their certainty that he was the man they were looking for, the police hadn't bothered to test his hands for traces of nitrates.
Yet no one except Dovey Roundtree seemed to question how a diminutive man such as Ray Crump, whose driver's license at the time of his arrest listed him as "5 feet 3½ inches and 130 pounds,"25 had been able to subdue a strong, athletic woman who was taller than he was and weighed about the same. Moreover, no one in Crump's family or community had ever seen him in possession of any firearm, much less use one with any skill or precision.
Crump, however, had in fact been weighed and measured at police headquarters on the day of the murder after his arrest. Police listed his height as 5 feet 5½ inches, weighing 145 pounds,26 but it wasn't clear whether he was wearing his 2-inch platform heel shoes at the time, or his wet clothes. In any case, Crump's height and weight, as well as his age according to both his driver's license and the police booking record were at a considerable variance from the "stocky 5 feet eight inches to five feet 10 inches, 185 pounds Negro in his 40s, with a weight of 185 pounds," listed on Police Form PD-251 and broadcast shortly after the murder, based on Henry Wiggins Jr.'s eyewitness account. The discrepancy would become the cornerstone for Crump's defense.
After the lunch recess, Alfred Hantman, despite Dovey Roundtree's objections, displayed a 55-foot-wide topographical map of the canal towpath and murder scene on the wall opposite the jury box. It was just one of fifty exhibits that Hantman would present at trial, including the bloodstained tree limb that Mary Meyer had clung to moments before she died. Such flamboyant displays by Hantman would eventually backfire, as the prosecution increasingly failed to fill the void of any real forensic evidence.
Hantman then called the map's creator, Joseph Ronsisvalle of the National Park Service, to the witness stand. "How many exits are there from the towpath between Key Bridge and Chain Bridge?" Hantman asked him. Ronsisvalle identified four: "There are steps to Water Street at Key Bridge. There's an underpass at Foundry Branch. There is an underpass at Fletcher's Boat House; and there are steps at Chain Bridge."27 Hantman asked about the distances between exits, and made a point of telling the court that within four minutes the police were guarding and closing off all four exits.
In her cross-examination of Joseph Ronsisvalle, Dovey Roundtree proved why her colleague had once called her "the world's greatest cross-examiner."
The many hours that Roundtree had spent combing and familiarizing herself with the towpath area were about to pay off. She not only revealed a fifth exit that Ronsisvalle had failed to mention, but also established through his testimony that there were many other places "where a person walking on foot could leave the area of the towpath without using any of the fixed exits."28 C&O Canal Towpath and Raymond Crump Jr. being arrested October 12, 1964. Photo credit: C&O Canal NHP / Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0) and Lets Roll Forums
Hantman became unsettled. Roundtree had raised doubts about Ronsisvalle's knowledge of the towpath area in fact, openly challenging his expertise.
"It would be possible, would it not, for a person to take a path which you have not indicated and which counsel, through his questions, has not asked about which you do not know; is that not true?"29 Hantman objected to her question, and Roundtree addressed Judge Corcoran: "I think that is a fair and proper question, Your Honor." The judge agreed, overruling Hantman. According to Judge Corcoran, Roundtree was "asking about his [the witness's] knowledge of the area. If he doesn't know, he doesn't know," said Corcoran.30
The judge's ruling helped Roundtree build the momentum she needed. She now revealed not only Ronsisvalle's complete unfamiliarity with many of the area's hidden exits, but also the fact that he had never himself walked along or explored the towpath, or any of the areas in question. It was a stunning revelation that undermined the prosecution's case, in addition to Ronsisvalle's credibility as an expert witness. Reasonable doubt was alive and well.
Before the end of the first day, the prosecution called its star eyewitness: tow truck driver Henry Wiggins Jr., who, Hantman made a point of noting, had been "a specialist in the Military Police Corps" for over three years and had "specialized training in the careful observation of people."31 Roundtree objected to Hantman adding that detail, but Judge Corcoran allowed it.
On the witness stand, Henry Wiggins recounted having been sent by his manager, Joe Cameron, to pick up Bill Branch at the Key Bridge Esso Station, from which he proceeded to the north side of the 4300 block of Canal Road to service a stalled Nash Rambler sedan. Wiggins estimated that it was approximately 12:20 p.m. when he and Branch reached the stalled vehicle and got out of their truck. Branch, said Wiggins, went to the Rambler's passenger side to unlock it, while Wiggins himself started to remove his tools from the truck in preparation for diagnosing and fixing the stalled vehicle.32
As soon as Wiggins was out of the truck, however, he heard "some screams…. It sounded like a woman screaming." He said that the screams lasted "about 20 seconds… coming from the direction of the canal."33
When the screaming stopped, Wiggins testified, he "heard a shot," again coming from the direction of the canal. In response, he "ran diagonally across the road" toward the three-foot wall overlooking both the canal and the towpath on the southern side of the canal. In the midst of crossing Canal Road, Wiggins explained, he heard "another shot just as I was reaching the wall of the canal."
Hantman asked "how much of a time interval" had elapsed between the first and second shot, and Wiggins testified that it was only "a few seconds."34 (His partner, Bill Branch, would later testify he thought it was closer to ten seconds).
Peering over the wall, Wiggins testified that he observed "a man standing over a woman lying on the towpath. The man was standing behind the body, facing my direction. The man's head, was bent down a little; he wasn't crouched. He was standing."
