by Ken Gross
Between sessions in the courtroom Alice Crimmins would cross Queens Boulevard to the Part I restaurant, which had become a defense fortress. The movement would be accompanied by all the attendant fanfare of backtracking television cameramen, a pause in traffic, and the rushing chorus of bystanders and courtroom spectators, who could never seem to stare at her enough. They would gaze quietly—only outsiders would cry out. They would follow her, the regulars, and stand in the doorway of the restaurant to watch Alice drinking Coca-Cola. It was not just an idle vigil. They waited for the moments when Alice relaxed. If she laughed, it was noted and reported to the others holding a place in line. If she fluffed her hair or nibbled on a hamburger, it was all recorded, and was used to demolish the portrait of grieving parent that Harrison and Baron were trying to paint. Someone would murmur, “Bitch!” and it would undo the courtroom effect so carefully planned by Harold Harrison. Each day Eddie would come over to the defense table, kiss his wife on the cheek, and lead her out of the courtroom. In another part of the courtroom Alice’s mother, accompanied by her son, John, would sit clutching her gloved hands into fists of determination. The family would enter and leave together, all performed for the benefit of the jury—the twelve men who would pronounce judgment, but also for the hundreds of others who sat in menacing witness. “I just want to make sure that the bitch gets what she deserves,” said a woman towing two reluctant children.
“I didn’t think she was a lovely young thing,” juror number nine, Lewis Rosenthal, would say later. “Her appearance was interesting. She sat there—she did not impress me as a monster; she didn’t impress me as a damsel in distress.”
As she sat day after day in the courtroom, stealing glances at the jurors studying her, Alice Crimmins began to have serious doubts that they would understand her complicated innocence.
44
One of the best parts of Peter Farrell’s job was the secret of his private theater. Alone in his chambers, he would drop the omniscient forbearance and chuckle over a particular performance. A judge could dine out forever on the things that take place in his courtroom. Trials have been compared to war and chess, but Farrell knew that the tactics of the theater were more apt. Every trial was a unique act of creation—a play that would never be repeated. The production was in the hands of the contending attorneys, who were also the principal actors, but Farrell was the omnipotent director who could sit back benignly or intervene harshly, cutting off one side or the other, leading the plot where he wanted it to go. Farrell had seen fine actors at work. A man like Maurice Edelbaum, virtually unknown to the public, was an expert in matters of timing and pacing and dramatic force. Edelbaum, employed by some of the most notorious Mafiosi, could use a crowd of spectators like stage props to influence the real audience—the jury. Edelbaum, who had a quality much like Spencer Tracy’s, was able to refocus attention to himself. A judge watching him work would not be immune to the spell, and among themselves the judges ranked lawyers like connoisseurs. In the Alice Crimmins trial, Farrell knew, he would not hear the splendid eloquence of a Maurice Edelbaum, but he would settle for the tussle of a George Raft and a James Cagney on prosecution and defense.
The opening of the trial was bound to be confusing. There was the obligatory clutter of technical testimony. As nearly as possible, evidence is based on hard proof. A map of the area cannot be introduced without an engineering expert to swear that it fairly represents the neighborhood. It is more than a fussy exercise—it is a habit of taking only the best possible proof.
Detective Frank Frezza said he had taken the photographs of Missy in the lot on 162nd Street on July 14, 1965. He examined his pictures carefully, noted his marks of identification on them, and only then were they accepted as evidence. People’s Exhibits One through Eight were passed around for the jurors to examine, their faces puckered as they stared at the corpse of the four-year-old girl. Politely they circulated the pictures among themselves as if they were handling a luncheon menu; yet the jury members were gripped by the impact of staring at a dead child.
Patrolman Bernard Banks, a member of the police engineering section, provided a diagram of the Crimmins apartment, perhaps the only clear reference point throughout the trial. Time and time again, as testimony collided and stories became muddled, some member of the jury could be found staring wistfully at Banks’ diagram, a touchstone of reliability.
