Mary's Mosaic (20 page)

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 Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Duncan had been replaced by one of the toughest prosecutors in the criminal justice department: Alfred (“Al”) L. Hantman.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

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.

O
n 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.