Mary Pinchot Meyer

Case background and investigation

Mary Pinchot Meyer, born October 14, 1920, was a painter living in Washington, D.C. According to Wikipedia and the Daily Beast, she was the former wife of CIA official Cord Meyer and is reported to have had a relationship with President John F. Kennedy during the last years of his life.

On October 12, 1964, two days before her 44th birthday, Meyer was shot and killed while walking on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath in Georgetown. Smithsonian magazine, in a 2008 account by Lance Morrow, placed the shooting at about 12:30 p.m. and reported that men working on a car nearby heard a shot, a cry for help and a second shot, then called police. According to the Daily Beast, one of them, mechanic Henry Wiggins, said he saw a Black man in a tan jacket and dark cap standing over the body. Meyer had been shot once in the head and once in the upper body.

Police arrested Raymond Crump Jr. in the woods near the river shortly afterward. Smithsonian reported that his clothes were wet and his hand was cut, that a jacket and cap were recovered from the river, and that his fishing rod was later found at his home. He was charged with murder. No gun was ever found, and the Daily Beast reported that no physical evidence tied Crump to the killing.

Crump was defended by civil rights lawyer Dovey Johnson Roundtree, who, according to her Wikipedia biography, took the case for a one-dollar fee. Her defense stressed that Crump was considerably shorter and lighter than the man the eyewitness had described. The trial was heard in July 1965 before Judge Howard Corcoran, and the jury found Crump not guilty. Sources differ on the exact verdict date, giving July 29 or July 31, 1965. City Journal notes the acquittal was based on insufficient evidence.

After Meyer's death, her sister Tony Bradlee and brother-in-law Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post looked for her diary, and accounts cited by Wikipedia and the Daily Beast say CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton was also involved in retrieving it; the diary was later reported destroyed. The case has attracted extensive speculation because of Meyer's connections, but no one other than Crump was ever charged. The Daily Beast and other accounts describe the killing as officially unsolved.