To establish a moral climate, Lombardino set out to hammer home his point mathematically. It was couched in a flimsy euphemism. How many times, he asked Carl Andrade, the manager of the Steak Pub, had he “seen” Alice Crimmins?
“Quite a few times,” answered Andrade.
That wasn’t good enough. “Was it more than fifty times?”
“I would say so.”
“Was it more than a hundred times?”
“It’s very hard to say.”
Lombardino had made his point.
The lovers each delivered mileage charts for Lombardino to show how Alice had strayed. Charles Boylan, her supervisor at Hagen Industries, where she worked as a secretary, had slept with her countless times. Even the neighborhood barber, Pasquale Picassio, who had made love to Alice in a car in back of the barbershop in the fall of 1964, was displayed to the jury. And, of course, Joe Rorech.
But somehow the filaments of the testimony could not support the dire charge of murder. The prosecution tried to wrap the wisps of inference into a convincing argument. Detective John Kelly went through contortions describing how eager the police had been to hear Alice’s confession, but were only rewarded with defiance. Lombardino tried to make it sound incriminating that Alice Crimmins wouldn’t confess. It was like a silent-film melodrama where Lombardino’s gestures of horror at such behavior were magnified and telegraphed to the jury. When Piering and Kelly had begged Alice to prove her innocence, she had stalked off and told them to bring her to court.
With a weak case, Lombardino and Mosley were forced to torture the record for anything incriminating. For example, Kelly testified that he had asked Alice to take sodium pentothal to prove her innocence.
“She looked at me and said, ‘When you arrest me and take me to court, that’s when I will prove I am innocent.’” Kelly paused to allow the natural conclusion to sink in—that she would now have to deliver the proof. It was a strange inversion of presumptive innocence, but in the courtroom it was telling. There was a meaningful exhale among the spectators. When witnesses reported that Alice had spoken about her “guilt feelings,” there was a murmur of understanding in the court. Lombardino’s weak strands were forming a web.
Evelyn Atkins, the former maid, embellished the major theme by testifying about the infamous boat trip when Alice had deserted her children for the weekend. It left the jury with the feeling that Alice Crimmins had been, at the least, careless about her children. Lombardino would have to produce better evidence to carry it a step further—that she could have actively conspired in their deaths.
Detective Gerard Piering had waited almost three years for his turn to take the stand against Alice. He would provide the prosecution’s first piece of hard evidence. On the morning the children disappeared, Piering swore, he had found a film of dust on the dresser and on the sill outside the window. He was unshakable on that point. Sitting almost motionless in the witness stand, Piering testified in a voice that trembled with sincerity. His memory of that morning was sharp and clear, he swore. Alice had told him that she had locked the children in their bedroom. She had fed them manicotti before they were put to bed.
On cross-examination, Piering wouldn’t budge; he continued to hurt the defense. Alice was wearing makeup and had her hair “fixed” when he arrived on the scene, he said with obvious malice.
On the third day a man with the distracted manner of a country doctor took the stand. It was Dr. Richard Grimes, who had made the first inspection of Missy’s body when it was still covered with flies. “I saw the body of a girl who appeared to be about five years of age
; she appeared to be lying on her left side. Her legs were flexed at the knees—flexed at the hips. She was clad in a cotton undershirt, a pair of yellow panties. . . .” Dr. Grimes spoke with dry professional detachment.
A voice broke the recitation. “No!” It was Alice Crimmins.
Harold Harrison put an arm around her, whispered, trying to comfort her. Dr. Grimes squirmed for having caused such a fuss. Judge Farrell pounded his desk and demanded order. Tony Lombardino went through a momentary panic. He felt a backlash of sympathy for Alice in the courtroom. He wanted the jury to hold the memory of Carl Andrade, the natty restaurant manager whose wardrobe fitted like ballet tights. But he misread the reaction.
