Soledad O'Brien

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer, W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer, W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinch O'Meara.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm proud of you, Robert. Yeah. I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot-Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinch O'Meara.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer, W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot-Meyer.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer, W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer, W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist, because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Knowing that she had six months to live, I was no longer pretending that this was my best friend.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him. Civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him. Civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out, Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer, W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer, W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot-Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

Before Dovey met Ray Crump, she wasn't sure she'd take on the case. She was skeptical. Which is understandable. Dovey was a lawyer. Being critical was her way. But everything changed when she met Ray in the D.C. jail. He couldn't give you a straight sentence. Talking about Ray is complicated. He's not alive to share his own story.

From everything we've read about him, it seems like Ray's intellectual capacity wasn't fully there. Dovey was no doctor, but that was her assessment. It sounds like if Ray were alive today, he might have been considered intellectually disabled. That said, Dovey thought that there was no way he could have plotted a murder. Here's historian Alexis Koh again.

In her memoir, Dovey vividly recounts her conversation with Ray. She told him that his mother approached her and that his family and friends at Second Baptist Church were praying for him. But that day in jail, Ray was somewhere else. He wasn't responding to Dovey at all. It was like he was simultaneously there and gone. Finally, Ray spoke up. "'Lawyer, what is it they say I done?'

She grasped his hands and wrapped them in hers. He was being charged with first-degree murder." It wasn't clear if he got just how dire his situation was. Ray was disoriented and physically shaking. All he wanted to know was if the police were coming after him again. He said the police officer who brought him to jail had beat him. And when he claimed innocence, he was beaten again.

Dovey was horrified. It didn't matter how many times she experienced the wrath of Jim Crow. She never let herself become numb to it. Dovey asked Ray point blank, did you kill that woman? Ray cried. And then he responded, I didn't shoot nobody. Dovey took him at his word. She took the case for a simple fee of $1.

If he didn't do it, why did Ray tell the police he was fishing when they found him at the crime scene? Later, the police found his fishing gear in his home, not by the towpath. Now, on top of a murder charge, the police caught him in a lie. Yes, Ray admitted he lied. But he did it because he was afraid his family would find out what really went on that morning of October 12th, especially his wife.

Every day, Ray walked to the corner where he'd get a ride to the day's construction job. But that morning, a woman he knew named Vivian gave him a lift, and they weren't going to a building site. They ended up at a liquor store. They picked up a bag of chips, some cigarettes, a bottle of whiskey, and headed to the canal. The two of them walked to a bank where Ray liked to fish.

And then, as Ray told Dovey, some fooling around took place. I don't need to tell you more. You get the picture. After their date, Ray fell asleep on the rocks at the water's edge.

Yeah, I'll say. He was down by the towpath that day for a tryst. So relaxed he'd fallen asleep after they'd fooled around. Now, he had woken up a suspect. Suddenly, the police had a lot of questions for him. What was he doing in the area? Why was he wet? That's when Ray got scared and blurted out the fishing story. Now this was something.

If Ray was telling the truth, his lover would confirm the story.

Ray's adultery wouldn't win him the sympathy of jurors, that's for sure. But if his lover was with him when Mary was murdered, then his fling might just be a good thing. All Dovey had to do was find this Vivian woman, which she did. Vivian corroborated everything in a phone call, down to the chips, whiskey, and cigarettes.

Winning Ray his freedom wasn't going to be easy. But Dovey was used to challenges. She'd spent her life overcoming them, starting with getting her education. Dovey grew up poor. She lost her father, and her grandfather was killed. Eventually, Grandma Rachel remarried, and her husband, Reverend Clyde Graham, was a preacher at one of Charlotte's largest black churches.

Emmett Till was visiting Mississippi when he and his cousins decided to go to a grocery store. Emmett was all of 14, a black boy hanging out with other children. A white woman would later say Emmett had whistled at her. She also claimed he touched her. More than 60 years later, she would recant her testimony. Emmett's body was found floating in a river.

But it was still hard to make ends meet. Dovey's mother, Leela, and her grandparents did what they could to get by. Leela cleaned the home of a white family named the Hurleys. According to her, they were good, decent white people. If it weren't for the Hurleys, Dovey wouldn't have gone to her dream college, Spelman. That dream started in grade school.

Her eighth grade teacher, Miss Wimbush, told her about a prestigious all-women's historically black college and told her to apply. That's how Dovey got it in her head. But the school was in Atlanta, the home of the Ku Klux Klan. There was no way Rachel wanted to send her granddaughter there. And financially, the school was out of reach.

Higher education was expensive back then, too. Not to mention an out-of-state private school. Tuition plus room and board were eight times the cost of attending a local black college in North Carolina. And for a black family during the Great Depression? Almost impossible. But Dovey would end up there. She even wrote about it in her admissions essay to the school.

How going to Spelman would be like winning the lottery. The letter comes to us courtesy of the Spelman College Archives. She wrote, "'I have been obsessed with the thought of continuing my education. Every year I have hoped and prayed that my worthy wish would be possible, but money held me back.'"

Alas, I have found the only way to conquer such a difficulty was not in the praying and wishing, but in the rising above the obstacle. I'm going to stop right there because it's in this moment in Dovey's life where we see a pattern emerge. Over the course of her life, Dovey was often faced with the most impossible of hurdles. Then someone would step in and give her a chance.

Sometimes those people were black, sometimes white. Dovey was brilliant, but it was the 1930s. Brilliant for a black woman wasn't enough. Sometimes still not enough. Here's Georgetown professor Dr. Chatelain.

As luck would have it, the Hurleys, the white family her mother worked for, were moving to Atlanta, the very city where Spellman is. And the Hurleys wanted two live-in housemaids. They wanted to help Leela and Dubby, give them jobs and some security. Everything had lined up. Now Dovey wouldn't have to pay room and board at Spelman.

Mother and daughter would work side by side for two years, save enough money for Spelman's tuition. And then Leela would return home while Dovey kept working for the family, all while Dovey was still in school. The two moved to Atlanta in the fall of 1932, and Dovey enrolled in Spelman two years later. Dovey was in awe. The campus was simultaneously inspiring and humbling.

She marveled at the imposing white columns and the magnolia and dogwood trees that sprinkled the campus.

Miss May Neptune taught English literature at Spelman. She was 60 years old and six feet tall. Miss Neptune had a presence. She wore a tight gray bun and wore thick rimmed glasses. And she could spot a revolutionary woman because she was one herself. Miss Neptune was a white woman from the North who believed everyone had an equal right to education.

The woman's husband and brother-in-law kidnapped and brutally murdered him. His body was so mangled, his own mother could barely identify him. You probably heard this story before, but I'm telling it to you again because this was the racial landscape of 1960s America, the world Ray Crump was living in when he was arrested for the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer.

She made her students think and gave them the space to write honestly about the world. One of the first assignments was to write an essay on democracy. Dovey took a chance and wrote what she really thought about being Black in America. She wrote about how democracy had gone wrong, that she wasn't living in the land of the free.

Miss Neptune was white, but Dovey had a hunch she could be frank with her. After all, this professor had uprooted her life to teach black women in the South. Miss Neptune read the paper. She returned Dovey's essay. Scrawled in red ink, she asked if she would like to write for the campus newspaper. She thought Dovey would be good at it.

And that was how the campus mirror found their new star reporter.

But things at home took a turn for the worse. Mrs. Hurley seemed to change. Ever since Dovey started school at Spelman, she grew cold and distant. It was as if she thought Dovey had broken a promise. This is how Dovey saw it. Mrs. Hurley wanted to make something of her. She didn't expect Dovey would make something of herself. They didn't want an uppity housemaid. Here's Charlene again.

She calls Dovey Nana.

Dovey was always one small step away from getting into trouble with her employer. One day, Mrs. Hurley accused her of stealing. She said Dovey was a thief. We don't know exactly what set Mrs. Hurley off, but in her memoir, Dovey was adamant she was wrongly accused, and there was simply no evidence she stole anything. That didn't stop Mrs. Hurley from marching Dovey straight to the police.

Mrs. Hurley didn't need much evidence to get Dovey in trouble. Her word against Dovey would be enough. She was a white, stately homeowner, and Dovey was just a black 20-year-old who served at her pleasure. Suddenly, Dovey was experiencing what happens to black and brown folks even today. even if you do everything right, it might not matter. Dovey was arrested and taken to the jailhouse.