Hantman wanted to know how much time had elapsed between Wiggins hearing the second shot and his seeing the man. "Just a fraction of a second," Wiggins testified. Hantman then asked what time of day it was when he had seen the man. In his testimony, Wiggins couldn't say for certain. "It was around 12:20 p.m., somewhere around there; it may have been later," he said.35
Henry Wiggins was certain about one point in particular: he had had a clear, unobstructed view of the man standing over the dead woman at a distance of 128.6 feet.36 He told the court that the man had "looked up towards the wall of the canal where I was standing."37
Hantman: Were you looking directly at him at that point?
Wiggins: I was looking at him.
Hantman: Then what happened?
Wiggins: I ducked down behind the wall at that time, not too long, and I came back up from behind the wall to see him turning around and shoving something in his pocket.
Hantman: Where was he holding this something that you speak of?
Wiggins: He was holding it in his right hand.
Hantman: Could you tell what the object was?
Wiggins: No, sir, I couldn't.
Hantman: Could you tell us whether it was light or dark or what particular color it was?
Wiggins: It was dark, I believe, some kind of hand object.
Hantman: And he put this hand object where, sir?
Wiggins: Into his right jacket pocket.
Hantman: After this individual put this dark object into right jacket pocket, what did you see him do?
Wiggins: [He] Just turned around and walked over straight away from the body, down over the hill.38
Next, Hantman asked Wiggins to describe what the man in question had been wearing. Wiggins recalled that the man wore a cap "that buttons onto the brim," with a light-colored jacket, dark trousers, and dark shoes, all of which the prosecution contended that Ray Crump had been wearing that day. Hantman introduced each article of clothing as government exhibits. The clothes did, in fact, belong to Ray Crump, who had been seen wearing them as he left his home the morning of the murder.
But according to Wiggins, he had only seen the man standing over the body for "around a minute," and he "didn't get a very good look at his face." He qualified this last detail by adding, "but I did get a glance at it." Hantman asked Wiggins to state the race of the man he had seen. "He was colored," Wiggins replied. "I think I would estimate his weight around 185 or 180. He was medium build."
"Were you able to determine how tall he was?" Hantman asked. "Well, I couldn't make an exact estimate to that," Wiggins responded.39
Dovey Roundtree would soon seize upon Wiggins's uncertainty. Hadn't the prosecution vaunted Wiggins's training "in the careful observation of people"?
The following morning, the prosecution's star witness would squander his credibility in less than an hour. Hantman needed Wiggins to identify the clothes Ray Crump was wearing on the day of the murder, and confirm the exhibited items. Roundtree knew where he was heading and objected. Judge Corcoran sustained her objection, saying, "I don't see how he [Wiggins] can say it was [Crump's actual clothing] unless he walked up to the defendant and took it off of him." His one concession to the prosecution was to "allow lookalike testimony" only.40
Hantman became irritated. "I don't see how the Court could strike it if that is the witness's testimony." Judge Corcoran's response was sharp and unequivocal: "If that is his testimony, it is subject to challenge."41
The irritation was mutual. That Hantman had been, for the second day, engaged in loud gum-chewing did not endear him to the judge. In fact, Judge Corcoran had taken his young clerk, Robert Bennett, into his chambers during one earlier recess and had admonished him "never to chew gum" when presenting in a courtroom.42
In spite of the fracas with the judge, Hantman pressed on with Wiggins, who appeared not to comprehend the significance of the exchange over the admissibility of his testimony about the clothing.
Hantman: All right. Now, when did you first see these articles of clothing?
Wiggins: I first saw these articles when they were being worn by the defendant when he was standing over the victim at the scene.
Hantman: According to your best recollection, Mr. Wiggins, are these the same ones or do they look like the articles you saw on the man bending over the body of Mary Pinchot Meyer?
Wiggins: They are the same articles which I saw.43
Again, the exchange was not lost on the defense. Wiggins had unintentionally started to dig his own grave. Dovey Roundtree would merely give him a bigger shovel to dig deeper.
Roundtree: Do you remember, Mr. Witness, that you also said you had only a glimpse of the person you saw at the scene?
Wiggins: I remember that.
Roundtree: This morning nevertheless, Mr. Witness, you are prepared to tell this court and this jury that these are the pants?
Wiggins: That's right.
Roundtree: Positively?
Wiggins: Positive.
Roundtree: You are prepared to say that this is the cap?
Wiggins: That is the cap.
Roundtree: And that these are the black shoes?
Wiggins: That is right.
Roundtree: And that this is the jacket?
Wiggins: That is right.44
Wiggins had already identified Ray Crump as the man he saw standing over the victim. Roundtree used this opportunity to highlight the discrepancy between what Wiggins had reported to the police and the actual size of the defendant.
Roundtree: Would that, then, be an accurate estimate of what you saw, the man you saw weighed 185 and was five feet eight?
Wiggins: That wouldn't be an accurate estimate, no, ma'am.
Roundtree turned to face the jury.
Roundtree: Well, now, are you telling us you gave them [the police] information which was not accurate?
Wiggins: Well, this information which I gave them at that time which I was looking across the canal down on the subject there, would not be very accurate but as close as I can give. I give it to them as close as I could remember.
Roundtree: And you gave them, though, what you thought you saw from across the canal?
Wiggins: I tried to do my best.
Roundtree: All right. A hundred eighty-five pounds; five feet eight.
Wiggins: That's right.45
If Wiggins was beginning to squirm, the increasingly exasperated, gum chewing Hantman had to have been agitated. His star eyewitness, and his case,were crumbling on the second day of the trial. During his redirect, Hantman asked Wiggins again whether his view of the murder scene had been obstructed in any way. Wiggins reiterated that nothing had blocked his view. Yet Wiggins had contradicted his own testimony.
