The Mysterious Murder of JFK's Mistress Read online

  The Mysterious Murder of JFK’s Mistress

  By Ron Rosenbaum and Philip Nobile

  Copyright © 2016 by Ron Rosenbaum and Philip Nobile

  The paint was still damp on Mary Meyer’s final canvas when she left her studio for a walk. It was a circular canvas. In her recent work she had been exploring the effects of swaying velvety semicircles of color across unprimed circles of canvas.

  She pointed an electric fan at the undried painting. It was a chilly fall day; she put on gloves, pulled on a sweater and a sweatshirt over her blouse and covered those three layers with a heavy blue cable-knit angora, complete with hood.

  From the outside, the studio looked like the garage it had once been. It was one among a row of garages along an alleyway behind the backs of two rows of brick townhouses fronting on N and O streets in Georgetown. Since her divorce, she had spent three or four days a week working in her studio, a few steps away from some of her closest friends, whose homes abutted that alley. Her sister, Tony, and Tony’s husband, Ben Bradlee, lived on one end; Mr. and Mrs. John Kennedy lived on the other end until they moved to the White House. Occasionally, Mary Meyer would take walks with Jackie along the towpath paralleling the old Chesapeake and Ohio barge canal.

  That was where she was heading now, in fact: out the alley, left on 34th street, down to the foot bridge that leads across the canal and onto the towpath between the canal and the wooded embankment that descends to the Potomac.

  She reached the towpath about noon that day, Monday, October 12, 1964. John F. Kennedy had been dead almost a year. It was two days away from Mary Meyer’s 44th birthday.

  AIR FORCE LIEUTENANT William Mitchell left the Pentagon Athletic Center on the Virginia side of the Potomac about noon, crossed over the Key Bridge, exited down the steps to the towpath and began his regular run 2 miles west to a fishing spot on the river called Fletcher’s Landing and back again. He passed three people on his way west—a middle-aged couple and a young white man in Bermuda shorts.

  He passed two more people on his way back east to Key Bridge. First there was the woman in a blue hooded sweater. He met her just as she was crossing the wooden footbridge a mile from Key Bridge. He came to a full stop in front of the bridge and allowed her to cross it alone to avoid jostling her in mid-passage. Picking up speed again, 200 yards farther east, the lieutenant came upon a black man walking in the same direction as the woman. The man seemed to the lieutenant to be about his size, wearing a light-colored windbreaker, dark slacks and a peaked golf hat. The man’s face didn’t leave much of an impression on the lieutenant.

  HENRY WIGGINS HAD just raised the hood of the gray Rambler when he heard the screams. Wiggins had been pumping gas at the M Street Esso station when he got a call to take his truck over to Canal Road, where a Rambler with a dead battery was stalled on a shoulder across from the canal.

  The screams were coming from the vicinity of the canal. It was a woman. “Someone help me, someone help me,” she cried. Then there was a gunshot. Wiggins ran across the road to the stone wall above the canal. A second gunshot. When he looked over the wall, Wiggins saw a black man in a light jacket, dark slacks, and a dark cap standing over the body of a white woman in a blue sweater. Wiggins saw the man place a dark object in the pocket of his windbreaker, then watched him disappear down the far side of the towpath into the wooded incline dropping down to the edge of the Potomac.

  JAMES ANGLETON WAS angry at his wife, Cicely. Here he was in the middle of a big conference at CIA headquarters—Angleton was then chief of counterintelligence for the CIA—and his wife was interrupting the meeting with a silly fantasy. According to a radio bulletin, an unidentified woman had been slain on the towpath that afternoon, and Cicely was sure the victim was their old friend Mary Meyer. She had often warned Mary not to go there alone.

  Angleton dismissed his wife’s anxiety. That evening they had planned to drive Mary Meyer to a poetry reading and he saw no reason to change anything.

  When they arrived at Mary’s home that night, her car was in the driveway, yet the lights were out inside. A sign hanging on her door said “Free Kittens—Ring Bell or Call.” No one answered the bell. At his wife’s insistence, Angleton checked Mary’s answering service. They told him Mary had been murdered. The Angletons hurried to the Bradlees’ home, where they helped make funeral arrangements. Later that night, Angleton returned and rescued three kittens from the empty house.

