by Peter Janney
“I thought Nina Burleigh’s book was terrible,” she said. “I thought it was badly researched and embarrassingly inaccurate.” I then attempted to defend some of Burleigh’s early descriptions of the Pinchot estate, Grey Towers, and their life in Milford, Pennsylvania—if only to keep our conversation going. It was already clear Alexandra knew much more than she was letting on. “I think it’s too dangerous to talk to you, I really do,” she finally said. Our conversation ended amicably. I suggested the possibility of some follow-up through email a couple of weeks later, but was quickly rebuffed.57
What could still be “too dangerous” to talk about more than forty years after the fact? The clue, of course, was Alexandra’s comment that she had talked with her mother at some length, concluding, “I think I know everything she knew.” Anne Truitt had concealed something. Like Anne Chamberlin, I wondered, had Leo Damore’s apparent “suicide” in October 1995 immediately after the publication of Ben Bradlee’s memoir, A Good Life, frightened Alexandra from talking further?
In late 1990, author Leo Damore conducted a two-hour face-to-face recorded interview with Timothy Leary, which will be discussed in some detail in a later chapter. During the interview, he told Leary that Mary’s real diary still existed and he had discovered its whereabouts. “Angleton offered the diary in 1980 to a person who I know,” Damore told Leary. “I know where it is, and the man who I believe has it is maddeningly this week in Hawaii.”58 Damore had sometimes cryptically referred to Mary’s diary as “the Hope Diamond” of the Kennedy assassination, but he guarded the fact that he had come into possession of it and only finally shared this bit of information with his attorney at the end of March in 1993.
Meanwhile, Cord Meyer would maintain that Jim Angleton was a “very close friend of ours, and he successfully dealt with a diary that might have been embarrassing, assured that it didn’t come out. That was not done to protect state secrets or anything like that. It was done to protect a friend.”59 Again, Cord does not mention that Mary had specifically entrusted her diary to Angleton, or asked him to “burn certain pages of her diary if anything happened to her.” And which “diary” was Cord referring to? Mary’s sketchbook, or the real diary that Angleton and possibly Bradlee had stolen on the night of the murder?
Sixteen years after his ex-wife’s murder in 1980, Cord would finally reveal in his book Facing Reality who had contacted him in New York on the afternoon of Mary’s murder to tell him what had happened—again, before police had any idea of the victim’s identity. It was the same “friend” that had called Ben Bradlee “just after lunch,” a man who happened to be a close CIA colleague—a fact that Cord, too, failed to mention in his account.60
2 Cicely Angleton twice declined to be interviewed for this book. She died on September 23, 2011.
3 Anne Chamberlin died on December 31, 2011 in Sarasota, Florida.
4
Deus Ex Machina
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.
—Thomas Jefferson1
Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.
—Joseph Goebbels
(Hitler’s propaganda minister)
WHILE THE MOST intense grief attended Mary Pinchot Meyer’s funeral at the National Cathedral on Wednesday, October 14, the Reverend Jesse A. Brown also consoled a member of his own congregation at the Second Baptist Church in Southwest Washington, D.C., only a few miles away in distance, yet worlds apart in social class and community. Martha Crump had been undone by Mary Meyer’s murder, too. Her son, twenty-five-year-old Raymond Crump Jr., was in police custody, charged with committing the crime. Reverend Brown spoke to Martha Crump that day not only of matters spiritual, but of matters practical as well. Something had to be done to help “Mr. Ray,” whom he believed had been wrongly accused.
Like most black churches in the 1960s, Second Baptist was a stronghold in its community, a spiritual refuge with a social conscience. Community outreach, drug and alcohol abuse counseling, care for the elderly, housing assistance—Second Baptist offered guidance that went beyond tending to the souls of the faithful. The church had a well-established record of fighting racebased discrimination and social injustice. As its founding pastor, Reverend Brown led the charge.
The civil rights movement of the 1960s owed much to churches like Second Baptist, where members gathered to stoke the causes of equal and fair treatment under the law. The black church functioned independent of white interference—that is, until the churches became centers of organized activism. When that occurred, they also became targets for those who would rather see the churches burn than have their congregations achieve equality. Across the American south, black churches were being firebombed, members of their faithful lynched. Violence was rampant. By 1964, there was a siege mentality in black churches.