Hantman had opened a problematic door. Dovey Roundtree merely walked Wiggins through it. Seeking to bolster Wiggins's credibility regarding Crump's clothing, Hantman had attempted something similar with Wiggins's description of the suspect's height and weight both of which in no way matched Crump's.
Inadvertently, Hantman had damaged the credibility of his star eyewitness so badly that his case would never recover. The description Wiggins had given police just minutes after the murder took place "five feet eight, medium build, 185 pounds" would be reiterated by nearly every one of the twelve policemen and detectives called to testify at the trial, except for two who remembered the height as "five feet 10 inches."
With nearly each of the prosecution's 27 witnesses, Dovey Roundtree would become a heat-seeking missile: If there was a weakness or discrepancy to be exploited, she would find it and expose it to the jury.
This was the description, they all testified, of the man they were told to look for, and it didn't come close to describing the defendant. Ray Crump shared just one physical feature with the man described on the police radio broadcast on the day of the murder: He was black.
By mid morning of day two, the defense strategy of reasonable doubt had started a crusade. With nearly each of the prosecution's 27 witnesses, Dovey Roundtree would become a heat-seeking missile: If there was a weakness or discrepancy to be exploited, she would find it and expose it to the jury.
Bill Branch, Henry Wiggins's tow truck assistant on the day of the murder, took the stand right after Wiggins. Branch had told police that after Wiggins left the murder scene to call police, he, Branch, was too afraid to keep watch over the wall that overlooked the canal towpath. Instead, he sat in the stalled Nash Rambler and waited. Yet on the witness stand, he testified that he had remained at the wall overlooking the murder scene until Wiggins returned with police. Roundtree confronted Branch with the report he had given to police:
"I [Bill Branch] didn't see anyone around her [the murder victim] at that time, I went back to the car."46 His tail now between his legs, Branch finally took refuge in a convenient loss of memory "I don't remember."47
It now appeared that Hantman, who had painstakingly rehearsed and written out the testimony of each of his 27 witnesses,48 had coached Branch to alter his statement to police. Surely, Hantman was aware of Branch's written police statement that he had stayed in the car, and not remained at the wall overlooking the towpath. Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Elvert Barnes / Flickr (CC BY 2.0) and Jeremy Riel / Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
In addition to exposing Branch's charade, Roundtree had also managed to reveal one very important fact: Between the time that Wiggins had left and returned with the police, no one had been monitoring the murder scene.
After the day two lunch recess, the trial proceeded with the testimony of two police officers, patrolman Roderick Sylvis and Detective John Warner. A puzzling question had now been pushed to the foreground: if the man Henry Wiggins had seen standing over the corpse of Mary Meyer wasn't Ray Crump, then who was it? Together, the testimony of Roderick Sylvis and John Warner would reveal one of the most important facts never before understood: Someone else was eluding capture by police.
Hearing the police radio broadcast at 12:26 p.m., police officer Roderick Sylvis and his partner, Frank Bignotti, sped to Fletcher's Boat House to close off the exit.49 They arrived, Sylvis told Hantman, at "12:30 p.m. or 12:29 p.m.," having driven their patrol car through the narrow underpass beneath the canal itself. Now facing north, with the towpath and canal in full view and the shore of the Potomac River behind them, they waited for "about four or five minutes."50
Anyone attempting to leave the entire C & O Canal towpath area would either have to walk through the narrow underpass or cross the canal in an old leaky rowboat that was attached to a rope and pulley on each side of the canal. In fact, that meant there were two exits at Fletcher's Landing two entirely different ways to exit the area that offered immediate access to Canal Road and beyond.51
After waiting "about four or five minutes," no longer content, the two officers hatched a plan: Sylvis would walk along the towpath toward the murder scene, while Bignotti would walk through the woods adjacent to the railroad tracks parallel to the towpath, both heading east toward the murder scene.
Leaving the entire Fletcher's Boat House area unattended, they risked allowing the killer to walk out unnoticed. Yet even that oversight paled to what was about to unfold, positioning themselves for their eastward trek toward the murder scene. As soon as they started out, "maybe 50 feet at the most" from Fletcher's Boat House, Sylvis testified, they spotted a young white couple walking westward on the railroad tracks.
The two officers approached the couple, informing them "that there had been a shooting on the canal." Sylvis inquired as to whether they had seen anyone leaving the area. "They did not observe anyone," Sylvis recalled during his testimony.52
How long had the interrogation of the couple taken? The question had not been asked during his testimony. However, reviewing his testimony in an interview for this book in 2008, Sylvis was adamant that he had asked the young white couple a number of questions, and it had taken "at least five minutes, probably more."53
That meant the time had to be approaching 1:00 p.m. before the two policemen began bushwhacking their way eastward toward the murder scene, a measured distance of 1.6 miles away. "I remember I proceeded very cautiously," Sylvis recalled, adding that he had been "taking a lot of time to be observant."54 Fletcher's Boat House inset over Google map of C&O Canal towpath. Photo credit: Josh / Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0) and Google Maps
Walking slowly and vigilantly for "approximately a mile east on the towpath," Sylvis told the court, he observed "a head jut out of the woods momentarily, just for a second, and went back. A head of a man, somebody stuck their head out of the woods, and were looking up at me, and pulled back again."
From a distance of "about 150 or 160 feet," Sylvis identified the head to be that of a "Negro male." He didn't remember the man wearing a cap of any kind.55 Sylvis then "proceeded very slowly towards the spot," sure the man had seen him. He yelled to his partner Bignotti for assistance, but Bignotti didn't respond, so Sylvis tried to "wave down someone on Canal Road" to assist him.
