Mary's Mosaic (26 page)

U
nfortunately, Raymond Crump’s grief—and troubles—were only beginning. Dovey Roundtree believed that Crump’s nine months in jail had transformed him from a gentle man into a violent one. Convinced he had been taunted, beaten, abused, and possibly raped during his incarceration, Roundtree was heartsick. “He was not a remotely violent man when he was jailed for Mary Meyer’s murder in 1964,” she wrote in 2009, “but he became one afterward, both in the District of Columbia and in North Carolina, where he eventually moved with his second wife.”
⁸⁷
In fact, after the trial Ray Crump’s alcoholism became acute. Within the next few years, he would be charged with arson, assault with a deadly weapon, and violently threatening two girlfriends. In one fit of rage, Crump reportedly set his home on fire with his wife and children inside. His family escaped unhurt, and Ray was given a stiff prison sentence in North Carolina. Upon his release, he maintained his downward trajectory, committing arson once again and serving more jail time.

The condition known as
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
(PTSD) wasn’t formally recognized until 1980, though working models dealing with its cluster of symptoms were engendered in the early 1970s. Like the innocent, ill-prepared young men sent into harrowing and prolonged traumatic combat conditions in places like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, Ray Crump had been psychologically and physically maimed by the violence and brutality he was subjected to during his nine-month incarceration. Continually threatened, terrified, and increasingly unable to cope, what little ego strength he possessed disintegrated over time. Like many returning combat soldiers, he became a broken, shattered man, capable of violence to others and to himself. Unfortunately, for many of Mary Meyer’s community and family in Washington, as well as people in the Justice Department, including Alfred Hantman, Ray Crump’s subsequent path of violence and crime merely served to bolster their belief that Mary Meyer’s true killer had gotten away with murder.

Crump’s post-trial criminal career also impressed high-profile criminal defense attorney Robert S. Bennett, who had closely observed the trial as Judge Corcoran’s law clerk. In his book
In the Ring
, published in 2008, Bennett wrote that he would have convicted Crump “because of the overwhelming evidence.” In his view, Hantman had failed to get “into the heart and soul of jurors,” because he had overtried the case, most notably with Henry Wiggins. “It diluted the impact of his evidence,” Bennett recalled in an interview for this book in 2009. “Hantman was primarily responsible for losing the case.” Bennett had been convinced of Crump’s guilt in part because he “gave the
police an unbelievable explanation of why he was on the towpath—that he went fishing—especially since his fishing tackle was never located.”
⁸⁸

Author Nina Burleigh reached a similar conclusion about Ray Crump’s guilt. In spite of having been told in her one interview with Dovey Roundtree that Ray had been having a sexual tryst with a girlfriend adjacent to the canal towpath area on the Potomac,
⁸⁹
Burleigh nevertheless posed the same old, timeworn questions: “If he wasn’t fishing, what was he doing there?” “Why did he toss his hat and coat in the water?”
⁹⁰
According to Burleigh, “Dovey Roundtree the advocate would always contend in public that Crump was innocent,” insinuating that she might believe otherwise in private, and even going so far as to suggest that the attorney’s religious belief in Christian forgiveness rendered the factual basis of her clients’ earthly guilt or innocence irrelevant.
⁹¹
Did Nina Burleigh actually believe that Dovey Roundtree would have staked her entire professional career and reputation, not to mention considerable financial resources, on the defense of someone whose innocence she wasn’t unequivocally convinced of? If so, that conclusion was entirely at odds with everything that Roundtree stated or wrote publicly about this case, including her private journey from initial doubt to absolute certainty about Crump’s innocence, detailed in her 2009 autobiography.
⁹²

Of all that she accomplished in her victory in the case of
United States of America v. Ray Crump, Jr., Defendant
, Roundtree wrote that she had been particularly gratified that she might have helped to ensure a continued search for the true killer: “I believe, too, that in winning acquittal for Ray Crump, I made it impossible for the matter of Mary Pinchot Meyer’s murder to be sealed off and forgotten, as the government so clearly wanted to do. There is much about the crime that bears the most serious and sustained investigation, 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.”
⁹³
Such “serious and sustained investigation” was long in coming. For twelve years, those who knew about Mary Meyer’s diary and her relationship with President Kennedy chose to remain silent, until the
National Enquirer
finally broke the story in 1976.

Dovey Roundtree never abandoned her belief that Ray had been a scapegoat, a “patsy,” who had been set up to take the fall. “So far as I am concerned,” wrote Roundtree in 2009, “there is in the complex and tangled web of certain truth and unconfirmed rumor, of inference and speculation and intrigue that surrounds the life and death of Mary Pinchot Meyer a single critical fact: Raymond Crump’s innocence in her murder.”
⁹⁴
Roundtree’s initial suspicions
about the murder itself were fueled by a number of perplexing events that have never been explained: the menacing phone calls she received after each of her many excursions to the towpath; the mysterious disappearance of the stalled Nash Rambler that had brought Henry Wiggins and Bill Branch to witness the murder scene; the fact that neither a record of a repair order nor the identity of the vehicle’s owner was ever established. Dovey’s radar had been on high alert from the very beginnings of the case in 1964, and the 1976 revelations of Mary’s diary having been sequestered by the CIA all these years, and of Mary’s affair with the assassinated president, further convinced her that something much more sinister had likely taken place—as did three years of interviews with the late author Leo Damore in the 1990s.
⁹⁵

Nearly fifty years after the murder, the most important questions are still unanswered: If Raymond Crump Jr. didn’t murder Mary Pinchot Meyer, who did? And, more important, why? In the absence of such motives as robbery or sexual assault, had there been perhaps some disgruntled, demented jealous lover lurking in the woods waiting to take revenge? That was highly doubtful. In the nearly fifty years of research and reporting on the murder, nothing of the sort has ever been suggested. In her community of friends and acquaintances, Mary had always been highly regarded and respected. She had no known enemies. There was no rancor between friends. “She was best friends to many,” recalled Jim Truitt, and revered as “a Georgetown artist with a hundred thousand friends.”