Shortly after Ray Crump’s arrest, Reverend Brown had been trying, through ministry channels, to reach attorney Dovey Johnson Roundtree, someone he often referred to as a “righteous lawyer” and something of a legend already in the black community. In addition to being a “righteous lawyer,” Roundtree was also a highly regarded associate minister of the Allen Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and a sought-after public speaker. She was an attractive, petite woman with delicate features, and a complexion that belied her fifty years. The only hints of her age were the strands of gray that streaked her hair.
Roundtree had been raised with a fierce understanding of—and belief in—justice. The only thing she believed in more absolutely was God. Behind her graceful appearance was a will of iron. “Her voice, like her demeanor, was kind, deliberate and thoughtful,” recalled attorney George Peter Lamb in 1991. “But she’s all business. She likes to look you square in the eye. There was something impossibly appealing about her. It’s difficult not to like this woman.”2
Dovey Roundtree had seen up close the failings and abuses of power in an American legal system rife with racism. Born Dovey Mae Johnson on April 17, 1914, in Charlotte, North Carolina, she never forgot the night her grandmother, Rachel Bryant Graham, pushed her, her mother, and her sisters under the kitchen table as members of the Ku Klux Klan approached. Grandma Rachel extinguished the kerosene lamp, closed all the shutters, and braced her daughter and crying grandchildren for the worst. Like an approaching freight train, howling men on horseback galloped past their house. Grandma Rachel clutched a broom in case she needed a weapon, and her husband, the Reverend Clyde L. Graham, kept vigil through the slats of a shuttered window.
After Dovey’s father died during the influenza epidemic of 1919, Grandma Rachel brought her daughter’s family to live with her and her husband in the parsonage attached to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, where he pastored. To the white bankers in Charlotte, Rachel Graham was just the Negro woman who did their laundry and ironed their shirts. To her granddaughter, “she was a force of nature.” Darkness didn’t scare her. Neither did the weather. While Grandpa Clyde took cover from summer thunderstorms, Grandma Rachel went out to the front porch to shake her fist at the lightning. The way she saw it, it was Mother Nature who was scaring her family, and that just wouldn’t do.3
Grandma Rachel’s courage had left an indelible impression on the young Dovey Mae Johnson, perhaps never more so than the day the pair took a trolley to downtown Charlotte. The inquisitive little girl wanted to see how the driver steered the vehicle and punched the tickets, so she took the seat behind him. “Get that pickaninny out of here!” the white driver yelled. “You know she can’t sit there.” Grandma Rachel took her granddaughter by the hand, yanked the stop cord, and, once descended, walked with her the entire way into town and back again. She was very quiet until much later that evening, when, with her family gathered at the table, she announced, “So
mething bad happened to Dovey Mae today.” They listened by the light of the kerosene lamp, the family Bible open in front of Grandpa Clyde. “The mean old conductor man on the trolley car called her a bad name,” she said. “I want to tell you all something. Now hear me, and hear me good. My chillun is as good as anybody.”4 During the years of struggle that followed, Dovey never forgot her grandmother’s words that night.
That day was a galvanizing moment for Dovey Mae. Many years earlier, her grandmother had had a galvanizing moment of her own. When she was still a girl, Rachel had been attacked by the white overseer of a Greensboro farm where her parents had been slaves. “He was meanin’ to bother me,” she told her granddaughter. “I ran and fought, and he stomped on my feet to keep me from runnin’ for good, he said. But I kept runnin’. He wasn’t going to have his way with me.”5
The broken bones in Rachel’s feet never set correctly, and every night after that, she had had to soak her feet and massage them with a homemade salve of mutton tallow and turpentine, just to be able to endure the discomfort of wearing shoes. When Dovey learned this about her grandmother a few years after the incident on the trolley, she better understood something her grandmother used to always say: “No matter what any sign said, what anyone whispered or shouted at you, if you walked tall, no one could bring you down.”6
Grandma Rachel was Dovey Johnson’s beacon. Dovey listened carefully to what her grandmother told her, and she heard loud and clear that the path forward was one of education. Rachel had regaled her grandchildren with stories of her friend, author and educator Mary McLeod Bethune, who had worked her way from the cotton fields of South Carolina to found a black women’s college in Florida. She would go on, during the 1930s, to be appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as special adviser for minority affairs and director of African American Affairs in the National Youth Administration.
