Mary's Mosaic (19 page)

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.
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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.”
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Having removed her client from the perils of the D.C. 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 D.C. 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.”
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A dissenting opinion was better than a unanimous decision, but it would do little for Ray Crump’s defense or mental equilibrium.

I
t 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.”
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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?”
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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.
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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.
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W
ho 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.
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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.”
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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

O
N
J
UNE
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 that 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.
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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