That meant that it took him even longer to arrive at the spot where the "Negro male" had peeked out from the woods.56
It wasn't clear whether Dovey Roundtree, or even the jury, had grasped the full implications of Detective John Warner's testimony, which was simply this: Ray Crump was not the only black man in the towpath area on the day of the murder.
How long had it actually taken officer Sylvis to walk "approximately a mile" before he saw the head of a "Negro male" jut out of the woods? Conservatively, it had to have been at least fifteen minutes or more. During his testimony, Sylvis told Hantman that it took him "approximately 10 or 15 minutes" additionally to reconnect with his partner after he had seen the mystery "Negro male."
Reunited, Sylvis and Bignotti spent even more time searching the area together. "We stayed there for a few more minutes and looked around the area where I had seen the head, and then proceeded on back toward Fletcher's [Boat House]," testified Sylvis.57
Hantman: Approximately what time was it when you saw this unidentified person about a mile down the towpath?
Sylvis: I'd say about ten or fifteen minutes. Let me see it would be about, about 1:45 or 1:50 [p.m.].58
Officer Roderick Sylvis's answer to Hantman's inquiry was very likely accurate. The problem, however, was that he had blown the answer he had rehearsed with Hantman, and Hantman knew it.
At this very moment, the government's case against Ray Crump was in peril, and about to be pushed off the edge of a cliff. Why? Because it had already been established during the trial that Ray Crump had been arrested at 1:15 p.m. In fact, Crump had been in the company of Detective John Warner at a location of one-tenth of a mile east of the murder scene for a period of at least ten to fifteen minutes before he was arrested at 1:15 p.m. The significance of this detail was that the "head" of the "Negro male" seen by patrolman Roderick Sylvis could not have been Ray Crump's.
Hantman, apparently aware he was standing in quicksand, tried another tactic: He asked Sylvis another rehearsed question.
Hantman: All right, sir. How long, all told, do you recollect your scout car was in the vicinity of Fletcher's Boat House that day?
Sylvis: I'd say about forty-five minutes.59
Forty-five minutes. This was the answer that appeared to lift Hantman out of the jam. If Sylvis and Bignotti arrived at Fletcher's Boat House at approximately 12:30 p.m. and they returned to their patrol car by 1:15, they came back just in time to conveniently hear the police radio broadcast that a suspect had been arrested.
But there was just one problem with this version of events: There were no police radios at the crime scene or adjacent to the site of Crump's arrest. Someone would have had to walk back to a police vehicle at the Foundry Underpass to make the call, but no such call if one ever took place was ever mentioned in the trial transcript or any police report. Dovey Roundtree seized on the discrepancy in patrolman's Roderick Sylvis's testimony in her cross-examination:
Roundtree: Mr. Witness, do you know what time the defendant, Ray Crump was arrested?
Sylvis: I know it was approximately 1:15 when it came over the air.
Roundtree: Now, then, 30 minutes after that time you saw a man stick his head out?
Sylvis: Pardon?
Roundtree: Thirty minutes after Ray Crump, Jr. has already been arrested, you saw an unidentified Negro male stick his head out of the woods?60
Hantman immediately objected, stating that what Roundtree had alleged had not been Sylvis's testimony, in spite of the fact that it had been. This may have been one of the few moments during the trial where Dovey Roundtree missed a significant opportunity. Why didn't she ask Judge Corcoran to have the stenographer read back Sylvis's testimony, confirming that Sylvis had just testified that it had been "1:45 or 1:50 [p.m.]" when he saw the mystery "Negro male"?
Sylvis, for his part, must have realized that he had been "off message," because in the next instant he corrected his testimony and said that he first saw the head of the man poking out of the woods at "approximately 12:45 [p.m.]."61
That would have been physically impossible. Having already testified that he had arrived at Fletcher's Boathouse at "12:30 p.m. or 12:29 p.m.,"62 then waited "about four or five minutes," before deciding on a plan with his partner, only to then spend "at least five minutes, probably more" interrogating the young white couple before beginning to vigilantly walk "a mile east on the towpath," Sylvis would have had to have been a world-class runner to spot the mystery "Negro male" man at 12:45 p.m.
It was, in fact, accurate that about an hour later, "about 1:45 [p.m.] or 1:50 [p.m.]," Sylvis's initial response to Hantman that he spotted the head of the mystery "Negro male," who could not have possibly been Ray Crump.
When Roundtree confronted Sylvis with the discrepancy, he had to have realized that by first telling the court that it was 1:45 p.m. when he saw the "Negro male," he had risked sabotaging the prosecution's case against Crump. Sylvis now wanted the court to believe that it had occurred at 12:45.
But his initial answer to Hantman's inquiry of "about 1:45 or 1:50 [p.m.]" was the correct answer, and he confirmed that with me in 2008.63 Crump, it will be shown, was already in the custody of Detective John Warner east of the murder scene as early as 1:00, which could only mean there was a second "Negro male" on the towpath that day and that he had eluded capture as well as the attention of the court proceedings.
Indeed, a cornerstone of the prosecution's case was that the man Sylvis had spotted was, in fact, the fleeing Ray Crump. Prosecutor Hantman hammered that point home repeatedly throughout the trial. Should that assertion be successfully challenged, the case against Crump would crumble. That was about to happen, although it would again elude the scrutiny of the defense and remain hidden in the trial transcript until now.
Detective John Warner, scheduled to testify after Sylvis, had not been in the courtroom during Sylvis's testimony. It was customary to keep witnesses from hearing other testimony in order to reduce the possibility of collusion and fabrication. Warner was therefore unaware of the various conflicting timestamps that had jeopardized the prosecution's case.