That's Dr. Chatelaine again.

At the jailhouse, a guard told Dovey she could call someone. Her mother was back in North Carolina. There was only one person in Atlanta she trusted in such a dire situation. Miss Neptune. By that evening, a white lawyer arrived at the jail for Dovey. Miss Neptune and Miss Rockefeller had sent him. He point-blank asked Dovey if she'd stolen anything. She said no.

The next morning, the police released Dovey. As a black woman, she could have easily stayed locked up for a good while. The police probably didn't believe Dovey, but they believed the white people around her. Dovey's legal troubles may have been behind her, but her financial ones were far from over. Where would she get the money to pay for her housing, for the rest of her tuition, to live?

So if you think about it, things could have gone way worse for Ray.

She wasn't going to be able to come back because she wasn't financially able. She would have to leave Spelman, maybe teach until she could make enough money to pay for all her expenses. She confided in Miss Neptune that she would have to leave school. Miss Neptune said to meet her the next morning at Miss Rockefeller's office. When she arrived, she was told some arrangements had been made.

Dovey's college expenses would be covered until her graduation. Miss Neptune wasn't a woman of means. She was on a modest teacher's salary, but she had gone into her savings to help pay off Dubby's tuition. The loan cost Miss Neptune. She would be penny-pinching for a long while. But she had seen something in Dovey that was undeniable.

She gave her protege the money she needed to become the woman who would one day defend Ray Crump. Dovey asked Miss Neptune how she could repay her. Miss Neptune told her to pass it on. Pass it on became a way of life for Dovey.

She wanted to right the wrongs in the world, to be kind when life wasn't kind to her, and to defend the defenseless like Ray Crump.

That's Dr. Marcia Chatelain.

After Mary's murder, local residents, well, white Georgetown residents, were scared. One D.C.

This was their thinking. If a murder in broad daylight could happen to someone as prominent as Mary, what hope did the rest of them have? The police also had incentive to wrap up this case and put all of this unease to rest. The U.S. attorney exponentially sped up the typical procedures for a criminal case in D.C.

When a black man is arrested for murdering a prominent white woman, it comes with the baggage of our fraught racial history.

The grand jury judge indicted Ray solely on the basis of Henry Wiggins' eyewitness testimony. Wiggins said he was about 120 feet away when he saw Ray. Now, typically, a preliminary hearing happens before a grand jury hearing. Alexis Coe says that's not what happened here. It's clear they wanted to ram through this process fast.

This enraged Dovey. It wasn't fair. In the meantime, Ray's mental state was deteriorating by the day. He was in solitary confinement in the D.C. jails. Dovey petitioned the court that Ray wasn't mentally fit to defend himself at trial. But the psychiatrist's report said otherwise. He was mentally competent. It was decided. Their case was going to trial.

There was nothing else to do but to prepare herself the best she could. How was she going to prove Ray's innocence? The answer, she thought, lay in the towpath. Dovey and her law partners, George Knox and Jerry Hunter, went to the scene of the crime. Throughout those cold days in November and December of 1964, the three of them retraced Mary's steps on the towpath. I've been there in the winter.

You can walk the towpath and count exactly how many steps it takes to get from the bridge to Mary's studio. That's exactly what Dovey and her law partners did that day. They walked back and forth from Foundry Underpass to Fletcher's Boathouse. They role-played. One would play Mary, the other her killer.

And sometimes one of them would play the role of a jogger who had passed Mary right before her murder. He'll become important later in our story. Dovey and her law partners even reenacted the gunshots. Instead of using guns, they smashed paper bags to see if Henry Wiggins would have been able to hear the pops from three-quarters of a mile away on Canal Road. We actually tried this ourselves.

Our producers Catherine and Natalie came with me to the towpath in Georgetown. Today, there's a bike path below the towpath, next to the Potomac. It's a similar distance between where Henry would have been and the murder scene. Could people hear the bag popping from that far away?

Dovey and her colleagues were getting creative, but they would do anything to give Ray a fighting chance. By the time she reached her 30s, Dovey had already faced injustice. Mrs. Hurley had wrongly accused her of stealing. A farm owner had maimed her grandmother. The Klan had terrorized her family. Hate seemed to be spreading at a global level, too. It was the 1940s.

Fascism was a cancer sweeping through Europe, and Dovey was hell-bent on stopping it. She joined the Army, becoming part of the first class of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps in World War II, and eventually becoming a captain. But she noticed the hypocrisy. She was fighting for freedom abroad while she lacked those freedoms at home every day. Dovey wasn't one to let all these injustices stand.

She wanted to do something about it. That's how she ended up at Howard University School of Law. In 1947, she was just one of five women in her class. Not everyone was thrilled that Dovey had arrived. On her first day, when she registered for classes, the receptionist asked her if she was registering for her husband or her brother. The message was clear. She didn't belong there.

And Dovey being Dovey, while she was attending law school, battling racism and sexism, she also had two part-time jobs. Eventually, her male classmates couldn't help but notice she was brilliant. Dovey said they actually asked to study with her.

She did have a grip on the law. Every week, Dovey and about six other students met at her house to study together. Dovey graduated in 1950. It was one of the proudest moments in her life. But even graduation was bittersweet. Yes, she had achieved, but how far had she come given that segregation was still the law of the land?

By now, Grandma Rachel was in her 80s, but she wouldn't miss Dovey getting her diploma. Rachel and Leela took the train up from North Carolina to attend the ceremony. Dovey went to Union Station to meet them. As soon as Dovey saw her mom and her grandmother, she knew something was wrong. Grandma Rachel was crying. Trouble had found them on the train.

After his arrest, Ray's mother, Martha, knew her son was in trouble, but she didn't have the money for a lawyer. She was a laundry woman. Every day, she commuted to the white part of Washington, D.C., and returned home to the black part, which was one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. On the weekends, she was a regular at Second Baptist Church.

Dovey reserved seats for her family, but by the time they got there, all of the seats in the black car were taken, packed with families. Luggage was overflowing onto the aisle. Meanwhile, the white seats were half empty. When they went to sit there, the conductor yelled at them. He refused to honor their reserved seats. So they put them in the back.

They had to go back to the black section of the train and stand for the 10-hour ride.

Rachel stood on her mangled feet for the whole trip. From North Carolina to Virginia and Maryland, she held onto seat edges and leaned any way she could to give her feet a break. By the time they got to Washington, Grandma Rachel collapsed on the toilet seat in the bathroom. She stayed there until the train pulled into Union Station.

They caught a cab back to Dovey's apartment. When they were safely home, Dovey looked at Rachel's feet. They were bloodied and bruised. Dovey called a doctor, but she also called her law partner. This was about more than Rachel's health. This was a matter of the law.

The Southern Railway needed to be held accountable.

Several weeks later, just after graduating from law school, Dovey marched into the U.S. District Court for D.C. to file a breach of contract complaint. The railway denied Dovey's mother and grandmother seats when seats were available. It took a year, but eventually the Southern Railway settled with her. Dovey bit her lip and teared up. She cried in front of the defendant's attorney and the judge.

Yes, it was a lot of money at the time, but it hurt her to see her mother and grandmother's pain reduced to a monetary value. Fifteen years later, she'd march into that building again to defend Rae. It had been a long time, but the memory of her grandmother's injustice was fresh. This time, she wasn't looking for financial compensation. She wanted justice for Ray Crump.

Next time on Murder on the Towpath, Dovey was preparing to go to trial to save Ray Crump and continue her life's work of defending the defenseless, of passing it on. But what did Dovey or anyone really know of the woman he was accused of killing? It was obvious Mary had been well-connected in certain D.C. circles. She was related to Ben Bradley. She walked with Jackie Kennedy.

Now, more than ever, she needed her prayers answered. And they were. At church, she heard about a lawyer whose reputation preceded her. A black woman named Dovey Johnson Roundtree.

But could those connections have played a role in her death?

What if Mary's murder wasn't so random after all? From Luminary, Murder on the Towpath is a production of Film Nation Entertainment in association with Neon Hum Media. Our executive producers are me, Soledad O'Brien, Alyssa Martino, Milan Papelka, and Jonathan Hirsch. Lead producer is Shara Morris. Associate producers are Natalie Rinn and Lucy Licht. Senior editor is Catherine St. Louis.

