by Ken Gross
At the 107th Precinct, detective teams were being assembled to begin a deep investigation on the background of Eddie and Alice Crimmins. From parents, teachers, and friends they would reconstruct the two lives.
In the case of Eddie, it seemed more or less straightforward. At Kennedy Airport the detectives talked with airline employees. It was hard to believe that the big, clumsy man could work with surgical precision on complicated jet engines. Yet Eddie was known as a competent dependable mechanic. He was a “regular guy,” someone with whom you could sit around the locker room and shoot the breeze about baseball.
“Not very bright, though,” said one of his supervisors.
Jerry Piering and George Martin learned one disturbing thing. Eddie had gone to Alice and told her he had exposed himself to little girls in the park.
“I told Alice about the park incident,” he would say in an affidavit.
I don’t know why it occurred but I told Alice about it because I was despondent. I was trying to make up excuses why it happened and I was blaming her maybe because of the marriage difficulties we were having. I never received any medical help for this condition.
The police questioned me about this incident—I don’t know for sure who told them about it. It may have been Alice, they never told me. But I denied it. But the police continuously used this as a threat to me and threatened to expose me in Court and embarrass me publicly in connection with the incident.
One of the reasons I told this to Alice about the incident [was] because she started to blame herself about the breakup of the marriage and I wanted to show her perhaps that I was partly at fault and this may have been one of the reasons. The police had continually wanted me to say that I committed the crime on my daughter or that Alice did and threatened to use this incident to expose me. They asked me if a similar incident happened with my kids and I said absolutely no. In fact, it never did.
Alice never believed me when I told her about the incident. She thought I was saying it to get back at her. . . .
In their investigation, the police found that Eddie had sneaked into the apartment more than a score of times when Alice was out, just to be around her things. He also listened with his crude bugs in the basement when she was with other men.
As the police went back over Eddie’s background, a single theme emerged—Alice Crimmins. There were no other girlfriends. Even when she was bringing men home, he was faithful to her. Even when she flaunted her affairs, he was ready to forgive and forget. With his children gone, his first concern was still Alice. This devotion was dismissed as pathetic by the detectives. They could not understand this physically powerful man who was rendered helpless and cringing by his faithless wife.
Among the detectives Eddie came to be known as “the Poor Soul.” This took on added poignancy later when it was learned that Alice Crimmins, in her inflated social orbit, had known Jackie Gleason.
“Alice and Wonderland,” said Jerry Piering. “You start looking at people’s lives and the filth that you come up with can make you sick. Sometimes I tell my wife, Helen, that we should get a couple of acres somewhere, get in the middle and put up a fence and a sign—anyone crossing over gets shot.”
16
There were extra dimensions to the investigation of a woman who in a few years had ricocheted from the life of a discontented housewife into an unrestrained swinger. The black address book was like a scorecard from a winning season. The men in the book ranged from neighborhood tradesmen to important city officials. There were women in the book, many of them married, who were available for parties—or sympathy. They formed the chorus of Alice Crimmins’ ambition. To the police they came to be known as “the bowling girls.” They got the name because they told their husbands they were going bowling at night when in fact they were involved in multiple lives.
“Do you know how many marriages could blow up from this?”
The detectives were slumped around a large desk in the squad room of the 107th Precinct. Inspector McGuire was late and the waiting men were inhaling the steam from the coffee containers like firemen using respirators after swallowing smoke. Dozens of detectives had been conscripted from squads all over the city. In the first few days they would be deployed around the city to assemble stray bits and pieces of evidence in the Crimmins case.
Some would slip into the underworld, making contact with reliable informants to see if this subculture knew anything about the killing; they would check into the prison shelters where street gossip about crime often travels faster than radio news bulletins. In an important case, all contacts and sources would be tapped, all favors would be called in.
DD5—Confidential Police Report—Drug dealer named Chico from 116th Street was asked to ask around about the Crimmins case and see if any of his people knew anything.
Inspector McGuire sat on the edge of the desk in the squad room to talk to the men. “Now, you have to be careful,” he said to the men about to go into the field to interview people. “You don’t have to let husbands and wives know if someone’s been screwing around. I mean, use your head.”
Marriages were only one volatile ingredient in the Crimmins address book. Reputations and careers were also at stake. The people would have to be handled with tact and skill. Mishandled, the book could be a live grenade.
“So, you talk to people, you use your heads.”
Jerry Piering shook hands with Jerry Byrnes, a crack detective in Queens Homicide. He would become one of the insiders, the detective who would stay with the case after most of the others had gone home. It was an easy partnership.
Like a lot of other cops, Byrnes came out of World War II and into the Police Department. He had grown up in Forest Hills, graduated from Richmond Hill High School, and had one child. At five ten and 270 pounds, he was a barrel of a man. He had a pleasant, round face and dressed in the uniform of a New York detective—toneless suit with a flash of color in the necktie.
Byrnes was about to plunge into a strange and unfamiliar world—a world that shriveled in daylight; a world of first names and bad imitation rock music; a world of quick, guilty sex in strange beds and silicone love. It was part of the world of Alice Crimmins.
