by Tonya Bolden
“Tall, prepossessing, an imposing figure with bristling eyebrows and an extraordinary legal mind,” according to Peter Janney, Hantman, white and forty-seven, “conveyed a formidable authority.” Some remembered the former World War II Army Air corpsman and George Washington University Law school graduate as “a screamer and a bully.”
WHILE DOVEY WAITED FOR the Court of Appeals ruling on whether Ray had been illegally detained, she was absolutely consumed by this case that wasn’t a paying one. Ray had no money. It seems that Ray’s parents were able to provide some money, but not much. So not only was Dovey not getting paid for her time, but most of the expenses were coming out of her pocket, from court filing fees to her investigator’s fees.
Dovey spent a lot of time on Ray’s case. Time spent thinking and planning. Time spent drafting and filing motions. Time spent in court hearings on those motions. She also spent a lot of time exploring the crime scene and environs.
Jerry Hunter remembered that on “most Saturday afternoons, or whenever we got the chance we went to Georgetown and the canal. There wasn’t a blade of grass we didn’t know about.”
After Dovey began exploring the area, she began getting telephone calls, often after midnight.
No words.
Only breathing.
The more she investigated the crime scene area, the more frequent the calls. Too, during those explorations Dovey felt eyes on her, sinister eyes, at times.
Dovey had few allies and sources of support within the white legal community. “My very presence, I knew, irritated and threatened many of the white judges and lawyers in the courthouse, male and female alike.” Many were still galled by her admission a few years earlier to the once all-white DC Women’s Bar Association, thanks to the valiant efforts of a future judge, Joyce Hens Green.
And these were still days of both promise and peril on the civil rights front.
On Sunday, March 7, 1965, scores of civil rights activists suffered the sting of tear gas, the agony of lashes from bullwhips, the pain of being trampled by sheriff’s deputies and Alabama state troopers on horseback. This happened on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, during a peaceful march to Montgomery, the state capital, in protest against the rampant suppression of the Black vote through such measures as literacy tests and violence.
As cries for justice continued, Dovey continued preparing her defense of Ray Crump Jr.
On June 15, 1965, the US Court of Appeals upheld, 2–1, the lower court’s ruling on that business about the preliminary hearing.
A new trial date was set.
Dovey had thirty-four days to be ready.
17
VOIR DIRE
ON MONDAY, JULY 19, 1965, jury selection for United States v. Raymond Crump Jr., criminal case number 930-64, got underway where all DC felonies were tried back then: in the US District Court for the District of Columbia on Constitution Avenue.
The presiding judge was a white, fifty-nine-year-old World War II veteran named Howard Francis Corcoran, a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Princeton, and Harvard Law.
At first Dovey didn’t know what to make of Judge Corcoran, who had been practicing law since the 1930s, primarily as a corporate lawyer. Corcoran’s public service included several years with the US Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York. For one of those years he was acting US Attorney. But Corcoran was a brand-new judge, appointed by President Johnson just a few months before Ray’s trial began.
In sizing up Corcoran, Dovey concluded that he had zero tolerance for “foolishness in his courtroom, from counsel or anyone else.”
Next to size up were the prospective jurors via voir dire (French for “to see to speak” or “to speak the truth”), a hearing to establish the admissibility of evidence, to determine whether a person was qualified to take the witness stand as an expert witness—and also to reduce a large pool of potential jurors (in this case more than seventy-five people) to a small group of actual jurors.
When it comes to the jury, defense and prosecution lawyers usually begin by asking prospective jurors about their backgrounds, occupations, and attitudes, looking for clues as to whether Miss X, Mr. Y, or Mrs. Z would be a benefit or a detriment to the defense or prosecution side.
Did they harbor racial prejudice?
Did they distrust cops?
In this case, with capital punishment a possibility, both sides would have wanted to know how prospective jurors felt about the death penalty. Jurors may also have been asked how familiar they were with the C&O Canal towpath, if they fished in the part of the Potomac River that runs parallel to the canal, and whether they had ever been the victim of a crime, violent or otherwise.
