The Alice Crimmins Case

by Ken Gross

  Alice Crimmins left the courtroom and went to a friend’s place on the eighth floor of an apartment house across Queens Boulevard. She stared down at the patient crowd milling in front of the courthouse. She carried a copy of Airport, but it was only a prop. She didn’t have the stamina to read. Finally she couldn’t stand the isolation and went downstairs to the Part I restaurant, where everyone assured her that the signs were good. There was a relay system into the Part I, where rumors and gossip raised and lowered moods.

  “It’s nine to three for conviction,” someone said out of Alice’s hearing, but she could tell by the grave expressions that not everyone was optimistic. Harrison and Baron made repeated attempts to brighten things, finding cause for hope in delay. When they heard that it was nine to three against, they reversed it and said the jury was three to one in her favor.

  “The majority of us were quite careful about the verdict,” recalled Lewis Rosenthal. “We leaned over backwards to give her the benefit of the doubt.” In the beginning Rosenthal was one of a handful who voted for acquittal. His instinct told him that she was probably guilty, but he had doubts about the proof. And even if the proof was adequate, he could not see any profit in finding her guilty. “She would be no danger to society,” he told fellow jurors. “She is not likely to commit another crime like this.” The others on the panel sensed something weak in Rosenthal’s position, as if he were asking to be convinced. He was vulnerable. An appeal could be made to Rosenthal on the very grounds on which he defended Alice Crimmins—her danger to society. On tables and mantels and surfaces around the Rosenthal home are the links in a complex chain. In stiff formal poses are the great-grandparents. European ancestors march in an unbroken procession of yellowing photographs. There are modern color photographs of Rosenthal and his wife and his daughter, who he hopes will one day inherit all the traditions and become the picture caretaker. Something about contemporary society nags Lewis Rosenthal: the disappearance of marriage, the rupture of family life. It bothers him that his daughter may grow to adulthood and never marry, thus breaking the family chain.

  As Monday, May 27, passed into Tuesday, there were different interpretations of the long deliberation. Some felt it was a good sign for the defendant because the jury was absorbed in doubt. Others said those holding out for acquittal were being whittled down, since jurors bent on conviction were usually more tenacious and less easy to convert. Still another view was that the jurors wanted as many free meals as they could get out of the state.

  At 1:45 a.m., after the jury had asked a few questions and requested a few instructions on the law, a call came to Louis Warren’s apartment, where Alice Crimmins waited: “There’s a verdict.” Warren, a friendly bail bondsman, wished Alice luck as she straightened her hair.

  Alice Crimmins was wearing a red dress and her face was chalk as she hurried through the strangely crowded street, in which people stood in the middle of the traffic lanes as they do in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

  “The first thing I’m going to do when I get home is take a hot bath,” she said bravely as she waited with Muriel Harrison in the filling courtroom.

  Judge Farrell entered suddenly, seeming preoccupied, as if he had been taken away from something truly important. “Now, as this verdict is announced,” Farrell warned the spectators, “anybody that makes a sound or stands up will be liable to contempt. Now watch yourselves. This is going to be in order. That’s what’s required by law.”

  Court attendants took up positions around the large room. The jurors came in looking haggard and miserable, trying to conceal the verdict by staring at their hands or feet. And suddenly Alice Crimmins knew that she was lost. A matron moved in behind her.

  “Have you agreed upon a verdict?”

  Alice was standing as Carl Boyer, the foreman, replied: “Yes, sir.” She sagged slightly and Harold Harrison held her by the elbow.

  “Your Honor, we, the jury, find the defendant guilty of manslaughter in the first degree.”

  Alice went limp in Harrison’s arms, moaning, “Oh, my God.”

  In the first row Eddie Crimmins buried his head in his hands and wept.

  Most of the spectators were too stunned to react. It was a verdict that most agreed with and had hoped for, and yet the impact was powerful, as if for the first time they realized the consequence of the wish.

