by Peter Janney
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
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. 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.
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 U.S. attorney David Acheson in an interview for this book in 2008. Acheson had been the Justice Department’s U.S. 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.
5
Trial by Fire
The only new thing in this world is the history you don’t know.
—President Harry Truman
ON JUNE 11, 1963, President Kennedy delivered legislation to Congress that would become, after his death, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In a landmark address from the Oval Office that evening, one day after his historic American University commencement address advocating world peace, the president said, “We face a moral crisis as a country, and as a people. Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right, as well as reality.” The next day—June 12, 1963—Medgar Evers, a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was shot and killed in front of his wife and three children in his Mississippi driveway. His killer, the white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith, evaded conviction twice with hung juries in 1964 and would not be finally convicted for the murder until 1994. Two months later, in August, Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights movement’s most eloquent and charismatic leader, had filled the nation’s capital and captured the country’s attention with his inspiring dreams of racial equality.
Nearly two years later, as Ray Crump’s murder trial approached in the summer of 1965, civil rights advocates were still marching across the American South. On televisions throughout the country, Americans witnessed images of racial hatred and its casualties: African Americans tear-gassed, beaten by police, bitten by police K-9 dogs, and lynched by racist mobs. Hatred and fear of the black man pervaded America in the months leading up to Ray Crump’s trial for the murder of a white woman. The surrounding political and racial climate was not lost on Dovey Roundtree.
For Dovey Roundtree and her legal team, the U.S. attorney’s pursuit of Raymond Crump Jr. for the murder of Mary Meyer was further evidence of the lingering racism that permeated the corridors of the American judicial system. It represented all that was unfair and unjust when it came to the failure of equal protection under the law for anyone who wasn’t white. Without any financial remuneration and with only her own resources, Dovey Roundtree would stake her professional life on defending a victimized, dirt-poor young black man. For Roundtree, it wasn’t just the life and future of one man t
hat was at stake. She believed Crump was being conveniently scapegoated. Justice itself was on trial; and if the cause of justice was to be served, then everything in its way had to be confronted and overcome.
The prosecution’s “declaration of war” on Ray Crump would unleash a righteous power for justice. Roundtree was ready to “act boldly,” perhaps more so than ever before. Ray Crump couldn’t pay his legal fees, so Roundtree committed her own resources to his defense. It was a terrific gamble, but one that Roundtree and her team considered supremely worthwhile. She would employ every skill she possessed to confront and defeat the government’s case against her client, of whose innocence she was categorically convinced. As her friend and fellow attorney George Peter Lamb once remarked, “Dovey Roundtree was the world’s greatest cross-examiner.” A courtroom full of people would soon understand why.
The government, however, was still stonewalling Ray Crump’s defense.
Four months after the murder itself, Roundtree still hadn’t been able to get a clear statement from the government’s lawyers, and therefore she wasn’t sure whether a murder weapon had even been recovered. Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Duncan, the young black prosecutor initially assigned to the case by senior U.S. attorney David Acheson, was normally an ebullient man and quite friendly with Dovey. But he wasn’t being helpful or cooperative when she ran into him on the elevator in the courthouse one day before Christmas.
“I’ve called you a couple of times,” she remembered saying to him. “I wanted to come and talk to you about this case. I’m uneasy about this. A million eyes are on this case, and we’re the ones that don’t know what’s really going on.” But Duncan had been evasive and put her off. “It’s just a straight case,” she recalled him saying. “They caught him. He was down there.”
“So were a lot of other people down there [on the C & O Canal towpath] that day,” Dovey recalled saying. Duncan had shrugged his shoulders, said something to the effect that he didn’t know whether he was going to continue with the case, and proceeded to walk away. How odd was this, Dovey recalled in 1991.1 In fact, Dovey didn’t know Charles Duncan had been offered a job as general counsel to the newly formed Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).2
Meanwhile, Dovey Roundtree and her legal team had lost the battle for a permanent injunction that would have restrained the government from forcing Ray Crump to give samples of his hair. In early February, Crump was taken to the police captain’s office to give a hair sample. He refused, and was then forcibly held down by several officers while hair was cut from his head. This infuriated Dovey. In mid-March, she filed a motion to suppress evidence—not only her client’s hair, but any chemical analysis from the hair, as well as his shoes, and the cap and jacket (alleged to have been Crump’s), all of which she argued had been taken either against his will or without his consent, violating his Fourth Amendment right to protection from unreasonable searches and seizures.
Roundtree was being stonewalled from every direction. Determined to establish exactly what evidence the prosecution had in its possession, she filed a motion for a complete bill of particulars. The motion would compel the prosecution to list everything or be held in contempt. In addition, they would have to turn over all evidence collected in connection with the murder, including eyewitness accounts, the murder weapon, the FBI Crime Lab report, items taken from Crump’s home, and everything that Crump had used or worn on the day of the crime.