Music and composition by Andrew Eapin. Sound design and mixing by Scott Somerville. Fact-checking by Laura Bullard. Special thanks to Allison Cohen, Sarah Vacchiano, Rose Arce, Kate Mishkin, Tanner Robbins, and Michaela Salella.

Martha wanted Dovey to represent her son. People around D.C. said she was tenacious and clever. But Martha wanted her for more than her legal smarts. She was black. And Ray's mother felt she would be invested in her son's case in a way a white lawyer wouldn't be. Martha was banking on Dovey thinking her child was as good as anyone else's.

The thing was, legal aid had already offered Ray an attorney. A white guy. An experienced guy. For free. But Martha wanted Dovey to take her son's case. So she pleaded with her to defend Ray. Save his life. Now, at that time, Dovey and Martha had just the facts about Mary's murder from the papers. A white woman was shot to death. She was prominent, part of Washington's elite.

It happened on the towpath in Georgetown, and a black man was arrested. Martha was sure Ray wasn't the killer. She thought he was too simple, too plain. She babied her 25-year-old son like he was still a kid, even though he was actually the oldest of her three boys. If Dovey took on the case, the cards would be stacked against her, and the deck was already high.

Here was a black female lawyer from the segregated South asking a jury to acquit a black man accused of shooting a white woman in 1964 with an eyewitness who said he saw the whole thing. The task would be monumental. Dovey didn't take the case at first, but she would because Martha's hope was true. Dovey did think Ray was as good as any other man. His black skin didn't make him inferior.

Her grandma Rachel's experiences had taught her that. From Luminary, Film Nation Entertainment, and Neon Hum Media, this is Murder on the Towpath, a story of two incredible women who never met, but whose lives became forever intertwined by tragedy. I'm your host, Soledad O'Brien. Last week, we started to tell you about an affair, Mary Pinchot Meyer and JFK.

But before we get to that, we need to dig into the life of the woman who would defend Mary's accused murderer, a woman who had no idea about Mary's connections to the president and wouldn't for years. In fact, at that time, very few people outside of Mary's inner circle knew about the affair. When Ray was tried, it was the case of a black man who had killed a white woman.

By the time of Mary's murder, Dovey was 50 years old. She had her own law practice with a colleague. She had accomplished so much in a half century, even though she wasn't allowed to drink from the same water fountain as white folks. She'd won some high-profile legal cases, including a bus segregation case that laid the foundation for Rosa Parks.

How had a Black woman in the segregated South gotten this far in 1964? Her story is even more unlikely than it seems. Dovey was born in 1914. After her father passed away, Dovey's mother and two sisters moved in with her grandparents in Charlotte, North Carolina. She was raised by her grandmother. That's Dovey's daughter, Charlene Pritchett-Stevenson.

She and Dovey met at church, but they grew so close that Dovey would eventually call Charlene her chosen daughter.

Her father died in the influenza epidemic of 1919. She was just five years old. They lived in Brooklyn, a neighborhood in Charlotte that was the thriving center of Black life there. It was almost a city within a city, complete with its own downtown. Dovey's family was poor, but some of her neighbors had money. It wasn't uncommon to find shotgun houses next to mansions.

But in the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan haunted Charlotte. As a kid, Dovey remembered them riding through the neighborhood, keeping the hate, not the peace. Her grandma, Rachel, would tell the children to get down on the floor. Dovey would shutter the windows before she hopped under. Her grandmother had reason to be terrified that the Klan had murdered her first husband, Dovey's grandfather.

Rachel said goodbye to him one day as he was heading north. He never returned. So when the Klan came around, Black people like Dovey took cover.

But Dovey had one distinct advantage in life, her grandmother, Rachel. Well, the first thing I'm going to say about her is, She was brilliant. That's Dovey Roundtree herself. She died in 2018 at the ripe age of 104. But about a decade before her passing, she sat down for an interview with an organization called the National Visionary Leadership Project.

She lit up when she talked about her grandma.

She was beautiful. Dovey talked about her grandmother as if she walked on water, like she was superhuman. When you're a kid, that's how many of us see our parents and grandparents. I know I do.

As a girl, Dovey didn't know how the outside world saw Rachel, how society treated poor, uneducated Black women like her. But Rachel was determined to make a good life for her family.

If you were poor and black at the time, you had to be resourceful.

It was a skill Rachel was determined to pass on to Dovey. She was arming her grandchildren for battle. Because Rachel knew how hard it was out there. She had lived it. You see, Rachel was born to slaves. She grew up when slavery was abolished, but the structures were still in place. The farm where she lived, she had to call the owner slave master. And when she was 13, that man tried to rape her.

But he wouldn't relent. The man stomped on her feet and crushed them.

When she returned home, Rachel's mother wrapped her bloody feet in bandages. But her feet would never recover.

Rachel eventually learned to walk again, but her feet would never be the same. Here's Charlene again.

Her swollen feet reminded her every day how that man thought he had a right to her. But she never wanted to forget how discrimination had shaped her. misshaped her, really. And she felt obligated to pass that resolve onto her children and grandchildren.

She told them the story about her feet, not once, but regularly. It was one of their family lures. Which, if you think about it, is a pretty traumatic story to tell such young girls. But for Rachel, it was probably her way of preparing them for the world.

Sometimes pain is a catalyst.

Dovey had her ways of decompressing after a stressful day in court. Each evening, she ventured outside to her back porch. She sipped on some lemonade in the hot, muggy D.C. air, and she took notes on the day's proceedings in her legal pad. Dovey still had to present her own evidence and witnesses to the court. That particular evening, she was wondering if she should put Ray on the bench.

If she put him on the stand, it would become clear that he wasn't calculating enough to pull off a murder in broad daylight.

They thought the prosecution would decimate him. Dovey believed Ray had intellectual disabilities. She worried he couldn't go toe-to-toe with someone like Hantman. It was during these nights, sometime after midnight, that Dovey's phone would ring. When she answered it, she could hear someone on the other end, but they were silent. She just heard breathing.

That's Patricia Bradford, a congregant from Dovey's church. These lingering calls happened multiple times throughout Ray's trial. Dovey had the sinking suspicion some people didn't want her to win this case. The next day, Dovey took the elevator up to the fourth floor of the courthouse. A Black woman was operating the elevator.

As the floors ticked up, she told Dovey something that would alter her entire defense strategy. The prosecution is delighted at the chance to cross-examine him. The Black elevator attendant overheard Hantman and his colleague talking about wanting the opportunity to question Ray.

The attendant told Dovey people say things in front of certain people, Black people, that they wouldn't say in front of others. Call it arrogance or just a big mistake, but Hantman had clearly underestimated this elevator attendant. It was the kind of break Dovey needed. She entered the courtroom and started her defense as she would with any other case. Evidence.

Her exhibit A was Ray Crump himself. She told the jury this was not the man Hantman's witnesses described. Just look at him. Here he was, all but 5'5", a small, slender man sitting before them. Then she brought on three character witnesses for Ray. A member of Ray's family, a member of his church, and a neighbor. They all said that Ray was known as a peaceful man in his community.

Hantman cross-examined each character witness. He tried to show the jury that they barely knew Ray, that they couldn't attest to his character. But the witnesses stood firm that they did know Ray and had grown up with him even. According to them, he was no killer. and she has to make a game-time decision. After hearing what went on inside the elevator, Dovey had to decide.

Was she going to have Ray testify?

Handman even admitted so. He approached the bench and said he was caught flat-footed. He never anticipated in his wildest dreams that Dubby would rest her case. He was sure that Ray would be called to testify. But this? This was the worst-case scenario for the prosecutors.

The courtroom was stunned, too. The decision to not put Ray on the stand sped things up dramatically.

In his closing statements, Hantman made one final plea to the jury. He told them Mary was shot to death by Ray after a struggle in which she, quote, "...tried to preserve her very existence." This was a crime of, quote, malicious mischief. He closed by asking the jury to find Ray guilty of first-degree murder. He sat back down. The court went into recess.

Ray Crump's future was now in the hands of the jury. The 12 jurors deliberated through the evening for more than seven hours. Did Ray Crump kill Mary Pinchot Meyer? A fervent pacifist? A painter coming into her own? Someone had to be held responsible for her nonsensical death? But would that person be Ray? There was a strong debate in the room.

With so much of the public's eye on this case, I can't even imagine the pressure the jurors faced. After more than seven hours, the foreman told Judge Corcoran they were at a standstill.

