The Alice Crimmins Case

by Ken Gross

  In their turn, the detectives visited the lonely bars and spoke to the people there, enlisting them as allies in the siege of Alice Crimmins. He was the manager of a steak bar and Alice had once been his favorite cocktail waitress. The steak bar had had a different name then, but that wasn’t unusual. Sometimes a bar switched names for tax reasons. Sometimes to elude creditors. Sometimes merely to revive excitement, like changing a dress. The Four Spoons would open again in a month as the Five Aces. If you looked closely, you could spot the same stains on the carpet; there were the same aging bartender, the same world-weary manager, the same tired singer at the piano bar tapping out ballads in ragged reminiscence of fashions that had already been beaten to death. Even the suntans seemed pasty; expressions on the bar veterans bore witness to all the sins Long Island could offer—from the rings of housewife prostitutes to child pornographers. The manager, in his velvet dinner jacket, wore the mechanical smile of a man for whom human appetites held no surprises. “I always liked Rusty,” he would say. “She glowed, know what I mean?” It was no small compliment in the burnt-out candescence of this world. “She could sit down with a bunch of executives and liven them up. She was champagne. When I heard about this, I never believed she had anything to do with it. I mean, I could never really picture her as a mother, but all of these broads have kids home. They’re all supporting a couple of kids. Her, though . . .” A few days after they buried Alice’s last child, she was back at the steak bar, seemingly without any sign of grief or mourning. “I changed my mind about Rusty after that,” he said with the shiver of someone who realizes that the people who come through his doors into daytime darkness are all strangers. “What kind of mother is that?”

  Charlie Prestia was on duty at the listening post. He had gone through his second cup of coffee. The microphones across the road picked up the voice of Joe Rorech. It had been Phil Brady’s idea to reunite Alice and Joe. He knew that they cared about each other, and in an almost paternal way he hoped that the solution of the case might even lead to some happy reconciliation. It was a vague and not entirely reasonable hope. But Brady was a man of infinite hope. So one day he gave Alice’s new telephone number to Joe Rorech. Brady wasn’t on duty when Rorech called and Alice told him to come over. In the listening post Detectives Prestia and Harry Shields waited breathlessly. The microphones were picking up voices—the familiar sounds of the early stages of seduction. Shields called Eddie Crimmins at the airport. Joe and Alice are at the apartment making love, Eddie was told.

  At the listening post Prestia heard the telephone ring. It was Eddie.

  “Are you alone?” he asked.

  That idiot! thought Prestia. Now he’ll give Joe a chance to get away. Why didn’t he just get in his car and rush home?

  “Of course,” said Alice. “Who’d you think was here?”

  Alice was lying. This was not new to the police. If she could lie to Eddie about a tryst, she could lie to them about the children. At least, that was how their reasoning went.

  Eddie was still not certain. He received another call from the detectives telling him that Alice was lying, that she was shacked up right this minute, and that he’d better get home.

  The voice-activated microphones in the apartment now picked up the conversation between Alice and Joe. “That was Eddie,” said Alice. “I told him no one was here, but I don’t think he believed me.”

  “You want me to go?”

  “I think you better,” said Alice.

  The police in the listening post heard the hurried sounds of dressing, kissing, sighs of regret.

  “We better do something,” said Shields, seeing his chance at confrontation slipping away.

  “What?” said Prestia.

  Prestia and Shields left the listening post. And then Shields got an idea. When Rorech came out of the apartment, he found three flat tires on his car.

  “Oh, Christ!”

  Alice had come out to watch the departure with her dog, Brandy. Rorech couldn’t find a jack. He ran to Alice’s car to see if hers would fit. Brandy, meanwhile, began sniffing around the bush where Prestia and Shields were hiding. It was a frantic half-hour. Finally Rorech called his friend Detective Phil Brady, who lived nearby. Brady, guessing what had happened, showed up with a jack and a tow truck from an all-night garage.