Warner testified that he had arrived at the Key Bridge entrance of the canal towpath at 12:29 p.m. with his partner, Henry Schultheis. They waited there until 12:40, he said, at which point Warner decided he "was going to cover the area between the railroad tracks and the towpath in the wooded area," while his partner would cover "the area to the left of the railroad tracks to the [Potomac] river bank."64 C&O Canal from Francis Scott Key Bridge, Georgetown, Washington, DC. Photo credit: cp_thornton / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Warner proceeded to walk westward toward the murder scene through the woods adjacent to the railroad tracks for what he estimated had been "forty five minutes" before discovering the wet, somewhat disoriented Ray Crump more than one-tenth of a mile east of the murder scene itself.65
If Warner's recollection was accurate, he would have come across Crump at approximately 1:25, ten minutes later than the official time stamp of Crump's arrest at approximately 1:15.
Under direct examination by Hantman, Warner proceeded to alter his testimony, saying that it had been 1:15 p.m. when he first saw Crump at a location one-tenth of a mile east of the murder scene. Hantman appeared to be irritated with Warner for not following the script, so Warner, under cross-examination by Roundtree, eventually changed his testimony again to 1:14 p.m.
(In their testimony during the trial, several detectives and police officers had already established that Detective Bernie Crooke had arrested Ray Crump on the railroad bed directly below the murder scene at approximately 1:15 p.m.)
The government's case was slowly spiraling out of control, yet the Roundtree defense team appeared to be missing another critical moment. Detective John Warner's testimony was undermining the prosecution's case. Warner told Hantman that he stopped Crump on the railroad tracks and identified himself as a police officer, and Crump took out his sodden wallet and handed over his D.C. driver's license. Crump, Warner testified, hadn't been running when he discovered him; "he was walking."66
Warner had looked at the name and photograph on the license to confirm Crump's identity. He hadn't needed to read the physical description five feet three and one-half inches and 130 pounds to realize that Crump wasn't a match for the general broadcast, which had put the height of the suspect, according to Warner, at five feet 10 inches, though he wanted to maintain during the trial that he hadn't noticed Crump's physical description on his license. In the unlikely event that that were true, why wouldn't he have arrested Crump immediately?
Hantman: Did you at any time say anything to him or did he say anything to you?
Warner: Yes, sir. I identified myself as a police officer. I asked him who he was, and he replied, "Ray Crump." He took his wallet out, and when he took his wallet out, water dripped out of his wallet as he handed me his D.C. driver's license. I asked him then if he had heard any pistol shots. He replied no. I said, "How did you get so wet?" He says, "Well, I was fishing from a rock, and I fell into the river and went to sleep, fell off the rock, fell into the river." I said, "Well, where is your fishing equipment?" He said it went into the river, too. I said, "Your rod and everything?" He said yes. I said, "Well, where are your fish?" He said they went into the river too. I said, "Who were you fishing with?" He said, "No one." I asked him then if he would point out the spot as to where he was fishing from, I would help him, see if I could retrieve his fishing gear for him. And he says, "Yes, sir." And he led us back up in a westerly direction, up the railroad tracks.
Hantman: About what time was this when you first saw the defendant standing 32 feet in front of you soaking wet?
Warner: This was 1:15 p.m., sir.
Hantman: 1:15?
Warner: p.m., sir.67
Warner was asking an entire courtroom to believe that in the space of literally no time at all, he had spotted Crump, who "was walking," at "1:15 p.m." and at a distance that would be measured to be 532 feet east of the murder scene,68 whereupon he proceeded to ask Crump a series of seven questions, with Crump giving his answer to each question, before the two then began to walk along the railroad tracks in the westerly direction toward where Crump said he had been fishing only to then find themselves one-tenth of a mile later (532 feet) immediately parallel and below the murder scene, where Crump was supposedly interrogated and arrested at 1:15 p.m. by Detective Bernie Crooke.
Warner's testimony was as ludicrous as it was dishonest. Under cross-examination, he changed the time when he first came upon Ray Crump; it was now "1:14 [p.m.],"69 an obvious attempt to reconcile with what previous police testimony had officially established as Crump's time of arrest of 1:15 p.m.
This incensed Dovey Roundtree, who discerned in Warner's conflicting testimony further evidence of prosecutorial shenanigans. Yet in spite of a second demand for a mistrial a demand Judge Corcoran rejected it wasn't clear whether Dovey Roundtree, or even the jury, had grasped the full implications of Detective John Warner's testimony, which was simply this: Ray Crump was not the only black man in the towpath area on the day of the murder.
Detective Warner had clearly first come upon the defendant well before 1:15 p.m. and at a distance of more than a tenth of a mile east of the murder scene. His methodical, seven-question interrogation of Crump, followed by their walk together, had to have taken at least ten, maybe even as long as fifteen, minutes before the two eventually found themselves parallel to, and beneath the murder scene, the place where Crump would be, by all accounts, officially arrested at approximately 1:15 p.m.
If Crump was in the physical presence of Detective Warner at a distance of a tenth of a mile east of the murder scene sometime around 1:00 p.m., he could not have possibly been the same "Negro male" that officer Roderick Sylvis spotted approximately six-tenths of a mile west of the murder scene well past 1:00 p.m. Detective Warner's testimony had, therefore, inadvertently corroborated the fact that a second, unidentified "Negro male" had eluded police capture.
