Alice Crimmins

Case background and investigation

On the morning of July 14, 1965, Alice Crimmins reported that her two children, five-year-old Eddie Jr. and four-year-old Alice Marie, known as Missy, were missing from their bedroom in the family's garden apartment in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens. According to case summaries compiled by Encyclopedia.com and Murderpedia, Missy's body was found that same afternoon in a vacant lot not far from the apartment; she had been strangled. Eddie's body was found on July 19 on an embankment near the Van Wyck Expressway, about a mile from home. His remains were too decomposed for a cause of death to be established.

The investigation centered on the children's mother. Accounts of the case, including a 2014 Daily Beast review, report that police kept her under surveillance and recorded her conversations for an extended period, and that earlier grand juries did not return an indictment. According to Murderpedia, she was arrested on September 11, 1967, after a neighbor, Sophie Earomirski, came forward to say she had seen a woman carrying a bundle and walking with a child in the early hours of July 14.

Crimmins was tried in May 1968 for Missy's death. The jury found her guilty of first-degree manslaughter and she was sentenced to five to twenty years. In December 1969 an appellate court ordered a new trial, in part because jurors had made an unauthorized visit to the scene, according to Encyclopedia.com; the state's highest court upheld that reversal the following year.

At a second trial, held from March 15 to April 23, 1971, she faced a murder charge in Eddie's death along with a manslaughter charge in Missy's. The jury convicted her on both counts and she received a life sentence plus five to twenty years. In 1973 the Appellate Division overturned both verdicts, dismissing the murder charge on the ground that the prosecution had not proved Eddie's death resulted from a criminal act, and ordering a new trial on the manslaughter count. In February 1975 the New York Court of Appeals let the dismissal of the murder charge stand but reinstated the manslaughter conviction. No third trial took place.

Crimmins returned to prison, later entered a work-release program, and was paroled in 1977; the sources consulted give differing months for the parole date. She married during her work-release period and has since lived privately under her married name.

The case has remained a subject of debate. Writers who have re-examined it, including in Hazlitt and the Daily Beast, argue that the prosecution and press coverage dwelt heavily on Crimmins's personal life and that the physical evidence was limited. Legally, the outcome is a single standing conviction for manslaughter in Missy's death; no one stands convicted in the death of Eddie Crimmins Jr.