Dovey Undaunted

by Tonya Bolden

  When Ray was first questioned by police, a cop had asked for some identification and Ray had handed over his driver’s license. It had him down as 5 feet 3 ½ inches tall and weighing 130 pounds.

  The DC Jail had him logged in as 5 feet 5 ½ inches tall and weighing 145 pounds.

  21

  HAIR IS NOT LIKE FINGERPRINTS

  HANTMAN CALLED SIX MORE witnesses that Wednesday.

  There was Bill Branch, the guy Wiggins had been working with on that stalled Rambler, a man who gave muddled testimony on his movements after Wiggins ran over to the low-rise stone wall. And Branch was confused about whether he heard two shots or three.

  The other witnesses were cops. One testified that once at the crime scene, he saw on the ground “signs of a scuffle,” long drag marks behind the victim’s body. Another officer admitted that by the time he got on the scene someone could have escaped through the exit he had been sent to guard.

  If any courtroom spectators were daydreaming or about to doze off, they probably perked up when Officer Roderick Sylvis testified that when he was on the towpath he saw the head of a Black man pop out from the woods, then pop back in. He couldn’t say for sure if the head had a cap. But he did say that his search for the person was in vain.

  Dovey:You can’t, of your personal knowledge, say that the person whose head you saw is this defendant, Raymond Crump, can you?

  Sylvis:No, ma’am.

  On the witness stand Officer John Warner identified Ray as the man he had stopped after he had testified that he was told by Scout Car 71 to be on the lookout for a Black man wearing a light jacket and a dark hat and approximately 5 feet 10. He also testified to Ray’s wet clothes, blood on his right hand, a tear on his pants, his fly unzipped, and to his story that he’d been fishing. Warner said he asked Ray to show him where he’d been fishing and that in doing so at one point Ray stopped. When Warner asked him how much farther, Ray said, “Just around the bend.”

  Dovey pursued this point in her cross-examination.

  Dovey:Around the bend where the defendant indicated that he had been, did you know whether or not there were rocks there?

  Warner:I don’t know. I never looked there.

  Dovey:You never went up there?

  Warner:No, ma’am.

  ON THURSDAY, JULY 22, day four of the trial, Hantman began as he had ended the day before.

  With police officers.

  To testify about finding a light-colored jacket, a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes about half full, a cap—a mind-numbing amount of minutia. More than once Hantman elicited testimony about Ray’s fly being unzipped.

  Under cross-examination, Lieutenant Arthur Weber said that he had been on the lookout for a “stocky” man about 5 feet 8 inches to 5 feet 10 inches tall.

  Dovey also used her cross to reveal that no fingerprints had been found on that pack of Pall Malls. More important, that Ray’s hands had never been tested for gunshot residue. Hantman had no proof that on the day of the murder Ray had fired a gun.

  After Officer Weber noted that Ray’s hands had been wet, Dovey rendered him a somewhat weak witness.

  Did Weber know exactly how long Ray’s hands had been in water?

  He did not.

  Couldn’t a technician find gunshot residue under fingernails?

  Weber:I don’t think nitrates—I am not an expert.

  Dovey:Oh, you are not an expert?

  Weber:I am not an expert.

  The most damaging testimony for the defense came from Elsie Perkins, Ray’s next-door neighbor.

  Perkins said that on the morning of the murder, she had seen Ray leave home not at his usual time (about 6:30 a.m.) but closer to 8 a.m. He was wearing a white T-shirt, a yellow sweatshirt, a jacket (beige or tan), and dark trousers.

  Hantman:Did he have anything on his head?

  Perkins:He had a cap, a kind of plaid cap.

  When Hantman showed her Exhibit 14 and 15, the cap and the jacket, Perkins said she’d seen Ray wearing them before. Several times.

  Perkins also testified that on the morning of the murder Ray had no fishing gear with him when he left home and that later that day while visiting Helena Crump she had seen that gear in their living room closet. She also said that, like her, Ray smoked Pall Malls.

