The Mysterious Murder of JFK's Mistress by Ron Rosenbaum

Author:Ron Rosenbaum [Rosenbaum, Ron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-07-18T04:00:00+00:00

THE ACQUITTAL LEFT the murder of Mary Meyer officially unsolved. But Washington police never reopened the investigation. They closed the towpath murder after the trial. “Without a full confession and witnessing it myself,” remarks Inspector Bernard Crooke, “there’s no question in my mind that Ray Crump shot Mary Meyer.” Like the detective in the film Laura, Crooke became somewhat captivated by the victim. He leafed through several old homicide notebooks stored in his current office at Third District Headquarters on V Street to refresh his recollection of the case. Homicide detectives interviewed at least 100 friends of Mary Meyer. Apparently, nothing untoward turned up; any prior association with Crump was ruled out after a check of her personal belongings. Crooke recalls going through her deep, narrow townhouse and being amused by the contrast of the exquisite antique furnishings and the starkly functional bathroom with a sunken tub. Crooke was also struck by the formal written invitation to a simple date with a gentleman that he found on her desk. “We learned that she was seeing several men,” he says, “and when you look 25 and you’re free…She would have quickened the pulse of many men.”

Crooke discovered a diary-type calendar in Mary Meyer’s home, but not any larger diary. “I’d have been very upset at the time if I knew the deceased’s diary had been destroyed.”

Dovey Roundtree believes Mary Meyer’s murderer is still at large, although she has no particular person in mind. In her pretrial investigation, Roundtree pursued the ghost of Mary Meyer in the hope of locating another suspect or a suggestion of one. If her client was innocent, as she truly believed, then somebody else, perhaps a boyfriend, committed the act. Although she despised making sexual innuendos about dead women in court, she was prepared to raise the matter: “She had a lot of different men,” Ms. Roundtree comments in her law office at Roundtree, Knox, Hunter and Pendarvis. “Some were younger. For a woman her age, you’d think she’d just have one person. I thought it was unusual even though she was an artist. I was looking for motivation. I narrowed it down to people who knew her and her habits, who may have argued with her and had a confrontation. I thought we were getting close to something sexual or some other reason which I didn’t understand myself. But after the prosecution introduced a mountain of evidence, I decided to keep my case as simple as possible. Hantman was a most frustrated man. He wanted Ray Crump on the witness stand and would have destroyed him. Ray had goofed off from work and took a six-pack of beer fishing to get away from his bitchin’ wife. They wanted to massacre and burn this boy. If I failed, he would die.”

Ms. Roundtree recalls a number of anonymous phone calls in the course of the case, directing her to secret meetings. Wary of a trap, she stayed away.

The trial proceedings seemed rushed to her. She learned that Mary Meyer had a high White House clearance and that her diary was burned before the trial.

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