  “Your Honor,” appealed Harrison, “may she see her husband before she’s taken out?”

  “She’s remanded,” said Farrell remorselessly. “No.”

  The matron moved Harrison out of the way and took charge of Alice’s rubbery body. She led her into another room, where for a few moments Alice was able to say goodbye to her family.

  Lombardino shook hands with Jim Mosley wordlessly. Mosley gathered up his papers while Lombardino left the courthouse with John Kelly and Jerry Piering. Strangely, only Lombardino seemed elated. He laughed and congratulated the two detectives and then clicked his heels in the air in celebration. “Cut it out, you jerk!” said Jerry Piering. It had been too long, too hard, and their feelings were too complicated for that kind of demonstration.

  As Alice was being taken to the detention pen, she collapsed again. Dr. Lester Samuels, a city Health Department physician, was summoned. “We’ll have to put her in the hospital,” said Samuels.

  Now semiretired, Samuels will no longer talk about the case, but in the next few days members of the prosecution staff began calling newspapermen they considered reliable to pass along something Samuels reportedly told them. It was contended that a sedative Dr. Samuels administered to Alice had acted as a truth serum, and that under it she had confessed killing her children. Samuels was horrified by the reports. He denied the stories, claiming that Alice had ranted incoherently under the sedative but had said nothing that could be regarded as a confession. The poisonous effect of the stories, however, reached into the community, and nothing that Samuels said afterward worked as an antidote to the first reports. In the years ahead it would be faithfully related by those familiar with the case that Alice had confessed under truth serum.

  48

  On the cover of Alice Crimmins’ probation report Jerry Piering had written: “There is no doubt that Alice Crimmins killed her two children!”

  The report took three months to compile. After the verdict Alice remained under heavy sedation for two weeks. Gradually she came to accept her new status. Harold Harrison visited her regularly in the prison hospital and told her cheerfully that he was working on an appeal and that there appeared to be considerable grounds for a reversal. John Burke, her brother, urged her to hire a new set of attorneys. He had nothing personal against Harold Harrison or Marty Baron, but Burke argued that they were clumsy and she needed more talent.

  And almost daily Eddie Crimmins went to Elmhurst General Hospital to see his wife, but he was not allowed in. He would stand outside staring at the windows of the prison ward, trying to pick out her face.

  In June, Alice was transferred to the Women’s House of Detention in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village to await sentencing on July 12. The matrons there reported that after a first burst of hysteria she settled into prison routine. She worked in the office, filing and typing, and was found to be efficient.

  The police, meanwhile, made a halfhearted effort at finding the “mystery man” who had purportedly helped Alice dispose of the children—which was the essence of their case. But it seemed more a public-relations justification of the verdict than a real manhunt.

  Harold Harrison, although believing he would soon be leaving the case, discovered that three jurors had improperly visited the scene of the crime during the proceedings, and filed a writ for a new trial. Harrison obtained an affidavit from one of the jurors, who swore he had driven to the area during the trial. Sam Ehrlich, juror number three, was the first to admit it. And then Harry Tunis and Irving Furst said they had visited Kew Gardens Hills to learn whether Sophie Earomirski could have seen what she claimed from her win
dow. Judge Farrell had blundered by failing to remind the jury regularly to stay away from the area. Instead of sentencing Alice on July 12, Farrell heard defense motions that the verdict should be turned aside because of the unauthorized visits. He postponed sentencing until August 9 after deciding that the visits were not a grave violation.

  When Alice appeared for sentencing, Judge Farrell asked her if she had anything to say before he pronounced sentence.

  “I am not guilty of this charge,” she said. “This horrible charge. I did not do it, and Mosley, Lombardino, and Mackell, all down the line, are rotten through and through. . . .”

  The judge interrupted to say that he was not interested in her “personal” attacks.

  “You don’t care who killed my children,” she shot back angrily. “You want to close your books. You don’t give a damn who killed my kids!”

  Harold Harrison had nothing further to say.

