by Peter Janney
The following day, the prosecution called its final witnesses. Agent Warren Johnson, an FBI firearms expert, told Hantman there were no powder burns or nitrates on Crump’s hands or clothing because he had been in the water that day. Roundtree, however, had already established that the police had never tested Ray Crump, or his clothing, for the presence of nitrates. Moreover, she confronted Johnson with the fact that the standard paraffin test for nitrates in gunpowder typically involves the suspect being asked to wash his hands repeatedly throughout the testing procedure. If a suspect had fired a gun recently, the presence of nitrates would still show up. Since there had been no nitrates discovered on Crump’s clothing or on any part of his body, she argued, there wasn’t any evidence he had fired a firearm that day.
Agent Johnson’s testimony did confirm—and underscore—that whoever killed Mary Meyer had shot her from close range and was likely highly skilled, possibly ambidextrous, in the handling of a.38-caliber revolver. In describing the shots, Johnson had corroborated Deputy Coroner Rayford’s testimony about which hand had fired which shot. 78
Next, Special Agent Paul Stombaugh, of the FBI’s crime lab, testified that in twenty-one out of twenty-two characteristics, Ray Crump’s hair sample was a match for a single hair found inside the golf cap recovered the day after the murder. This forensic analysis, he maintained, linked both the jacket and cap to the defendant. The cap and jacket on exhibit did belong to Ray Crump, but the hair match wasn’t evidence that he was guilty of murder.
In her cross-examination of Stombaugh, Roundtree called into question the entire field of hair and fiber analysis. In preparation for the cross-examination, she had read a number of textbooks, a dozen of which were stacked on the defense table. Stombaugh wasn’t able to answer questions about the latest literature in the field, because he hadn’t read it. He was also unfamiliar with a University of Pennsylvania study Roundtree cited, showing that hair and fiber analysis was far from an exact science. She then compelled Stombaugh to admit that he had never published anything in the field and that he was not, in fact, an expert. But the witness attempted to fight back. He explained that his FBI laboratory relied heavily upon something called neutron activation in analyzing hair and fiber samples. “There is a great controversy raging right now,” Stombaugh testified, and “this field [neutron activation] hasn’t been perfected yet to the point where we can positively identify a hair of some particular person through this method.”79 That admission inadvertently succeeded in making Roundtree’s case for her.
In the end, Stombaugh’s testimony dealt more than one blow to the prosecution. The FBI’s state-of-the-art forensic laboratory in Washington, D.C., had failed to find any forensic evidence—hair, clothing fibers, blood, semen, skin, urine, or saliva—that linked Ray Crump to either the murder scene or the body and clothing of Mary Meyer. Similarly, there had been no traces of Mary Meyer’s blood, hair, fibers, or saliva found on Ray Crump. If the first gunshot had produced a wound that, according to Dr. Rayford, very likely spurted blood, wouldn’t Mary Meyer’s assailant be covered in it? Even if the killer had jumped into the Potomac River in an attempt to flee, it was unlikely that all traces of the victim’s hair, blood, saliva, or clothing fibers would have been completely washed out of his clothes or body. But absolutely nothing had been found on the body, or clothes, of Ray Crump.
In his description of the man he had seen standing over the dead woman’s body, Henry Wiggins had made no mention of any stains, blood or anything else, on the man’s light-colored jacket. Given the intensity of the skirmish and the fight that Mary Meyer had put up, as well as the amount of blood that likely squirted from her head wound, the assailant would probably have been covered with bloodstains easily visible on a light-colored, zipped-up beige jacket, even from a distance of 128.6 feet. Furthermore, the man’s golf cap was in place, not askew, only seconds after the fatal second shot. In the immediate aftermath, the man Wiggins saw exhibited no signs of having been in a violent struggle.