  Soon the CIA chief would learn he had a mission of great delicacy to perform. An intimate of Mary Meyer’s had charged him with recovering and disposing of her secret diary, a diary that contained references to a very special affair.

  THE MANHUNT BEGAN less than five minutes after the murder. When Henry Wiggins phoned the D.C. police from the nearby Esso station, the dispatcher sent squad cars full of men from all over the precinct racing to seal off he five well-marked exits from the towpath across the canal to the streets of Georgetown. With the exits sealed off soon enough, police figured they’d trapped the murderer on the hilly wooded strip of bank between the canal and the river (which was chilly and too wide at that point to afford an escape).

  Officer Warner was heading east through the underbrush along the roadbed of the old C & O tracks. He emerged from a detour into a shadowy spillway to find standing, in the middle of the tracks, a short wiry black man, dripping wet and covered with grass and twigs. Water ran out of the wallet the man offered as identification. He said his name was Raymond Crump Jr. He had been fishing around the bend, he told the officer, had fallen asleep on the riverbank and woke up only when he found himself sliding down the bank into the water.

  Officer Warner asked Raymond Crump Jr. to show him exactly where “around the bend” he had been fishing. Raymond Crump started to lead him west along the shore. They didn’t get far.

  WHEN HE ARRIVED at the body with the medical examiner and eyewitness Wiggins in tow, Detective Bernard Crooke was struck immediately by how beautiful the murdered woman was. “I’ve seen a lot of dead women,” Detective Crooke says, “but none who looked beautiful when dead. She even looked beautiful with a bullet in her head.”

  Crooke didn’t have much time to reflect upon this. A few minutes after he arrived, as he was still trying and failing to find some identification on the body, a cry went up from Henry Wiggins, who was peering down the bank that descended from the towpath to the C & O roadbed and then down the river. Wiggins was pointing at two figures on the roadbed below. One was Officer Warner; the other was Raymond Crump Jr. “That’s him,” shouted Wiggins, pointing at Crump.

  Five minutes later, a handcuffed Crump was brought before Crooke. “Why is your fly open?” Crooke asked Crump.

  “You did it,” Crump said. Crooke didn’t like that. He didn’t like the fishing alibi Crump told him, but Crump stuck to his story. As he was led past Mary Meyer’s body toward a squad car to be booked, Crump looked down at the blue-angora-clad body.

  “You think I did that?” he asked.

  Crooke thought he did it. Then came what was for Crooke the clincher. He was interrogating Crump back at the stationhouse when one of the men who had been searching the shoreline for the still missing murder weapon brought back to Crooke something he had found in the Potomac—a light-colored windbreaker jacket with a half empty pack of Pall Malls in one of the pockets. Crooke told Crump to try it on. According to Crooke, it fit Crump perfectly.

  “It looks like you got a stacked deck,” Crooke recalls Crump telling him. Then Crump began to cry. Crooke says he patted him on the back, but the sobs only increased.

  MS. DOVEY ROUNDTREE is a black woman, an ordained minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and o
ne of the best homicide lawyers in Washington. She claims an acquittal rate of 80 percent for clients accused of murder. In addition to a steel-trap legal intellect and an aggressive courtroom style, she brings to the task of winning over a jury some of the righteous fervor and persuasive eloquence of the pulpit.

  One day in December 1964 a black woman, a church-going A.M.E. Christian, came to Ms. Roundtree’s law offices and asked for her help. Her son, Raymond Crump Jr. stood accused of first-degree murder and couldn’t make bail. Her son was innocent, the mother told Ms. Roundtree. She knew in her heart he was a meek, gentle boy. He had had some hard times—a bad accident a year ago, troubles with his wife, some problems with drinking and work—but he was not a murderer. Roundtree took the case. She started her own private investigation: she was determined to find out who this woman Mary Meyer was, and who her friends were.