  Rorech’s suit was torn, his manicured hands had been scratched to the quick, and Alice had to bite her cheek to keep from laughing. Brady and Rorech towed the car out of the neighborhood before Eddie got home. The two detectives hiding in the bushes learned gratefully, after watching Brandy circle and circle before picking a spot right in front of them, that she was female and would squat instead of squirting.

  Joe Rorech and Phil Brady drank together in a bar, unwinding from the near miss. More and more, Brady was becoming disillusioned by the way his colleagues were handling the Crimmins case.

  30

  The meeting was set for the squad room of the 107th Precinct at six o’clock and the police brass began arriving fashionably late. A few minutes after 6:00 p.m. on November 9, 1965, the black limousines screeched in front of the Fresh Meadows Precinct, the drivers jockeying for positions close to the door, to fit the rank of their bosses. Tom McGuire’s driver edged forward and back, keeping away the car of Joe Coyle, the borough commander. McGuire, known as Friar Tuck for his priestly manner and ample figure, bounded inside like a track star. His face was flushed with excitement. Inside, the detectives closest to the case were nervously mashing out cigarettes, wondering if this would be the break in the case. Only Jerry Piering circled cautiously, unable to accept any solution that didn’t include Alice Crimmins. He took Phil Brady aside. “Look at this,” he said, showing Brady the report of an interview between Alice Crimmins and Anthony Grace that had been taped. During the conversation Alice Crimmins had said she had come to believe that the children were “better off now.”

  He shoved it under Brady’s nose as if that would settle all of the detective’s doubts. Brady read the report and looked at Piering with his eyebrows raised, as if to say “So what?”

  “If she were my wife, I’d kill her,” said Piering.

  Brady shrugged and waited for the commanders to assemble and begin the meeting. It was a refrain that he had heard often from the major detectives in the case—“If she were my wife, I’d kill her.” Brady shoved aside Piering’s interruption. He had something more important to think about. The Journal-American had been contacted by a man who claimed he’d been hired to kill the Crimmins children. There had been more than a score of “confessions” so far—not unusual in a much publicized case. But there were details in this man’s statement that couldn’t be ignored. In addition, he was in the hands of a newspaper that couldn’t be relied upon to sit on the story for very long. For the sake of prestige, it was imperative that the police have better information than the newspaper.

  By 6:30 p.m. the police officials had gathered around the scarred wooden table. Coyle sat quietly, his cigar dangling expectantly, waiting for the subordinates to commit themselves about the suspect. The discussion started and then the lights began to flicker.

  The desk lieutenant came rushing in. “It looks like a power failure,” he said.

  Coyle and McGuire shrugged.

  “It’s the whole city,” added the lieutenant.

  The meeting broke up as everyone scattered to take up traffic-control duty during the East Coast’s major power blackout.

  A few days later the suspect sat under the lights in the lieutenant’s office at the 107th Precinct, repeating his “confession” for Piering and Brady and Jerry Byrnes.

  “Tell us again how you got in,” said Piering.

  The suspect, a small, nervous man with wire-rimmed glasses, was a maintenance man in Manhattan. He said he had been approached by two strangers and for the unlikely sum of $500 had driven to Queens, slipped into the children’s room, taken them out through the front door, and killed them both. Two men had
helped him, he said, but he didn’t know their names.

  “OK,” said Brady, who knew that the layout of the Crimmins apartment had been very carefully published—all except the details of the children’s room, “now where was the double bed?”

  The man skipped a beat in his story. By the far wall, he replied.

  And what kind of lock was on the children’s door?

  “It was a barrel-bolt lock,” said the man.

  The detectives turned away in disgust. There had been no double bed in the room. The lock was a hook-and-eye, not a barrel-bolt They had been taken in for a moment by another crank. Newspapers were not the best detectives.

  “Get him out of here,” said Piering.

  “What’s wrong?” asked the man, bewildered, seeing his spotlight and moment of glory fading.

  “Get that creep out of here.”

