by Peter Janney
When the screaming stopped, Wiggins testified, he “heard a shot,” again coming from the direction of the canal. In response, he “ran diagonally across the road” toward the three-foot wall overlooking both the canal and the towpath on the southern side of the canal. In the midst of crossing Canal Road, Wiggins explained, he heard “another shot just as I was reaching the wall of the canal.” Hantman asked “how much of a time interval” had elapsed between the first and second shot, and Wiggins testified that it was only “a few seconds.”34(His partner, Bill Branch, would later testify he thought it was closer to ten seconds).
Peering over the wall, Wiggins testified that he observed “a man standing over a woman lying on the towpath. The man was standing behind the body, facing my direction. The man’s head, was bent down a little; he wasn’t crouched. He was standing.” Hantman wanted to know how much time had elapsed between Wiggins hearing the second shot and his seeing the man. “Just a fraction of a second,” Wiggins testified. Hantman then asked what time of day it was when he had seen the man. In his testimony, Wiggins couldn’t say for certain. “It was around 12:20 P.M., somewhere around there; it may have been later,” he said.35
Henry Wiggins was certain about one point in particular: he had had a clear, unobstructed view of the man standing over the dead woman at a distance of 128.6 feet.36 He told the court that the man had “looked up towards the wall of the canal where I was standing.”37
Hantman: Were you looking directly at him at that point?
Wiggins: I was looking at him.
Hantman: Then what happened?
Wiggins: I ducked down behind the wall at that time, not too long, and I came back up from behind the wall to see him turning around and shoving something in his pocket.
Hantman: Where was he holding this something that you speak of?
Wiggins: He was holding it in his right hand.
Hantman: Could you tell what the object was?
Wiggins: No, sir, I couldn’t.
Hantman: Could you tell us whether it was light or dark or what particular color it was?
Wiggins: It was dark, I believe, some kind of hand object.
Hantman: And he put this hand object where, sir?
Wiggins: Into his right jacket pocket.
Hantman: After this individual put this dark object into right jacket pocket, what did you see him do?
Wiggins: [He] Just turned around and walked over straight away from the body, down over the hill. 38
Next, Hantman asked Wiggins to describe what the man in question had been wearing. Wiggins recalled that the man wore a cap “that buttons onto the brim,” with a light-colored jacket, dark trousers, and dark shoes, all of which the prosecution contended that Ray Crump had been wearing that day. Hantman introduced each article of clothing as government exhibits. The clothes did, in fact, belong to Ray Crump, who had been seen wearing them as he left his home the morning of the murder.
But according to Wiggins, he had only seen the man standing over the body for “around a minute,” and he “didn’t get a very good look at his face.” He qualified this last detail by adding, “but I did get a glance at it.” Hantman asked Wiggins to state the race of the man he had seen. “He was colored,” Wiggins replied. “I think I would estimate his weight around 185 or 180. He was medium build.”
“Were you able to determine how tall he was?” Hantman asked.
“Well, I couldn’t make an exact estimate to that,” Wiggins responded.39
Dovey Roundtree would soon seize upon Wiggins’s uncertainty. Hadn’t the prosecution vaunted Wiggins’s training “in the careful observation of people”? The following morning, the prosecution’s star witness would squander his credibility in less than an hour. Hantman needed Wiggins to identify the clothes Ray Crump was wearing on the day of the murder, and confirm the exhibited items. Roundtree knew where he was heading and objected. Judge Corcoran sustained her objection, saying, “I don’t see how he [Wiggins] can say it was [Crump’s actual clothing] unless he walked up to the defendant and took it off of him.” His one concession to the prosecution was to “allow lookalike testimony” only.40
Hantman became irritated. “I don’t see how the Court could strike it if that is the witness’s testimony.” Judge Corcoran’s response was sharp and unequivocal: “If that is his testimony, it is subject to challenge.”41 The irritation was mutual. That Hantman had been, for the second day, engaged in loud gum-chewing did not endear him to the judge. In fact, Judge Corcoran had taken his young clerk, Robert Bennett, into his chambers during one earlier recess and had admonished him “never to chew gum” when presenting in a courtroom.42
In spite of the fracas with the judge, Hantman pressed on with Wiggins, who appeared not to comprehend the significance of the exchange over the admissibility of his testimony about the clothing.