  IT WAS A wedding of special grace and promise. When Mary Eno Pinchot and Cord Meyer Jr. married in the bride’s Park Avenue home in the spring of 1945, life seemed rather splendid. They were both monied, talented and justly full of expectation. She was the most beautiful girl in Vassar’s class of ’42. He graduated Yale Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, and won the Alpheus Henry Snow Award as “the senior adjudged by the faculty to have done the most for Yale by inspiring his classmates.”

  Mary came from one of America’s prominent political families—the Pinchots of Pennsylvania. Her uncle Gifford Pinchot, a two-term governor of his home state in the twenties and thirties as well as a noted forester, was often mentioned as a dark horse for the Republican presidential nomination. Her father, Amos Pinchot, a radical lawyer, helped organize the breakaway Bull Moose Party for Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. He later became a pacifist and an American First critic of FDR’s internationalism. Our declaration of war against the Axis drove him to attempt suicide. The Pinchot fortune, based on the lucrative dry goods business of Mary’s paternal grandfather, James, and augmented by the large inheritance of his wife, Mary Eno, reached into the millions.

  Cord’s blood lines were less illustrious but similarly marked by wealth and politics. His great grandfather grew rich in sugar and his grandfather, a state chairman of the New York Democratic Party, in Long Island real estate. Cord Meyer Sr. served as a diplomat in Cuba, Italy and Sweden before retiring from government service when he fathered a second set of twin sons in the twenties.

  At the time of the marriage, Cord was serving as a military aide to Commander Harold E. Stassen, then a U.S. delegate at the drafting of the United Nation’s Charter in San Francisco. He had lost an eye to a Japanese grenade on Guam and published “Waves of Darkness,” a moving, often anthologized short story of the disillusions of war, in the December 1945 Atlantic. In 1947 the Junior Chamber of Commerce named him one of the ten outstanding young men in the United States. As spokesman for the liberal United World Federalists, he crusaded across the country for the idea of world government. After listening to one of Cord’s speeches, Merle Miller noted in his journal: “If Cord goes into politics he’ll probably not only be President of the United States; he may be the first president of the parliament of man. And if he does become a writer, he’s sure to win the Nobel Prize.”

  Cord did not fulfill Miller’s prophecy. At the urging of Allen Dulles, he joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1951 and developed into a determined anti-Communist operative, eventually rising to the post of assistant deputy director of plans, better known as the dirty tricks department.

  By 1956, after 11 years of marriage, Mary, then 36, could no longer tolerate living with Cord and the CIA, a business she hated. She divorced him and moved across the Potomac from McLean, Virginia, where RFK was her next-door neighbor and friend, to a Georgetown townhouse around the corner from her sister, Mrs. Benjamin Bradlee, and their mutual good friend Senator John Kennedy.

  It was Mary, not Cord, who eventually attained the White House. The grace and promise of their wedding was twisted in unforeseen fashion. While he sulked in the CIA, even briefing JFK on occasion, she became the secret Lady Ottoline of Camelot.

  Jack and Mary first met at Vassar. Kennedy (Harvard ’40) dated several members of Mary’s class, including her chum Dorothy Burns. “Everybody knew everybody then,” says Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s daughter and Mary’s classmate. The women closest to Mary on campus refused to reminisce about her. But interviews with acquaintances indicate that she did not particularly distinguish herself at Vassar. Selection for the daisy chain, a wreath of daisies borne at graduation by the comeliest and most personable sophomores, seems her only honor. “Mary wasn’t very gregarious,” Scottie Smith remarks. “She didn’t mingle about. She was in independent soul. I always thought of her as a fawn running through the forest.”

  A short story entitled “Futility” in the April 1941 Vassar Review and Little Magazine, the single extant sample of her campus writing, suggests a free and wildly imaginative spirit. A young lady, bored with the “chicly cadaverous” women who are “being too killing about Noel Coward’s love life” at a Park Avenue cocktail party, runs off to a hospital for a strange operation. She wants to have the ends of her optical nerves attached to the hearing part of the brain and the auditory ends to the seeing part so that everything she sees she hears and vice versa. The surgery was a success. The young lady returned to the apartment now empty of partygoers and lay down on the hostess’ sofa. Mary concluded the fantasy: “The lighted aquarium, like a window to a green outdoors, shone above the mantle in the dark room. The copper fish undulated aimlessly among the other weeds, and as she watched them, she heard the far off buzz of men’s and women’s voices chattering in the room, the sound of glass clinking against ice, Beatrice’s voice rising and falling. The low murmur hummed on and on, and Ruth fell asleep. And because her eyes were closed, she heard nothing to disturb her, and slept forever on the chartreuse couch.”

