Mary Pinchot Meyer

On October 12, 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer, a 43-year-old painter, socialite, and ex-wife of CIA officer Cord Meyer, was shot twice—once in the head and once in the back—while walking along the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal towpath in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. A mechanic working nearby heard screams and gunshots and saw a man standing over a woman's body. He called police, and within minutes, Raymond Crump Jr., a 25-year-old local laborer, was found nearby, wet and disheveled.

Crump was charged with the murder, but at trial in July 1965, his attorney Dovey Johnson Roundtree systematically dismantled the prosecution's case. No murder weapon was ever found, the eyewitness's identification was shaky, and Crump did not match the physical description given by other witnesses. The jury acquitted him after deliberating for less than twelve hours.

The case took on deeper significance when it emerged that Meyer had been having an affair with President Kennedy in the two years before his assassination. Her diary, which reportedly described their relationship and her experiments with psychedelic drugs, was sought by CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, who was found at her art studio attempting to retrieve it the night of her death. CIA involvement in the case—or at least intense interest—fueled decades of conspiracy theories.

Despite numerous investigations, books, and documentaries, no one has ever been definitively identified as Mary Meyer's killer. Some researchers believe it was a random attack, while others point to possible connections to the CIA, the Kennedy assassination, or the Cold War intelligence community. The case remains one of Washington's most intriguing unsolved murders.