“It was amazing. Here I was trying to question this woman about a homicide case, right? So I arrange to meet her in this bar. She has to get a baby-sitter; the whole bit. I meet her there and she’s dressed to kill. Everybody’s saying hello to her at the bar—she’s no stranger. OK. So she can’t start without a couple of drinks. I’m still trying to work and she’s having this party! She starts getting personal with me. With me. She asks me if I’m happily married and all that crap. About Alice Crimmins, I tell her. Oh yeah, she says. Sure, I know Alice. Everybody knew Alice. Great kid. A lot of fun. ‘Listen,’ she says, ‘do you know that my ex-husband is nine weeks behind in his payments? I mean, if you were divorced, would you leave your wife stranded, nine weeks behind in payments? How about another drink?’ So I let her go through this bullshit. For three hours I’m pumping drinks into her like she’s got a wooden leg. Three fuckin’ hours! And it’s all bullshit. Finally, I say don’t you have to get home to your kids, and she looks at me like I’m crazy. She got up to walk to the ladies’ room. When she passed under a light, I got a good look at her face. It’s really hard to see in some of those bars out in Nassau County. She looked like somebody’s wife, you know what I mean? She looked like she was too old and too tired to be out hustling drinks. I could practically see the stretch marks on her stomach. It almost made me feel sorry for her.”
It was a colloquial term indicating that he was going to stay close to her, but it was not without its irony. Jerry Piering was “married” to Alice Crimmins. On July 15 the police moved her around. First to the 102nd Precinct, then to the 103rd. She remembers walking through tunnels and asking someone to call her mother to tell her that she was all right. Once George Marfeo, Eddie’s attorney in the custody case, came to take her home from the 103rd Precin
ct. But she was soon back on the same treadmill—going through the same corridors, answering the same questions. She lost track of the precincts. But always she was aware of Jerry Piering’s frowning presence.
“Well,” said one detective, defending the process, “if you disorient someone, if they get confused about the details of where they are and what time it is, then they won’t be able to think of the cover story. It’s a good way of cracking through the defenses of a phony story and maybe to find out the truth.”
Alice Crimmins was exhausted. But she wasn’t allowed to lie down and rest. No one ever touched her physically, but she did suffer on that second day. She was kept moving and confused.
“Did anyone call my mother?” she asked Inspector McGuire.
“Don’t worry about it,” she was told.
No one called her mother.
“Did you tell Eddie that you were never going to let him have the children?” persisted Piering.
“So?”
“Did you?”
“I guess so. What’s wrong with that?”
Alice doesn’t remember coming home on the night of the 15th. She was disabled by exhaustion and tranquilizers. She passed out on the couch. When she woke up, she was alone and frightened. The telephone rang.
“Who is it?”
There was no answer.
“Who is it?”
She heard heavy breathing at the other end. She dropped the telephone and ran outside. There was a police emergency van nearby, but it was empty. People on the mall stared at Alice.
She hurried back to the house and slammed the receiver back on the telephone. Soon her mother showed up. And then the homicide detectives assigned to stand guard over Alice Crimmins were back. They had gone for coffee, certain that Alice was safely asleep. Later, when it was impossible for her to shake the shadows, Alice would remember almost wistfully the feeling of being alone.
17
On Friday, Eddie and Alice Crimmins were reunited. They hadn’t seen each other since they had identified their daughter’s body in the lot. Eddie had been kept only a few paces behind on the same dizzying circuit as his wife, but they were carefully separated. Between interrogations Eddie had slept at his mother’s house in the Bronx. On Friday he returned to the apartment in Kew Gardens Hills. The reunion wouldn’t last, but they did find some temporary comfort together. They had been bled dry of tears and so they sat on the couch, parched and sobbing. Eddie held Alice’s unsteady hand and she rested her head on his shoulder.
Friends kept trying to buoy the parents’ hopes for their missing son. But the efforts sounded hollow and desperate, and the parents slumped into a doomed quiet.
“Honey,” he said, “let’s go to church.”
There was no resistance left in Alice Crimmins. She put on a high-necked dress and arranged her hair. The detective on duty said it was all right to go to church. But Alice stopped in the hallway. Somehow her own appearance bothered her. She wanted to show her grief. It wasn’t her fault that people couldn’t read it in her expression. So she draped a black sweater over her shoulders like a cape. It was eighty-one degrees outside.
Eddie and Alice, trailed by an unmarked police car, drove a few blocks to St. Nicholas of Tolentine Church on Parsons Boulevard and went to confession.
The Catholic Church, with its chalices and smoky rituals, had lost its mystery for Alice Crimmins. Neither did it invite confession. The formality merely made her stiff. If she had to expose her soul, she preferred an ear of comparable vulnerability.
Piering, meanwhile, was back at the apartment waiting to resume the questioning. But Alice made one more stop. She had to buy a black dress to wear to Missy’s funeral the next day.