It had been nine months since Mary Meyer was shot in broad daylight on the Georgetown towpath. Her killer hadn't been brought to justice. For Mary's family and friends, Ray's trial was their chance for some closure. Mary was a painter, a pacifist, a vital part of a Georgetown community of artists. In many ways, her life was just beginning. Her friend, Cicely Angleton, was back in the courtroom.

It was already 10.30 at night. He told the jury to go home. They'd continue their deliberations in the morning. The next day, the jury resumed. In a way, they also retraced Mary's steps. Though they couldn't go to the towpath, they used photographs and maps to pore over the evidence. trying to put the pieces together on how Mary was killed and who might have done it.

After 11 hours of back and forth over two days, they reached a decision. Everyone returned to the courtroom. The trial had lasted 11 days, and now there was a conclusion. Ray's mother, Martha, had been at the trial every day, but she couldn't be there for the actual announcement. It was too much for her. So she waited in the courthouse corridor.

Ray sat motionless throughout the trial, but now, standing, waiting for his verdict, he was swaying. Judge Corcoran commended the prosecution and defense for presenting both sides of the case. Then the foreman offered the written verdict to the judge. Corcoran told the jury to rise.

He said, Members of the jury, we have your verdict, which states that you find the defendant, Ray Crump Jr., not guilty. And this is your verdict, so say you each and all. The jurors nodded. Corcoran told Crump, you are a free man. Ray's eyes were closed. It almost looked like he was fainting. Then he and Dovey hugged. Here was a man who'd been in jail for nearly a year.

He was in solitary confinement. He could have faced the death penalty if found guilty. And now he could finally go home. In the corridor, Ray's mother, Martha, held back tears. She and her friends praised the Lord, singing hallelujah through the courtroom. She thanked the Lord for returning her son back to her.

The jury didn't believe Ray was Mary's killer. And Dovey helped everyone see it. And managed to present her entire defense in 20 minutes, no less. That's right, her entire defense was that quick because of her strategic decision not to put Ray on the stand. On July 31st, 1965, the New York Times reported the verdict. The headline read, Washington Negro Freed in Murder.

If that's not a sign of the times, I don't know what is. That in itself proves how historic this win was. Here was a black woman who could barely walk around Georgetown without people raising their eyebrows because of her race. And yet, she had just won a case against a powerful white prosecutor who had the state and all of its resources behind him. Here's Bob Bennett again.

Soon, judges began appointing her murder cases left and right.

At last, the legal community gave her respect. Letters came in from all over the country congratulating Dovey on her big courtroom success. A friend from St. Louis wrote her a note shortly after the verdict. He said...

Ray's mother Martha was sitting in the back of the courtroom with her church friends. When we last left the trial, Dovey had just won a big victory. She'd shown that Hantman's theory was bunk. He tried to say Ray had to be Mary's killer because there were only so many official exits off of the towpath. But Dovey had dismantled that argument.

But not everyone was happy with the verdict. People like Bob Bennett.

Other people did feel that way, like Mary's family and friends. Cicely Angleton sat in the back of the courtroom when she heard the news. She was stoic. And several days after the trial, Ben Bradley called Hantman, asking him, what went wrong? Why did Ray get off? We couldn't find any records of Mary's ex-husband, Cord, or their sons being at the trial.

A few sources told us Mary's family thought the prosecution was going after the right man all along. Maybe when the judge granted Ray's freedom, they felt like they were watching the murderer slip through their hands. It had to be devastating. We reached out to the Meyer family. A producer of ours spoke with one of Mary's sons on the phone, but he and the family declined to speak for this podcast.

What if, in their eyes, the man who killed their beloved Mary went unpunished and now he was going home?

There were countless ways a phantom killer could have escaped the area. U.S. Attorney Alfred Hantman called up Henry Wiggins to the bench. Henry Wiggins was a working man, a war veteran, an upstanding citizen. He had a lot of things going for him as a witness. After all, he was the one who'd heard the murder go down. Sure, he was a black man, and it was the 1960s.

Even if Mary's family thought it was unfair, Ray was now a free man, he had still been punished. He was locked up for nearly a year, and we know that at least some of it was in solitary confinement. His life would never be the same. He was irrevocably changed by being locked away.

That's Terry Coopers. He studies prison conditions, including solitary confinement. He's a psychiatrist at the Wright Institute.

This could be what happened to Ray. The trauma of jail time hardened him. After the trial, he was a free man, but no longer the man he had been. Shortly after returning home, Ray and his wife, Helena, split up for good. She hadn't visited him in jail. At first, Ray returned to his routine. He went back to his construction jobs. He worked to lay the foundations for D.C.

buildings that lawyers and journalists work in to this day. But four years after his acquittal, his life would never be the same. Ray was never a criminal before being locked up. But after, something changed. After he was acquitted for Mary Myers' death, he was arrested 22 times. Some were petty crimes, but others were very serious. In 1971, he remarried.

He and his new wife moved in together with her four children in Maryland. We don't know much about their family life, but things got bad enough that at one point, Ray turned on his wife.

He was arrested again. He pled guilty to malicious burning and went to jail for two months, followed by rehab for alcohol. He threatened other women in his life and was arrested multiple times for vandalism and arson, setting fire to homes and cars. For many people, these crimes were a sign that Ray had killed Mary, but just gotten away with it. Here's Ron Rosenbaum.

But it was his word against another black man. And, well, the scales were tipping in his direction now that Ray looked like he was a liar. The kind of man who skipped work. The kind of man whose friend would testify against him. Henry was the prosecution's backbone. Dovey thought the car mechanic looked younger in person than his photograph in the paper. And he was young, only 24 years old.

Ray pled guilty to a bunch of crimes. It was serious. But it's hard not to think about Ray's mental state after the spectacle of Mary's trial. Here's Terry Coopers again.

Some would say Ray made the perfect fall guy, but it cost him dearly.

There are some historical figures whose lives and stories are immortalized. Dubby wrote a memoir about her life. Mary didn't get to tell her story on her terms, but she's been written about extensively. But Ray, he was at the center of this whole trial, and yet his story is mostly untold.

We don't know if his relatives consider him a man who was wrongfully accused of Mary's murder or if they have their own doubts. His relatives never returned our invitations to speak for this podcast. Aside from his criminal record, we really don't know what happened to him or his family.

The one thing we do have is a letter. It's addressed to Dovey on August 10th, 1965, 10 days after Ray was acquitted.

And so, knowing what we know about Ray, that a jury found him not guilty, but his future involved bad behavior, we're still left wondering, if it wasn't Ray, then who could have murdered Mary Pinchot Meyer? Her killing left so many unanswered questions. It was only a matter of time before people filled in the gaps.

Mary was a woman who had the ear of some of the most powerful people in the country. Journalists, government officers, a sitting U.S. president. What did she know? Was it enough to cost her her life? Oh, and did we mention the diary?

We'll get to all of that and more on next week's episode of Murder on the Towpath. From Luminary, Murder on the Towpath is a production of Film Nation Entertainment in association with Neon Hum Media. Our executive producers are me, Soledad O'Brien, Alyssa Martino, Milan Popelka, and Jonathan Hirsch. Lead producer is Shara Morris. Associate producers are Natalie Rinn and Lucy Licht.

Senior editor is Catherine St. Louis. Music and composition by Andrew Eapin. Sound design and mixing by Scott Somerville. Fact-checking by Laura Bullard. Special thanks to Allison Cohen, Sarah Vacchiano, Rose Arce, Kate Mishkin, Ronald Young Jr., and Michaela Salella.

He had been in the military police corps in Korea. When he took the stand, you could tell he was a soldier. He was confident and calm. He knew how to follow orders. Henry told the prosecutor what happened. He and his colleague were affixing a stalled AMC Rambler near the Esso station on Canal Road. No one knew whose Rambler it actually was or how it was even left there in the first place.

It was around 12.25 when they heard a scream. A scream that went on for 20 seconds. Then, a gunshot. After less than a fraction of a second, Henry said he crossed the road toward the stone wall. Then he heard the second gunshot. He looked over the wall, around 120 feet or so away, and got a glance of a black man standing over a woman's body. After he saw the killer, he ducked behind the barrier.

Then he peeked back over to get a second look. That's when he saw the man put a dark object into his jacket pocket and saunter off into the woods. Henry called the police. When they arrived, he described the man he saw. He was of medium build, around 5'8 in height, weighing about 185 pounds. Around that time, Officer Warner, one of the detectives on the scene, was walking below with a man.

