by Peter Janney
That would have been physically impossible. Having already testified that he had arrived at Fletcher’s Boathouse at “12:30 P.M. or 12:29 P.M.,”62 then waited “about four or five minutes,” before deciding on a plan with his partner, only to then spend “at least five minutes, probably more” interrogating the young white couple before beginning to vigilantly walk “a mile east on the tow path,” Sylvis would have had to have been a world-class runner to spot the mystery “Negro male” man at 12:45 P.M. It was, in fact, accurate that about an hour later, “about 1:45 [P.M.] or 1:50 [P.M.],”—Sylvis’s initial response to Hantman—that he spotted the head of the mystery “Negro male,” who could not have possibly been Ray Crump.
When Roundtree confronted Sylvis with the discrepancy, he had to have realized that by first telling the court that it was 1:45 P.M. when he saw the “Negro male,” he had risked sabotaging the prosecution’s case against Crump. Sylvis now wanted the court to believe that it had occurred at 12:45. But his initial answer to Hantman’s inquiry of “about 1:45 or 1:50 [P.M.]” was the correct answer, and he confirmed that with me in 2008.63 Crump, it will be shown, was already in the custody of Detective John Warner east of the murder scene as early as 1:00, which could only mean there was a second “Negro male” on the towpath that day and that he had eluded capture—as well as the attention of the court proceedings.
Indeed, a cornerstone of the prosecution’s case was that the man Sylvis had spotted was, in fact, the fleeing Ray Crump. Prosecutor Hantman hammered that point home repeatedly throughout the trial. Should that assertion be successfully challenged, the case against Crump would crumble. That was about to happen, although it would again elude the scrutiny of the defense and remain hidden in the trial transcript until now.
Detective John Warner, scheduled to testify after Sylvis, had not been in the courtroom during Sylvis’s testimony. It was customary to keep witnesses from hearing other testimony in order to reduce the possibility of collusion and fabrication. Warner was therefore unaware of the various conflicting time stamps that had jeopardized the prosecution’s case. Warner testified that he had arrived at the Key Bridge entrance of the canal towpath at 12:29 P.M. with his partner, Henry Schultheis. They waited there until 12:40, he said, at which point Warner decided he “was going to cover the area between the railroad tracks and the towpath in the wooded area,” while his partner would cover “the area to the left of the railroad tracks to the [Potomac] river bank.”64 Warner proceeded to walk westward toward the murder scene through the woods adjacent to the railroad tracks for what he estimated had been “forty-five minutes” before discovering the wet, somewhat disoriented Ray Crump more than one-tenth of a mile east of the murder scene itself. 65 If Warner’s recollection was accurate, he would have come across Crump at approximately 1:25, ten minutes later than the official time stamp of Crump’s arrest at approximately 1:15.
Under direct examination by Hantman, Warner proceeded to alter his testimony, saying that it had been 1:15 P.M. when he first saw Crump at a location one-tenth of mile east of the murder scene. Hantman appeared to be irritated with Warner for not following the script, so Warner, under cross-examination by Roundtree, eventually changed his testimony again to 1:14 P.M. (In their testimony during the trial, several detectives and police officers had already established that Detective Bernie Crooke had arrested Ray Crump on the railroad bed directly below the murder scene at approximately 1:15 P.M.)
The government’s case was slowly spiraling out of control, yet the Roundtree defense team appeared to be missing another critical moment. Detective John Warner’s testimony was undermining the prosecution’s case. Warner told Hantman that he stopped Crump on the railroad tracks and identified himself as a police officer, and Crump took out his sodden wallet and handed over his D.C. driver’s license. Crump, Warner testified, hadn’t been running when he discovered him; “he was walking.”66 Warner had looked at the name and photograph on the license to confirm Crump’s identity. He hadn’t needed to read the physical description—5 feet 3½ inches and 130 pounds—to realize that Crump wasn’t a match for the general broadcast, which had put the height of the suspect, according to Warner, at 5 feet 10 inches, though he wanted to maintain during the trial that he hadn’t noticed Crump’s physical description on his license. In the unlikely event that that were true, why wouldn’t he have arrested Crump immediately?
Hantman: Did you at any time say anything to him or did he say anything to you?
