by Ken Gross
It was not sabotage. Piering simply did not ask for help. Perhaps because of his pride and youth, he insisted on running things himself. And so there was the spectacle of a hundred New York City detectives running in and out of the 107th Precinct on the instructions of a third-grade detective, Gerard Piering, who was not quite certain what was important in a homicide investigation.
There was also a failure of command. The supervisory police officials at first assumed that matters were under control. Piering kept assuring them that a clear-cut case was being developed and they took his word for it. All that was needed was the collapse and confession of one or both parents.
The Crimminses were given Monday, July 19, to grieve. But on Tuesday they were back at the 107th being hammered with the same questions.
“This time,” recalled Eddie Crimmins, “there were no holds barred. They said that I did it and they wanted to know the details. When I said that I didn’t do it, they threatened to take me down to the morgue and force me to look at the remains of my son.”
The sessions at the 107th Precinct became longer and more acrimonious. With a paucity of physical evidence, a confession seemed the only hope for breaking the mystery. To prove murder, the police would have to connect a suspect directly to the deed. They would need a witness, or else persuasive circumstantial evidence. But the main shot seemed a confession. Everyone was working himself into exhaustion.
Tuesday slipped into Wednesday—ironically, the day of the scheduled court case dealing with the custody of the two children. Early Wednesday morning Deputy Inspector Michael J. Clifford started to leave the Fresh Meadows Precinct after the grueling interrogations. Clifford was the father of Patrolman Mike Clifford, the first uniformed officer to answer Mrs. Crimmins’ alarm. Inspector Clifford was groggy when he paused to chat with a pair of newspapermen camped outside the precinct house. He thought he was talking “off the record.” But almost nothing was off the record to reporters who worked for the New York Journal-American. They had been raised in an almost outlaw form of journalism—a vestige of another era when seventeen newspapers had competed for attention on the New York City news stands. In 1965 that brand of journalism was almost extinct. Within a year the Journal-American itself would be dead. But the ear of reporter George Carpozi, Jr., reacted to Clifford’s off-the-record remarks.
“It looks like an inside job to me,” said Clifford casually, under the impression that he was delivering a “backgrounder.”
Instead, he delivered the next day’s eight-column front-page headline for the Journal-American. Carpozi, who had been in the newspaper’s doghouse before the case, was suddenly a star reporter again. (Carpozi was a former editor who had been demoted to reporter after an argument with another editor. This story was to be his rehabilitation.)
But the headline had a more sinister effect. It branded the parents as killers and created the momentum for what was to follow. There were secondary repercussions. Clifford was transferred out of Queens and given a lesser assignment in Brooklyn. There were other transfers and demotions.
High police officials had noticed that the Crimmins case was being handled very sloppily.
They buried little Eddie beside his sister that Wednesday morning. Father Joseph McGrath read the interment service. No relatives were present. Eddie and Alice were busy at the 107th Precinct. Father McGrath had been a lifelong friend of Eddie’s and understood why no one attended the funeral. Both graves were, and remain, unmarked.
23
On July 28, Detective John Kelly officially entered the Crimmins case. He was taken off his regular assignment in Brooklyn North Homicide and ordered to invest some professionalism in the anarchy of the Crimmins investigation. Kelly was a crackerjack professional. He had never had an unsolved homicide, and in Brooklyn North, covering Bedford-Stuyvesant, more than one was often concluded each day.
Chief of Detectives Frederick Lussen, in charge of all of New York City’s detectives, was furious at the image of ineptness. He took the top homicide cops from the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan and concentrated them at the Fresh Meadows Precinct.
For the first few days Kelly read the field reports and talked to the detectives who had worked on the case. In two weeks the trails had gone cold and attitudes had hardened. Kelly decided to stay away from Eddie and Alice for the time being. He thought he would be able to work his rough charm on them in time. It was more than a hunch. Kelly was astonished when he read one of the DD5’s. It was the report of Eddie Crimmins’ activities on July 13. On that day, Eddie told police, he had driven out to Bethpage Golf Course and played eighteen holes of golf, then sat in the clubhouse with a beer and watched the All-Star Game.
