Mary's Mosaic (18 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.
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The C & O Canal fell under the jurisdiction of the U.S. 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 twenty-two 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.”
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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 D.C. 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.”
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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. 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.
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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.”
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This was not only a physical impossibility, it was factually incorrect. The distance—128.6 feet, to be exact—had already been measured by police the day after the murder.
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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 [D.C. Cir. 1964]
),
decided only six days later on October 29, the D.C. 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.”
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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.”
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D
ovey Roundtree filed her appearance in the defense of Ray Crump Jr. on October 28, 1964.
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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 Sheldon 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.”
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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,” Roundtree told Leo Damore in 1990. “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.”
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The D.C. district judge denied the writ of habeas corpus on November 9, 1964. Anticipating as much, Roundtree had already begun preparing an appeal for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. 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.
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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.”
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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.”
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Wondering whether her client was fit to stand trial, Roundtree also feared that brutality and taunting by prison guards would undo Crump completely.