They were heading toward the murder scene. Henry saw them from above on Canal Road. It was the same man he saw standing over the victim's body. That's when Henry pointed to the man and said, that's him. The prosecution was playing their hand well.

According to author Ron Rosenbaum... It was good eyewitness testimony.

After hearing Henry's memory of the events, Hentman brought out several pieces of clothing, shoes, a white jacket, dark corduroy pants, and a cap Ray wore that day. The district jail confiscated Ray's pants and shoes after his arrest. Wiggins testified they were the exact clothes he had seen on the man standing over Mary Meyer. Handman had all the pieces in place.

Now he was putting it together for the jury. He pointed to Ray and asked Henry if that was the man he saw standing over Mary's crumpled body. Yes, sir, Henry said. This is Murder on the Towpath, a story of two incredible women who never met but whose lives became forever intertwined by tragedy. I'm your host, Soledad O'Brien.

This episode, we take you back into the courtroom, where we finally hear the verdict of Ray Crump's trial. Dovey approached the wooden bench. It was her turn to cross-examine the star witness. She seized on a phrase Henry just said to the courtroom, that he only got a glimpse of the killer. She asked him if he remembered saying that. Yes, he did. Dovey spotted a weakness in Henry's testimony.

Because earlier that day, Henry told Hantman he was sure the clothes the officer brought out in front of the courtroom were Ray's. Here's Bob Bennett again. You'll recall he was the clerk to the judge.

And Henry had just said he only got a glance of the killer. She brought on the questions. If Henry was looking at the murder scene, 120 feet away behind a stone wall, could he really know he was looking at the exact same clothes? She went one by one with each article of clothing. She held up the pants. Was he positive these were Ray's dark corduroy slacks? Yes, Henry answered, he was positive.

What about the cap? Was this the cap Ray wore? Yes. How about these black shoes? Yep, that's correct. Dovey zeroed in on the shoes, because lots of men wear black shoes, it's pretty hard to tell the difference unless you look closely at the details. Henry admitted he couldn't tell what kind of design the black shoe had from where he was standing. Dovey emphasized this to the jury.

You can't tell the design, she said. No, he knew the shoe was black, but he couldn't tell the style. Henry was contradicting himself. He had just said he was positive that the killer wore the same black shoes Ray wore when arrested. But now, he was saying, it's too hard to decipher shoe details from a distance. His fragile argument was resembling Ray's dark, frayed corduroy pants.

Dovey merely tugged one of its loose threads, and Henry's testimony slowly unraveled before the courtroom. She went in for the kill. Dovey asked Henry if he remembered testifying earlier that Ray was 5'8 and weighed 185 pounds. Sure, of course he did. The whole courtroom had just heard him testify that to Hantman. It was really a bit of a trap.

She asked Henry to look at Ray now. Ray was the thin, small man sitting at the defense table. Henry admitted it. He wouldn't describe Ray as he had described the killer. Here's Bob Bennett.

If it wasn't an accurate statement, did Henry lie in the court of law? He said he tried as best he could to remember. Debbie thought he had a clear view of the killing. She asked Henry what Ray was wearing that day. He responded, I didn't look at him that hard. The courtroom went still. She held the room, and then she asked Henry one final question.

She asked him if he had ever looked at the murderer hard. Just like that, the star witness flopped. His certainty, it all sort of fell apart on the stand. Pantman's last hope was to dispute Ray's height. He said there was a reason that Ray appeared taller that day. His shoes had an unusually tall heel. That gave him a good two inches more to his 5'5".

In court, Hantman brought out these, quote, built-up shoes. They're a vanity thing some short men use to bolster their height. He waved them in front of the jury, pointing to the heels. There are two inches of heel on these shoes, he declared. If Ray was 5'5", and he had some help from these shoes, that would get him to 5'7".

This is what gave Wiggins the idea he saw a man five feet, eight inches tall. This was his last chance. Hantman was exasperated. He asked the jury if this would really come down to a back and forth over a half inch or so. It was a good question. Only time would tell whether Dovey had sown enough doubt into his star witness's testimony.

Bob was clerking for Judge Howard Corcoran, who'd recently been appointed to the district court bench. President Johnson nominated him, and he was confirmed by the Senate in March. Some thought the judge wasn't ready for such a high-profile murder case. Guess Dovey wasn't the only one out there with something to prove.

Dovey knew he wouldn't suffer fools. She had to be exemplary. Crowds of people gathered in the fourth-floor courtroom. The space was all wood and cavernous. Thankfully, it was air-conditioned, which offset that muggy July heat in the district. There were two tables, one for the prosecutor and one for the defense. Behind the lawyers sat a large crowd who'd come to watch justice be served.

Throngs of journalists were covering the trial. Stylish Georgetown women like Cicely Angleton came for all 11 days. You'll recall her husband Jim Angleton was the chief of CIA counterintelligence. Ray's mother, Martha Crump, had her church friends there for support. And sitting in front of all of them were Ray and Dovey. Ray wore a new blue suit. His mother bought it for him for the trial.

Ray was only 5'5". He looked sharp in his suit, but he was scared. He was visibly shaking. If he was convicted, Ray could face a death penalty. At one point, he reached out to touch Dovey's hand.

Seven women, five men, sat on the jury. According to Dovey, they were black and white in equal number and came from every walk of life. There was a taxi driver, a social worker, a nurse, and a counselor. And then there was the prosecutor representing the state, U.S. Attorney Alfred Hantman.

Hantman was a 25-year veteran of the D.C. criminal courts. He knew these kinds of cases better than most trial lawyers, prosecuted dozens of them. He was confident he'd prevail.

Chewing gum aggressively didn't exactly win over jurors, or at least annoyed one or two, according to Bennett. It smacked of overconfidence. Hantman took the floor and began his account of what happened that fateful day of October 12th, 1964. He recounted the murder blow by blow, growing louder and louder with each gruesome detail.

The Washington Post printed all the details of Hantman's opening statement. The assailant shot the victim first in the left temple. Then she was dragged 20 or 25 feet toward the embankment. The witness, Henry Wiggins, heard a scream, God, somebody help me. Mary struggled back across the towpath to the canal's edge. She crawled on her hands and knees, tearing at her assailant.

He shot her a second time, this time in her right shoulder. The bullet ripped through the main blood vessel leading into her heart. The details were hard to hear then. They're hard to hear now, decades later. Once Hantman had the courtroom horrified, he tore into Ray.

According to Hantman, Crump was a killer with no motive, a black man who enjoyed the thrill of violence, who killed for the sake of killing. The jury looked terrified. Hantman's details were graphic. That was the point. It seemed like his strategy was to scare jurors into a guilty verdict. But he didn't just want jurors to think Ray was a mindless killer, a man without a moral compass.

He also wanted them to know he was a liar. Hantman brought up the fishing rod.

We know Ray hadn't told the truth. As you might remember, he told Dovey he was with a lover that day. But the woman, Vivian, didn't want to testify because she didn't want her husband to find out. But during Hantman's opening statement, the jury thought Ray was lying because he had killed Mary. It was a devastating moment in court. Hantman finished his opening statement.

The fairest verdict was the guilty one. The U.S. attorney sat down. It was an unforgettable opening. Usually at this point, a defense lawyer tells their version of events so jurors will believe that the accused is actually innocent. Not, as Hantman argued, a killer who enjoyed the thrill of violence. Dovey rose. Then she did something out of the ordinary.

Earlier this year, my producer Natalie and I went to the place where all of this began. So this towpath is, it's very pretty. It runs right along a wall. That's about, what, 20 feet high? Maybe that's a guess. And between the towpath and the wall is a marsh. And it's, I guess the time of year, it's sort of got a low level of water in it.

Even though everyone was expecting she would, she didn't make an opening statement. It was a bold move. But Dovey had her reasons. She didn't want to give away the main points of her case. If she did, then Hantman might not call one important witness, a gentleman who mapped out the area where Mary died. So Dovey bided her time and let the witness testimonies begin.

Hempman called upon Ray's neighbor, Elsie Perkins, to testify about the fishing gear. Elsie and Ray's apartment sat side by side on Stanton Terrace. She testified she saw Ray leaving his apartment at 8 that morning. He was wearing the same cap and jacket that the police found near Mary's body later that day. And mind you, he had no fishing gear with him.