On July 13, John Kelly had gone to Bethpage and shot a fast eighteen holes, then he drank a beer in the clubhouse and watched the baseball game. Of course, the clubhouse was crowded and he didn’t remember seeing Eddie, but the coincidence seemed almost mystical. “I’ll be able to talk to him,” he told himself.
Kelly was a believer in the methodical school of detection. You cover yourself carefully. If it takes time, that’s the price you pay. Solving cases involves hard work, shoe leather, and the painstaking job of going over the same things again and again until they make sense.
It was easy to misjudge John Kelly. He was big and heavy, but it was a mistake to conclude that his mind worked ponderously. Kelly had never completed high school, but he had an analytic mind. He had the gift of patching together bits and pieces of seemingly random information until he had a coherent story.
John Kelly was born on March 13, 1920, the son of a Bronx steel-worker. He attended parochial school, but he was more comfortable on the street. After three years he left high school and became a moving man for the Seven Santini Brothers. Then he went to work for the New Haven Railroad. At the outbreak of World War II, Kelly joined the Marines. As a member of the Fourth Division, he took part in the invasion of Iwo Jima. He emerged in 1946 a corporal. In 1950 he joined the Police Department. He remembers that there were dock strikes going on at the time. He spent four years in uniform, patrolling the Bronx. During the war he had married a Polish girl—Hedwig. Kelly had his share of arrests. Once a pair of gunmen who had held up a gin mill were trying to escape. They had fired a few shots into the ceiling, so Kelly was not taking any chances. The stickup men, however, stumbled into a dead end at a pier leading to the Harlem River. It was either the river or a shootout, and the bandits gave up.
On March 1,1954, Kelly joined the detective division. He was assigned to Brooklyn. He had a natural aptitude.
In 1962 Brooklyn had a strangler who had killed five women. The man would crawl into a woman’s window at night and kill her. He would then jump up and down on the dead body. The man made one mistake. One woman, a nurse, talked him out of killing her.
“We staked out the place—I guess he thought that he had a girlfriend,” said Kelly.
There were three detectives on the stakeout. A few nights later the man crawled through the woman’s window. “Hold it!” shouted Kelly. The man darted out of the bedroom door and slammed it behind him. All three detectives started blazing away through the closed door. They found the suspected strangler with eleven bullets in him.
“I put three in him,” said Kelly.
There was no doubt afterward that they had killed the strangler. The man’s prints matched those found at the scenes of the five homicides. The strangling case gave a particularly cynical cast to John Kelly’s view of the world. There were good guys and bad guys, and policemen were justified in firing eleven bullets into the bad guys.
When Kelly arrived at the 107th Precinct, he was appalled by the undisciplined mess. Scores of detectives crowded into the squad room. Telephones were ringing. Whoever answered the telephone would check out that lead. “Go up to Main Street and talk to everyone,” one of the deputy inspectors told one of the arriving teams.
That wasn’t the way Kelly worked. He read the reports. He
studied the charts. He examined the physical evidence. He drove around the neighborhood. He talked to residents. He became a familiar sight, sitting for hours on the mall with pigeonlike determination. He got to know families. Habits. He played cards with the people of Kew Gardens Hills. He believed in patience and systematic detection. He talked to storekeepers. He talked to witnesses. They had been talked to before, but Kelly had a knack for drawing out more. Alice told police that she had bought gas at about 8:30 or 8:45 p.m. on July 13. Kelly went to the Gulf station and found two attendants who swore that she had bought gas at 5:30.
In itself, the discrepancy might seem inconsequential. But Kelly punched more and more holes in her story. He was not surprised. People get confused during crisis and memories become jumbled. What would surprise him was that Alice would not concede any error. The men at the gas station were lying, she would say.
