by Tonya Bolden
(Adler was a shoe company famous for its “elevator shoes,” ones constructed to make men look taller.)
Hantman told the jury that Mitchell had said the man he saw was 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighed 145 pounds.
Hantman went on to stress the rapid arrival of police on the scene. He claimed that Ray had ditched his cap and jacket because he knew Henry Wiggins had seen him. Hantman also told the jury that the .38-caliber pistol might very well still be in the area of the C&O Canal towpath.
Hantman talked again about blood, including that blood on the tree.
He sought to make Dovey’s character witnesses irrelevant. “Does it mean that if a person has peace and a good character he has a license to commit crime?”
Hantman circled back to Ray’s lie about fishing.
“The evidence is clear,” said Hantman in winding down. “The evidence is convincing. I submit to you, ladies and gentleman, the evidence is overwhelming.”
He urged jurors to think with their heads, not with their hearts. If they did that, they could come to no other conclusion but that Ray Crump Jr. was guilty.
It was going on 5 p.m. Jury deliberation would begin the next day.
24
IF JUSTICE IS TO BE DONE
ON THURSDAY, JULY 29, 1965, Judge Corcoran delivered his charge to the jury.
First, Corcoran thanked the jurors for their service. He acknowledged that jury duty “is never easy, for it is never easy to sit in judgment on your fellowman.” But jury duty “is always important. If justice is to be done, the burden must be borne.”
Judge Corcoran asked the jury to do its duty with “all care and deliberation” and “free from passion, free from bias, free from prejudice.” Focus on the evidence, he said.
On the verdict, which had to be unanimous, the jury had five options.
Guilty of first-degree murder: punishable by death.
Guilty of first-degree murder: punishable by life imprison-ment.
Guilty of first-degree murder but unable to agree unanimously on the punishment (in which case the judge would determine the sentence).
Guilty of second-degree murder (killing with malice but without premeditation): punishable by up to life in prison.
The fifth possibility: Not guilty.
BY 11:00 A.M. TREASURY CLERK Evelyn S. Carpenter, homemaker Cecilia Chmielewski, St. Elizabeths Hospital nurse’s aide Bessie E. Hawkins, cab driver Archie N. McEachern, Job Corps program specialist Edward O. Savwoir, and the other seven jurors were escorted to the jury room to commence deliberations. The four alternates had been discharged.
Four hours later, with the jury still deliberating and Ray at the defendant’s table with his counsel, Judge Corcoran returned to the bench and asked Dovey and Hantman to approach.
He had a note from the jury foreperson Edward Savwoir.
“Your Honor,
(1) Did the police officers go with defendant Crump to the spot or rock which he said he was fishing and from which he said he fell? If so, at what time on what date?
(2) May we please have all photos admitted as evidence as well as the small map of the area that was distributed to us previously?
(3) May we know if defendant Ray Crump is left or right-handed?”
The photos the jury wanted to see included several of the crime scene and the photo of the tree.
Judge Corcoran informed Dovey and Hantman that he proposed to respond thus:
“(1) Your recollection of the evidence controls.”
(2) Photos and map herewith.
(3) Your recollection of the evidence controls.” (By “your recollection of the evidence controls,” Corcoran meant that the jurors must rely on their memories.)
With no objections to his proposed response, the judge recessed the court.
AT 10:30 P.M., JUDGE CORCORAN was back in the courtroom.
Another note from the jury.
“After 8 ½ hours we have 8 jurors who have reached a decision and 4 who have not. Do you consider this jury deadlocked?”
With no objection from the prosecution or defense, Judge Corcoran replied, no, he didn’t think the jury “hopelessly deadlocked.”
He did, however, think it was time for the jury to retire for the night. “You will resume your deliberations in the morning,” the judge wrote to the jury, advising them that they’d be “comfortably taken care of tonight,” meaning they’d be given lodging and meals and kept from the outside world. Judge Corcoran also told them not to mention the “numerical standing of the jury” in future.
The next morning the Washington Post reported that Ray’s mother, Martha, had been waiting for the verdict in a corridor of the courthouse the whole time.