  “It is the sentence of the court. . . that she be confined in the New York State prison for women at Westfield State Farms, Bedford Hills, New York, for a term of not less than five years, nor more than twenty years.”

  “Until this I always had a very deep respect for the law, you know?” Alice Crimmins would say years later. “I thought that people get justice in the courtroom. I don’t know what I believe in any more.”

  Standing in the courtroom when Alice was sentenced were two men who were to become her new attorneys. William Erlbaum, in his thirties, was a large, rawboned man with waves of dark hair that kept flopping in his face as he took frantic notes. Erlbaum was the detail man—a painstaking fanatic for fact, with wild, blazing eyes.

  The senior man was two decades older. Herbert Lyon, who had a deliberately somnolent look, was considered by many the most skilled forensic attorney in Queens. He had a thriving practice—taking large fees for successfully defending alleged mobsters—and was warned that the Crimmins case would only bring him grief. “It’s a no-win case,” his colleagues along Queens Boulevard told him. But Lyon was outraged at the verdict and the sloppy handling Alice had received. As she was led away to prison, he saw her for a moment and promised that she would not remain in prison long. With Harrison’s help, he got her out in less than a month. On September 4, Harrison, still the attorney of record, obtained a certificate of reasonable doubt and she was free on $25,000 bail.

  For more than a year Erlbaum buried himself in the paperwork of the appeal, taking direction and broad approaches from Lyon. Sixteen months after stepping into the case, Lyon and Erlbaum argued Alice’s appeal before the Appellate Division. One week later they were rewarded for the great care they had invested in preparation. By a four-to-one decision, the court ruled that the improper visits to the crime scene were enough grounds to grant Mrs. Crimmins a new trial.

  District Attorney Thomas Mackell announced immediately that he would bring Mrs. Crimmins to trial again.

  After her conviction and before she engaged her new lawyers, Harold Harrison persuaded Alice to sign a paper giving him exclusive book and movie rights to the story of her life. He did it because she had run out of money and he said he could not work for free. In addition, there had been inquiries from writers and movie producers. None of them came to anything and the document would be renounced by Harrison, but, according to Anthony Lombardino, one of the factors that influenced the District Attorney’s office to take Alice to court again was to prevent her from exploiting her story in a book or a movie.

  Indignation about Alice Crimmins was still high in Queens County and there was never any doubt that she would be retried, but Tom Mackell decided he would bring in a new team to match Lyon and Erlbaum. Lombardino was too heavy-handed and Mosley too ineffectual to succeed against the talented new combination. Mackell had learned through experience to respect Lyon, who had beaten Mosley when the latter came out to Queens and tested his feet in the water.

  Lyon was particularly effective in a courtoom. Juries found him full of wisdom and understanding, capable of resolving knotty complications with benevolent even-handedness. To Herb Lyon, prosecutors were never mean or cruel, they were merely mistaken and lacking a forgiving perspective. There were broader, more informed dimensions to Lyon than to most Queens lawyers. He had a taste for literature and had, in his youth, written a modest novel. He appreciated music and good food, and the partnership between him and the younger Erlbaum was nourished by mutual respect. Their conversations were not girded by the boundaries of local politics and lunch-hour vendettas. This catholicity set Lyon and Erlbaum somewhat apart from their colleagues, but there were common interests. Herb Lyon and Bill Erlbaum would put in hours drinking at Luigi’s bar with the personnel who inhabited the courtrooms across the street, showing not a trace of performing a grudging duty.

  Harold Harrison accepted Alice’s decision to switch attorneys with good grace, but Marty Baron felt somewhat betrayed. He believed he had devoted more time and effort to the case than was repaid—financially or in consideration. While Harrison had wanted to remove himself from the case the moment that Rorech turned against Alice, and regretted the book-and-movie document because it made him look greedy, Baron felt he had done nothing wrong. The result was hurt feelings. And when it came time to turn files over to Lyon and Erlbaum, the old firm was slow.