Why would they lie?
They’re lying, she insisted.
Such brittle certainty only made the police suspicious. Why insist on trivial points, they would conclude, unless deep fear was involved? The normal reaction would be to shrug and say what difference does it make if I got the gas at 5:30 or 9:00 p.m.? But Alice clung to her version like a drowning woman.
Police officials, meanwhile, were trying to patch up Inspector Clifford’s public-relations blunder. “Everyone is a suspect,” said Captain John Thompson, who refused to be pinned down about the status of the Crimmins parents.
Four days before the murders of Missy and Eddie, just four blocks away from the Crimmins apartment, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Levins were asleep in their apartment at 147-27 71st Avenue. At six o’clock in the morning someone crawled through the casement window and took Mr. Levins’ wallet.
In another room four-year-old Robert Levins, Jr., was awakened by the intruder. The man asked the little boy to come with him. The boy said he couldn’t because he didn’t have his mother’s permission. Later he was able to give police a description of the pants burglar. The man was between twenty-five and thirty years of age. He was about five feet ten and weighed about 160 pounds. He had light brown hair and wore dark-rimmed glasses and work clothes.
Next door Mrs. Rose Davis said the same man entered her ground-floor apartment through the casement window and stole a wrist watch and a television set.
After the Crimmins murders a delegation of fifty mothers and twenty-five children went to the Fresh Meadows Precinct and spoke to the commander, Captain James Shannon. They wanted more protection for the children. He promised to put extra foot patrols in the area. Detective Captain John Thompson, however, dismissed the incidents, claiming they were unrelated to the Crimmins case.
The switchboards could barely keep up with the reports of prowlers and Peeping Toms.
At 150-16 72nd Road, almost across the mall from the Crimmins’ apartment, two teenage girls reported that someone had tried to break into their apartment. Detectives said the incidents were probably unrelated.
On Friday an armed burglar was reported. The sound of police sirens throughout the night was, at the same time, reassuring and a painful reminder.
24
Eddie Crimmins wanted to talk to a priest. All his life he had been an ardent Catholic. He attended Mass and took Communion regularly. He had wanted his children to have a parochial education. He still cherished the values of Catholicism. He needed to talk to a priest, but he also needed a friend. Father Joseph McGrath had known the Crimminses all his life. His brother had been best man at Eddie’s wedding. Father McGrath was something more, though. He was also a psychologist.
Eddie wanted to talk, but he felt inhibited by the ubiquitous detectives. Could we find someplace where we could be alone?
It was like something out of a movie. Eddie and Father McGrath conspired in hushed voices. One started one way, the other in an opposite direction. They ducked into side streets and backtracked until they had lost the tails. They talked in the gymnasium of Cardinal Hayes High School.
“Why didn’t you come to me sooner?” said Father McGrath. “Maybe I could have helped.”
Eddie poured out the painful details of his marital breakup. He told the priest about catching Alice in bed with Carl Andrade. About listening to the impassioned trysts from his basement listening post. About her wanton disappearance on a yacht. Her unrealistic ambition.
None of it mattered, Eddie told the priest. He still loved her.
“Will she go to a psychiatrist?” asked Father McGrath.
Eddie shook his head miserably. “She doesn’t think anything’s wrong with her. She doesn’t see anything wrong with her life.”
They would work on her together. A few days after the funeral for little Eddie, Father McGrath was invited for dinner at Alice’s mother’s house where Alice was living. Alice Crimmins had gone to extraordinary lengths, even for her. She enjoyed cooking, and now she fussed over every specialty. The wine had to be right. The dinnerware.
Joseph McGrath was suitably impressed. Every hair in place, and yet she produced a feast. He understood that it was a kind of therapy in the face of her tragedy. After dinner they sat around talking. Gently, Father McGrath led the conversation in the direction of psychiatry.