25
WEPT
PAGE 995 OF THE trial transcript tells us that on Friday, July 30, 1965, at about 11:40 a.m., after about eleven hours of deliberations, the jurors took their seats in Criminal Courtroom 4.
Deputy Clerk:Will the forman please rise.
Edward Savwoir stood up.
Deputy Clerk:Mr. Foreman, has the jury agreed upon its verdict?
Savwoir:It has.
Deputy Clerk:May we have the verdict, please?
Edward Savwoir handed the verdict form to the deputy clerk, who in turn handed it to Judge Corcoran. The transcript is silent on exactly what happened next. Presumably Judge Corcoran looked over the verdict form, found nothing irregular, then handed it back to the deputy clerk.
Deputy Clerk:Will the jury please rise.
The jury stood up.
Deputy Clerk:Members of the jury, we have your verdict which states that you find the defendant Ray Crump Jr. not guilty, and this is your verdict so say you each and all?
Yes.
Judge Corcoran discharged the jury, then addressed the defendant. “Raymond Crump, you are a free man.”
“Ray’s mother cried out,” recalled Dovey forty years later, “and so did her minister and her friends from church.”
Dovey and Ray hugged.
Soon, they were out of Criminal Courtroom 4, out of the US District Court for the District of Columbia, out onto Constitution Avenue.
Dovey asked, “Is there anywhere you want to go, Ray?”
Ray replied, “I wants to go home.”
THE NEXT DAY THE Washington Post reported that Ray “swayed forward against the counsel table, closed his eyes and seemed to be near fainting when the verdict was read by a court clerk.”
A South Carolina paper said he “wept.”
CODA
WHEN WASHINGTON POST STAFF WRITER William Chapman reported on the outcome of the trial on July 31 under the front-page headline “Crump Free in Murder on Towpath,” he, like writers for the Evening Star, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Virginia’s Danville Register, the Orlando Sentinel, and other newspapers, included foreperson Edward O. Savwoir’s statement on the verdict: “There were many missing links . . . we just didn’t get the man at the scene.”
About a week and a half later, Ray wrote to Dovey from Mount Gilead, North Carolina, about sixty miles east of Queen City and about seven miles east of Norwood, North Carolina, where he’d been born.
“Just a few line to say hello and thank very much.” Ray reported that “at the present time I am during alright and so for I had no trouble and thing are looking good for me right now.”
He asked Dovey to gather his personal effects still with the Metropolitan Police Department and to send them to his mother so that she could send them to him. Those items included his driver’s license, a lighter, a picture, and a buck and a half.
BUT RAY CRUMP JR. didn’t do “alright” after those nine months in the DC Jail. Before the trial, his rap sheet had two drunken and disorderly charges and one shoplifting charge. Over the years after his acquittal, Ray was arrested more than twenty times, in DC, in Maryland, in Virginia, in North Carolina, and on far more serious charges.
Assault with a deadly weapon more than once.
Arson more than once.
&nb
sp; Gun possession.
Rape.
The victims of these crimes included his second wife, Lois; a girlfriend; and a guy with whom he had a beef over money.
He lived quite a long time, notwithstanding his troubles. Raymond Crump Jr. died on June 4, 2005, at the age of sixty-six.
Dovey was forever “heartsick” over what she deemed the shattering of Raymond Crump Jr. “He was not a remotely violent man when he was jailed for Mary Meyer’s murder in 1964, but he became one afterward.”
IN FEBRUARY 1976, the Washington Post reported on a National Enquirer piece alleging that when President Kennedy was assassinated he and Mary Pinchot Meyer had been having an affair and that she had kept a diary that ended up in the hands of CIA official James Angleton, who supposedly destroyed it.
Many people, including Robert Bennett, Judge Corcoran’s law clerk at the time of the trial, maintained that justice had not been done in Corcoran’s court, that Ray was the killer. Others believed that Ray was a scapegoat, that Mary Pinchot Meyer was a woman who knew too much about Kennedy’s assassination. Such people pointed out that Meyer had been shot execution-style.