Who, then, was the man that Henry Wiggins had seen standing over Mary’s corpse less than fifteen seconds after the fatal second shot was fired? His pristine, unstained clothes appeared to closely match the clothes worn by Ray Crump that morning. Was it possible that the man Wiggins had seen was the same “Negro male” that had briefly peeked out from the woods, the one spotted by police officer Roderick Sylvis—well after the time Crump was discovered by Detective John Warner? If so, who was he? And was he even a “Negro male,” or someone purposely disguised to look like one?

The final question still remains: What, then, was the motive behind the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer? The intent was clearly to kill her, but why? Was there something Mary knew, or had discovered, that made her dangerous? If so, what—and to whom? And did that imply some concern about who Mary Meyer was, and what she might be capable of ?

P
ART
T
WO

“
L
OOK WHO’S CALLED
to visit us!” said Lady Julia, daughter of Caesar Augustus, First Emperor of Rome. “Gnaeus Domitius.”

“I was on my way to Formiae,” said the Priest Domitius from the College of Augers. “I felt I must call upon you, Lady.”

“Do you know my son, Lucius?” asked Lady Julia.

“An honor, sir.” extending his hand toward Lucius. “I took the auspices for your brother Gaius before he left for Syria. They were most favorable. I’ve never seen the liver of a ewe so clear. One could almost see through it. His death is inexplicable to me.”

“And to us all,” added Lady Julia.

A screeching overhead is then heard, as an approaching group of children that includes Claudius and his sister Livilla grow louder with the awareness of eagles fighting above them.

“Mother, Mother, the eagles are fighting! Look out!” A small animal drops from the claws of one of the fighting eagles and lands in Claudius’s lap.

“What is it, Claudius?” asked Livilla.

“It’s a wolf cub!” said one of the other children.

“Mother, it dropped right from its claws,” exclaimed Livilla excitedly. “Let me have him!”

“Leave it be! It fell to Claudius, leave it be!” said the stunned Antonia, mother of Claudius.

“Look at the blood! Ye Gods, what does it mean?” asked Lady Julia. “Domitius, tell us what it means.”

“Lady, I …”

“You know what it means, I can see. Tell us, I beg you!” demanded Lady Julia. “Children, go into the house…”

“No! Let them stay!” Domitius sternly warned. “The sign was given to you all, and given now, perhaps, because I am here to read it. But they must be sworn to secrecy. Who are the gods that watch over this house?”

“Jupiter and Mars,” Lady Julia answered.

“Then do you swear, all of you, by these your gods that no word of what you are about to hear shall ever pass your lips?”

(ALL) “Yes, we do.”

“The wolf cub is Rome,” began Domitius. “No doubt of it. Romulus was suckled by a wolf as her own cub, and Romulus was Rome. And look at it: All torn about the neck and shivering with fear. A wretched sight. Rome will be wretched one day.” Then looking at Claudius holding the wolf cub in his lap, he pauses. “But he will protect it. He and no other,” said Domitius solemnly.

“Claudius as protector of Rome! I hope I shall be dead by then,” Livilla mockingly laughed out loud.

“Go to your room! You shall have nothing to eat all day!” snapped her mother Antonia angrily. “Children, come in. Come inside.”

“May I k-k-keep the cub, please, mother?” pleaded the stuttering, head-twitching Claudius to his mother Antonia. “Please, may I ?”
¹

1
    From the 1976 BBC Masterpiece Theatre production of
I, Claudius
.(Based on:
I, Claudius: from the autobiography of Tiberius Claudius born 10 B.C. murdered and deified A.D. 54
. and
Claudius The God
, both authored by Robert Graves. New York: Vintage International Edition, 1989, originally published by Random House, 1935.

6

“Prima Female Assoluta”

We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It’s just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there.

Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.

—Ben Okri

There is no such thing as chance; and what seems to us merest accident springs from the deepest source of destiny.

—Friedrich von Schiller

T
HAT
M
ARY
M
EYER’S
murder would become “officially” regarded as an erratic, random act of savagery, simply another unsolvable crime, ignored the flourishing multidimensional panorama of her life and the particular network of relationships it had engendered. Far from indiscriminate, her murder was deliberate; and, as the reader will eventually come to understand, precisely motivated. For Mary Pinchot Meyer was in no way ordinary—nor easily intimidated—particularly during the years just prior to her murder in the fall of 1964. That left an unsettling question: Who was she, and how was she unique? What accounted for her perseverance, her courage? And, for that matter, what made her dangerous, and to whom?

In order to arrive at some understanding of why, and how, Mary Meyer’s murder was orchestrated, certain details of her extraordinary life warrant
deeper exploration. For her life’s mosaic—the events, the people, the choices she made amid life’s vicissitudes and circumstances—only begins to reveal the complexity and uniqueness of a woman who ultimately came to thrive within the Cold War’s hidden history, a defining moment of which was President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, followed by Mary Meyer’s less than a year later. This remarkable odyssey not only reveals a glimpse of a strikingly rare and exceptional woman, but raises another perplexing question: Why was her demise considered necessary at the time, and by whom?