She also said she knew Ray owned only one fishing rod. She saw it in a closet in his family's apartment later that day. Dovey cross-examined Elsie. The Evening Star documented the exchange. Why was Elsie so certain of what Crump wore on the day of the murder? Elsie responded, Mr. Crump's wife and I are in the habit of checking to see who's coming or going. Isn't that being nosy? Dovey asked.

You could call it that, the housewife answered. Dovey wasn't getting anywhere. The media didn't think so either. The Washington Star's headline the next day read, Meyer Witness Links Cap to Crump. That didn't sound good. Dovey knew she had to be strategic. Pantman may be aggressive, but maybe she could outmaneuver him in other ways.

She tried to win over the jury by showing that Ray was a man worth tending to, not a monster, but a slight, short man who was somebody's son. Hantman brought another witness to the stand. It was one of Ray's friends, Robert Woolbright. Robert was the guy who was supposed to take him to the construction job that day. He stopped by Ray's. But that morning, Ray was nowhere to be found.

He told the jury he didn't see his friend on the job either. This anecdote didn't make Ray a murderer, but the prosecution was painting a picture for the jury. They were saying Ray was an unreliable man, shifty, someone who didn't keep his word, someone whose own friend would testify against him. We still don't know why Robert Woolbright did that.

Hantman said all of these testimonies were a textbook case of circumstantial evidence. In other words, he was asking the jury to connect the dots. You don't need to look far. The murderer is in plain sight. Right here, in the blue suit, in front of you. Sounds strange to say it, but Dovey and Hantman saw eye to eye on one thing. There was no direct evidence linking Ray to the crime.

Without it, Hantman had to try for a conviction in a roundabout way. He portrayed Ray as a killer and a liar who was found near Mary's body and hoped the jurors would convict him of murder without direct evidence. Dovey had other plans. At every turn, she was going to point out the lack of evidence that tied Ray to Mary's death. Take the gun, for example. Police never found the murder weapon.

To the left of the towpath as we're walking, and of course you see the skyline right on the other side of that. It's so pretty. I mean, it really is very beautiful.

After the shooting, 40 police officers combed through 1,500 feet of dirt. The park police even drained the canal, hoping to find a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson laying at the bottom of that murky water. But they didn't, and they certainly never found a pistol on Ray. The government worked hard to find it, and still, nothing. Dovey knew there was no real evidence connecting Ray to the crime.

She just needed to convince the jury of that, too.

We wanted to see for ourselves where Mary Meyer and Dovey Roundtree intersected. Mary Meyer walked here. Dovey Roundtree hunted for clues here. This might be the only place where the two of them cross paths. Literally, Georgetown overlooks this path.

To build their case, the prosecution brought out technical experts. First, an FBI hair and fiber expert testified. The man, Paul Stombaugh, compared a hair taken from Crump's head with hairs found near the scene of the crime. He told the jury they matched. He said there were no dissimilar characteristics.

But this was a time before DNA testing, so all the FBI expert could say, with that weird phrase, was that the hair on the jacket and cap looked like it could be Ray's hair. There was no way of knowing if the strands of hair were genetically identical. not exactly science. If Ray were tried today, that alone could have changed the course of the trial.

Under cross-examination, Dovey forced him to admit what was actually true, that hair cannot positively be traced to a particular source. Stambaugh sat back down. Up next was another FBI figure, this time a gunpowder expert named Warren Johnson. He said the gunpowder residue found on Mary's blouse and sweater showed the murderer put a gun up to Mary's body, or very, very near contact.

I mean, if you looked out the window of a Georgetown dorm, you would see the path. I had this idea of what the towpath would be like. Actually, when I first heard the word towpath, I wasn't even sure what one was. I guess I assumed the towpath was heavily wooded, like in a movie. You know, the slightly ominous scene. It's typically at the beginning of a film noir.

But at the same time, no gunpowder compounds were found on the jacket and cap that were supposedly Ray's. Hantman argued it was because Ray was wet when the police found him. He suggested Ray had deliberately fallen into the water to clean himself off. Then the prosecution brought out their next bit of evidence. And boy, was it big. Literally.

The Evening Star said it was 30 feet long. And some records say the map was as large as 55 feet wide. Point is, this map was hard to miss. It's pretty likely the prosecution was resting a large part of their case on the map. Hantman even wanted to keep the map up during the trial. But Judge Corcoran thought it could sway the jury.

So every time Hantman examined a new witness about the crime scene, he'd clumsily put the map back up like a 10th grade geography teacher. The map itself covered a substantial area, everything between Key Bridge and Chain Bridge. It wasn't just the crime scene where Mary died. It included potential exits, too, where the killer could have escaped after the murder.

The mapmaker was a lifelong government employee. His name was Joseph Roncesvalle, and he was an engineer. He testified that there were multiple official exits to the towpath, including Key Bridge, Chain Bridge, Foundry Tunnel, and Fletcher's Boathouse. Remember, the police caught Ray within 45 minutes of the murder.

The police had probably been manning those exits within 10 to 15 minutes of Mary's body being found. So essentially, the mapmaker was saying the murderer was trapped in the area. There was no way he could have escaped. So the killer had to be Ray. That's what the prosecution argued. Dovey quickly seized on the mapmaker's argument in her cross-examination.

She asked him if he had ever walked the towpath area. He hadn't. Dovey's long days traversing the towpath were about to pay off. Unlike the mapmaker, she had been to the towpath. A lot. By this point, she had memorized its pathways. She listed off all the numerous small and unofficial entry and exit points in the area.

And it was clear to me the killer didn't have to leave the towpath through an official exit. Natalie and I noticed that immediately when we walked there. I mean, you're so close to roads on both sides, so sure, there's not an official exit. But if you walk over here, right, if we head kind of toward the Potomac and we walk through this bramble... There's a path right here.

I'm sure that's not an official path, but clearly somebody else has come down here, and you can see where they've tucked through there, and they could make their way. I mean, it's a 30-foot drop, but you could see how you could scoot down there, not easily. You can also see sort of a tunnel that brings you somewhere other than... Oh, yeah, yeah. Try not to fall off this edge here.

But yeah, look at that. There's a little tunnel that you can see pretty clearly. That's not an official exit by any stretch of the imagination, but could you get out? You could. Could you go down these stairs, maybe run over that way? Could you jump into the water? I mean, those aren't official exits, but they're ways out. You could run across the marsh. You and I, if we go to the other side...

But look, I mean, you and I could just jump right into this. It's mucky, but it's not full of water like it is down further. You could run across that and scale up over that wall. I mean, I could hop that. Yeah. I mean, truly, anybody could do that. So this idea that, yes, it's not an official exit, but if you're asking, could someone in fact exit? Yes, they could.

Within five minutes of watching, you know, from the pacing and the moody lighting, that she's not going to make it to the end of the film. just like Mary, who was killed too soon, before her life had run its course. But here's the thing. The place Mary was murdered is actually an open public park. It's amazing how crowded it is. And obviously, we're talking many decades ago.

It seems as though Dovey came to the same conclusion. Back in 1965, the mapmaker was no contest for Dovey. After she listed all the potential unofficial exits, he relented. He couldn't counter her argument. He hadn't been to the towpath. So in open court, he had to admit he wasn't sure there were a fixed number of escape routes. The implications were huge.

It meant the fact that Ray was in the area didn't mean that he was guilty. It meant that if the murder was planned, someone could have quickly left the area any number of ways. And someone could even have gotten away before the cops started their dragnet. Dovey scored big for Ray's defense. Here's Bob Bennett again.

Hantman grew visibly angry. He objected. Judge Corcoran overruled him. The mapmaker's testimony was fair game. Ray's case wasn't looking as hopeless as it had after opening arguments. Dovey was going toe-to-toe with the gum-chewing, aggressive prosecutor. She was smart. She knew what she was doing. Dovey was finding gaps in Hantman's argument.

What she didn't know, what only Mary's inner circle knew, was that Mary had had an affair with JFK. Had she known, she might have argued her case differently. But JFK was known to have countless women at his fingertips. Look at Marilyn Monroe. But what JFK and Mary had was not a typical affair. JFK wrote to her and said, you know, you need to give me what I want. Yes, that's right.