In weeding out jurors, defense and prosecution were able to strike an unlimited number of jurors for “cause”—that is, for a specific reason. There was also the option of peremptory challenges, strikes that didn’t require a reason. Here the limit was twenty.
AS QUESTIONS WERE ASKED and answered, as minutes ticked by, General Services Administration warehouse worker William M. Coston and IBM keypunch operator Cecelia L. Cyr were among those dismissed “for cause.” The phrase “cap. pun.” is scribbled after their names in a voir dire document.
One of Dovey’s peremptory challenges was Cornelius V. Kelliher Jr., an administrative assistant at the CIA. Although Dovey didn’t need to provide a reason for having him removed, it’s easy to understand why she didn’t want him on the jury. Scribbled after Kelliher’s name was the fact that he had been attacked with a knife and his mother had been robbed, events which might prejudice him against someone accused of a violent crime. Also, Kelliher knew “by sight” a police officer who would be a prosecution witness.
A page pertaining to jury selection. It shows some jurors were struck for cause and others for reasons that didn't have to be explained. "G" indicates a peremptory challenge made by the prosecution on behalf of the government. What looks like a triangle indicates one made by Dovey on behalf of the defendant.
There’s no knowing what went through Ray’s mind as he sat at the defense counsel table learning bits and pieces about the women and men who might sit in judgment of him, listening to people’s views on the death penalty, then perhaps staring intently at the faces of the twelve main jurors and four alternates who were left when voir dire ended.
The main jury was composed of four white people and eight Black people, five men and seven women. They included Evelyn S. Carpenter, a clerk at the Treasury Department; Cecilia Chmielewski, a homemaker; Bessie E. Hawkins, a nurse’s aide at St. Elizabeths Hospital; and Archie N. McEachern, a taxi driver with the Coast Line Cab Company.
The jury’s spokesperson was Edward O. Savwoir, a Black program specialist at Job Corps.
After Savwoir and the other jurors were sworn in, Ray was sent back to the DC Jail.
“Jury Ready for Trial of Crump,” the Washington Post announced the next day, reporting that two jurors had been struck because of bias. What they knew about the case had “influenced their judgment.”
The Post didn’t say what that judgment was.
18
SCARED TO DEATH
“THE GOVERNMENT’S PROOF AS you will hear it from the lips of the very many witnesses that appear from this witness stand will be clear, convincing, and should lead the jury to the honest conclusion by each of you that Raymond Crump Jr. deliberately, willfully and maliciously shot and killed Mary Pinchot Meyer,” a woman “in the high noon of her lifetime when death struck suddenly and violently at about 12:25 p.m. on the afternoon of October 12, 1964.”
This is from Assistant US Attorney Alfred Hantman’s opening statement on Tuesday, July 20, 1965.
Hantman told the jury what Mary was wearing on the clear, chilly day that she was killed on the C&O Canal towpath—gray slacks, white shirt, two gray sweaters and over them a thicker blue Angora sweater. She also had on tan leather gloves, tennis shoes, and sunglasses.
What the victim didn’t have with her was
money or jewelry, “nor were there any other manifestations of wealth that could be seen by anybody who happened to be on the towpath at that time.”
Hantman was driving home the point that Mary’s murder wasn’t the result of a robbery gone wrong: “We will show, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that Mary Pinchot Meyer met with violence and death after a struggle with the defendant to escape his unprovoked attack upon her.”
Police officers and detectives at the crime scene.
Ray, said Hantman, had approached Mary Pinchot Meyer from behind, “dragged her some 20 to 25 feet across the towpath towards an embankment which led down to the railroad tracks out of view of the people who happened to be traveling along Canal Road in their automobiles.”
Mary Pinchot Meyer cried out, “God, somebody help,” and continued to scream for about twenty seconds.
Then came the shot to the head with a .38-caliber revolver.
Still Mary put up a fierce fight, said the prosecutor.