Warner: Yes, sir. I identified myself as a police officer. I asked him who he was, and he replied, “Ray Crump.”
He took his wallet out, and when he took his wallet out, water dripped out of his wallet as he handed me his D.C. driver’s license.
I asked him then if he had heard any pistol shots. He replied no.
I said, “How did you get so wet?” He says, “Well, I was fishing from a rock, and I fell into the river and went to sleep, fell off the rock, fell into the river.”
I said, “Well, where is your fishing equipment?” He said it went into the river, too.
I said, “Your rod and everything?” He said yes.
I said, “Well, where are your fish?” He said they went into the river too.
I said, “Who were you fishing with?” He said, “No one.”
I asked him then if he would point out the spot as to where he was fishing from, I would help him, see if I could retrieve his fishing gear for him. And he says, “Yes, sir.”
And he led us back up in a westerly direction, up the railroad tracks.
Hantman: About what time was this when you first saw the defendant standing 32 feet in front of you soaking wet?
Warner: This was 1:15 P.M ., sir.
Hantman: 1:15?
Warner: P.M., sir. 67
Warner was asking an entire courtroom to believe that in the space of literally no time at all, he had spotted Crump, who “was walking,” at “1:15 P.M.” and at a distance that would be measured to be 532 feet east of the murder scene,68 whereupon he proceeded to ask Crump a series of seven questions, with Crump giving his answer to each question, before the two then began to walk along the railroad tracks in the westerly direction toward where Crump said he had been fishing—only to then find themselves one-tenth of a mile later (532 feet) immediately parallel and below the murder scene, where Crump was supposedly interrogated and arrested at 1:15 P.M. by Detective Bernie Crooke.
Warner’s testimony was as ludicrous as it was dishonest. Under cross-examination, he changed the time when he first came upon Ray Crump; it was now “1:14 [P.M.],”69 an obvious attempt to reconcile with what previous police testimony had officially established as Crump’s time of arrest of 1:15 P.M. This incensed Dovey Roundtree, who discerned in Warner’s conflicting testimony further evidence of prosecutorial shenanigans. Yet in spite of a second demand for a mistrial—a demand Judge Corcoran rejected—it wasn’t clear whether Dovey Roundtree, or even the jury, had grasped the full implications of Detective John Warner’s testimony, which was simply this: Ray Crump was not the only black man in the towpath area on the day of the murder.
Detective Warner had clearly first come upon the defendant well before 1:15 P.M. and at a distance of more than a tenth of a mile east of the murder scene. His methodical, seven-question interrogation of Crump, followed by their walk together, had to have taken at least ten, maybe even as long as fifteen, minutes before the two eventually found themselves parallel to, and beneath the murder scene, the place where Crump would be, by all accounts, officially arrested at approximately 1:15 P.M.
If Crump was in the physical presence of Detective Warner at a distance of a tenth of a mile east of the murder scene sometime around 1:00 P.M., he could not have possibly been the same “Negro male” that officer Roderick Sylvis spotted approximately six-tenths of a mile west of the murder scene well past 1:00 P.M. Detective Warner’s testimony had, therefore, inadvertently corroborated the fact that a second, unidentified “Negro male” had eluded police
capture.
More policemen were called to testify the following day. Collectively, their testimony offered nothing in the way of incriminating evidence against Crump and, instead, expanded the grounds for reasonable doubt. A neighbor of Crump’s testified that she saw Ray leaving his house the morning of the murder wearing his light-colored beige jacket and golf cap. In fact, some facsimile of a light-beige Windbreaker jacket—seen by eyewitnesses Henry Wiggins and allegedly by Lieutenant William L. Mitchell on the “Negro male” each of them saw—was the most conspicuous evidence that, according to the prosecution, identified the killer. For Henry Wiggins in particular, it had been the distinguishing piece of clothing, and it was a jacket very similar to the prosecution’s exhibit that lay before the court. So important was the jacket as evidence, its very existence—including its location and whereabouts—seemed to have a life of its own.
And so, before the end of day three of the trial, a fascinating element—its real significance never realized during the trial, or afterward—was revealed. It involved possibly the most critical piece of evidence: the light-colored beige windbreaker jacket, allegedly worn by the defendant.