Hantman: All right. Now, when did you first see these articles of clothing?
Wiggins: I first saw these articles when they were being worn by the defendant when he was standing over the victim at the scene.
Hantman: According to your best recollection, Mr. Wiggins, are these the same ones or do they look like the articles you saw on the man bending over the body of Mary Pinchot Meyer?
Wiggins: They are the same articles which I saw. 43
Again, the exchange was not lost on the defense. Wiggins had unintentionally started to dig his own grave. Dovey Roundtree would merely gave him a bigger shovel to dig deeper.
Roundtree: Do you remember, Mr. Witness, that you also said you had only a glimpse of the person you saw at the scene?
Wiggins: I remember that.
Roundtree: This morning nevertheless, Mr. Witness, you are prepared to tell this court and this jury that these are the pants?
Wiggins: That’s right.
Roundtree: Positively?
Wiggins: Positive.
Roundtree: You are prepared to say that this is the cap?
Wiggins: That is the cap.
Roundtree: And that these are the black shoes?
Wiggins: That is right.
Roundtree: And that this is the jacket?
Wiggins: That is right. 44
Wiggins had already identified Ray Crump as the man he saw standing over the victim. Roundtree used this opportunity to highlight the discrepancy between what Wiggins had reported to the police and the actual size of the defendant.
Roundtree: Would that, then, be an accurate estimate of what you saw, the man you saw weighed 185 and was five feet eight?
Wiggins: That wouldn’t be an accurate estimate, no, ma’am.
Roundtree turned to face the jury.
Roundtree: Well, now, are you telling us you gave them [the police] information which was not accurate?
Wiggins: Well, this information which I gave them at that time which I was looking across the canal down on the subject there, would not be very accurate but as close as I can give. I give it to them as close as I could remember.
Roundtree: And you gave them, though, what you thought you saw from across the canal?
Wiggins: I tried to do my best.
Roundtree: All right. A hundred and eighty-five pounds; five feet eight.
Wiggins: That’s right. 45
If Wiggins was beginning to squirm, the increasingly exasperated, gumchewing Hantman had to have been agitated. His star eyewitness, and his case, were crumbling on the second day of the trial. During his redirect, Hantman asked Wiggins again whether his view of the murder scene had been obstructed in any way. Wiggins reiterated that nothing had blocked his view. Yet Wiggins had contradicted his own testimony. Hantman had opened a problematic door. Dovey Roundtree merely walked Wiggins through it. Seeking to bolster Wiggins’s credibility regarding Crump’s clothing, Hantman had attempted something similar with Wiggins’s description of the suspect’s height and weight—both of which in no way matched Crump’s. Inadvertently, Hantman had damaged the credibility of his star eyewitness so badly that his case would never
recover. The description Wiggins had given police just minutes after the murder took place—”five feet eight, medium build, 185 pounds”—would be reiterated by nearly every one of the twelve policemen and detectives called to testify at the trial, except for two who remembered the height as “five feet ten inches.” This was the description, they all testified, of the man they were told to look for, and it didn’t come close to describing the defendant. Ray Crump shared just one physical feature with the man described on the police radio broadcast on the day of the murder: He was black.
By midmorning of day two, the defense strategy of reasonable doubt had started a crusade. With nearly each of the prosecution’s twenty-seven witnesses, Dovey Roundtree would become a heat-seeking missile: If there was a weakness or discrepancy to be exploited, she would find it and expose it to the jury.
