by Peter Janney
Judge Corcoran also barred any testimony that referred to the Central Intelligence Agency. Could he have been privy to the rumors of a CIA conspiracy link that surrounded Mary Meyer’s death? That was unknown, but it appeared likely that as a first-timer on the bench, Corcoran sought to avoid any controversy whatsoever, and in that regard, any mention of the CIA would seem especially off-limits. The Warren Report’s lone gunman assertion was already beginning to be challenged. There were rumblings swirling all over Washington and elsewhere about CIA involvement in President Kennedy’s assassination, and Corcoran likely sought to steer clear of any mention of the Agency altogether.
Prosecutor Hantman, for his part, knew he was involved in a high-profile case, but at the time of the trial, he was unaware how high profile the case might become. He didn’t know that Mary Meyer had kept a diary and that in it, she had written about her lover, the slain president. Nor did he know that Mary’s diary was now in the hands of CIA counterintelligence chief Jim Angleton, and that Angleton’s wife would be in court every day, observing the trial.
On Monday, July 19, 1965, a three-hundred-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 U. S. 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 courtroom’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 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 twenty-five 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
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 ran 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
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.
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 D.C. 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 twenty-five 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. 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.
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 8 inches to 5 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 fifty-five-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
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 twenty seconds … coming from the direction of the canal.”33