Harbor Precinct policeman Frederick Byers was called to testify. Under direct and cross-examination, Byers was adamant: He had received a radio call at “about one o’clock or a little after” to search in his patrol boat for a “lightcolored beige jacket,” which he would eventually find at “about 1:46 P.M.” at a distance of 1,110 feet southwest of the murder scene.70 How did he know where to look? Moreover, neither the defense nor the prosecution questioned the time—”about one o’clock”—that Byers asserted he received the call, nor why he had been asked only to search for a jacket, and not a golf cap. (The cap, the reader will recall, was found the day after the murder on the Potomac River shoreline, 684 feet from the murder scene.)
If the prosecution wanted to maintain that Crump wasn’t arrested, by all accounts, until 1:15 P.M., how did police know to start looking for a jacket at “approximately one o’clock”? That was very possibly before Crump had even been spotted by any police officer, much less apprehended, and before Henry Wiggins identified Crump, subsequent to his arrest at 1:15 P.M., as the man he had seen standing over the victim wearing a jacket and cap.
Detective Warner, by all accounts the first police officer to encounter Ray Crump, had likely done so in the vicinity of 1:00 P.M., but he had had no means of communication with any other police officer until Sergeant Pasquale D’Ambrosio spotted him with Crump right before 1:15 P.M. D’Ambrosio had first arrived at the murder scene at 12:35 P.M. The Chief Detective, Lieutenant Arthur Weber, also the ranking homicide officer, and detectives Crooke and Coppage arrived at the murder scene at approximately 1:00 P.M.71 There were no portable police radios at the crime scene. If there had been, Henry Wiggins and patrolman James Scouloukas would not have had to return to the police cruiser parked at the Foundry Underpass to call in a radio broadcast description of the killer.
The implication of Byers’s testimony is inescapable: Someone, other than police, was monitoring the murder scene and the events unfolding around it. And it appears that someone, other than police, who had access to police band radio frequencies radioed Byers and gave him instructions to start looking for the jacket, and told him where to look for it. Whoever the caller was, he had to have known that Crump was no longer wearing his jacket before he was first spotted by Warner (somewhere in the vicinity of 1:00 P.M.) and subsequently arrested by Detective Crooke at approximately 1:15 P.M.
When the trial recessed for a three-day weekend on Thursday, July 22, Dovey Roundtree was still holding her own; her strategy of establishing reasonable doubt at almost every juncture was bearing fruit. Before the recess, Roundtree again focused the jury’s attention on the description Henry Wiggins had given police of the man he saw standing over the body: 5 feet 8 inches, weighing 185 pounds. In her cross-examination of Chief Detective Arthur Weber, a twenty-three-year veteran and the ranking officer of the D.C. Homicide Squad in charge of the investigation, attorney Roundtree further highlighted this discrepancy:
Weber: We were looking for—to the best of my recollection—a Negro who had on a light-colored jacket and a dark cap.
Roundtree: Did that lookout not also include the fact that he weighed 185 pounds?
Weber: From my recollection that I remember from the [PD-251] lookout, I had—one of my ways of doing this—I had a picture in my mind of a stocky individual.
Roundtree: Did that not include also the fact that the lookout indicated he was about five feet eight or ten inches?
Weber: In my mind, yes. 72
The chief detective’s admission underscored the defense’s position that the man Wiggins had seen could not have been the defendant, Ray Crump. That this came from the most senior ranking police officer at the murder scene, the man in charge of the entire investigation, would not be lost on the jury. But there was still one eyewitness left to testify, and that individual was potentially lethal to the defense.