  Dovey used her cross to make the most of other things Elsie Perkins had not seen.

  A bulge in a jacket pocket as if Ray was packing a .38-caliber pistol?

  Perkins had seen no bulge.

  Had she ever seen Ray with a gun?

  No.

  AROUND 3:20 P.M. JUDGE Corcoran told jurors that they would be excused until Monday. This was a concession to Dovey. That morning, she had asked him for a day’s recess. “I am a one-woman office,” she explained.

  At the end of every day, the judge cautioned jurors against talking about the case. Now that they would have three days off, he doubled down on this warning. “There will be all kinds of news stories. You will probably hear news broadcasts, TV broadcasts, and you may have friends who may want to know what is going on. Please refrain from talking to anybody if you can avoid it.” If anyone leaned on them for information, they were to contact the marshal’s office. “Try to avoid any contact with the case even among yourselves,” added Corcoran. “Forget it for the weekend.”

  In his coverage of the day’s trial, Evening Star staff writer William Basham spent quite a bit of ink on Elsie Perkins’s testimony in an article headlined “Meyer Witness Links Cap to Crump.” He also reported that “some 40 policemen, Park police scuba divers, Navy deep sea divers and soldiers with mine detectors” had conducted a “thorough” search for that .38-caliber pistol, but no gun was ever found. That information had come from Detective Weber.

  In addition, Basham reported that over the last two days “under cross examination by Mrs. Roundtree,” most of the policemen who took the witness stand said they had been told to be on the lookout for a Black man who was about “five-feet-ten and weighed about 180 pounds. Crump is noticeably shorter and slender.”

  WHEN THE TRIAL RESUMED on Monday, July 26, and on the day after that, the jury heard from ten more prosecution witnesses.

  Along with police officers, there was a National Park Service surveyor, the jogger William Mitchell, a police photographer brought in from his hospital bed, and three FBI special agents: a firearms expert; an expert on stains, including bloodstains; and an expert on hair and fibers. Also, having been unable to get into evidence that bloodstained section of the tree the victim had supposedly clung to, Hantman entered instead a photograph of it.

  Hantman scored some victories with Mitchell. He testified that it was from a distance of two or three feet that he saw a Black man trailing the victim, a man who had on a cap with a brim, a light windbreaker, and dark pants. He estimated his weight to be 145 pounds. His height: “about my height.” Mitchell was 5 feet 8 inches tall. When shown the cap, jacket, and pants, Mitchell said they were “similar” to those of the man he saw.

  Was this man carrying a fishing rod?

  “No, no fishing rod,” replied Mitchell.

  Allison C. Semmes, the FBI special agent on stains, testified that blood found on the victim’s clothing was type O, as was the blood sample taken from her body in the morgue. Semmes couldn’t say that there were bloodstains on the jacket that allegedly belonged to Ray, only “three very small diluted appearing stains” that “possibly consisted of blood.” Dovey used her cross-examination to establish that no one else’s blood had been found on any of the victim’s clothing.

  Spectators in Criminal Court 4 may well have thought at first that the defense suffered a major blow in the testimony of FBI Special Agent Paul Morgan Stombaugh, the hair and fibers expert. He explained that he had used a microscope to examine the hair found on the cap and jacket and the hair sample taken from Ray, looking for twenty-two different characteristics. He found that the hair on the cap and jacket matched the hair sample from Ray. He concluded that all the hair came from the sam
e person or from two different people whose hair was identical on the microscopic level. However, in his opinion, the latter was a remote possibility.

  Dovey didn’t have the money to bring in a hair expert, but she had done her homework. In her cross-examination, she read a passage from a book on criminal investigations by a former FBI investigator who wrote, “At best an expert can say that two specimens of hair are similar.” An expert could not say that “they are identical.”

  Stombaugh’s testimony failed to prove that the cap and jacket belonged to Ray.

  Dovey:In other words, hair is not like fingerprints?

  Stombaugh:No. Hair changes characteristics. Fingerprints do not.