Dr. Grimes continued: “Around the little girl’s face there was a cloth tie. The loose ends of the tie appeared to be the arm of some type of garment. The tie was over the mouth of the child, the knot encircling the neck, and the tie was rather loose. . . .”
Alice Crimmins completely lost control of herself. She made wailing animal noises—sounds that she had never uttered in public and that she had sworn to herself to keep private. In the audience, some few cried out for a recess and some wept aloud. The courtroom was in danger of disintegrating into hysteria, and Judge Farrell gaveled a recess.
Harrison led her away to lunch, across Queens Boulevard, where yellow and orange trucks were grinding up the green malls to build extra traffic lanes. On the sides of the trucks the name of the man who ran the construction company was painted in large green letters—Anthony Grace. The man himself waited in an obscure booth of the Part I restaurant for Alice Crimmins. Harrison planted himself wearily in the booth, ordered a drink, and suggested that when Tony Grace took the witness stand after lunch, he should tear up the courthouse the way his trucks were cracking the streets.
Grace’s appearance on the stand worried Peter Farrell. He summoned Lombardino and Harrison into his chambers and warned that he didn’t want too much exploration of the purely lurid side of the relationship. Lombardino pledged to keep the sexual emphasis minimal.
“I tried to keep as much of this kind of testimony out as possible” Judge Farrell would recall later. “Of course, she was laying for everybody in creation.”
James Mosley handled the questioning of Tony Grace. He would provide the extra ingredient of civility. But without Lombardino’s bludgeoning innuendos, it was hard to elicit anything fruitful from Grace. In his own clumsy way, Mosley attempted to trap the witness into admitting that he had taken part in the crime, but Grace curtly denied it, as disdainfully as he would flick off a fly. There were two reasons for keeping Grace on the stand, however. One reason was to display him to the jury. If they were going to accept the prosecution theory, the jurors would have to see the unsavory characters cast in specific roles. Grace’s rough grammar and imperious gangster-like tone and silk suit would form a more lasting impression than any tricks of testimony.
But the more crucial reason for keeping Grace grunting denials all afternoon was a stall. Lombardino was frantically trying to bolster his case. Judge Farrell had let word leak that he was thinking of throwing the case out. Farrell was disgusted with the quality of prosecution evidence. “You have no case,” he had told Lombardino. “I have to throw it out as a matter of law.” Lombardino had told Farrell that there was more to the case than the grand jury had seen.
Actually, Lombardino was bluffing. There was no more to it, but he thought that, given a little time, he could add a few things. He spent his lunch hour on Monday, May 13, in gloomy despair. If he blew this case, if it never even went to a jury, he would be cast back into the obscure pits of the felony trial part. His popularity, or at least his acceptance, in the District Attorney’s office was based solely on his success. He had leap-frogged over too many people, brushed aside too many sensibilities, ignored too much civility to be tolerated on any other terms. He would be like the class bully rendered powerless if he fumbled this case: his enemies, crouching in every shadow, would pounce.
Mosley, who already had a loser’s pallor, accepted Farrell’s judgment with a shrug. But Lombardino told his partner they were not going to quit. What are you going to do? Mosley asked.
“I’m gonna deliver Joe Rorech,” said Lombardino.
In the courtroom James Mosley performed a holding action while his partner gambled on one more ratchet turn for Rorech. Mosley called Dr. Milton Helpern to the stand.
Dr. Helpern’s books and articles made an impressive file, and he was listed as a consultant or advisor by the nation’s best hospitals and medical universities. There was nothing self-deprecating about his manner: when he took the stand, he wanted it understood that he brought with him the full weight of his standing and experience. Thus introduced, he could adopt a very imposing manner upon being questioned.
“I might say that with regard to the gastrointestinal tract,” he began, “the stomach contained a large amount of food that extended from the upper end of the stomach down to the lower opening of the stomach. And this food appeared to be recently ingested. In other words, the contents of the stomach were not empty. The stomach was full. . . .”
Mosley interrupted Dr. Helpern impatiently. He wanted this point driven home to the jury. On this evidence he intended to smash Alice’s alibi.
“How soon after this child digested the food was the child dead?” he asked, turning to face the jury.
Dr. Helpern paused for a moment before answering. It was a question upon which dozens of doctors had anguished and disagreed for almost three years. Finally science came down to questions of memory and judgment. “This is a difficult question to answer with any precision,” Dr. Helpern replied, and for a flicker James Mosley thought his case was gone. “But the finding of as much food as was found in this case is consistent with a post-ingestion period, that is, a time after the food was ingested, of less than two hours. . . .”
Relieved, Mosley slumped against the jury railing for a moment. Milton Helpern had fulfilled his promise to Tony Lombardino. He had committed the full weight of his reputation to the prosecution’s argument that Alice could not have seen the children alive at midnight.
Under relentless cross-examination that took the rest of the afternoon and continued the next morning, Dr. Helpern held his ground. Each time the defense tried to make him hedge or qualify his stout opinion, Dr. Helpern repulsed the effort with a flourish of his own specialty. “In a healthy person, especially a child, the stomach empties rather rapidly,” he testified like a patient teacher. He brushed off a defense suggestion that Missy could have died from the venom of a bee sting, and that the marks on her neck might have been the result of the weeds and branches in the lot. Nearly impossible, testified Helpern.
Harold Harrison was at a severe disadvantage. He did not know about the long campaign it had taken to win Dr. Helpern’s conclusion that Missy had died within two hours of eating. He was not aware of the conversation that Detective Phil Brady had recorded in which Dr. Helpern said that such a conclusion was “irresponsible and impossible.” The defense was ignorant of the undertone of disagreement within the Medical Examiner’s office—of the doctors on Helpem’s own staff who regarded their chief not as a giant in his field, but as a rather narrow man who was jealous and insecure about his reputation and spiteful about his enemies.
The defense table merely slumped into despair as Dr. Helpern deluged the courtroom with damaging scientific jargon.
“There was one piece of evidence that was indisputable,” juror number nine, Lewis Rosenthal, recalled years later. “The medical evidence. The stomach contents. Dr. Helpern could not be disputed. He’s a famous man; a reliable doctor. . . . The defense was never able to establish that there was ever any other possibility. Oh, they brought up other doctors, but no one could satisfactorily dispute Dr. Helpern. She claimed she woke the children at midnight and he testified that they had to be dead at 9:30 p.m. . . . We seized on that point.”
Inside the stomach, the doctor testified, we
re found a green leafy material, like string beans, a macaroni-type substance, and orange seeds. Little details like the undigested orange seeds left an unbearably plaintive chord haunting the trial.
There had been a final meeting between Joe Rorech and Alice Crimmins on May 13. It had taken place in Harold Harrison’s office and was a tearful affair. “I won’t be able to see you for a while,” Alice had told Joe. “It wouldn’t look right during the trial.”
“What about after the trial?” Rorech asked.
“I don’t know,” replied Alice. “Maybe I’ll stay with Eddie for a while. Maybe I owe my mother something.”
Rorech was inconsolable. As they sat on the couch in the lawyer’s office, Rorech caressed Alice’s hand, sobbing that he wanted to marry Alice, wanted her to have his baby. Harrison, embarrassed by the scene, stepped outside. Joe frantically tried every appeal. Then he began fondling Alice on the couch, trying to revive her physical dependence.
Harrison, who had re-entered unseen, cleared his throat. He had business to discuss with Rorech, who seemed on the verge of collapse. Harrison wanted to talk about the trial, but all Joe could think about was this further blow, the loss of Alice. Rorech was scheduled to take the stand on Thursday—three days away—and Harrison wanted to know what he planned to say. “Just what I’ve always said,” replied Rorech.