Murder
On October 12, 1964, nearly eleven months after John F. Kennedy's assassination and two weeks after the Warren Commission report was made public, Pinchot Meyer finished a painting and went for a walk along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath in Georgetown. Mechanic Henry Wiggins was trying to fix a car on Canal Road and heard a woman cry out, "Someone help me, someone help me." Wiggins heard two gunshots and ran to a low wall looking upon the path where he saw "a black man in a light jacket, dark slacks, and a dark cap standing over the body of a white woman."
Pinchot Meyer's body had two bullet wounds, one at the back of the head and another in her heart. An FBI forensic expert later said "dark haloes on the skin around both entry wounds suggested they had been fired at close-range, possibly point-blank".
Minutes later a disheveled, soaking African-American man named Raymond Crump was arrested near the murder scene. No gun was ever found and Crump was never linked to any gun of the type used to murder Mary Pinchot Meyer. Newspaper reports described her former husband only as either an author or government official and did not mention Kennedy, although many journalists apparently were aware of Meyer's past marriage to a high ranking CIA official and her friendship with Kennedy.
When Crump came to trial, judge Howard Corcoran ruled Mary Pinchot Meyer's private life could not be disclosed in the courtroom. Corcoran had recently been appointed by President Lyndon Johnson. Pinchot Meyer’s background was also kept from Dovey Johnson Roundtree, Crump's lawyer, who later recalled she could find out almost nothing about the murder victim: "It was as if she existed only on the towpath on the day she was murdered." Crump was acquitted of all charges on July 29, 1965, and the murder remains unsolved. Crump went on to what has been described as a "horrific" life of crime.
Read more about this topic: Mary Pinchot Meyer
Famous quotes containing the word murder:
“Television has brought back murder into the home—where it belongs.”
—Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980)
“Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.”
—Anonymous. Late 19th century ballad.
The quatrain refers to the famous case of Lizzie Borden, tried for the murder of her father and stepmother on Aug. 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Though she was found innocent, there were many who contested the verdict, occasioning a prodigious output of articles and books, including, most recently, Frank Spiering’s Lizzie (1985)
“One murder made a villain,
Millions a hero.”
—Beilby Porteus (1731–1808)