JFK wrote Mary Meyer a letter, an epic love letter. Next time, you'll get to hear it. From Luminary, Murder on the Towpath is a production of Film Nation Entertainment in association with Neon Hum Media. Our executive producers are me, Soledad O'Brien, Alyssa Martino, Milan Papelka, and Jonathan Hirsch. Lead producer is Shara Morris. Associate producers are Natalie Rinn and Lucy Licht.

Senior editor is Catherine St. Louis. Music and composition by Andrew Eapin. Sound design and mixing by Scott Somerville. Fact-checking by Laura Bullard. Special thanks to Allison Cohen, Sarah Vacchiano, Rose Arce, Kate Mishkin, and Michaela Salella.

But still, like, you're not alone and secluded. There's a lot happening. You don't feel alone. It doesn't feel scary. It doesn't feel quiet.

It feels busy.

Right, you see the joggers kind of above your head on the bridge, and you even see the homeless people's little encampments because the trees don't even hide those at all. But I thought, having not seen it before, that it would be much more secluded and much, you know, more places where you could hide and not, I mean, really, you can see everything.

And these days, planes constantly pass overhead. The towpath has long been in the flight path of Reagan. Of course, back then it was just called National Airport. The path itself is also wider than I thought it would be. We passed people walking their dogs, soccer players and cyclists were whizzing past us. That afternoon, Natalie and I retraced Mary's steps on her final day.

We started at M and 34th Street, passed Key Bridge and walked west toward Fletcher's Boathouse, crossed the wooden footbridge, and even walked past the tunnel that journalist Lance Morrow would have taken to reach Mary. We used several sources about the crime to figure out where Mary died, but our best guess is roughly 4300 Canal Road. Natalie pinned it on her phone and we headed that way.

At this point in our walk, the canal was on the right. The Potomac was on the left, down a slope filled with brush and trees. And that's the spot where she was first shot? Yes. Even in the Potomac kayaks. Like, you're really not alone.

Well, it's almost right here like being on a beach, right? The water is to our left, the Potomac. The path has gotten very flat and open. Not too much brush. And the highway is to our right. And it's kind of just... Exposed. Over these last few months, I've read so much about Mary's final walk, the horror and the history of it.

She was just doing what she did every day to take a moment for herself. Remember, she'd been going through a lot, getting divorced, grieving Michael's death. And yet, when it came down to it, this act of violence happened in a public park that people pass every day, not far away from posh Georgetown stores. You'd think there'd be a plaque or something commemorating this death.

But it's business as usual on M Street. You can see people deciding which cupcake flavor to get as a treat as pop music blares from the speakers. It's all a bit jarring. Even if we don't know it, the shadow of history is always following us. I don't think there's anybody walking on those streets 15 minutes away who realized that a murder occurred.

I don't think there's anybody who's thinking, oh my gosh, this is a site of a murder. They just don't think that way. Partly because I think we forget so quickly and partly because I think it just looks so regular. It doesn't look like a thing at all. It's just a dirt path.

And yet, this is where a woman's life ended, and where Dovey returned to again and again in the months following Mary's murder to unlock clues that might save Ray Crump's life. In July of 1965, the time had come for Dovey to give everything she had to convince the jury that Ray was innocent.

From Luminary, Film Nation Entertainment, and Neon Hum Media, this is Murder on the Towpath, a story of two incredible women who never met, but whose lives became forever intertwined by tragedy. I'm your host, Soledad O'Brien. This episode, we take you to the courtroom, where we finally hear about Ray's trial.

Those major victories were exciting.

It would take longer for white people to consider black people their equals. Many people still don't. Dovey felt the weight of all of this. It was the weight of defending Ray in a society that devalued Black men. But it was also the weight that she felt whenever she entered a courtroom.

A year before the trial, the D.C. Bar Association actually protested her membership. The all-white group didn't like a black woman in their midst. Some board members even resigned over Dovey. So while she was fighting for justice for Ray, Dovey also had to fight for herself. She carried all of this with her that morning as she walked into the D.C. Circuit Court on July 20th, 1965.

People wanted her to fail.

On that hot summer Tuesday in D.C., all eyes were on Ray's trial.

That's Bob Bennett. Back in 1965, Bob was a newly minted lawyer working as a clerk.

Bob's a successful lawyer these days, and he knows a thing or two about being part of a noteworthy case. In the 90s, he was one of President Clinton's defense attorneys during his impeachment hearings. But Ray's case was one of the first times he was in a courtroom.

He was a man of many talents, a poet, an intellectual, but the thing he wanted most was world peace.

In their short lives, Mary and Cord had seen plenty of death and darkness. Mary had lost an older sister to suicide. Cord enlisted in the Marines after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. He had seen soldiers die. But on their wedding day in the spring of 1945, they both looked overwhelmed with happiness, hopeful. The war was in its waning days. Hitler would be gone weeks later.

It was December 1956, a week before Christmas. Mary and Cord Meyer had once been very in love, hopeful for the future. They'd been brought together by their shared passion for world peace, just as the Second World War was ending. Back then, they were young intellectuals in love with books, ideas, and each other. Their bond was strong.

Death on such a large scale had never been seen by anyone before. It left a mark. But maybe now there were better days ahead. especially for Mary and Cord, because they'd found each other.

The young couple was married in the Pinchot family's apartment on Park Avenue. Mary wore a green and white daydress with a string of pearls and a pair of reading glasses around her neck. Cord wore his marine dress uniform. In one image of that day, Mary, arm in arm with Cord, cranes her gaze upward toward her new husband.

Wide-eyed and flashing a white smile through red lips, it's as if she sees her future in Cord. By the time they married, Cord knew war was absurd. He had been sent home after he lost an eye in a grenade explosion. He had become a pacifist. On the day of the nuptials, Cord got some good news. He learned he'd get to go to a UN convention in San Francisco to work toward world peace.

Mary joined him there. The perfect honeymoon for two idealists. Not on a beach, but at an international conference to end all war. But in San Francisco, Cord became quickly disillusioned. The U.S., France and China demanded veto power over U.N. resolutions. Cord knew world peace had no chance if one country's interests won out.

Cord was interviewed at the convention by a reporter for The New York Times. He barely mustered any optimism. He just said it had been a step in the right direction. There was one more journalist at the convention who wanted to talk to Cord, but Cord wouldn't allow it.

Cord refused JFK's request for an interview. Kennedy wrote skeptical remarks about Cord's pessimistic takeaway from the convention in a personal notebook. The two men, who were both war vets from prominent New England families, couldn't find common ground. But fate kept Kennedy in Mary's close orbit. And then, on their way back east, the newlyweds got unforgettable news that shook the world.

The newsreels showed the unimaginable, and everyone was watching.

But by Christmas 1956, what once seemed unbreakable had started to crack at its very foundation. This would be the Myers' last Christmas, all together as a family. They installed a tree in their spacious farmhouse in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., Mary had hidden the presents inside closets away from her three boys. Quentin, the oldest, was ten. Michael was nine. And the youngest, Mark, was six.

For a few years, Cord set out on the lecture circuit, going from college to college. He made advocating for world peace alluring, apparently, because students pinned images of Cord, the pacifist with an eye patch, on the walls of their dorm rooms. But Cord was growing pessimistic. The U.S. fight against communism had ramped up, and nuclear testing continued.

So when Cord's father set him up with a meeting, Cord was despondent enough to listen to what the CIA had to say. Here's Lance Morrow.

Cord hoped the agency could help quell the threat of nuclear war.

If Kord couldn't work toward world peace through international cooperation, maybe this was the next best option. Kord took the job.

The Meyer children's needs were always met. But there was one thing they really wanted. A TV. The 1950s were the dawn of TV in the American living room.

In 1951, Mary, her husband Cord, and their three young boys moved to a well-to-do suburb of Washington, D.C. Mary was excited. Now she could take care of her boys in a big farmhouse. And she could meet up with old Vassar friends who had settled in the district.

Their shared hopes for a peaceful future had all but vanished. Here's Nina Burley again.

They started taking their grievances about each other to an especially personal space, Cord's diary.

I know it sounds odd or even unhealthy, but it indicates how unhappy they were. Still, for Cord, his diary was the place he felt comfortable expressing his frustrations.

His diary wasn't something that was meant to be kept private from his wife, at least not according to Mary's handwritten annotations inside of it.

Cord would write about his disappointments over his career and the dimming prospects of peace. And then Mary would dive in.

Mary was not a gentle editor.

It wasn't easy to be the wife of a CIA man. To begin with, what do you tell the children?