Some people have also made much of the fact that Mary Pinchot Meyer’s ex-husband Cord Meyer was a CIA official, who was, wrote Dovey, presented in the press at the time as an “author and lecturer.” Some newspapers did describe him that way, but two days after the murder the New York Times, with its huge readership, stated that Cord Meyer was working for the CIA in New York City.
Certainly the causes of acquittals and convictions are often the subject of debate.
Was Ray acquitted because eight of the twelve jurors were Black?
The David (Dovey) and Goliath (Hantman) optics may also have been a factor.
Did Dovey win the day because of her simplicity, motherliness, and skillful cross-examinations?
Or had the sometimes cold, arrogant, gum-chewing Hantman been his own worst enemy? Robert Bennett concluded that Hantman had overtried his case. Hantman “took a vacuum cleaner approach to presenting evidence. He put it all in no matter how insignificant, and this diluted the impact of his strong evidence.”
Looking back on Ray’s acquittal, Dovey stated that at least she had made it “impossible for the matter of Mary Pinchot’s murder to be sealed off and forgotten, as the government so clearly wanted to do,” and “to the extent that my efforts in defending Raymond opened the path for researchers seeking to know more about the troubling circumstances surrounding her death, I am gratified.”
What is not in doubt is that Ray’s acquittal brought Dovey “the kind of success of which many lawyers dream. If success is defined as volume of cases, notoriety in the press, and respect in the legal community, then it can fairly be said that in the wake of the Crump case, I achieved it.”
Dovey’s success contributed to changing notions about the capabilities of Black lawyers, women lawyers. Dovey is part of the reason why Black women lawyers are no longer rare birds.
AFTER RAY’S CASE, JUDGES appointed Dovey to some of the toughest murder cases and she was proud to win acquittal “for other men who, like Ray, had no chance at all.”
Dovey’s success and reputation even led to a nomination for a judgeship. In March 1969, the Bar Association of the District of Columbia, the organization that denied Black lawyers membership when she began practicing law, wrote to Attorney General John N. Mitchell endorsing Dovey and three other attorneys to fill two vacancies on the US District Court for the District of Columbia.
The Attorney General soon received a stream of letters of recommendation on Dovey’s behalf, including from Florence Read (long since retired from Spelman) and civil rights activist Dorothy I. Height, another protégé of Mary McLeod Bethune. Height was then president of the National Council of Negro Women, for which Dovey was general counsel and still serving the organization at no charge.
Dovey J. Roundtree, Esquire, didn’t get that judgeship, but her work continued to be noticed and applauded.
While enjoying success and awards, Dovey remained rooted and grounded in Veritas et Utilitas. She became an Edith Wimbish, a Mary Mae Neptune, a Mary McLeod Bethune, a Professor Nabrit. She opened her office to young attorneys “for seminars, coached, and trained and mentored them.” It did her heart good to hear from law students how much they had been “inspired by what they witnessed in that fourth-floor courtroom in the last two weeks of July 1965.”
In the 1970s, then at the helm of Roundtree, Knox, Hunter & Parker, Dovey moved into family law, becoming an advocate for children. “More and more, as I labored at the bar and in the pulpit and in the privacy of the counseling room,” she explained in her memoir, Mighty Justice, “I confronted shattered children, children caught between warring parents, children who’d borne witness to the most horrific crimes, children neglected and shunted aside, children preyed upon by those entrusted with their care.” She added that her law practice and her ministry at Allen Chapel AME “tightly bound from the beginning, became almost indistinguishable, one from another.”
Dovey the riveting public speaker stayed active too. Invitations came from churches in and outside DC, from college and universities, from organizations as different as the DC’s Cosmetologist Association and the city’s Tots and Teens chapter. In late August 1992, the Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Sentinel announced that Dovey, age seventy-eight, was to be among the speakers at an upcoming conference at the US Army Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks. The theme of this conference was Black service in the US armed forces during World War II. Dovey’s session was titled “Looking Back But Forward.”