The lean, trim William L. Mitchell took the witness stand the afternoon of Monday, July 26. The reader will recall that Mitchell, an Army lieutenant stationed at the Pentagon in the fall of 1964, claimed to have been out for his daily lunchtime run on the towpath the day of the murder. He had come forward to police, he said, because he recognized the victim from newspaper accounts, and believed she was being followed by a “Negro male,” who was wearing clothes identical to those Henry Wiggins had seen. At the trial, Mitchell identified himself no longer as a military man but as a mathematics instructor at Georgetown University. He gave the same address he had given to police nine months earlier: 1500 Arlington Boulevard, in Arlington, Virginia, an apartment complex known at the time as the Virginian.73
The presence of Lieutenant William L. Mitchell had troubled Dovey Roundtree from the very beginning. What else, Roundtree wondered, might Mitchell add to the information he’d already given? How might he elaborate on what he’d told police the day after the murder? Mitchell had refused to return her phone calls in the months before the trial; she had little to go on. But whatever he said, whatever claims he might make in his testimony, she feared the jury was certain to believe him, simply because he appeared to be the quintessence of credibility: educated, a retired military officer, a Georgetown University mathematics instructor. And he was white. At a murder trial where the innuendo of an attempted sexual assault by a black man upon a white woman had captivated the attention of an entire city, William L. Mitchell indeed presented a formidable threat. Might the jury even go so far as to overlook the discrepancy in Wiggins’s height and weight testimony, given Mitchell’s corroboration to police of the clothing description that was nearly identical to what Wiggins had seen? Potentially, this spelled doom for Ray Crump, Roundtree told Leo Damore years later, because Ray had lied on two important counts: his clothing, and his reason for being in the area on the day of the murder. Without testimony from Crump’s girlfriend, Vivian, Roundtree still feared the possibility of ruination for her client.
As a witness for the prosecution, Mitchell was a cool customer. He didn’t fall into the same traps that had tripped up Henry Wiggins. When asked by Hantman to identify the exhibits of Crump’s and Mary Meyer’s clothing, Mitchell made certain to say only that they were “similar to the clothes worn by the individual,” not the exact clothes he had seen that day. He described the “Negro male” he had seen following Mary as “about my height, about five-feet eight [inches],”74 and then added that he, Mitchell, weighed “about 145 pounds.” The reader will recall that this was the precise weight that police recorded for Crump after his arrest on the day of the murder.75
Mitchell was careful to stop short of saying that Ray Crump was the man he had seen. Doing so would have invited a fierce cross-examination from Roundtree, which might have aroused suspicion and damaged Mitchell’s testimony. Instead, Mitchell slyly and repeatedly implied that the man he’d seen was indeed Crump. The man he saw, he told the court,
“had his hands in the pockets of his jacket when I passed him.” He carried “no fishing rod.”76
Hantman asked Mitchell if he had seen anyone else on the towpath the day. Mitchell testified that he had twice passed “a couple walking together,” as well as a younger runner—”about twenty”—wearing Bermuda shorts.77 The runner in Bermuda shorts was never identified, and he never came forward. Patrolman Sylvis had already testified about seeing the couple, a point that corroborated Mitchell’s account, bolstering his credibility, but Sylvis had obtained no identification and the couple never came forward to police. Aside from his own claim, no one ever substantiated that Mitchell had been on the towpath that day, or any other day.
In spite of Mitchell’s calm demeanor, Roundtree probed for weak spots in his testimony, in which Mitchell reported with military precision his time on the towpath, and approximately when and where he was located at each of several critical points on the line of the murder. Roundtree focused on another detail that would undermine Mitchell’s well-rehearsed precision: Had he been wearing a watch? Mitchell was forced to concede that he hadn’t; he couldn’t be entirely certain that the times he gave were exact. He admitted that he had based his accounting of the time he returned to the Pentagon on the “clock in the barbershop of the [Pentagon] basement athletic center,” which read “a quarter of one.” It was a small but significant detail, again establishing a degree of reasonable doubt about Mitchell’s account.
Yet Mitchell’s assertion that the man he passed weighed “about 145 pounds” was troubling to the defense. It was too close for comfort, in spite of Mitchell’s claim that the man he had seen was “about my height, about five-feet eight [inches],” clearly taller than Ray Crump. The weight match wouldn’t be lost on Hantman, who would exploit it for all it was worth, along with one other detail, in his summation. At the end of his testimony, William Mitchell’s sheen was still untarnished; he remained a model citizen, and he had delivered precise eyewitness testimony that corroborated the less-than-stellar witness Henry Wiggins, thereby indirectly and ironically resuscitating the Wiggins testimony. At that point in the proceedings, in the eyes of the jury, it may have still been anyone’s case to win.