  After the witness was excused, Hantman addressed Judge Corcoran. “Your Honor please, that is the Government’s case. And the Government rests.”

  The next day, Dovey mounted her defense. Finally, the jury would hear her opening statement.

  22

  EXHIBIT A

  DOVEY’S DEFENSE WAS ROOTED in her first impression of Ray on that late October day in 1964.

  Incapable.

  The crime simply didn’t fit the man.

  What would she show and show and show?

  In her opening statement Dovey told jurors that despite the prosecution’s “great quantity of evidence” they simply couldn’t find proof that Ray was the person “who fired the gun on that fatal afternoon causing the death of Mrs. Meyer.”

  Dovey would also show her client to be a “person of peace and good order in the community wherein he lives.”

  She anticipated jurors wondering, So what?

  “Evidence of good character may be sufficient alone without anything else to raise a reasonable doubt,” she said, “and having raised reasonable doubt in your minds, then you may not convict Raymond Crump Jr. as charged of murder in the first degree.”

  Against Hantman’s more than forty-five exhibits Dovey would present just one.

  “No one said, ‘This is Exhibit A’ ” but, she said, the jury had seen this evidence every day of the trial.

  Ray was Dovey’s Exhibit A.

  “And I urge you, ask you, as we go forward, to look at Raymond Crump Jr. and then you weigh him besides the evidence that you have before you these long, tedious days of the trial.”

  In contrast to Hantman’s fifteen-plus-page opening statement, Dovey’s runs just a little over two pages.

  Next Dovey called her witnesses.

  HOMEMAKER LOUISE WESTER WAS the Sunday school superintendent at Ray’s church, Second Baptist Southwest. She had known Ray for about twelve years.

  Roach Young (occupation not recorded) also attended the same church. He had known Ray for about thirteen years.

  The Reverend Jesse A. Brown, pastor of Second Baptist Southwest, had known Ray for about eighteen years.

  All three testified that Ray was known to be not a violent person, but rather peaceful, calm, quiet.

  After the Reverend Brown left the witness stand, Dovey addressed Judge Corcoran: “At this time, if it please the Court, the defendant rests.”

  Dovey had begun her opening statement around 10:40 a.m. When she rested it was about 10:55.

  “There wasn’t a sound in the courtroom, except Mr. Hantman’s chair scraping as he stood up and looked at me, and then at Judge Corcoran, in pure astonishment.”

  After the jury was ushered out, Dovey and Hantman stood at the bench.

  Hantman:If Your Honor please, I am caught completely flatfooted at this moment because I never anticipated in my wildest dream that counsel would rest her case without—

  For one, he thought she’d be calling more witnesses.

  Typically, before closing arguments the defense and prosecution confer on the instructions to be given to the jury. Hantman didn’t have his paperwork ready. But he’d have to get it done within a few hours. Corcoran, also taken back by the brevity of Dovey’s defense, wanted Dovey and Hantman to give their closing statements that afternoon. “I hate to keep this jury sitting around,” he told them. “They are getting impatient, I can see.”

  Corcoran had the jurors brought back in, told them that they’d hear closing arguments around 2:30 p.m., then excused them.

  23

  ADLER HEELS

  IN THE TRIAL TRANSCRIPT, Assistant US Attorney Alfred Hantman’s closing statement begins on page 903 and ends on page 926.

  Between his start and finish Hantman reminded the jury of the charge against Ray, that he “purposely and with deliberate and premeditated malice did shoot Mary Pinchot Meyer with a pistol causing injuries as a result of which Mrs. Meyer died.”

  He reminded them of the vial of blood.

  The bullets.

  The dark circles around the victim’s wounds.

  The blood-stained tan gloves.

  The abrasions and lacerations on the corpse.

  The map.

  Henry Wiggins’s testimony that he had seen Ray standing over the body, then shoving something into a jacket pocket.

  Elsie Perkins’s testimony about what Ray was wearing on the morning of the murder.

  FBI Special Agent Stombaugh’s testimony on Ray’s hair sample being a match for hair found on the jacket and the cap.