Bill Branch, Henry Wiggins’s tow truck assistant on the day of the murder, took the stand right after Wiggins. Branch had told police that after Wiggins left the murder scene to call police, he, Branch, was too afraid to keep watch over the wall that overlooked the canal towpath. Instead, he sat in the stalled Nash Rambler and waited. Yet on the witness stand, he testified that he had remained at the wall overlooking the murder scene until Wiggins returned with police. Roundtree confronted Branch with the report he had given to police: “I [Bill Branch] didn’t see anyone around her [the murder victim] at that time, I went back to the car.”46 His tail now between his legs, Branch finally took refuge in a convenient loss of memory—”I don’t remember.”47
It now appeared that Hantman, who had painstakingly rehearsed and written out the testimony of each of his twenty-seven witnesses,48 had coached Branch to alter his statement to police. Surely, Hantman was aware of Branch’s written police statement—that he had stayed in the car, and not remained at the wall overlooking the towpath. In addition to exposing Branch’s charade, Roundtree had also managed to reveal one very important fact: Between the time that Wiggins had left and returned with the police, no one had been monitoring the murder scene.
After the day two lunch recess, the trial proceeded with the testimony of two police officers, patrolman Roderick Sylvis and Detective John Warner. A puzzling question had now been pushed to the foreground: if the man Henry Wiggins had seen standing over the corpse of Mary Meyer wasn’t Ray Crump, then who was it? Together, the testimony of Roderick Sylvis and John Warner would reveal one of the most important facts never before understood:Someone else was eluding capture by police.
Hearing the police radio broadcast at 12:26 P.M., police officer Roderick Sylvis and his partner, Frank Bignotti, sped to Fletcher’s Boat House to close off the exit.49 They arrived, Sylvis told Hantman, at “12:30 P.M. or 12:29 P.M.,” having driven their patrol car through the narrow underpass beneath the canal itself. Now facing north, with the towpath and canal in full view and the shore of the Potomac River behind them, they waited for “about four or five minutes.”50 Anyone attempting to leave the entire C & O Canal towpath area would either have to walk through the narrow underpass or cross the canal in an old leaky rowboat that was attached to a rope and pulley on each side of the canal. In fact, that meant there were two exits at Fletcher’s Landing—two entirely different ways to exit the area—that offered immediate access to Canal Road and beyond.51
After waiting “about four or five minutes,” no longer content, the two officers hatched a plan: Sylvis would walk along the towpath toward the murder scene, while Bignotti would walk through the woods adjacent to the railroad tracks parallel to the towpath, both heading east toward the murder scene. Leaving the entire Fletcher’s Boat House area unattended, they risked allowing the killer to walk out unnoticed. Yet even that oversight paled to what was about to unfold.
Sylvis and Bignotti exited their patrol car and spent about five minutes positioning themselves for their eastward trek toward the murder scene. As soon as they started out, “maybe 50 feet at the most” from Fletcher’s Boat House, Sylvis testified, they spotted a young white couple walking westward on the railroad tracks. The two officers approached the couple, informing them “that there had been a shooting on the canal.” Sylvis inquired as to whether they had seen anyone leaving the area. “They did not observe anyone,” Sylvis recalled during his testimony.52 How long had the interrogation of the couple taken? The question had not been asked during his testimony. However, reviewing his testimony in an interview for this book in 2008, Sylvis was adamant that he had asked the young white couple a number of questions, and it had taken “at least five minutes, probably more.”53 That meant the time had to be approaching 1:00 P.M. before the two policeman began bushwhacking their way eastward toward the murder scene, a measured distance of 1.6 miles away. “I remember I proceeded very cautiously,” Sylvis recalled, adding that he had been “taking a lot of time to be observant.”54
Walking slowly and vigilantly for “approximately a mile east on the towpath,” Sylvis told the court, he observed “a head jut out of the woods momentarily, just for a second, and went back. A head of a man, somebody stuck their head out of the woods, and were looking up at me, and pulled back again.” From a distance of “about 150 or 160 feet,” Sylvis identified the head to be that of a “Negro male.” He didn’t remember the man wearing a cap of any kind.55 Sylvis then “proceeded very slowly towards the spot,” sure the man had seen him. He yelled to his partner Bignotti for assistance, but Bignotti didn’t respond, so Sylvis tried to “wave down someone on Canal Road” to assist him. That meant that it took him even longer to arrive at the spot where the “Negro male” had peeked out from the woods.56
How long had it actually taken officer Sylvis to walk “approximately a mile” before he saw the head of a “Negro male” jut out of the woods? Conservatively, it had to have been at least fifteen minutes or more. During his testimony, Sylvis told Hantman that it took him “approximately 10 or 15 minutes” additionally to reconnect with his partner after he had seen the mystery “Negro male.” Reunited, Sylvis and Bignotti spent even more time searching the area together. “We stayed there for a few more minutes and looked around the area where I had seen the head, and then proceeded on back toward Fletcher’s [Boat House],” testified Sylvis.57
Hantman: Approximately what time was it when you saw this unidentified person about a mile down the towpath?
