Ron Rosenbaum - The Mysterious Murder of JFK’s Mistress (Singles Classic)

The Mysterious Murder of JFKs Mistress

By Ron Rosenbaum and Philip Nobile

Copyright 2016 by Ron Rosenbaum and Philip Nobile

The paint was still damp on Mary Meyers final canvas when she left her studio for a walk. It was a circular canvas. In her recent work she had been exploring the effects of swaying velvety semicircles of color across unprimed circles of canvas.

She pointed an electric fan at the undried painting. It was a chilly fall day; she put on gloves, pulled on a sweater and a sweatshirt over her blouse and covered those three layers with a heavy blue cable-knit angora, complete with hood.

From the outside, the studio looked like the garage it had once been. It was one among a row of garages along an alleyway behind the backs of two rows of brick townhouses fronting on N and O streets in Georgetown. Since her divorce, she had spent three or four days a week working in her studio, a few steps away from some of her closest friends, whose homes abutted that alley. Her sister, Tony, and Tonys husband, Ben Bradlee, lived on one end; Mr. and Mrs. John Kennedy lived on the other end until they moved to the White House. Occasionally, Mary Meyer would take walks with Jackie along the towpath paralleling the old Chesapeake and Ohio barge canal.

That was where she was heading now, in fact: out the alley, left on 34th street, down to the foot bridge that leads across the canal and onto the towpath between the canal and the wooded embankment that descends to the Potomac.

She reached the towpath about noon that day, Monday, October 12, 1964. John F. Kennedy had been dead almost a year. It was two days away from Mary Meyers 44th birthday.

AIR FORCE LIEUTENANT William Mitchell left the Pentagon Athletic Center on the Virginia side of the Potomac about noon, crossed over the Key Bridge, exited down the steps to the towpath and began his regular run 2 miles west to a fishing spot on the river called Fletchers Landing and back again. He passed three people on his way westa middle-aged couple and a young white man in Bermuda shorts.

He passed two more people on his way back east to Key Bridge. First there was the woman in a blue hooded sweater. He met her just as she was crossing the wooden footbridge a mile from Key Bridge. He came to a full stop in front of the bridge and allowed her to cross it alone to avoid jostling her in mid-passage. Picking up speed again, 200 yards farther east, the lieutenant came upon a black man walking in the same direction as the woman. The man seemed to the lieutenant to be about his size, wearing a light-colored windbreaker, dark slacks and a peaked golf hat. The mans face didnt leave much of an impression on the lieutenant.

HENRY WIGGINS HAD just raised the hood of the gray Rambler when he heard the screams. Wiggins had been pumping gas at the M Street Esso station when he got a call to take his truck over to Canal Road, where a Rambler with a dead battery was stalled on a shoulder across from the canal.

The screams were coming from the vicinity of the canal. It was a woman. Someone help me, someone help me, she cried. Then there was a gunshot. Wiggins ran across the road to the stone wall above the canal. A second gunshot. When he looked over the wall, Wiggins saw a black man in a light jacket, dark slacks, and a dark cap standing over the body of a white woman in a blue sweater. Wiggins saw the man place a dark object in the pocket of his windbreaker, then watched him disappear down the far side of the towpath into the wooded incline dropping down to the edge of the Potomac.

JAMES ANGLETON WAS angry at his wife, Cicely. Here he was in the middle of a big conference at CIA headquartersAngleton was then chief of counterintelligence for the CIAand his wife was interrupting the meeting with a silly fantasy. According to a radio bulletin, an unidentified woman had been slain on the towpath that afternoon, and Cicely was sure the victim was their old friend Mary Meyer. She had often warned Mary not to go there alone.

Angleton dismissed his wifes anxiety. That evening they had planned to drive Mary Meyer to a poetry reading and he saw no reason to change anything.

When they arrived at Marys home that night, her car was in the driveway, yet the lights were out inside. A sign hanging on her door said Free KittensRing Bell or Call. No one answered the bell. At his wifes insistence, Angleton checked Marys answering service. They told him Mary had been murdered. The Angletons hurried to the Bradlees home, where they helped make funeral arrangements. Later that night, Angleton returned and rescued three kittens from the empty house.

Soon the CIA chief would learn he had a mission of great delicacy to perform. An intimate of Mary Meyers had charged him with recovering and disposing of her secret diary, a diary that contained references to a very special affair.

THE MANHUNT BEGAN less than five minutes after the murder. When Henry Wiggins phoned the D.C. police from the nearby Esso station, the dispatcher sent squad cars full of men from all over the precinct racing to seal off he five well-marked exits from the towpath across the canal to the streets of Georgetown. With the exits sealed off soon enough, police figured theyd trapped the murderer on the hilly wooded strip of bank between the canal and the river (which was chilly and too wide at that point to afford an escape).

Officer Warner was heading east through the underbrush along the roadbed of the old C & O tracks. He emerged from a detour into a shadowy spillway to find standing, in the middle of the tracks, a short wiry black man, dripping wet and covered with grass and twigs. Water ran out of the wallet the man offered as identification. He said his name was Raymond Crump Jr. He had been fishing around the bend, he told the officer, had fallen asleep on the riverbank and woke up only when he found himself sliding down the bank into the water.

Officer Warner asked Raymond Crump Jr. to show him exactly where around the bend he had been fishing. Raymond Crump started to lead him west along the shore. They didnt get far.

WHEN HE ARRIVED at the body with the medical examiner and eyewitness Wiggins in tow, Detective Bernard Crooke was struck immediately by how beautiful the murdered woman was. Ive seen a lot of dead women, Detective Crooke says, but none who looked beautiful when dead. She even looked beautiful with a bullet in her head.

Crooke didnt have much time to reflect upon this. A few minutes after he arrived, as he was still trying and failing to find some identification on the body, a cry went up from Henry Wiggins, who was peering down the bank that descended from the towpath to the C & O roadbed and then down the river. Wiggins was pointing at two figures on the roadbed below. One was Officer Warner; the other was Raymond Crump Jr. Thats him, shouted Wiggins, pointing at Crump.

Five minutes later, a handcuffed Crump was brought before Crooke. Why is your fly open? Crooke asked Crump.

You did it, Crump said. Crooke didnt like that. He didnt like the fishing alibi Crump told him, but Crump stuck to his story. As he was led past Mary Meyers body toward a squad car to be booked, Crump looked down at the blue-angora-clad body.

You think I did that? he asked.

Crooke thought he did it. Then came what was for Crooke the clincher. He was interrogating Crump back at the stationhouse when one of the men who had been searching the shoreline for the still missing murder weapon brought back to Crooke something he had found in the Potomaca light-colored windbreaker jacket with a half empty pack of Pall Malls in one of the pockets. Crooke told Crump to try it on. According to Crooke, it fit Crump perfectly.

It looks like you got a stacked deck, Crooke recalls Crump telling him. Then Crump began to cry. Crooke says he patted him on the back, but the sobs only increased.