“We will show you by clear and convincing evidence that Mary Pinchot Meyer immediately upon being shot grabbed her head. We will show you after she did that, she grabbed a tree.”
Hantman promised to show that Ray tried to drag Mary from the tree. And Hantman was prepared to bring into the courtroom the blood-stained section of that tree.
And the struggle continued, said Hantman, alleging that Mary tore at Ray’s jacket, ripped one of his pants pockets, desperately trying to escape, then—
Bang!
The shot to the right shoulder.
This bullet “coursed laterally through the body, severed the aorta which carries the blood to the heart and came out just underneath the skin over the heart area.”
Hantman’s “We will show . . .,” “We will show . . .,” “We will show . . .” went on and on, probably intended to persuade jurors that the evidence was overwhelming.
His opening statement is a little more than fifteen double-spaced typed pages.
And Hantman had more than forty-five exhibits lined up to show the jury. Besides the victim’s clothing, among the items he wanted to enter into evidence were two bullet slugs, a blood sample, a map, slides of hair, slides of fibers, a photograph of a button, a statement from Henry Wiggins, and that blood-stained section of the tree.
What’s more, Hantman had sixty-one witnesses lined up to testify. More than half were cops.
“I was completely overwhelmed by what he promised the jury he was going to present,” Dovey told a journalist years later. “I was scared to death.”
BEFORE THE PROSECUTOR’S OPENING STATEMENT, before the jurors took their seats in Criminal Courtroom 4, Dovey, her co-counsel George Knox, and Hantman stood before the bench for about fifteen minutes, going over some things with the judge (a “sidebar”).
For one, Dovey chose to beat a dead horse. Declaring Ray’s non-preliminary hearing “so prejudicial as to taint all proceedings,” she motioned that a preliminary hearing be held forthwith or that the indictment be dismissed.
Corcoran:You went to the Court of Appeals on that, didn’t you?
Motion denied.
Hantman had requests too. He wanted to post a large topographical map of the towpath area on the wall opposite the jury box. The map, he said, would be affixed to the wall with a type of tape that would not “mar” the courtroom walls and could be easily removed.
Corcoran:I am not concerned about that.
He was, however, concerned about the size of the map, that it might be “so huge as to constitute prejudice.” He told Hantman that he’d decide on the map after he saw it.
Eventually, the judge called for the jury to be brought in. By 10:30 that morning the twelve jurors and four alternates had taken their seats in the jury box. Corcoran explained to them how things were to work.
The attorneys would make opening statements outlining what they were out to prove and also closing statements. These statements, Corcoran stressed, “do not constitute evidence.” Furthermore, if in their closings, prosecution or defense mentioned something that did not “jibe with” the jurors’ recollection, “it is your recollections which is to control you. You are to be the sole judges of the facts and the issues of fact in this case.”
The judge also told the jury that the defendant didn’t have to prove his innocence. Innocence was presumed. It was the prosecutor’s job to prove guilt.
Beyond a reasonable doubt.
It was shortly after this that Hantman launched into his opening statement about all that he would show, and show, and show.
When he finished, he and Dovey were back at the bench. She wanted it on record that she found Hantman’s statements “inflammatory and high prejudicial”—especially the bit about the blood-stained tree.
Corcoran:You have made your record.
Back in open court, it was time for Dovey’s opening statement.
“The courtroom was quiet, expectant, as I rose.” What Dovey said certainly surprised Hantman and likely stunned everyone else in the courtroom.
Dovey:If it please the Court, at this time we will reserve our opening statement on behalf of the defendant Raymond Crump.
Onlookers who didn’t know Dovey’s reputation may have thought that she was unprepared. Not so. “There are times, in trial, when it is best to hold one’s peace,” she later explained. “To reveal anything about the basis of my case to the prosecution placed me at great risk. I thought it best to tread lightly, and watch, and make my move when I saw an opening.”
However, when the judge called for a fifteen-minute recess, she did not tread lightly. At the bench, she told Judge Corcoran that Hantman’s opening statement was so prejudicial as to be grounds for a mistrial.