Sylvis: I’d say about ten or fifteen minutes. Let me see—it would be about, about 1:45 or 1:50 [P.M.]. 58
Officer Roderick Sylvis’s answer to Hantman’s inquiry was very likely accurate. The problem, however, was that he had blown the answer he had rehearsed with Hantman, and Hantman knew it. At this very moment, the government’s case against Ray Crump was in peril, and about to be pushed off the edge of a cliff. Why? Because it had already been established during the trial that Ray Crump had been arrested at 1:15 P.M. In fact, Crump had been in the company of Detective John Warner at a location of one-tenth of a mile east of the murder scene for a period of at least ten to fifteen minutes—before he was arrested at 1:15 P.M. The significance of this detail was that the “head” of the “Negro male” seen by patrolman Roderick Sylvis could not have been Ray Crump’s.
Hantman, apparently aware he was standing in quicksand, tried another tactic: He asked Sylvis another rehearsed question.
Hantman: All right, sir. How long, all told, do you recollect your scout car was in the vicinity of Fletcher’s Boat House that day?
Sylvis: I’d say about forty-five minutes. 59
Forty-five minutes. This was the answer that appeared to lift Hantman out of the jam. If Sylvis and Bignotti arrived at Fletcher’s Boat House at approximately 12:30 P.M. and they returned to their patrol car by 1:15, they came back just in time to conveniently hear the police radio broadcast that a suspect had been arrested. But there was just one problem with this version of events: There were no police radios at the crime scene or adjacent to the site of Crump’s arrest. Someone would have had to walk back to a police vehicle at the Foundry Underpass to make the c
all, but no such a call—if one ever took place—was ever mentioned in the trial transcript or any police report.
Dovey Roundtree seized on the discrepancy in patrolman’s Roderick Sylvis’s testimony in her cross-examination:
Roundtree: Mr. Witness, do you know what time the defendant, Ray Crump was arrested?
Sylvis: I know it was approximately 1:15 when it came over the air.
Roundtree: Now, then, thirty minutes after that time you saw a man stick his head out?
Sylvis: Pardon?
Roundtree: Thirty minutes after Ray Crump, Jr. has already been arrested, you saw an unidentified Negro male stick his head out of the woods? 60
Hantman immediately objected, stating that what Roundtree had alleged had not been Sylvis’s testimony, in spite of the fact that it had been. This may have been one of the few moments during the trial where Dovey Roundtree missed a significant opportunity. Why didn’t she ask Judge Corcoran to have the stenographer read back Sylvis’s testimony, confirming that Sylvis had just testified that it had been “1:45 or 1:50 [P.M.]” when he saw the mystery “Negro male”? Sylvis, for his part, must have realized that he had been “off message,” because in the next instant he corrected his testimony and said that he first saw the head of the man poking out of the woods at “approximately 12:45 [P.M.].”61