After calling twenty-seven witnesses and introducing more than fifty exhibits, the prosecution rested its case at the end of the day on Tuesday, July 27. The next morning, Dovey Roundtree delivered her opening statement on behalf of her client. In five full days of testimony, she stated, the government hadn’t produced a shred of forensic evidence linking Ray Crump to either the murder scene or the body of Mary Meyer. There was no proof that Crump had handled or fired a gun the day of the murder, and no firearm had been produced. Roundtree maintained that the testimony of Henry Wiggins was flawed: The man he saw, described as five feet eight inches tall and 185 pounds, could not have been the defendant, Ray Crump. The defense’s strategy was simple and effective: Three character witnesses testified for the defendant, the last of whom was Crump’s pastor at the Second Baptist Church in Southwest Washington. Each witness stated that he or she had known Ray in his church and community for more than fifteen years, and testified to his good character.
Over the preceding weekend, Dovey had discussed with her defense colleagues, George Knox and Alan Robeson, the possibility of putting Ray Crump on the stand. She thought that doing so would persuade the jury, once and for all, that the shy, meek, harmless man was incapable of such a crime. But Knox and Robinson were against it. Why jeopardize, they argued, the fact that the government had been unable to prove its case? Roundtree listened, unconvinced.
On Monday, she rode the elevator to the courtroom. The elevator operator, a black woman, took her aside and told her that earlier in the morning the men from the all-white prosecution team had been chortling in the elevator about looking forward to destroying Ray Crump on the witness stand.80 The moment changed everything; Providence had given her a sign. The prospect of her helpless defendant being metaphorically lynched in open court was too big a risk.
As Crump’s last character witness left the stand, Roundtree stunned the prosecution by announcing that the defense would rest its case. She would call no further witnesses. She then told Judge Corcoran that she wished to renew a number of motions, including an immediate judgment of acquittal. Barring that, she wished to renew her motion for a mistrial. It was a bold, deliberate move that caught everyone off guard.
Judge Corcoran denied each of Roundtree’s motions, but he and the prosecution had been taken by surprise. Hantman in particular was caught flatfooted and unprepared. For days, he had eagerly awaited the opportunity to interrogate Ray Crump on the stand, believing he could lead Crump to obliterate any chance of an acquittal. Still, Hantman had one last trick up his sleeve. In his summation rebuttal, he held up the shoes that Ray Crump had worn when he was arrested. Hantman drew the jury’s attention to the two-inch heels in an attempt to make the case that Crump would have been taller than the 5 feet 5½ inches that had been recorded at the time of his arrest.
“This is what gave Lieutenant Mitchell the appearance that this defendant Raymond Crump was his [Mitchell’s] size, his weight, which he said was five foot eight and 145 pounds,” a desperate Hantman pleaded, hoping that the jury would not remember that Crump’s driver’s license had, in effect, established a baseline for his height and weight of “5 feet 3½ inches and 130 pounds.” His closing ploy, along with everything else he had presented, still amounted to little; his case was, at best, circumstantial, if he had any case at all.
Dovey Roundtree, in response, delivered her arguments for reasonable doubt regarding Crump’s guilt. First, she underscored the discrepancy between the 5 foot 8 inch and 185-pound suspect that was wanted by police and the actual height and weight of the defendant. Next, she noted that officers Sylvis and Bignotti had left the rowboat and the exit at the Fletcher’s Boat House underpass unattended; anyone could have left the area undetected during the time they went on their search. Roundtree also explained that had there been a struggle between the victim and the assailant, such as the prosecution had underscored throughout, fibers from Mary Meyer’s blue angora sweater would have been found on the defendant; yet there were none. Simila
rly, blood from Crump’s cut finger would have been found on the victim’s clothing, but had not been. Roundtree also reminded the jury that mapmaker Joseph Ronsisvalle didn’t know about a number of exits out of the towpath area, through which an assailant could have easily fled. Finally, Roundtree asked, with the vast resources that the government had at its disposal—helicopters, scuba divers, the state-of-the-art FBI Crime Laboratory, more than forty police officers and detectives assigned to the case, the draining of the canal, the repeated combing of the murder scene area for weeks—why hadn’t the murder weapon been found? Because, she argued, the real killer had escaped from the towpath area with the gun.