18
The wake for Missy Crimmins was held at Cooke’s Funeral Home at Parkchester in the Bronx. Monsignor Gustav Schultheiss, who had buried Michael Burke from St. Raymond’s Church in May, tried to penetrate the gloom of the parents and relatives. Schultheiss, who was fifty-six years old, had a soothing voice that seemed to have survived a lifetime of suffering.
“You must realize that Missy is now in heaven,” he told Mrs. Burke, who clutched rosary beads in her white fist. She nodded that she understood.
Alice Crimmins stitched herself through the ordeal chain-smoking cigarettes. “My children were very religious,” she told friend after friend. “Every night Missy said her prayers.”
Eddie was in a fog. He had gone home to shave and change. But in some self-protective way he withdrew into confusion. He lost track of time, and events blurred together in his memory.
Saturday was another day begun without sleep. The funeral was held at 10:00 a.m. in the chapel of St. Raymond’s Church, where the ceiling was lower than the arch of the main room. The chapel seemed more intimate and appropriate for Missy. Still, the coffin was heartbreakingly small in the sanctuary where Father Michael Gannon recited the Mass of the Angels. Before the age of seven—the age a child reaches reason, according to the church—a soul passes in perfect innocence straight to heaven. It was a white mass and was designed to invest some factor of joy into the brutal death of Missy Crimmins.
The sun on that Saturday morning was relentless. The temperature soared past ninety degrees. Inside the chapel there were other discomforts. Mingling among the mourners were detectives.
Missy’s coffin remained closed. The attention, for the most part, focused on Alice Crimmins, who looked like a young Susan Hayward in her black dress and dark veil.
St. Raymond’s had been chosen because Eddie and Alice wanted to avoid attention, but the reporters and photographers were almost as hard to shake as the detectives. Eddie and Alice were no longer parishioners at St. Raymond’s, but there were attachments.
St. Raymond’s was the Mother Church of the Bronx. It had been constructed in 1841 when most of the borough was farmland. Over the years the Byzantine and Romanesque architecture had been improved and rebuilt.
The sun played through the stained-glass windows on July 17. Some detectives insist that Alice Crimmins committed an act of uncommon callousness in the light of the stained-glass windows. During the mass, according to police officials, she passed a note to one of her lovers in the rear. Allegedly, the note set up a date to meet and was relayed by Alice’s former roommate Anita Ellis (known to her friends as Tiger).
However, the note has never been produced and Alice denies that the incident took place. Officials, in court and through newspaper contacts, cited the “fact” that Alice could do such a thing during her daughter’s funeral as proof that she lacked concern for the child.
After the mass Alice and Eddie, her mother, brother, and sister-in-law paused for a moment in the cool rectory to recover their strength. There they had coffee and cake and girded themselves for the final ordeal.
Then they piled into the caravan limousines and slowly drove the mile to the burial site. They passed underneath the arch of the entrance to the cemetery of St. Raymond-the-Redeemer in the shadow of the Throgs Neck Bridge. And at a spot near a shrine to St. Anne—the patron saint of mothers—they laid Missy Crimmins to rest in an unmarked grave. There was enough room for another grave right beside it.
19
On Sunday, Cunningham Park was less crowded than usual. On a normal summer weekend even the threatening thunderheads in the sky would not have kept away the Softball players or the picnickers or the strolling lovers. Even the bocci players surrendered the park to Colonel Mortimer Kashinsky, leader of the detail of auxiliary policemen who turned out to search for Eddie Crimmins. They were strung out in a human chain, sweeping through Cunningham Park until, at 3:15 p.m., they were dispersed by a cloudburst. There had been a false alarm. One of the auxiliaries cried out that he had found something. Standing back, the man pointed to a bush where there appeared to be a blond-headed body. Another policeman approached the bush and the “body” turned out to be a discarded doll.
The cloudburst temporarily drove the helicopters f
rom the sky, but the search was soon on again in full force. By now few people expected that the little boy would be found alive. There had been no sign of a ransom demand. With his sister dead, logic said that Eddie must be dead, too.
“What about the pants burglar?” said Jerry Piering.
The Fresh Meadows–Kew Gardens section of Queens had recently been plagued by a burglar with a strange quirk: he would break into a house or apartment and attack one thing—the trousers of the man of the house. The thief was bold. He/she struck when the people were home and asleep. And only the hard cash of the man of the house was taken. It was uncharacteristic of burglars, who normally try to avoid contact with people. This one depended on someone’s being home.
The pants burglar was an outside possibility in the Crimmins case, but one that Piering would have to consider. There had also been a rash of reports of Peeping Toms. Usually voyeurs are harmless. But psychopaths can grow from minor vices, Piering believed.
Piering read the DD5 field reports coming in from the other detectives on the case. A hard-working cop, he wanted to be prepared when he resumed the questioning.
Piering almost hadn’t made it into the department. He was twenty-six years old when he was sworn in, and had kicked around in a number of municipal jobs. Jerry and Helen Piering already had two children when he was scheduled to be sworn into the Police Department in the fall of 1956. Helen was ready to give birth as Jerry was putting on his brand-new uniform to attend the swearing-in ceremony.