When Dovey was in seventh grade, Mary McLeod Bethune came to speak at Charlotte’s Emancipation Day celebration. Grandma Rachel took the entire family to the event. “Mary, I want you to meet my grandchildren,” she said to her old friend. After the event, Grandma Rachel took her granddaughter Dovey aside. “She’s somebody,” Grandma Rachel told Dovey, referring to her friend Mary Bethune, “and you can be somebody too.”7
Dovey Mae Johnson attended Spelman College, where she worked three jobs, juggled majors in English and biology to prepare her for the medical career she envisioned, and edited the school newspaper. While there, she met Bill Roundtree, a student at Morehouse College, Spelman’s brother school. The approaching war and other circumstances would keep them from marriage until some years later.8
Dovey Johnson graduated from Spelman in 1938. In 1941, she became Mary McLeod Bethune’s personal assistant in Washington, D.C. The job blew open the young woman’s horizons, introducing her to the day’s leaders, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. With the onset of World War II, Bethune selected her young protégé as one of the forty black women to train in the first class of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC).9
“You are not doing this for yourself,” Bethune told Dovey. “You are doing it for those who will come after you.” Despite her initial ambivalence, Dovey distinguished herself in the fight for a racially integrated WAAC regiment. The experience set her on a path to pursuing a career in justice and legal protection for those who needed it most. Law would become her life’s focus and passion—so much so, it overshadowed her short-lived marriage to Bill Roundtree, which ended in divorce in 1947.10
Studying law at Howard University was an awakening for Dovey Roundtree. As her biographer, Katie McCabe, wrote of Dovey’s passion for the law, “There was a simplicity about it, and an intricacy, and a logic. Closely reasoned opinions, precedents, constitutional principles—these, woven together, made a kind of sense that imposed itself on the scattered reality of human existence.”11 In addition to her regular law courses, Dovey did legal research for the NAACP legal team, which was headed by future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall.
She passed the D.C. bar exam in December 1950 and was sworn in a few months later, in April 1951. She immediately set about developing a private law practice. Many of her clients came from her church. She allowed the poorest among them to barter for her legal services. In the ten years during which Dovey practiced with her law partner, Julius Robertson, before his untimely death in 1961, the two established a thriving practice. After Robertson’s death, Dovey, who had led the vanguard of women ordained to the ministry in African Methodist Episcopal Church that same year, went on to make a name for herself as a one-woman legal aid society and a force to be reckoned with. By the fall of 1964, Dovey Roundtree was a sought-after defense attorney.
So when Reverend Brown contacted her in October 1964 and asked if he could bring a member of his church to her office, attorney Dovey Roundtree had already formed an opinion about the “Towpath Murder” from the front-page newspaper accounts that she had read. “The case sounded cut and dried and all but decided, what with all these so-called eyewitnesses,” she recalled in a 1990 interview by the late author Leo Damore. She had read the newspaper reports that a tow truck driver near the scene, Henry Wiggins, had identified Ray Crump as the man standing over the corpse. She had also read about the jogger, Lieutenant William L. Mitchell, who had come forward the next day and told police he’d seen a black man dressed like the man Wiggins had described, trailing Mary Meyer as she walked along the canal.
