Epilogue
On October 12, two days before her birthday, Mary left her studio around noon for her regular walk along the towpath of the C&O canal. A man grabbed her from behind and shot her in the head. She flailed, tried to run, fell, staggered to her feet. The man pushed his gun against her shoulder blade and fired again. The bullet pierced her aorta, killing her.
Who killed Mary Meyer?
We know this much: Police arrived almost immediately. Fifteen minutes later, they spotted a small black man. Twenty-five-year-old Raymond Crump, Jr. was wet, with weeds pasted to his T-shirt. His hand was bleeding. His fly was open. He said he’d been fishing, had fallen asleep, dropped his pole in the water, woke up, and fell into the water trying to retrieve it. His bloody hand and a cut over his eye? Branches in the river had scraped him. In the water, near the murder scene, police found Crump’s torn jacket; they never found a gun. Forty-five minutes after the murder, police arrested Crump. They found his fishing gear—at his home. Later, he would say he’d come to the canal to have sex with a prostitute.
At trial, Crump was represented by Dovey Roundtree, a civil-rights activist, minister, and legendary defense lawyer. The prosecutors presented fifty exhibits and testimony from twenty-seven witnesses but offered no forensic evidence. Roundtree’s cross-examinations focused on a single point: eyewitnesses had described a killer considerably larger than Crump, who stood 5’3” and weighed 130 pounds. Roundtree called three witnesses and offered one exhibit: the defendant. Her thirty-minute closing argument was a reminder that the prosecution’s witnesses were not credible: “You hold in your hands the life of a man—a little man, if you please.” On July 30, 1965, after eleven hours of deliberation, the jury acquitted Crump.
Who killed Mary Meyer?
We have all watched hundreds of hours of police shows on television and read bushels of thrillers; it’s hard to hear about a murder and not think about solving it. When the murder is epic—and none in America in the last century is more epic than the assassination of the president—it becomes a parlor game: Whodunit?
There are two books about Mary Meyer.
In A Very Private Woman: The Life and Unsolved Murder of Presidential Mistress Mary Meyer, Nina Burleigh is more interested in Meyer’s life than her murder; she sees Meyer as an early feminist, a rebel, and an artist, not just a socialite who happened to be the president’s mistress. When she deals with Meyer’s murder, she notes that Crump, who had mental problems and a history of violence against women, would go on to spend time in federal prison for arson and be convicted of the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl—maybe he did kill Mary Meyer.
Peter Janney grew up with Mary Meyer’s sons. His father was a CIA official; Janney suspects he was a conspirator in her murder. As an act of atonement for his father, he spent decades investigating Meyer’s death. The result—Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace—fills 636 pages. Janney’s obsession produces a suspect he finds more likely than Ray Crump: the jogger who claimed to have witnessed the murder. That man, he discovered, was linked to the CIA.
JFK and Mary Meyer is a novel, but so built on fact that only the romance is invented. It was the romance that hooked me. Kennedy was damaged goods. Mary was his last hope for a healthy relationship; I wanted to write that relationship. So I didn’t begin with a theory about her murder, and I didn’t develop one along the way. For a simple reason: I didn’t need to. I always knew when the diary—which is, by definition, written by someone who doesn’t know the future—would end: just before Mary’s murder. And I always knew how it would end: after deep mourning for her lost lover, Mary was moving beyond despair.
But I can’t avoid the chilly reality. Two lovers, both shot to death. Two murders, eternally unsolved. Was his assassination a coup? If so, was her murder just a bit of housekeeping? Or were these murders isolated events: a demented loner in Dallas, a demented loner in Georgetown?
This much I know. Even in 1963, when I was seventeen, I didn’t believe Oswald was the sole assassin. That year, this was a common opinion: a poll found that 52 percent of Americans believed “others were involved,” while 29 percent thought Oswald acted alone. More than half a century later, those views are virtually unchanged—61 percent believe others were involved in the assassination, and 33 percent believe Oswald acted alone.
In 1963, at seventeen, I was so busy with my own life I couldn’t process the implications of my disbelief. It took Vietnam to make me confront America’s dark side. After that, I couldn’t not see it—every time I’d turn away, looking for the light that cast so dark a shadow, some fresh horror would remind me that there are terrible things done in my name. A conspiracy to kill the president? Credible. A conspiracy to silence his lover? Also credible.
I was a journalist for four decades, and I have a journalist’s love of facts and a resistance to conspiracy theories. Mary had been a journalist after college; in her assassination research, she had great energy and a good eye for facts. Theories of the murder were more elusive; she may not have learned who pulled the trigger, but she definitely felt she knew who paid for the bullets. I’m less sure. Don’t conspiracies usually unravel? If Kennedy’s murder was the product of a conspiracy, the conspirators have, remarkably, kept their secrets for over fifty years.
During a newspaper strike, New York Times columnist James Reston said, “How can I know what I think if I can’t read what I write?” That happened here. I set out to write one story, and I did, but when I read it, I saw I’d also written another, about power and institutions and the way they intersect to make that power and those institutions permanent. Mary Meyer had an insider’s look at that process. It’s entirely possible she paid for it with her life.
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Acknowledgments
In distant 1989, Libby Handros asked me to write the script for Trump: What’s the Deal? That was a prescient subject for a documentary; when Libby mentioned Mary Pinchot Meyer, I prudently started to research this book.
At Skyhorse, deep gratitude to Tony Lyons, Mark Gompertz, and Caroline Russomanno, who compressed the leisurely pace of book publishing into a sprint without any loss of professionalism. For editorial guidance, Mary Hawthorne was my unfailing beacon light. Julie Metz, the gold standard in cover design, suggested Mimi Bark, another gold medalist. Wiley Saichek adeptly managed Internet publicity. The readers of HeadButler.com contributed unvarnished commentary on an early draft. My research only took me so far; when I needed to channel Mary Meyer, I was guided by Kim Bealle, Carol Fitzgerald, Karen Collins, Maeve Kinkead, Helen Kornbluth, Susan Lehman, Karen Maiorano, Paige Peterson, and Victoria Traube. Friends who helped, by word or deed: Patricia Bosworth, Dominique Browning, Judith Bruce, Michael Bush, Deborah and Michael Cindrich, David Patrick Columbia, Lisa Dickey, Pimm Fox, Jessica Goodrich, Melissa Hamilton, Christopher Hirsheimer, Judith Kahn, Dorothy Kalins, Richard Kornbluth, Rachael Kramer, Bram Lewis, Diane Meier, Brinton Parson, Sima Patel, Liane Reed, Elinor Renfield, Carolyne Roehm, Don Schlitz, Frances Schultz, Roger Sherman, Deborah Shriver, Amelia Smith, Roger Smith, and Warren Wechsler.
About the Author
Jesse Kornbluth has been a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and New York, and a contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. His books include Married Sex: A Novel; Highly Confident: The Crime and Punishment of Michael Milken; Pre-Pop Warhol; and Airborne: The Triumph and Struggle of Michael Jordan; he has collaborated with Twyla Tharp (The Collaborative Habit) and Frank Bennack (Leave Something on the Table). His play, The Color of Light, had its Equity premiere in 2019; he has written screenplays for Robert De Niro, Paul Newman, ABC, and PBS. He cofounded Bookreporter.com; from 1997 to 2002, he was editorial director of America Online. In 2004, he launched a cultural concierge site, HeadButler.com.
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