Who killed Mary-really? Was Ray Crump set up? By whom? Why?Īs real evidence went mute, the public imagination worked on two possible narratives. China exploded its first nuclear bomb.īut over the years, sensational fragments of the story (JFK, CIA) turned up. There was a presidential election coming, Johnson (who had recently signed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution) versus Goldwater (the warmonger, according to the 1964 narrative). It was Bradlee who identified the body at the morgue. Her younger sister, Tony, was married to Ben Bradlee, then of Newsweek, later of the Washington Post. The papers noted that Mary, 43, was a Georgetown artist, born to a wealthy Pennsylvania family, daughter of Amos Pinchot, the Progressive lawyer, and niece of Gifford Pinchot, the conservationist and Teddy Roosevelt's chief forester. In newspapers, Cord Meyer-wounded World War II hero and young idealist who helped found the United World Federalists-was identified as an author, with a vague government job. When Mary Meyer died, no one knew about her affair with John Kennedy, or about her ex-husband's job managing the CIA's clandestine services. I thought of Mary Meyer's murder again during the presidential campaign, when the drama of a black man, Barack Obama, and two women, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, in a race for the top places in American government took me back over a distance of time to a city that was then, for black people and for women, a different universe. I have not figured it out, though I have theories. I pick it up from time to time and examine it in different lights. That October day rests in a corner of my mind, a vivid and mysterious curio. Crump eventually was acquitted for lack of evidence. It may still be at the bottom of the river. His fishing rod was in a closet where he lived, on the other side of the city. The police found his jacket and cap in the river. The two men who had heard the shots told the police they had seen Crump standing over the body. He said he had been fishing and had dropped his fishing pole and gone into the river to retrieve it he said he had been drinking beer and went to sleep and fell in. His name was Ray Crump Jr., and he was black. The police found a man in the woods down by the river. The cops from the homicide squad knew me. I stood there with her until the police came up. She looked entirely peaceful, vaguely patrician. I saw a neat and almost bloodless bullet hole in her head. She was an artist and had a studio nearby, and she had gone out for her usual lunchtime walk. She was dressed in a light blue fluffy angora sweater, pedal pushers and sneakers. I approached the body of Mary Pinchot Meyer and stood over it, weirdly and awkwardly alone as the police advanced from either direction. I pushed aside the vines at the tunnel entrance and hurried through, heart pounding, and burst into sunshine on the other side. But the tunnel would be the quickest way for me to get to the other side of the canal, to where the body was. I knew the killer was still at large and might also have known about it. But in the distance, between the Potomac and the canal, I saw the lines of the police dragnet closing in along the towpath from west and east.īecause I had played there as a boy, I knew there was a tunnel under the canal a few hundred yards west of where the body lay. Two men who had been changing a tire nearby told me they had heard a shot.a cry for help.a second shot.and had called the police. I alerted the city desk, drove to Georgetown, ran to the wall overlooking the canal and saw a body curled up in a ball on the towpath. In the classically scruffy pressroom at police headquarters, I heard the radio dispatcher direct Cruisers 25 and 26 (which I recognized as homicide squad cars) to the C&O Canal. I was a cub reporter on the Washington Star. On a perfect October day in 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer-mistress of John Kennedy, friend of Jackie Kennedy and ex-wife of a top CIA man, Cord Meyer-was murdered in the rarefied Washington precinct of Georgetown.
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