  Phil Brady was married to a perky little redhead named Ann, and he’d never been entirely convinced that Alice Crimmins had killed her children. It was not a popular position to take among his colleagues, and, for the most part, he kept his opinions to himself. He did his job—placed telephone taps where he was supposed to. The District Attorney, Nat Hentel, instructed him to put a bug on the telephones of the Assistant District Attorneys in the case, Edward Devlin and Nicholas Ferraro. The taps on the official telephones were for the sake of the record. It was the tap on Devlin’s telephone that produced Brady’s basic skepticism about the conduct of the case and about the guilt of Alice. In the fall of 1965 the cluttered fragments of the case were beginning to assemble themselves. The stories had been recorded. The alibis checked.

  “What it boils down to,” said Devlin decisively, “is the time factor. Alice says that she checked the kids at midnight. If the autopsy shows that they were dead at midnight, then . . .”

  He let it hang there. The meeting turned to young Dr. Michael Baden, who was representing the Medical Examiner’s office.

  Dr. Baden felt the pressure. “I don’t know if we can do that,” he replied, squirming under the third degree. “I’m not sure we can pin it down like that.”

  “Well,” said Devlin, “without some kind of evidence, we don’t have a case.”

  There was another moment of silence and Baden felt the expectation fall on him.

  “Let’s get Dr. Helpern on the phone,” said Devlin, nodding to Brady, who slipped out of the room and went to his listening post, a converted janitor’s closet at the end of the second-floor hallway of the District Attorney’s office. Brady picked up a headset and monitored the conversation between Dr. Milton Helpern and Dr. Baden. Helpern was arguing that it was impossible, absolutely impossible, to pinpoint the time of death with precision.

  I know, I know, said Baden, passing the telephone to Devlin. Helpern repeated the medical truth—that the time of Missy’s death couldn’t be pinpointed before midnight. The closest they could come with scientific certainty was to estimate that Missy died sometime between 10:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m.

  Disappointed, Devlin hung up. It was early in the case and if they couldn’t nail Alice on the time factor, there would be other wedges. Brady would later transcribe this conversation from the tapes and turn them over to the District Attorney’s office. Later he would be amazed and conscience-stricken when Dr. Helpern testified in court that the medical evidence indicated Missy died before midnight. Of course, Dr. Helpern had been subjected to relentless pressure from police and the District Attorney’s office.

  After Brady retired from the Police Department, he tried to contact Alice’s defense attorney to reveal his knowledge of the tapes. Three times he phoned Herbert Lyon, her second attorney, but the calls were never returned. For a time Brady kept a copy of the Helpern tape in his Flushing home. Later it would be reclaimed by the District Attorney’s office, but he still kept a transcript of it. The tape itself was filed with the other stacks of details of the case. But that call echoes in Philip Brady’s memory, even a decade later.

  31

  If Phil Brady thought his colleagues were showing a lack of professionalism, he was not immune from his own emotions. He did not like Eddie Crimmins.

  On December 22,1965, Brady stared out of the window of the hospital across the street from the Crimmins apartment and blinked in disbelief. There was Santa Claus on Alice’s window. Red, green, and blue Christmas lights were strung gaily around the room. And he saw Eddie, as if nothing at all had happened in the past year, putting up a Christmas tree. The Christmas lights seemed obscene and inappropriate, but confirmed his feeling that Eddie was the more mystifying of the pair. It was then that Brady started keeping a private dossier on Eddie Crimmins. Every time he raised a suspicion about Eddie to one of his colleagues, it was brushed away as if he were a finicky accountant calling attention to some minor unpaid bill. Stick to the technical side, he was told. Keep up with the paperwork and tape transcriptions and cultivate your friendship with Joe Rorech.

  And so Brady kept his private diary. The detectives in command had focused on Alice that first night and virtually dismissed everyone else. The newspapers repeated the official innuendo that both parents were under suspicion, and, indeed, in December 1966 the New York Post, the New York Times, and the Daily News would list Alice and Eddie as uncooperative witnesses. But Brady’s suspicions had landed on Eddie. He was bewildered by the others’ lack of interest. In his routine canvass of the neighborhood shortly after the killings, Brady had found a woman who said she had seen a man standing near the children’s window at 1:10 a.m. The man, tall and dark-haired, wore tan slacks and a dark shirt—clothing such as Eddie had been wearing that night. Her name was Maria Gomez and she’d been coming out of a friend’s home a hundred yards away from the Crimmins house. Her companion, a married man who did not want to get involved in the case, said he had noticed nothing—a figure, perhaps, but he would never be able to identify the person. The woman was more willing.