  “Can there be any doubt that this jacket and this cap are the articles of clothing owned by and worn by Crump on October 12th 1964?” Hantman asked as he exhibited the clothing once again.

  There was a lot more Hantman wanted jurors to remember, from testimony by police about arriving on the scene and one officer seeing a Black man’s head pop out of a wooded area to Ray having been found soaking wet and his claim that he’d been fishing.

  “Tie this up,” said Hantman. “Tie this up with the testimony of Mrs. Perkins. When she saw the defendant leave his home that morning he wasn’t carrying anything.”

  “Tie that up,” said Hantmen, “with the testimony of Mr. Mitchell,” the jogger who said he had seen a Black man in a cap and light windbreaker trailing the victim.

  Hantman also reminded the jury that when first approached by police, Ray, besides being wet, had a cut on his hand.

  And that his fly was unzipped.

  Hantman once more reminded the jury of blood—on the tree, on the victim’s clothes. He asserted that “in all probability” the three small stains that the FBI agent found on the jacket that allegedly belonged to Ray were bloodstains. “They were Mary Meyer’s blood that spattered when she was shot.”

  When done, he thanked the jury.

  It was about 3:30 p.m.

  After a ten-minute recess, Dovey gave her closing statement.

  SHE FIRST THANKED THE jury for its “attentiveness,” its “seriousness,” and apologized if at any point she seemed “overly aggressive and pushy,” if she seemed in any way to be discourteous to Judge Corcoran or to Mr. Hantman. “But,” she added, “my business here has been the business of a man’s life laid on the line with circumstantial evidence.”

  On the day after the murder, police officers, along with bystanders, watch as the Park Police's Private C. G. Vermillion prepares to dive into the C&O Canal in search of the gun.

  Like Hantman, she, too, wanted jurors to remember what Wiggins and Mitchell had said about the suspect’s height and weight.

  Was Ray 5 feet 8 inches tall?

  Did Ray weigh 185 pounds?

  Dovey continued to sow seeds of doubt.

  Could someone have escaped the area before or after police arrived on the scene?

  Where is the gun?

  How did the prosecution explain the absence of any of the victim’s blood on clothing that allegedly belonged to Ray?

  Had a strand of Ray’s hair been found on Mary’s body?

  How could there have been no transfer of blood or hair if, as the prosecution claimed, there had been a great struggle?

  She reminded the jury of what her character witnesses had said about Ray.

  “Lawyer” was almost done.

  AS ON OTHER DAYS in Criminal Court
room 4, Ray didn’t just have Dovey with the law degree, Dovey who had taken classes at Georgetown Law, Dovey who had been practicing law for fourteen years fighting like a tiger for his life.

  The other Dovey was there too: the granddaughter of a once electrifying preacher, the granddaughter of a woman who had prayer and praise song pulsing through her home, the daughter of a Sunday school superintendent, the daughter of a woman who led a choir, the girl who grew up in a “God’s House,” the woman who became an AME minister.

  “I leave this little man in your hands.”

  Both Doveys were bringing it home.

  “And I say to you fairly and truly, if you can find that he is five feet and eight inches tall, that he weighs 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.”

  HANTMAN WASN’T DONE. AS was his right, he made a rebuttal argument.

  “Circumstantial evidence is equally competent, equally forceful, equally as admissible with direct evidence,” he said. He reminded the jury that Wiggins had been a specialist in the Military Police Corps and made it sound as if Wiggins had only said the man “looked” to be about 185 pounds.

  Hantman even said that he didn’t think a difference of 35 or 40 pounds was all that significant, restating that once in custody Ray had been found to be 5 feet 5 ½ inches tall and to weigh 145 pounds. He put his Exhibit 17, Ray’s black shoes, on the lectern in front of the jury box.

  Hantman:Look at the heels on these shoes. They are practically Adler-heel shoes. There are at least, as I look at it, and you will have to make up your own mind, two inches of heel on that pair of shoes. These are the shoes the defendant was wearing.