More policemen were called to testify the following day. Collectively, their testimony offered nothing in the way of incriminating evidence against Crump and, instead, expanded the grounds for reasonable doubt. A neighbor of Crump's testified that she saw Ray leaving his house the morning of the murder wearing his light-colored beige jacket and golf cap. In fact, some facsimile of a light-beige Windbreaker jacket seen by eyewitnesses Henry Wiggins and allegedly by Lieutenant William L. Mitchell on the "Negro male" each of them saw was the most conspicuous evidence that, according to the prosecution, identified the killer. For Henry Wiggins in particular, it had been the distinguishing piece of clothing, and it was a jacket very similar to the prosecution's exhibit that lay before the court. So important was the jacket as evidence, its very existence including its location and whereabouts seemed to have a life of its own.
The implication of Byers's testimony is inescapable: Someone, other than police, was monitoring the murder scene and the events unfolding around it.
And so, before the end of day three of the trial, a fascinating element its real significance never realized during the trial, or afterward was revealed. It involved possibly the most critical piece of evidence: the light-colored beige windbreaker jacket, allegedly worn by the defendant.
Harbor Precinct policeman Frederick Byers was called to testify. Under direct and cross-examination, Byers was adamant: He had received a radio call at "about one o'clock or a little after" to search in his patrol boat for a "light colored beige jacket," which he would eventually find at "about 1:46 p.m." at a distance of 1,110 feet southwest of the murder scene.70
How did he know where to look? Moreover, neither the defense nor the prosecution questioned the time "about one oâ
Moved this post from John Kowalski's new thread, described as:
Tom Scully Wrote:
John Kowalski Wrote:Have uploaded Permindex and CMC documents that I copied from the Bloomfield collection at Library and Archives Canada, and from other sources. These documents includes letters written by Bloomfield to Seligman, Mantello and others regarding the operation of these 2 companies. The files were uploaded to internet archive.
I want to avoid sending your new thread in any OT direction.
Your efforts are much appreciated, John. Recently I read an EF post of yours in which you shared the age you were when you read your first Assassination topic book. I recalled I had overreacted to an article you authored and you are exactly the sort of researcher the community should be encouraging because people your age are the only hope more stones will be lifted and looked under.
I was irritated because of this experience, which also resulted in being an Ed Forum mod one day, and a banned guest the next.
At 39.16 you can even hear him say:
Quote:
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD="class: alt2"]What [B]we uncovered...[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
However, these "new Mitchell data" were definately found by Tom Scully last year. Scully posted them in this thread too.
Janney apparently "overlooked" these data, available in Google long ago. Although he referred to them on the sheet he showed during this part of his presentation, he didn't feel the need to credit Tom Scully for finding these new Mitchell data:.... [/B]......
and by a save face rewrite by a longtime researcher author that boldly made it seem he discovered on his own [URL="https://www.google.com/search?ei=fsguXa22HNmttQbds7WwBw&q=john+armstrong+jfklancer.com+money+order+serial+number&oq=john+armstrong+jfklancer.com+money+order+serial+&gs_l=psy-ab.1.0.33i299l3.3776.7229..8936...0.0..0.211.1083.0j7j1......0....1..gws-wiz.......33i160.5KkamJ-Nv-E"]after 20 years of
maintaining the opposite[/URL], including in a presentation Lancer annual gathering. My research proved the Klein's money order was not numbered suspiciously out of sequence compared to PMOs purchased in fall,1962 from the same Dallas p.o., and there was nothing troubling about the paid Klein PMO being retrieved from an Arlington archive vs. the K.C., PMO center that was actually in the process of deactivation in March, 1963, as a result of new automated processing and archiving technology.
Please accept my apology and if you think I might be helpful to you someday, do not think twice to ask me. I hope you have or will influence friends of yours to join you in increasing Assassinations related body of knowledge.
Peter Janney's uncle was Frank Pace, chairman of General Dynamics who enlisted law partners Roswell Gilpatric and Luce's brother-in-law, Maurice "Tex" Moore, in a trade of 16 percent of Gen. Dyn. stock in exchange for Henry Crown and his Material Service Corp. of Chicago, headed by Byfield's Sherman Hotel group's Pat Hoy. The Crown family and partner Conrad Hilton next benefitted from TFX, at the time, the most costly military contract award in the history of the world. Obama was sponsored by the Crowns and Pritzkers. So was Albert Jenner Peter Janney has preferred to write of an imaginary CIA assassination of his surrogate mother, Mary Meyer, but not a word about his Uncle Frank.
17-07-2019, 08:12 AM (This post was last modified: 17-07-2019, 09:53 AM by Tom Scully.)
........
Peter Janney's uncle was Frank Pace, chairman of General Dynamics who enlisted law partners Roswell Gilpatric and Luce's brother-in-law, Maurice "Tex" Moore, in a trade of 16 percent of Gen. Dyn. stock in exchange for Henry Crown and his Material Service Corp. of Chicago, headed by Byfield's Sherman Hotel group's Pat Hoy. The Crown family and partner Conrad Hilton next benefitted from TFX, at the time, the most costly military contract award in the history of the world. Obama was sponsored by the Crowns and Pritzkers. So was Albert Jenner Peter Janney has preferred to write of an imaginary CIA assassination of his surrogate mother, Mary Meyer, but not a word about his Uncle Frank.
17-07-2019, 08:18 AM (This post was last modified: 17-07-2019, 09:51 AM by Tom Scully.)
Why do people insist on putting their name on and distributing long intentionally misleading details? Why do it? Who benefits?
The elephant in the community is confirmation bias enabling face saving instead of fact finding.
Quote:[URL="https://books.google.com/books?id=OGOCDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT411&lpg=PT411&dq=mary%27s+mosaic+%22faux+truce%22&source=bl&ots=9nc1fwJtfZ&sig=ACfU3U2IjGbEVWexqVNGg1CeX_Xn0AFHgw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjV3qOjyLvjAhWRKM0KHY-wAnYQ6AEwAHoECAAQAQ"]Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary ...