  Even before Mackell announced his decision to retry Alice, Lyon and Erlbaum went to work with energy to prepare a defense. They hired a talented private detective, Irwin Blye, to re-examine the evidence. Unlike the stereotyped private detectives, Blye was a quiet family man who made his way by being polite and thorough. He retraced all the previous steps and found himself stumbling over the carefully guarded police theory of the case, which turned on the man they believed had helped Alice kill her children.

  His name was Vincent Colabella and his police record was that of a viper. He was now being held on robbery charges in the Tombs. One of Colabella’s fellow inmates reported that he had boasted of driving the car the night the children disappeared.

  John Kelly and Jerry Piering immediately went to see Colabella. “All right, hump,” began Kelly, “I’m giving you a choice—you can either be a witness or a defendant in the Crimmins case.”

  Colabella was surprised; he had spoken carelessly to a fellow prisoner in the morning and by afternoon two detectives were waiting for him. A man in prison might drop coy hints about cooperation and being able to solve this or that crime, and it could take months before some harassed Assistant District Attorney would show up to drive a hard bargain. But the Crimmins case was different.

  “What can you guys do for me, huh?” said Colabella, his face a smirking slate. At the age of thirty-three, Colabella was toughened to life in prison. He had spent a third of his life in some kind of confinement and the threat of doing time did not hold terror for him. “What can you guys do for me?” He was not asking; it was a statement. Kelly slammed his fist on a table and demanded that Colabella tell them his role in the case.

  “I was kidding,” said Colabella. “I don’t know anything about it.”

  Kelly, a great believer in the polygraph, asked Colabella if he would take a lie-detector test. Colabella replied that he didn’t mind, but that he would like to talk to his lawyer first. After speaking to the lawyer, Colabella refused to take the test.

  Colabella’s withdrawal was a disappointment to the District Attorney. There were some in Queens who felt that Alice Crimmins was being persecuted by Mackell’s office. The conviction had merely strengthened that opinion, and the appearance of Colabella stirred hope among police and staff in the District Attorney’s office that their case would be vindicated. There was a powerful desire to produce one solid, incontrovertible piece of evidence in court instead of the chain of inferences.

  Strategists in Mackell’s office did not want to get involved in another sordid name-calling contest. The prosecutor began to re-examine the case, as Irwin Blye was doing, trying to develop additional evidence. Privately, the police were convinced
that they had solved the case and that Vincent Colabella had helped Alice dispose of the children. But he was a hardened criminal, unlikely to violate his own code of silence. So the only tactic available was to try and bolster the existing case.

  John Kelly had been saving something, he told Piering and, later, Tom Mackell. A week after he testified against Alice, Joe Rorech had been drinking with Kelly at a bar at La Guardia Airport. Rorech had been tormenting himself for having turned on his lover. “I hated to blow the whistle on Alice,” Rorech reportedly had told Kelly. “I hated to do that to her, but I didn’t have any choice. They were beautiful kids. I can’t see why she wanted to take their lives.”

  Kelly said that when he heard this, he had blanched. “What the hell are you talking about?” he said he had asked. “I thought that you testified that she only admitted she killed the girl.”

  “I told Lombardino and Anderson before I testified about the boy, too, but they didn’t want me to mention it on the stand,” Rorech had said, according to Kelly. “They said it would be prejudicial and that the judge would call a mistrial.”

  “What did you tell Tony and Walter?” Kelly said he had asked Rorech.

  “Only that Alice told me that she had help in killing her son,” Rorech reportedly had replied.

  Kelly brought this conversation to the attention of the District Attorney’s staff and the seeds of a variation on the first prosecution began to grow. The new prosecution tactic would be to bring Alice to trial for the murder of both children. A conviction for the murder of the boy was not likely since no one could testify about a cause of death. But if Alice was indicted for both murders, the jury might be persuaded that it was doing her a favor by convicting her of only one. This was a ploy, but in the absence of substantial new evidence, the District Attorney and his staff felt compelled to expand the first theme.