Four years later Dovey the lawyer retired and went back to Queen City, where she eventually lost her eyesight due to complications of diabetes.
Dovey Johnson Roundtree in 1995. Her numerous awards included a "Lawyer of the Year" award from Howard Law, a Spirit of Spelman College Founder's Day Award, an American Bar Association Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award, and an Award of Excellence from the Charlotte, North Carolina, chapter of the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund. "I've come to the conclusion that there's not much in life except helping people, and both law and religion do that," she told the Washington Afro-American in 1965.
But Dovey didn’t lose her vision. In her waning days, surely she hoped, dreamed, prayed that troops of young people in future generations would find in her story strength for their journeys and enough stamina, sound thinking, and love to devote at least some of their time, talent, and treasure to mending brokenness in their world.
Dovey Mae Johnson Roundtree passed away on May 21, 2018, several weeks after her 104th birthday.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am so grateful to my editor, Simon Boughton, for your careful reading of drafts, your astute, fine thinking, and your excellent direction. Gratitude is also due to others in the Norton family: Assistant Editor Kristin Allard, Project Editor Dassi Zeidel, Copy Editor Laurie Lieb, Production Manager Julia Druskin, Designer Steve Attardo, and cover artist Monique Aimee.
I am also grateful to many people outside the Norton family, people who responded so promptly and generously to my inquiries and provided invaluable information and/or priceless material.
At Spelman College Archives: Kassandra Ware, truly “another light.”
At the US District Court for the District of Columbia: Bryant Johnson.
At the National Archives and Records Administration: Damani K. Davis, Mena-Keona S. Nokes-Drake, Stanley Coln, Tracy Coates, and Nakisha Smith.
At the National Archives for Black Women’s History: Kenneth J. Chandler.
At the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room, Charlotte Mecklenburg Library: Robert Stocker and Shelia Bumgarner.
Thank you, David DiLapi, CPA, for helping me decipher the Dovey Johnson Roundtree–Mary Mae Neptune loan agreement. Thank you, attorneys Stephen J. Pollak, John V. Geise, and William John O’Malley Jr., for your generous responses to questions about the law.
Thank you to my sister Nelta for re
ading the manuscript and assisting with research.
And thank you to my agent, Jennifer Lyons, for all that you continually do.
NOTES
For complete citations of books heavily consulted, please see Selected Sources.
Abbreviations
DJR Alumna File, Spelman: Dovey J. Roundtree Spelman Alumna File, Spelman College Archives, Atlanta, Georgia.
DJR Papers, NABWH: Dovey Johnson Roundtree Papers, NABWH_005, National Archives of Black Women’s History, Mary McLeod Bethune Council House, Washington, DC.
Crump: United States v. Raymond Crump Jr., Criminal No.930–64, US District Court for the District of Columbia.
Prologue
1“Lawyer . . .?”: Roundtree and McCabe, Mighty Justice, p. 192.
1Ray’s priors: “Laborer Is Charged in Slaying of Artist,” Evening Star, October 13, 1964, p. B1; Janney, Mary’s Mosaic, p. 95.
1“They say you killed . . .”: Roundtree and McCabe, Mighty Justice, p. 192.
2Ray’s lack of assets and his dollar and a half: “Affidavit in Support of Application to Proceed Without Prepayment of Costs,” October 20, 1964, Crump, Folder 1, pdf pp. 44–45.
2“Mrs. Mary Pinchot Meyer . . .”: “Laborer Is Charged in Slaying,” p. A1.
3“At first we didn’t . . . started across the road”: “Laborer Is Charged in Slaying,” p. B1.
4“Robbery Motive Seen . . .”: headline to article by Alfred E. Lewis, Washington Post, October 13, 1964, p. A1.
4“Rape Weighed as Motive . . .”: headline, Evening Star, October 14, 1964, p. B1.
4“blowing on a newly . . .”: “Gun Hunted in Artist’s Canal Death,” Washington Post, October 14, 1964, p. A1.
5“righteous lawyer”: Janney, Mary’s Mosaic, p. 90.
1: Those Poor Broken Feet