Corcoran:No, I don’t think it is grounds for a mistrial.
AFTER THE RECESS, HANTMAN called his first witness.
Someone with clout and from the same social class as Judge Corcoran and Mary Pinchot Meyer.
Someone brusque and at times full of bravado.
19
THANK YOU, SIR
HANTMAN’S FIRST WITNESS WAS the person who had identified Mary’s body in the DC Morgue, her brother-in-law Ben Bradlee, still Newsweek magazine’s Washington bureau chief, but not for much longer. That week’s issue announced that Bradlee was leaving Newsweek to become deputy manager of the Washington Post.
Journalist and author Zalin Grant reasoned that Hantman “scheduled Bradlee as the first witness, thinking in part, no doubt, that this well-regarded journalist and known friend of President Kennedy would make a good impression on the jury and help build his case.”
Forty-three-year-old Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee possessed prestige beyond that.
Raised in Boston, Bradlee was a Harvard graduate and ex-navy intelligence officer. His family tree included a wealthy New York lawyer, a fine artist, an ambassador to Britain, an editor of the high-society magazine Vanity Fair. And Bradlee was a descendant of counts, princes, and kings.
THROUGH HANTMAN’S DIRECT EXAMINATION of Ben Bradlee, jurors learned a series of bare-bones facts.
Bradlee’s address.
Bradlee’s occupation.
Bradlee’s twelve and a half years with Newsweek.
Bradlee’s relationship to Mary Pinchot Meyer.
Bradlee’s identification of her body the morning after the murder.
There was also Bradlee’s familiarity with Mary’s habit of taking walks along the C&O Canal towpath, his knowledge that she was a painter, that her studio was a converted old garage, and that on the night of her murder he had discovered in that studio her pocketbook. “It contained a wallet, some cosmetics and pencils, things like that.”
We don’t know if Bradlee made a good impression on the jury. If he impressed or intimidated Dovey, it doesn’t seem that she showed it in her cross-examination.
Dovey:Mr. Bradlee, I have just one question.
Bradlee:Yes, ma’am.
Dovey:Do you have any personal, independent knowledge regarding the causes of t
he death of your sister-in-law? Do you know how she met her death? Do you know who caused it?
Bradlee:Well, I saw a bullet hole in her head.
Dovey:Do you know who caused this to be?
Bradlee:No, I don’t.
Dovey:You have no other information regarding the occurrences leading up to her death?
Bradlee:No, I do not.
Dovey:Thank you, sir. I have no further questions, Your Honor.
In less than a minute Dovey had made Ben Bradlee irrelevant, an example of why George Peter Lamb, one of Ray’s original Legal Aid attorneys, hailed her as “the world’s greatest cross-examiner.”
But all was not smooth sailing for Dovey J. Roundtree. Most frustrating of all: Ray had an alibi that she could not use.
When first questioned by police near the crime scene, Ray had said that he’d been fishing in the Potomac River, had slipped on some rocks, fell in. Thus the tears on his clothing. Thus the bleeding cut on his hand when a detective stopped him.
Where was his fishing gear?
Lost in the river, said Ray.
When cops searched the area where Ray said he’d been fishing, they found no fishing gear. After his arrest, armed with a search warrant, cops went to his home, an attached yellow-brick number in Southeast DC’s Stanton Terrace public housing complex. In Ray’s living room closet, cops found his fishing rod and tackle box.
Ray had lied to cover up an extramarital affair.
ON THE MORNING OF the murder, instead of going back to the job Brown Construction Company had him on (paving work at a hospital), Ray had met up with his girlfriend, Vivian. They picked up some booze, cigarettes, chips, then headed for a spot near the C&O Canal where Ray did sometimes fish.
After they “fooled around a little,” Ray fell asleep, so deeply, he told Dovey, that he slid into the river. When he woke up, got himself out of the water, girlfriend was gone. Ray was making his way to a bus stop when a cop approached him.