“I leave this little man in your hands,” attorney Dovey Roundtree concluded to the jury, “and I say to you fairly and truly, if you can find that he is five feet and eight inches tall, that he weights 185 pounds, irrespective of what he wore that day—if you can find—I cannot from this evidence—and I say you must have a substantial and a reasonable doubt in your minds, and until the Government proves its case beyond such doubt, then you must bring back a verdict of not guilty.”81
As the jury deliberated, they sent word for all photos that had been submitted as evidence. And they wanted the answer to two questions: (1) Had the police ever actually gone to the rock from which Crump said he had been fishing before allegedly falling from the rock into the water? (2) Was the defendant Ray Crump left-handed or right-handed? Judge Corcoran gave the jury the photos, but he told them that with regard to their other two requests “your recollection of the evidence controls.”
The following morning, Friday, July 30, 1965, the jury found Raymond Crump Jr. not guilty of the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer. Dazed and nearly catatonic, Ray had been standing behind the table along with his defense team. Dovey Roundtree embraced him. His mother, Martha, began singing praises to the Lord and other church members shouted hallelujahs throughout the courtroom. Mary Meyer’s longtime friend Cicely Angleton was reportedly sitting in the back of the courtroom and showed little emotion. As Dovey led the now-wobbly Ray Crump out of the courtroom, her adversary, Alfred Hantman, cast one final, embittered look toward her. He had just lost the most important case of his career, and he would never congratulate Roundtree or even acknowledge her victory.
Immediately after the trial, Hantman received a call from Ben Bradlee.
“What went wrong? Why had Crump gotten off?” queried Bradlee.82 Hantman would always maintain it had been a racial verdict, still convinced in 1991 that Dovey’s “ministerial” approach had profoundly affected the majority-black jury. “They’d take her word on anything,” Hantman said. Even in 1991, he was still confident that he had assembled enough evidence to get a conviction.83 His view was upheld by the Justice Department, which would always maintain that Crump had been guilty. The case, though unsolved, would never be reopened. U.S. Attorney David Acheson complained that Henry Wiggins had been a huge disappointment.
That night, an exhausted Dovey Roundtree, still very concerned for Ray Crump’s safety, put him on a bus for North Carolina, but only after his belongings were released to him. From the $1.50 that he had had in his possession at the time of his arrest, Crump handed his defense attorney, the woman who had saved his life, the dollar bill, thanking her in the only way he could. She told him she would “treasure it” forever as a keepsake.
In the wake of the trial, jury foreman Edward Savwoir resented the insinuation, widely reported in the media and shared by the police department as well as many of Mary Meyer’s friends, that the jury’s decision had been racially motivated and that Crump had gotten away with murder. Savwoir never wavered from what he told reporters after the trial: “There were many missing links…. we didn’t get the man on the scene.” Even twenty-five years after the trial, Savwoir was emphatic: “There was no gun. They [the prosecution] never proved he [Ray Crump] was at the murder scene, they never proved he had anything to do with it. If Crump had a gun, someone in his community—his wife—would have known it.”84
The case catapulted Dovey Roundtree, awash in accolades in the wake of her victory, to citywide and national prominence. “She was an incredible force in any courtroom she appeared,” said her former colleague George Peter Lamb after the trial, “and it wasn’t just because she’s also a minister in a black church. Dovey’s soul was rooted in the law and the fair application of justice for everyone—white or black. Everyone was entitled to it. She not only believed it, she lived it, and lived it fully. She was such a star, and a class lady.”85
One of the first people to call and congratulate her was former U.S. assistant attorney Charles Duncan, now general counsel for the EEOC, the prosecutor who was first assigned by the Justice Department to prosecute the case. He confessed that he never thought she could win the case. Roundtree had to restrain herself. She reminded him of how many times she had tried to reach him in the beginning. “I appreciate your call, Charlie,” she remembered saying. “It’s mighty nice of you to call. But I wish you had made this call six months ago. It would have saved a lot of people a lot of grief!”86
Unfortunately, Raymond Crump’s grief—and troubles—were only beginning. Dovey Roundtree believed that Crump’s nine months in jail had transformed him from a gentle man into a violent one. Convinced he had been taunted, beaten, abused, and possibly raped during his incarceration, Roundtree was heartsick. “He was not a remotely violent man when he was jailed for Mary Meyer’s murder in 1964,” she wrote in 2009, “but he became one afterward, both in the District of Columbia and in North Carolina, where he eventually moved with his second wife.”87 In fact, after the trial Ray Crump’s alcoholism became acute. Within the next few years, he would be charged with arson, assault with a deadly weapon, and violently threatening two girlfriends. In one fit of rage, Crump reportedly set his home on fire with his wife and children inside. His family escaped unhurt, and Ray was given a stiff prison sentence in North Carolina. Upon his release, he maintained his downward trajectory, committing arson once again and serving more jail time.