  After Vassar, Mary went to work for the United Press in New York City, and there fell in love with Bob Schwartz, a home-front staffer for the GI newspaper Yank. For the sake of Mary’s mother, they maintained separate quarters, but their intense three-year involvement was public knowledge. The Pinchots accepted the relationship. The couple traveled together and passed many weekends at the several-thousand-acre Pinchot estate in the Poconos. Now an entrepreneur in Tarrytown, New York, Schwartz would say only that he was Mary’s first love and that he had ended it in 1944, before Cord returned from the Pacific. “Mary was unbelievable to behold,” Schwartz avowed. “She was uncompromising about her view of the world and had great strength about it.”

  Although Mary considered medical school, she took her $30-a-week feature writing job at U.P. seriously. In 1944 she free-lanced three well-turned pieces on “meteorbiology,” venereal disease and college sex courses for Mademoiselle. Criticizing squeamish public attitudes toward the wartime epidemic of syphilis and gonorrhea, she wrote, “Though the spirochete is better barred from the body, there’s no reason to ban awareness of it from the mind.” In “Credits for Love,” she endorsed sex education “as a means to a happier and less hazardous private life.”

  Scottie Fitzgerald Smith was at Time during this same period and saw a lot of Mary. They lunched and partied together. Scottie recalls that Mary enjoyed skinny-dipping ensemble in the bubbling “champagne pond” under the idyllic waterfall on the Pocono property. “She was unconventional and broke the rules of our generation. But her unconventionality was quiet and disciplined. She was never a showoff.” Asked to describe Mary’s appeal to men, her old friend remarked, “Mary had perfectly lovely skin and coloring. She always looked like she had just taken a bath. A man once told me that she reminded him of a cat walking on a roof in the moonlight. She had such tremendous poise. Whether she was merely shy or just controlled, I don’t know. She was very cool physically and psychologically, a liberated woman long before it was fashionable.”

  Mary’s first son, named Quentin after Cord’s twin who had died in Okinawa, was born in 1946. She the
reupon combined motherhood and manuscript-reading at Atlantic Monthly while Cord studied at Harvard. Soon she retired from her literary career to assist her husband’s world government efforts and bear two more sons, Michael and Mark. After the divorce was all but decided in 1956, Michael was killed by a car in McLean. This tragedy affected both parents deeply, but it did not bring them back together; it could not salvage the marriage. “She respected Cord but wanted to make it on her own as a painter,” explains a Washington intimate. “Why should she have to go to dinners with the director of the CIA when she’d rather be in her studio?”

  After the separation, Mary fell under the influence of Kenneth Noland, a painter who was one of the founders of what became known as the “Washington Color School.” Inspired by Helen Frankenthaler’s revolt against the “too painterly” qualities of Abstract Expressionism, Noland and the late Morris Louis, both residents of Washington in the fifties, began experimenting with new techniques of applying paint to canvas. They made color, rather than structure or subject, their primary concern. They and their disciples tended to concentrate on a single format. Louis worked with the bleeding edge, Noland on targets and Gene Davis in stripes. This small community significantly affected the history of American art and made some of its members famous and wealthy.

  Mary chose to paint in tondo; that is, on rounded canvasses. Like her lover Noland, four years her junior, she focused on swaths of circular color. Her painting Blue Sky hangs in the Manhattan apartment of poet Barbara Higgins, a friend from the early sixties. Blue Sky, a very early work, is a 6’ by 5’6” rectangle, but large semicircular bands of green, blue and orange color resting above and below two hard-edged horizontal lines show evidence of her later direction. “When Mary started painting large pictures, she began freeing herself,” Mrs. Higgins says. “She felt she was making a breakthrough and was happier than I’d ever seen her.”