  John Kelly and Brady found Eddie Crimmins in a diner on Union Turnpike. Would he be willing to come with them and stand under the window? Kelly asked. A woman said she had seen a man standing there that night.

  “I don’t have to go,” said Crimmins.

  “It would help us,” argued Brady, “if you would just put on your tan slacks and shirt and just stand there.”

  “I’m not gonna go,” said Eddie, continuing his meal. “If you bother me, I’m gonna call my lawyer.”

  “Either you come with us,” said Kelly firmly, “or else we take you.”

  Eddie went reluctantly. He didn’t change his clothes. He stood under the window, but the woman couldn’t be sure. He looked like the man, she said. But she couldn’t be positive.

  Brady thought, anyway, that Maria Gomez would make a terrible witness. She lived on welfare and the generosity of the men she took to her bed. He could imagine what a hostile attorney could make of her credibility.

  But the things about Eddie that bothered Brady mounted. There was, for example, Eddie’s alibi. Eddie claimed he had been in a bar at 12:30 a.m. watching a particular television program. When Brady checked with the station, he learned that the program had been interrupted by a bulletin about Adlai Stevenson’s death. Eddie Crimmins knew nothing about the bulletin. Also, Eddie had been in the Nite Cap Lounge drinking gin-and-tonics later that night. Eddie had never before or since drunk gin-and-tonics. He invariably took beer. It was as if he’d been trying to make an impression on the bartender for an alibi.

  One of the more puzzling aspects of Eddie’s story was that he had told many people he had exposed himself to children in Kissena Park. He told the story to Alice, to a friend, Margie Fischer, and to Inspector McGuire. Eddie’s later explanation—that he’d been trying to show Alice that he was as bad as she was—didn’t sit well with Brady. Why would a man invent such a story? Why would he drill holes from the basement to Alice’s bedroom in order to hear her bed squeak when she was with other men?

  “Look,” said Piering, “he’s a sch
nook!” As if that would explain it all away. Brady wasn’t satisfied and found a sympathetic superior officer, Wolfgang Zanglein. He prepared a five-page single-spaced document outlining certain facts about Eddie.

  Eddie had not been to see his children for two weeks until the day before they disappeared.

  Eddie had a key and access to the apartment.

  Eddie had a more important motive than Alice, since she had custody and was not likely to lose it.

  On the day before Eddie was to take his lie-detector test, he went to the public library and read everything he could about the subject.

  There were more subtle things that Brady told Zanglein in one of several all-night conferences. Eddie had seemed almost pathologically curious about the injuries on his children’s bodies. He didn’t seem to show the normal revulsion that Alice felt. While Alice cried, Eddie had wanted to know every detail about the bruises and whether a cause of death could be ascertained.

  His fascination with the case seemed to Brady less like an aggrieved father than like a man keeping track of police knowledge. And when he said that Alice was innocent, it sounded like an obligation—as if really he wanted the police to keep after her.

  Finally, there was the business of the telephone calls. For some time Alice had been getting strange calls. Sometimes the caller would just hang on, saying nothing. Sometimes there was a brief, although almost incoherent conversation. A few days after the children died, Alice phoned Eddie and said they should bring in the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  “No,” said Eddie laconically. “The police are handling it.”

  “But don’t you think the FBI could do a better job?” said Alice.

  “The police are handling it,” said Eddie.

  Brady listened to the tape of this conversation. He played it again. The voice seemed familiar. He wondered if it could be the same voice that Alice was receiving at home. He contacted Lawrence Kersta of Voice Prints Labs, Inc., in Somerville, New Jersey. Kersta, who had invented the process of tracing people through the use of voice prints, said Brady’s information was too sketchy to be traced.