The condition known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) wasn’t formally recognized until 1980, though working models dealing with its cluster of symptoms were engendered in the early 1970s. Like the innocent, ill-prepared young men sent into harrowing and prolonged traumatic combat conditions in places like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, Ray Crump had been psychologically and physically maimed by the violence and brutality he was subjected to during his nine-month incarceration. Continually threatened, terrified, and increasingly unable to cope, what little ego strength he possessed disintegrated over time. Like many returning combat soldiers, he became a broken, shattered man, capable of violence to others and to himself. Unfortunately, for many of Mary Meyer’s community and family in Washington, as well as people in the Justice Department, including Alfred Hantman, Ray Crump’s subsequent path of violence and crime merely served to bolster their belief that Mary Meyer’s true killer had gotten away with murder.
Crump’s post-trial criminal career also impressed high-profile criminal defense attorney Robert S. Bennett, who had closely observed the trial as Judge Corcoran’s law clerk. In his book In the Ring, published in 2008, Bennett wrote that he would have convicted Crump “because of the overwhelming evidence.” In his view, Hantman had failed to get “into the heart and soul of jurors,” because he had overtried the case, most notably with Henry Wiggins. “It diluted the impact of his evidence,” Bennett recalled in an interview for this book in 2009. “Hantman was primarily responsible for losing the case.” Bennett had been convinced of Crump’s guilt in part because he “gave the police an unbelievable explanation of why he was on the towpath—that he went fishing—especially since his fishing tackle was never located.”88
Author Nina Burleigh reached a similar conclusion about Ray Crump’s guilt. In spite of having been told in her one interview with Dovey Roundtree that Ray had been having a sexual tryst with a girlfriend adjacent to the canal towpath area on the Potoma
c,89 Burleigh nevertheless posed the same old, timeworn questions: “If he wasn’t fishing, what was he doing there?” “Why did he toss his hat and coat in the water?”90 According to Burleigh, “Dovey Roundtree the advocate would always contend in public that Crump was innocent,” insinuating that she might believe otherwise in private, and even going so far as to suggest that the attorney’s religious belief in Christian forgiveness rendered the factual basis of her clients’ earthly guilt or innocence irrelevant.91 Did Nina Burleigh actually believe that Dovey Roundtree would have staked her entire professional career and reputation, not to mention considerable financial resources, on the defense of someone whose innocence she wasn’t unequivocally convinced of? If so, that conclusion was entirely at odds with everything that Roundtree stated or wrote publicly about this case, including her private journey from initial doubt to absolute certainty about Crump’s innocence, detailed in her 2009 autobiography.92
Of all that she accomplished in her victory in the case of United States of America v. Ray Crump, Jr., Defendant, Roundtree wrote that she had been particularly gratified that she might have helped to ensure a continued search for the true killer: “I believe, too, that in winning acquittal for Ray Crump, I made it impossible for the matter of Mary Pinchot Meyer’s murder to be sealed off and forgotten, as the government so clearly wanted to do. There is much about the crime that bears the most serious and sustained investigation, and to the extent that my efforts in defending Raymond opened the path for researchers seeking to know more about the troubling circumstances surrounding her death, I am gratified.”93 Such “serious and sustained investigation” was long in coming. For twelve years, those who knew about Mary Meyer’s diary and her relationship with President Kennedy chose to remain silent, until the National Enquirer finally broke the story in 1976.