[/URL][URL="https://books.google.com/books?id=OGOCDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT411&lpg=PT411&dq=mary%27s+mosaic+%22faux+truce%22&source=bl&ots=9nc1fwJtfZ&sig=ACfU3U2IjGbEVWexqVNGg1CeX_Xn0AFHgw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjV3qOjyLvjAhWRKM0KHY-wAnYQ6AEwAHoECAAQAQ"]https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1510708936
[/URL] Peter Janney - 2016 - ‎History
By the end of the deposition, we had reached a kind of "faux truce" where I admitted that it was highly unlikely that Mr. Mitchell had been the actual assassin in ...
THE BRILLIANT BLACK WOMAN WHO DEFENDED THE ACCUSED KILLER OF JFK'S MISTRESS, PART 2 ...........
The presence of Lieutenant William L. Mitchell had troubled Dovey Roundtree from the very beginning. What else, Roundtree wondered, might Mitchell add to the information he'd already given? How might he elaborate on what he'd told police the day after the murder? Mitchell had refused to return her phone calls in the months before the trial; she had little to go on.
But whatever he said, whatever claims he might make in his testimony, she feared the jury was certain to believe him, simply because he appeared to be the quintessence of credibility: educated, a retired military officer, and white.
At a murder trial where the innuendo of an attempted sexual assault by a black man upon a white woman had captivated the attention of an entire city, William L. Mitchell indeed presented a formidable threat.
Might the jury even go so far as to overlook the discrepancy in Wiggins's height and weight testimony, given Mitchell's corroboration to police of the clothing description that was nearly identical to what Wiggins had seen? Potentially, this spelled doom for Ray Crump, Roundtree told Leo Damore years later, because Ray had lied on two important counts: his clothing, and his reason for being in the area on the day of the murder. Without testimony from Crump's girlfriend, Vivian, Roundtree still feared the possibility of ruination for her client.
As a witness for the prosecution, Mitchell was a cool customer. He didn't fall into the same traps that had tripped up Henry Wiggins. When asked by Hantman to identify the exhibits of Crump's and Mary Meyer's clothing, Mitchell made certain to say only that they were "similar to the clothes worn by the individual," not the exact clothes he had seen that day.
He described the "Negro male" he had seen following Mary as "about my height, about five feet eight [inches],"74 and then added that he, Mitchell, weighed "about 145 pounds." The reader will recall that this was the precise weight that police recorded for Crump after his arrest on the day of the murder.75 Mitchell was careful to stop short of saying that Ray Crump was the man he had seen. Doing so would have invited a fierce cross-examination from Roundtree, which might have aroused suspicion and damaged Mitchell's testimony. Instead, Mitchell slyly and repeatedly implied that the man he'd seen was indeed Crump. The man he saw, he told the court, "had his hands in the pockets of his jacket when I passed him." He carried "no fishing rod."76
Hantman asked Mitchellif he had seen anyone else on the towpath the day. Mitchell testified that he had twice passed "a couple walking together," as well as a younger runner "about 20" wearing Bermuda shorts.77 The runner in Bermuda shorts was never identified, and he never came forward.
Patrolman Sylvis had already testified about seeing the couple, a point that corroborated Mitchell's account, bolstering his credibility, but Sylvis had obtained no identification and the couple never came forward to police. Aside from his own claim, no one ever substantiated that Mitchell had been on the towpath that day, or any other day.
In spite of Mitchell'scalm demeanor, Roundtree probed for weak spots in his testimony, in which Mitchell reported with military precision his time on the towpath, and approximately when and where he was located at each of several critical points on the line of the murder.
Roundtree focused on another detail that would undermine Mitchell'swell-rehearsed precision: Had he been wearing a watch? Mitchell was forced to concede that he hadn't; he couldn't be entirely certain that the times he gave were exact. He admitted that he had based his accounting of the time he returned to the Pentagon on the "clock in the barbershop of the [Pentagon] basement athletic center," which read "a quarter of one." It was a small but significant detail, again establishing a degree of reasonable doubt about Mitchell's account.
Yet Mitchell's assertion that the man he passed weighed "about 145 pounds" was troubling to the defense. It was too close for comfort, in spite of Mitchell's claim that the man he had seen was "about my height, about five feet eight [inches]," clearly taller than Ray Crump.
The weight match wouldn't be lost on Hantman, who would exploit it for all it was worth, along with one other detail, in his summation. At the end of his testimony, William Mitchell's sheen was still untarnished; he remained a model citizen, and he had delivered precise eyewitness testimony that corroborated the less-than-stellar witness Henry Wiggins, thereby indirectly and ironically resuscitating the Wiggins testimony.
At that point in the proceedings, in the eyes of the jury, it may have still been anyone's case to win. No Evidence
..............
Third edition (aka 2nd revision of Peter Janney's book, Mary's Mosaic) Chapter 16
Peter Janney's uncle was Frank Pace, chairman of General Dynamics who enlisted law partners Roswell Gilpatric and Luce's brother-in-law, Maurice "Tex" Moore, in a trade of 16 percent of Gen. Dyn. stock in exchange for Henry Crown and his Material Service Corp. of Chicago, headed by Byfield's Sherman Hotel group's Pat Hoy. The Crown family and partner Conrad Hilton next benefitted from TFX, at the time, the most costly military contract award in the history of the world. Obama was sponsored by the Crowns and Pritzkers. So was Albert Jenner Peter Janney has preferred to write of an imaginary CIA assassination of his surrogate mother, Mary Meyer, but not a word about his Uncle Frank.