“I met Crump’s mother and his wife,” Roundtree told Damore. “They were all fearfully upset and very worried that something was going to happen to Ray Jr. His mother just worried me to death. She called me day and night. She was afraid there was going to be a killing in the D.C. jail—which eventually became one of my concerns. He was in the D.C. jail, and they had predominately white guards in those days. And those in charge, the captains of the supervisors, were all white men.”12
On her very first trip to the D. C. jail to meet Ray Crump, Dovey found him to be a diminutive little man. “He was no taller than me—I’m five feet four inches—and maybe 140 pounds,” she recalled in 1990. “I never saw anybody as frightened as this man was! Crump was crying; he was pitiful. And to me, he was in a stupor. He asked me that question many times: ‘What was really going on?’ He didn’t know what happened. I had to tell him. He didn’t know a woman had been murdered.”13 She asked him to try to remember everything he did on the day of the murder.
But Crump couldn’t remember very much, and what he did remember he had a hard time expressing. Roundtree was patient. Eventually, a story emerged. Crump had had a fight with his wife, Helena, that morning and he had refused to go to work. Instead, he had met up with a girlfriend named Vivian, whose last name was never made public. Both Crump and his mother, Martha, had finally offered that last bit of information, but Ray hadn’t wanted to reveal his paramour’s identity for fear of repercussions with his wife and the woman’s husband.14
Crump then told Roundtree that he had taken a bus from his house on Stanton Road to a point where he met Vivian in her car. The couple stopped to buy beer, a half pint of whiskey, a bag of potato chips, and some cigarettes. The $1.50 left over was hardly enough to rent a motel room.
“They were trying to figure out where it would be a good place to go,” Roundtree told Leo Damore in 1990. “He’d been fishing on the river on occasion. So it was someplace he knew about.”
“I was goofin’ around,” Crump eventually disclosed.
“And I fully understood what he meant,” Roundtree explained in 1990. “He had sex—the usual thing. He was drinking and he fell asleep. And the girl left. The next thing he knew he was trying to get himself together and he slipped and fell into the water. That scared him. He almost drowned. He didn’t know how to swim. He was really trying to find his way out of the dang place. He wasn’t familiar with that area at all. And he sort of roamed around. And then he heard something like an explosion.”15
“I tried to pin him down,” Round
tree continued. “I asked him, ‘Well, what did it sound like?’ Crump said he heard something ‘like the backfire of a car,’ but he paid no attention to it. He said he was afraid.”
“Well, what were you afraid of?” Roundtree had asked him.
“I don’t know. I was trying to get out of there and I couldn’t get myself together,” she remembered him responding.
“Well, you were half drunk,” Roundtree replied.
“I had to get home,” Crump had told her. “And then, all hell broke loose. Police all around. I didn’t know what was going on.”
“Do you own a gun?” Roundtree wanted to know. Crump said no. He never owned a firearm. His brother Jimmy had a.22 rifle because Jimmy used to go hunting, but not Crump. He didn’t like hunting. He had never owned a gun and wouldn’t have one with five children in his house, Roundtree recalled.
“That made sense to me, so I didn’t pursue it,” said Roundtree. “He wasn’t given to armed robbery. He didn’t have a record like that. He had a job. He was hustling the best way he could. He wasn’t going out to rob anybody.”16
But Crump did have a misdemeanor record: two drunk and disorderly charges and a conviction for petit larceny. Convicted of shoplifting, he’d been sentenced to sixty days in jail, a substantial sentence for a first offense.
“But it was at the whim of the judge,” Roundtree said in 1990. “We didn’t have dialogues about sentencing like we do now. And it may well have been, according to what Ray told me, that he was drinking at the time. And that could have made the judge angry, that would have aggravated it.”17
Toward the end of their first interview at the D.C. jail, the bewildered Ray Crump again asked Roundtree, “What was really going on down there?” And again, Roundtree tried to explain that a woman had been murdered and that he had been arrested for the crime. Crump was already withering under the stress of being in prison. He was withdrawing and was increasingly unable to help with his own defense. That vulnerability convinced Roundtree to take his case. “Instantly, I felt this man was being used as a scapegoat. The crime just didn’t fit him at all,” she recalled. Roundtree believed that Crump didn’t have the temperament to be a killer. “He wouldn’t have the nerve. He was of such meekness, I came to know him to be frightened half out of his wits in fear of his life. And I was afraid for him.”18 So afraid, in fact, that Roundtree did what she had never done for any client: She visited him in jail every day.