Finally, in early March, five months after the murder itself, the prosecution was forced to cough up what it had. No murder weapon had been found, but the two.38-caliber lead bullets taken from Mary Meyer’s corpse would be entered into evidence, as well as Ray Crump’s hair, the clothing he had been wearing that day—the beige-tan zippered jacket, the dark-plaid golf cap, dark corduroy trousers, black shoes—and an open package of Pall Mall cigarettes. A complete list of all persons at the scene, interviewed, or connected with the crime would also be produced. It was straightforward enough. What struck Roundtree as ominous, however, was the signature on the statement of evidence. Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Duncan had been replaced by one of the toughest prosecutors in the criminal justice department: Alfred (“Al”) L. Hantman.
“Oh, brother!” Dovey remembered thinking. “What are they doing to me!”
Her heart sank as she contemplated what was before her.3 With Hantman on the case, she knew they were bringing in the heavy artillery. As Assistant Chief of the Criminal Division in the Justice Department, Hantman would have a full staff, as well as a small army of ancillary personnel.
Alfred L. Hantman was, indeed, a big gun. Seasoned, tough, savvy, he was a 1948 graduate of George Washington University Law School and had been an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. He was counted among the top three attorneys in the criminal division of the Justice Department, where his career would span twenty-three years. Hantman had already tried a range of felonies, including murders; observers described him as “a screamer and a bully” in the courtroom. Tall, prepossessing, an imposing figure with bristling eyebrows and an extraordinary legal mind capable of prodigious feats of memory, he conveyed a formidable authority; and defense attorneys were known to work into the wee hours of the morning preparing to face him in a courtroom. Respected for being “a worker in the vineyard,” Al Hantman was not, however, part of the old-boy aristocratic Ivy League club to which his boss, U. S. Attorney David Acheson, belonged.
Dovey Roundtree was well aware of Hantman’s reputation, and she was troubled by this turn of events. With Hantman’s appearance for the prosecution, she recalled later, she believed that “they were out to kill this boy.”4 In the District of Columbia, first-degree murder carried the death penalty. What Roundtree didn’t know at the time was that a confidential internal Justice Department memo, dated February 24, 1965—five months before the start of the trial—noted the following: “[Hantman’s] case is very weak from an evidentiary standpoint, and he needs all the evidence that he possibly can get to support his case.”5(See Appendix 2.)
Of course, Al Hantman was aware that his case against Crump was entirely circumstantial. For that reason, he would attempt every possible maneuver to gain advantage in the months leading up to trial, including dueling with the defense over pretrial motions, evidentiary hearings, and the admissibility of various pieces of evidence. The rulings were almost always in Hantman’s favor, an advantage that he maximized, and sometimes embellished. In one pretrial conference, Hantman went so far as to allege that Ray Crump had cleaned Mary Meyer’s house—a complete fabrication that nonetheless introduced the possibility of the defendant’s prior association with the victim. In response, Dovey Roundtree produced every single payroll receipt that Crump had received from the Brown Construction Company. In doing so, she made it clear that she would countenance no further deceptions of that sort.6
Making matters worse for Roundtree, the judge assigned to the trial was an unknown quantity. The Honorable Howard F. Corcoran had just been appointed by President Johnson to be a U.S. District Court Judge for the District of Columbia. It was an appointment that surprised many. At his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing, when asked about his actual trial experience, the prospective federal judge replied, “Zero.” In spite of the embarrassed silence that followed, his nomination was approved. One insider speculated it was nepotism. Judge Howard Corcoran was the brother of the legendary Tommy “the Cork” Corcoran, an influential lawyer and D.C. power broker who had drafted much of the New Deal legislation for Franklin D. Roosevelt. Judge Corcoran’s pedigree and education—Phillips Exeter Academy, Princeton, and then Harvard Law—placed him in the social class of Mary and Cord Meyer, as well as that of U.S. Attorney David Acheson, signaling an easy access to power. Pedigree aside, many felt that Judge Corcoran was not ready for a case like this. Some even speculated that because of his lack of experience, he would rule according to the letter of the law to avoid being overturned on appeal. For Roundtree and her team,
it was another bad break, something that might work against her.
Judge Corcoran’s law clerk for the trial was a young, agile attorney fresh out of Harvard Law School’s prestigious Master of Laws program. Twenty-five-year-old Brooklyn-born Robert Stephen Bennett had graduated from Georgetown Law in 1964. He salivated at the prospect of being part of the action, and no place would be hotter than Washington in the summer of 1965. Thirty years later, having become one of Washington’s and the nation’s eminent criminal defense attorneys, he would find himself standing at the podium in the marbled United States Supreme Court representing President Bill Clinton in a sexual harassment lawsuit.
In response to Roundtree’s wish to enter into evidence the fact of Mary Meyer’s divorce and two surviving sons, Corcoran refused. “I do not want this woman’s reputation dragged through the mud,” he said. It seemed an odd response to the request, since “lack of relevance” might have kept it out just as well. Could Corcoran have learned of the unconventionality of the dead woman’s lifestyle? The judge sustained Hantman’s objection, however, when Roundtree tried to establish for the jury that Ray Crump was the father of five children. “Anything you can do to humanize the defendant, you try to get in,” Roundtree said years later. “But it was clear that Corcoran intended to maintain a tight rein on the kind of evidence he was going to allow. Whether it was because this was his first case, or he was nervous, I don’t know, but he was very strict.”7