Tom Scully Wrote:Moved this post from John Kowalski's new thread, described as:
Tom Scully Wrote:
John Kowalski Wrote:Have uploaded Permindex and CMC documents that I copied from the Bloomfield collection at Library and Archives Canada, and from other sources. These documents includes letters written by Bloomfield to Seligman, Mantello and others regarding the operation of these 2 companies. The files were uploaded to internet archive.
I want to avoid sending your new thread in any OT direction.
Your efforts are much appreciated, John. Recently I read an EF post of yours in which you shared the age you were when you read your first Assassination topic book. I recalled I had overreacted to an article you authored and you are exactly the sort of researcher the community should be encouraging because people your age are the only hope more stones will be lifted and looked under.
I was irritated because of this experience, which also resulted in being an Ed Forum mod one day, and a banned guest the next.
At 39.16 you can even hear him say:
Quote:
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD="class: alt2"]What [B]we uncovered...[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
However, these "new Mitchell data" were definately found by Tom Scully last year. Scully posted them in this thread too.
Janney apparently "overlooked" these data, available in Google long ago. Although he referred to them on the sheet he showed during this part of his presentation, he didn't feel the need to credit Tom Scully for finding these new Mitchell data:.... [/B]......
and by a save face rewrite by a longtime researcher author that boldly made it seem he discovered on his own [URL="https://www.google.com/search?ei=fsguXa22HNmttQbds7WwBw&q=john+armstrong+jfklancer.com+money+order+serial+number&oq=john+armstrong+jfklancer.com+money+order+serial+&gs_l=psy-ab.1.0.33i299l3.3776.7229..8936...0.0..0.211.1083.0j7j1......0....1..gws-wiz.......33i160.5KkamJ-Nv-E"]after 20 years of
maintaining the opposite[/URL], including in a presentation Lancer annual gathering. My research proved the Klein's money order was not numbered suspiciously out of sequence compared to PMOs purchased in fall,1962 from the same Dallas p.o., and there was nothing troubling about the paid Klein PMO being retrieved from an Arlington archive vs. the K.C., PMO center that was actually in the process of deactivation in March, 1963, as a result of new automated processing and archiving technology.
Please accept my apology and if you think I might be helpful to you someday, do not think twice to ask me. I hope you have or will influence friends of yours to join you in increasing Assassinations related body of knowledge.
Hi Tom:
Apology accepted. Am glad to read that you are still looking for the truth in JFK's assassination.
Are you doing any research?
Posted a message on DPF asking members to try the link to the files. Posted the same link in EF and was told that it didn't work. Can you try the link on DPF to see if it works.
![[Image: image2-17-700x470.jpg]](https://whowhatwhy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image2-17-700x470.jpg)
Dovey Johnson Roundtree (left). Raymond Crump Jr. being arrested on October 12, 1964 (upper right). Mary Pinchot Meyer murder scene (bottom right). Photo credit: ![[Image: messenger.svg]](https://platform-cdn.sharethis.com/img/messenger.svg)
![[Image: reddit.svg]](https://platform-cdn.sharethis.com/img/reddit.svg)
![[Image: flipboard.svg]](https://platform-cdn.sharethis.com/img/flipboard.svg)
![[Image: image3-8.jpg]](https://whowhatwhy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image3-8.jpg)
Dovey Johnson Roundtree, Washington DC, 1963. Photo credit: ![[Image: image8.jpg]](https://whowhatwhy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image8.jpg)
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: ![[Image: image5-1.jpg]](https://whowhatwhy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image5-1.jpg)
Key Bridge over C&O Canal Georgetown, Washington, DC. Photo credit: ![[Image: image1-36.jpg]](https://whowhatwhy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image1-36.jpg)
C&O Canal at intersection of Canal Road and Foxhall Road. Photo credit: Google Maps![[Image: image4-6.jpg]](https://whowhatwhy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image4-6.jpg)
Raymond Crump being escorted into DC Police Headquarters, October 12, 1964. Photo credit: ![[Image: image6.jpg]](https://whowhatwhy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image6.jpg)
C&O Canal from Chain Bridge at the base of the Palisades. Photo credit: ![[Image: image4.jpg]](https://whowhatwhy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/image4.jpg)
Mary Pinchot Meyer at JFK's 46th birthday Party. Photo credit: ![[Image: image2-22-700x470.jpg]](https://whowhatwhy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image2-22-700x470.jpg)
Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from ![[Image: image13.jpg]](https://whowhatwhy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image13.jpg)
United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Photo credit: ![[Image: image10.jpg]](https://whowhatwhy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image10.jpg)
Ben Bradlee. Photo credit: ![[Image: image1-43.jpg]](https://whowhatwhy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image1-43.jpg)
Ben Bradlee playing with John F. Kennedy Jr. Atoka, Virginia, November 10, 1963. Photo credit: ![[Image: image8-1.jpg]](https://whowhatwhy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image8-1.jpg)
Mary Pinchot Meyer (left), Mary's Mosaic by Peter Janney (center), and James Jesus Angleton (right). Photo credit: ![[Image: image7-1.jpg]](https://whowhatwhy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image7-1.jpg)
C&O Canal Towpath and Raymond Crump Jr. being arrested October 12, 1964. Photo credit: ![[Image: image5-2.jpg]](https://whowhatwhy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image5-2.jpg)
Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from ![[Image: image9.jpg]](https://whowhatwhy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image9.jpg)
Fletcher's Boat House inset over Google map of C&O Canal towpath. Photo credit: ![[Image: image4-7.jpg]](https://whowhatwhy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/image4-7.jpg)
C&O Canal from Francis Scott Key Bridge, Georgetown, Washington, DC. Photo credit: