The Alice Crimmins Case

by Ken Gross

EAROMIRSKI: I tried to close the window. I picked up the crank and I turned the handle and it squeaked. She said to him, “Somebody’s seen us,” and they turned and they looked in back of them at the building for a while. Then they turned and they looked into my apartment, the apartment downstairs, the one on the first floor, and they kept looking up at my apartment and I had ducked behind my drape.

  MOSLEY: What happened then?

  EAROMIRSKI: I waited there for a while and I looked and I seen this other fellow was crossing from Kissena Boulevard over, and they were looking at him and they had this conversation and the man turned away from her and he was like facing me, and when this other man passed by them she acknowledged, like a hello, a greeting, and he walked down the area towards the mall; and again I stood back. I sat down. I lit a cigarette.

  The testimony was breathtaking. Every eye was on the heavy woman, but drifted now and then to see the effect on Alice, who was as struck as anyone else.

  EAROMIRSKI: Well, then I got up and I looked out the window and I saw the car turn around and go towards the area by Kissena Boulevard.

  There was a pause. Mosley waited until he had the courtroom’s attention. “Now, the woman you say you saw carrying this bundle and the woman you heard say ‘Don’t do that to her,’ and the woman you heard say ‘Somebody seen us,’ do you see that woman in this courtroom?”

  Sophie snapped her head and looked at the defense table. Her right arm went up straight as an arrow and a finger pointed at Alice Crimmins. “That’s the woman!” she said.

  There was a rumble from the spectators and Alice Crimmins screamed at Sophie Earomirski: “You liar! You liar!”

  “I heard you!” Mrs. Earomirski shouted back.

  “You liar! You liar!”

  Judge Farrell was trying to rap down the exchange with his gavel, but Alice kept shouting: “You liar! You liar!”

  “This will stop from this point on,” ordered Judge Farrell vainly. “You are instructed to disregard this outburst,” he told the jury.

  During the weekend and on Monday the defense staff had worked on Sophie’s background. However, the defense had temporarily been sapped of its greatest energy source—Harold Harrison. His father, Louis Harrison, died that Monday and Harold was called out of the courtroom. He would not return for a week, and so Marty Baron would have to lead the attack on Sophie Earomirski.

  The witness sat with her defensive armor bristling as Baron circled for a moment, reading the file his detectives had brought in. Softly, almost innocently, Baron began probing for soft spots. Did you recognize the man? he asked. No, replied Sophie, but he had a big nose. Baron picked up a copy of Sophie’s grand-jury testimony. He noted what seemed to him like a discrepancy. In court she displayed an impressive memory for detail. The woman’s legs were bare and she wore a triangle scarf; her hair was dark and fell below the shoulders. But the only thing that Sophie had told the grand jury was that the woman had on a pair of shorts and a blouse.

  To the spectators it seemed that Baron was nit-picking. To many, this moment in the trial had turned into a contest between a hapless woman and a tricky lawyer. Each time she scored a point, there was a cheer. When she left the stand for a recess, she held her hands up in a boxer’s salute and the audience laughed appreciatively.

  When she returned to the stand, Baron was ready with some tough questions. He asked her about the concussion she had received when working at the World’s Fair, and Sophie dismissed the injury as trivial. What did the hospital at the Fair do for you? Baron asked. When she replied, “Nothing,” the spectators roared.

  During her two days on the witness stand, Sophie’s testimony grew stronger with the encouragement of the audience. She denied having seen a psychiatrist. She denied having made suicide attempts, although her stomach had once had to be pumped after an overdose of pills. Another time her husband had found her unconscious with her head in the oven, but she claimed she had fallen asleep when checking on something she was cooking. There was never any risk of a perjury charge against Sophie, since she was the prosecution’s star witness and her explanations had been accepted.

  Baron confronted another handicap. Judge Farrell was limiting the range of questioning. Before he left the trial, Harrison had ordered a psychiatric profile of Sophie Earomirski from Dr. Louis Berg, a specialist in neurology and psychiatry.

  That Wednesday—May 22—Dr. Berg examined the Workmen’s Compensation file of Sophie Earomirski. He explored her case with other doctors and reported his findings to Harrison in a written report. On August 25, 1967, he noted in his report, Mrs. Earomirski had been treated at Booth Memorial Hospital after taking an overdose of librium—presumably a suicide attempt. Her stomach had had to be pumped.

  It is my considered opinion after reading and evaluating these hospital reports and the compensation file that Mrs. Earomirski suffered first a head injury [at the World’s Fair] which resulted in permanent brain damage. This is evidenced by the fact that her compensation case was terminated by the carrier on the basis of a permanent partial disability of the brain. Secondly, Mrs. Earomirski made at least one suicide attempt [which] is further evidence of her emotional instability. Finally, it is an established clinical fact that a hysterectomy, which brings a woman’s menstruation function [to an end], is accompanied by emotional and sometimes even mental symptoms.

  The clinical picture presented by the hospital records . . . shows a heavily unstable individual. . . .

  (signed) LOUIS BERG, M.D., M.A.P.A.

  Dr. Berg’s affidavit was sworn to on May 22, 1968, but Judge Peter Farrell, within his discretionary powers, ruled that it was inadmissible to the case.

  There were sharp inconsistencies in Sophie Earomirski’s testimony. She claimed she had never had trouble sleeping except on this one night. And yet when she was seeking damages for her injury, she had sworn before many medical boards that she was an insomniac.

  In the letter she wrote to the District Attorney, she said that what she saw that night “may be connected and may not be” connected to the case. In the letter she described just “a woman,” and yet she had known Alice Crimmins from the neighborhood and was later able to pick her out from police photographs. On the witness stand the first soft assertion hardened into cement.

  Finally, there was the testimony about the dog. Mrs. Earomirski swore that she had heard the woman on the mall say that the dog was “pregnant.” But several other witnesses swore that no one knew Brandy was pregnant that night. When the dog gave birth to a single pup the week after the killings, it was a complete surprise to Alice, her family, and the neighbors. She had even been negotiating with one of the neighbors to buy another dog—she wanted one for each child.

  With Sophie, it was hard to know where reality left off and the power of suggestion began. When she was questioned about her eyesight and brainwave tests, she announced proudly that they were all “perfect,” and the spectators applauded her spunk.

  It was finally too much for Judge Farrell. “What do you think this is,” he said sternly, addressing the audience, “the Hippodrome? I will not allow any more of this.”

  It was hard not to hold Sophie up to ridicule. When she said it was not a suicide attempt when she was found unconscious with her head in the oven, that she was just checking on dinner, there was a good-natured wave of applause. The spectators admired the bravery of someone who would expose herself to that kind of laughter. Sophie didn’t distinguish between those who laughed with her and those who laughed at her. She basked in the limelight.

  But there was more to it than a fearless performance. When Sophie left the stand, she was pleased with herself. She asked Lombardino how she had done, and he said, “fine, fine,” as if he were grading her on an oral exercise. More compelling, though, was the effect Sophie’s testimony had on the jury. If Sophie was uncertain about her story, if she had lapses of memory, she did provide the jury with a story that linked Alice Crimmins with the District Attorne
y’s version of the children’s death. The jury had been shown the complete circle—the deaths, a possible motive, and opportunity.

  The prosecution case was completed. Its effect on the jury was impossible to measure. But what it had done to the woman sitting in volcanic fury at the defense table, no more the demure little housewife in a white collar, was evident. This was what Tony Lombardino wanted the jury to see—Alice seething with rage, capable of violence.

  Harold Harrison, in mourning for his father, was consulted by Marty Baron. Both men agreed that the defense had been injured badly by Joe Rorech’s defection. They had a string of character witnesses who would testify to Alice’s good nature and assert that she had been a good mother. The testimony of her husband, who had blurted out his belief in his wife’s innocence on the witness stand, was not enough. Only one person could save Alice, they agreed—Alice Crimmins herself.

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  The first-strike advantage belongs to the prosecution. The defense must remain calm and stitch the wounds, one by one, with surgical patience. But the efforts of Harold Harrison and Marty Baron seemed feeble and doomed.

  Choosing Theresa Costello as the first defense witness was a mistake. At seventeen, she was too young, and Alice’s former baby-sitter left an aftertaste of youthful defiance with the jury. The testimony itself was too complicated. By now a high-school junior, Theresa swore that she had heard the children reciting their prayers at 8:30 p.m. the night they disappeared. This was intended to challenge the medical testimony.

  She told the jury she had seen the porter’s stroller that night and noticed the screen inside the window of the children’s room. The next morning the stroller had been moved under the window and the screen was down on the mall. The suggestion was that someone had used the stroller to take the children out through the window where the screen had been removed. But the testimony was too abstract to gain attention.

  Mrs. Mary Buttner testified that Alice Crimmins’ hair was worn an inch below her ears before the disappearance; Sophie Earomirski said that the woman on the mall had hair falling below the shoulders. Robert Levins, a neighbor, was among a group who said that the lighting on the mall was poor—too poor for someone to notice false eyelashes, as Sophie had sworn she had done. Others swore that Alice Crimmins had been a good mother and that it would have been out of character for her to strike a child, much less murder her own.

  But the effect was less telling than the prosecution’s brutal suggestions. The jurors were plainly dissatisfied with what they regarded as diversionary attacks on Sophie Earomirski.

  Alice never really had time to prepare herself. There was a quick drink at lunch, accompanied by Marty Baron’s hard warnings, but Alice was still stung by Sophie’s testimony when she took the witness stand on Wednesday afternoon.

  Judge Farrell, in the indirect and impersonal manner of the courtroom, had cautioned Alice through her attorney that by taking the stand she was waiving her right to stand mute.

  “Does your client understand, Counselor?”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” replied Marty Baron.

  But Baron was not certain that Alice really understood. Once she took the oath, she would be left open to the harshest assaults of the prosecution. Anthony Lombardino was waiting for just such an opportunity. The rules of the courtroom are precise. A defendant may guard him/herself against character attacks by remaining silent and the court is obliged to respect that privacy unless the evidence directly bears upon the case. But once a defendant takes the witness stand, the prosecution, under a broad cloak of authority to impeach his/her word, is allowed to explore every aspect of character.

  There would be no more prim hesitation about the propriety of examining her sex life. Nothing would be private on the witness stand. Lombardino was sure to use this license to bait and taunt her, trying to provoke her temper to give the jury a glimpse behind the shadows of Alice Crimmins’ defenses.

  But Alice had a very important motive for going to the witness chair. She wanted her own voice. From the start of the trial she had sat back helplessly, hearing herself depicted as a homicidal slut, and she was determined to correct that image. She was under the misapprehension, as she swore an oath to tell the truth, that she would at last be given a voice. What she did not understand was that the law was such a fine instrument that a cunning surgeon could cut her throat with a scalpel of objections and questions.

  At first the voice was inaudible. “Alice, I’m going to ask you to speak up,” said Marty Baron, but she had such a thin voice that it could never rise to the occasion. Farrell finally installed a microphone-and-loudspeaker system so that she could be heard.

  Alice retraced her background . . . childhood in the Bronx . . . meeting Eddie at fifteen . . . the marriage in St. Frances de Chantal Church on November 8, 1958 . . . the disintegration of the marriage as Eddie worked from midnight to 8:00 a.m. as a mechanic for Trans World Airlines. The story was flat. She was unable to flesh it out with subtle details, important nuances. She couldn’t make the people in the courtroom understand the overwhelming loneliness she had felt in her marriage, or the gradual numbing of feeling, the loss of respect. She could recite the fact that her husband was an airline mechanic, but “Did you know he couldn’t even fix his own car?” she wanted to shout. That was irrelevant or immaterial to the court, but it had been a powerful influence on her feelings. Testimony, she was beginning to discover, was not always the whole truth.

  It was late in the afternoon, almost 3:00 p.m., when Alice took the stand. Baron had wanted to counteract Sophie’s impact on the jury. When Alice reached the point where she was talking about her children, she began to tremble. She turned to her right and whispered something to Judge Farrell.

  “She says she can’t go on,” Judge Farrell told Baron, but his voice was skeptical. When Alice began to sob softly, Farrell declared a recess. Marty Baron put his arm around his client and helped her into a small room off the courtroom, where she slumped into a chair and stared hopelessly at the tile floor. Eddie bent over his wife, making consoling gestures. John Burke hovered near his sister. But Alice couldn’t regain her composure. The trial would have to be postponed until the next day.

  As she entered the courtroom on Thursday, a curtain had once again come down over her face, like the white gloves that her mother wore to conceal her hands. Alice was wearing the black crepe dress with the white fluted collar. She carried a handkerchief.

  Carefully, almost gracefully, Baron led her through her past and up to the present. She was now working as an executive secretary for the North American Phillips Company, a fact that the defense hoped would mitigate the cocktail-waitress image. It was a futile hope.

  Shrewd attorneys bring out the worst about their clients, assuming it will take out the sting and disarm the prosecution. If something bad is sprung by the prosecution, it has the double disadvantage of seeming furtive and shameful. Better to have a sympathetic questioner bring out the worst in the best light. And so Baron asked Alice about her boat trip with Tony Grace.

  BARON: Did you bring a suitcase with you when you went on that boat?

  CRIMMINS: No.

  “I was working that day,” explained Alice, “and Tony had told me that he was going to have a bon voyage party. . . . I had gone down there with a friend of mine, Margie Fischer, and we’re on the boat, and I guess we were fooling around. . . . I couldn’t get off.”

  The explanation seemed unsatisfactory and she wanted to make the jury understand. She hadn’t taken a suitcase because it was totally unplanned, she insisted, her sense of frustration leading her on. There had been no deliberate neglect of the children. Evelyn, the maid, had known that there was always between $80 and $100 in cash in the house for emergencies. She looked desperately at the jury, as if to say, “Don’t you see?”

  Baron moved the questioning to the night of the disappearance. Alice twisted the handkerchief tighter and her voice softened. She couldn’t remember whether or not th
e front door had been locked; she couldn’t recall if she had clapped the hook in the eye. When the subject of Joe Rorech came up, her voice flared with emotion. He was a liar, she said. His testimony was based on the fact that she had recently spumed him, and she denied the “confession.” Rorech’s story was an amazing reversal, she told the jury. Just two weeks ago, she recalled, they had been at the Red Coach Grill in Westbury having drinks and Joe had kept saying that he thought Eddie had killed the children. Sam [Spade] Gianopoulos had been with her that night and would back her up. It was all very sad, she said; Joe Rorech had brought his children to meet her—and this was after the alleged confession—and left them alone with her. Would he have risked that with a confessed murderess? she asked. Joe had always sworn she was innocent—until last week in court. And she shook her head tragically.

  “Did you ever say, ‘I’m sorry, Joe, I killed her’?” Baron asked.

  “Never,” she said in a powerful voice.

  Lombardino, meanwhile, could hardly contain his impatience. He was going to cross-examine Alice Crimmins and it would be brutal. He had boasted about it in private, entertaining friends by saying, “Let me at her.” He had thought about his attitude, and from the Start he treated her without pity, his voice betraying more than professional anger and magnified in the cloistered courtroom. At first Mosley had thought he might handle the questioning of Alice, but Lombardino had said no. Although Mosley was the titular head of the team, it was apparent that Lombardino had snatched the leadership from his hands. When the trial began, newspaper reporters had sought information from Mosley; now they instinctively turned to Lombardino. Without protest, Mosley had slipped into the background.

  As Alice and Tony faced off in the courtroom, the cold antipathy between them was manifest.

  LOMBARDINO: Mrs. Crimmins, would you mind getting a little closer to the microphone so everybody in this jury panel can hear you?

  CRIMMINS: They can hear me, sir.