Why not? he asked. He put it as a challenge. Alice always had trouble resisting a dare. He remembered her as a girl. Her brother, John, a year older than she, had run on his high-school track team. Every morning at Van Cortlandt Park, Alice, her flaming hair trailing like a comet, had paced John around the track, convinced she was a better runner. At least, she would never admit defeat. So Father McGrath appealed now to her pride. Why not try psychiatry?
She agreed, reluctantly. It would be a fiasco. The psychiatrist would probe things that Alice Crimmins considered private. Even a psychiatrist was not allowed near parts of Alice Crimmins that she hid under layers of self-protection. She quit after a few sessions.
Father McGrath experienced his share of police interrogation. When detectives learned that Eddie and, perhaps, Alice had confided in him, they questioned the priest.
The thing that impressed McGrath was the emotional turmoil of the police. “You know what this case was about?” he would ask later. “This was a case in which men were more fathers than police. They had dozens of kids between them. They got all caught up in something. Something very emotional.”
Gradually, it became clear that there was not going to be a quick breakthrough. And so the detectives settled down to assembling the mass of information. Backtracking.
In his second interview Anthony Grace admitted that he had lied to the police. At first he told them that he’d never left the Bronx on the night of July 13/14. Later he would revise his story. At about midnight, with a group of women—“bowling girls”—he drove over the Whitestone Bridge to a restaurant called “Ripple’s on the Water,” where they had a snack. They returned to the Capri by 1:30 a.m.
Ripple’s was a few miles from Alice’s apartment. Piering wondered why he had lied. Grace shrugged. He was a married man. His wife was in and out of mental hospitals. Soon after the Crimmins children were killed, she entered a mental hospital, where she later died. Tony Grace explained that he’d been trying to spare her—he didn’t want her to know he was involved in a sensational murder case.
Detective Phil Brady had been brought into the case because of his ability to take shorthand. Later he had developed a valuable rapport with Joe Rorech. Brady was one of the few people that Rorech trusted.
There was one crucial piece of information in Rorech’s story. He told Brady he had called Alice twice that night. The first time was after 10:00 p.m., when he had tried to entice her to come to the Bourbon House. He said he had called her again at 2:00 a.m., but there had been no answer.
Where was Alice during the two-o’clock phone call? wondered Piering.
Of course, Rorech admitted he had been drinking all night—possibly as many as twenty drinks—and he could have misdialed the number. A man who has consumed twe
nty drinks is not the best witness.
Piering believed that he had enough to confront Alice Crimmins. He talked at length with Eddie about his growing suspicions. “We think she did it,” said Piering.
Eddie couldn’t believe it. He and Alice had been reconciled, and, he told Piering, he would never live with a woman who had killed his children.
“But her answers don’t add up,” said Piering.
“Talk to her about it,” suggested Eddie. “She wants to clear this up as much as you do.”
Eddie suggested that the meeting take place on neutral territory. He knew his wife well enough to believe that she would clench up and freeze if they brought her into a police station again. Piering agreed to meet on her turf. There was a bar in the Bronx where they could hash over all the statements and inconsistencies and clarify their positions. The bar was called the Tender Trap.
Alice Crimmins wore her makeup like a bulletproof vest on August 2. She fortified herself with Scotch. Piering carried a small brown paper bag. The cordiality was forced—Alice knew the detective’s opinion of her. She regarded him as narrow and constipated. Still, the drinks dulled the edges.
We have just received the complete Medical Examiner’s report, said Piering. According to the report, Missy couldn’t have died more than two hours after being fed. (This was not precisely true—it would be months before Dr. Milton Helpern would agree to a two-hour span.)
“Maybe you were mistaken about the time you fed the children, Alice.”
She did not reply. Her smile grew tighter.
Piering left openings. Would you like to change the story? He offered a possible scenario: Alice was a swinger; she’d stepped out for a quick tryst with one of her lovers. She might have even left the door open. When she came back, the children were gone. He threw out another lure—it was true that Eddie had had a key, wasn’t it?