Accord was definitely not delivering the mail. And over time, this high-stakes secrecy took its toll.

This is Lance Morrow again.

Some CIA men had lived through war. They'd seen death from the front lines. And they woke up to the reality of nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, women were compelled to be caretakers and homemakers, both out of duty to their husbands and families, and of course, systemically, by design.

For CIA wives, it was a job they took very seriously, hosting dinner parties.

It was one of those small but significant ways she was willing to go against the grain. The Myers were not getting a television. So when their two older sons, Quentin and Michael, wanted to watch their favorite Western, they had to go to the neighbor's. They had to cross Route 123 to get to their friend's house. The boys knew to be careful crossing.

And given these high stakes, an independent thinker like Mary Meyer would have been looked at with suspicion.

So women, Mary included, continued to play the roles assigned to them. Driving kids in carpools, gardening, and cooking family dinners. But Mary also did something for herself, self-care before we called it that. She took art classes at American University, and when she had time, she painted in the shed in her backyard. Still, being a mother took precedence.

Both Mary and Dovey came up long before Betty Friedan argued that women should and could work outside the home. The Feminine Mystique was only published in 1963, just a few years before I was born. and the year before Mary's murder. In the 1950s, most women lived with certain limits.

Maybe Mary thought she'd be a CIA wife forever, but she chose independence. After her son died, her life took a different turn. And that was true for Dovey, too. She'd married her college sweetheart, William Roundtree. But Dovey and William wanted different things by the time she decided to pursue the law. Here's Dovey speaking to the National Visionary Leadership Project.

Dovey said she didn't want to be reined in by her husband. She took a job in another state. He went into the civil service, and they parted ways. Incredibly, both Mary and Dovey got divorced at a time when ending a marriage wasn't common. When doing so would have opened them up to no small amount of ridicule. Mary's father had divorced his first wife. Still, he was a man. He had money.

Mary was not only a woman, but a mother, choosing independence over family in the 50s. It was so unusual, most women wouldn't dream about it, let alone do it. As for Dovey, well, she had neither an example to follow or money. She had only her own will, her own goals to follow. Both Mary and Dovey were ahead of their time. Lance Morrow saw the similarities between them. He said Dovey...

Just two years earlier, their golden retriever had been killed on the road, right in front of their house. The route wasn't well lit. And on this fateful December day, sunlight had already given way to nightfall.

By 1954, Cord, unfulfilled by his job, was continuing to drink heavily, but was also rising quickly through CIA ranks. Mary's patience wore thin. She went on a European trip with her sister, Toni. Each sister had affairs with new men. Toni's was with Ben Bradley, and they married the following year. Mary met a man that a family friend described as an Italian count.

She went back home to the suburbs, feeling liberated, and Cord sensed a shift. It was the beginning of the end of their relationship. He thought he could wait out his wife's love affair, but the distance between them grew. Mary stopped attending CIA dinners and social outings. And then came that awful day, that December day that would break up her family for good.

Mary ran downhill to her son's body. He had died instantly in the crash. She kept her composure in the moment, but later it all sunk in. She gave away Michael's Christmas presents and found other ways to cope. She encouraged Michael's friends to come visit and pick one of his toys to keep for themselves. I'm a mother of four. The idea of Mary giving away those toys is absolutely heartbreaking.

Was it because she couldn't bear to look at them? Or did she want his toys to bring joy to other children, a way of having his memory live on? It's hard to fathom the depths of Mary and Cord's sadness.

Cord was hoping that this tragedy would bring them closer together, but it was not to be.

In her grief over her son, over her marriage, over the hopes for her future, Mary needed to regain her sense of self. She would breach society's expectations of her. She would start volunteering at an art gallery and establishing her own home. She'd get a painting studio in Georgetown. She'd begin painting in the morning and taking a daily walk along the Georgetown towpath.

And just like Mary's short story at Vassar, everything was about to be new and exciting and different and interesting. Next time on Murder on the Towpath, we return to Mary's murder trial, where Ray Crump is facing the death penalty. The police found him soaking wet near the towpath. But could someone else have committed the crime and had time to escape?

On TV, as the good guys were battling the bad guys, Quentin and Michael knew dinner time was fast approaching. They had promised to be home for supper. So, they headed home. The older boy, Quentin, dashed across the road first and reached his family's lawn. Michael followed close behind. At home, Mary was likely preparing the final touches on dinner when she heard a horrible noise.

To find out, I go to the scene of the crime, to the towpath itself. It's almost not secluded enough to make you feel afraid or to get a sense of foreboding about what's coming. On Mary's last walk, in her moments of solitude, she was surrounded by beauty, an exposed path in nature. Mary wouldn't have had reason to be scared at all.

From Luminary, Murder on the Towpath is a production of Film Nation Entertainment in association with Neon Hum Media. Our executive producers are me, Soledad O'Brien, Alyssa Martino, Milan Papelka, and Jonathan Hirsch. Lead producer is Shara Morris. Associate producers are Natalie Rinn and Lucy Licht. Senior editor is Catherine St. Louis. Music and composition by Andrew Eapin.

Sound design and mixing by Scott Somerville. Fact-checking by Laura Bullard. Special thanks to Allison Cohen, Sarah Vacchiano, Rose Arce, Kate Mishkin, and Michaela Salella. And to Liesl Schillinger for reading Mary's short story.

One of Mary's biographers, Nina Burley, told us more about that moment.

Perhaps Mary was in shock, or maybe she didn't want to give in to the horror of that moment, so she kept her composure. But the accident was kind of a catalyst. It changed her, changed her priorities. After that horrible evening, she chose a new course. Mary didn't want to be married anymore. She didn't want to live in the suburbs.

She'd get a painting studio in Georgetown and start to take a daily walk on the towpath. From Luminary, Film Nation Entertainment, in association with Neon Hum Media, I'm Soledad O'Brien, and this is Murder on the Towpath, a story of two incredible women who never met, but whose lives became forever intertwined by tragedy.

By the time of Mary's murder, Dovey Roundtree knew she had come from a prominent family, but she didn't have the full story. Had she known what kind of powerful people Mary had known her entire life, maybe Dovey would have felt less optimistic about her case defending Ray. Here's historian Alexis Coe.

She lived on Park Avenue in Manhattan. and went to the Brearley School on the Upper East Side. Brearley was academically rigorous and, of course, exclusive. Girls with last names like Matisse, Roosevelt, and Graham attended. Mary studied math, history, Greek, Latin, and French. She played basketball and smoked cigarettes.

In between classes, she'd duck into a smoking room at Brearley that was for seniors only. Mary would continue to smoke socially for the rest of her life. She first crossed paths with JFK long before he was president. It was a winter formal in 1936. Mary was just 15. Among the New England prep school set, winter was the season of the formal dance.

Bill Atwood, a future ambassador to the UN, invited Mary to a weekend of festivities at Choate Rosemary Hall. In the dance hall, there were tuxedos with coattails and intricate formal dresses. John F. Kennedy had graduated from Choate the year before and was already a freshman at Princeton. But he turned up that night on the Choate dance floor alone.

He was confident, not embarrassed to return to a high school dance, not embarrassed to go stag. As Bill and Mary danced, JFK's eyes rested on her. He tapped Bill on the shoulder and cut in. According to Bill's memoir, Kennedy cut in on his dances with Mary again and again that night. Mary had an effect on the future president. He wouldn't soon forget her.

But it wasn't just wealth and beauty that made Mary Pinchot stand out. Her family was also liberal and unconventional. Here's Nina again.

There was plenty of space to frolic at Gray Towers. That's what they called the family estate outside Milford, Pennsylvania. Mary and her father Amos played tennis together. Growing up, he was the parent she looked to please.

Mary's mother, Ruth, spent hours behind closed doors writing her stories and was much more hands-off when it came to parenting. Her father had left his first wife to marry her. Divorce was generally unheard of in the early 1900s. Mary's father knew his choice would open him up to scrutiny, but he took the risk anyway. In that way, Mary took after her father.

But when it came time for college, Mary did follow in her mother's footsteps and went to Vassar. She daydreamed about studying to become a doctor. But the truth is, that's not really why Mary went to college. Here's historian Alexis Coe.

Vassar women were divided into two camps, career types and those who got hitched and had children. But Mary was also hard to categorize. One famous classmate, Scotty Fitzgerald, daughter to F. Scott, called her an independent soul and even compared her to a fawn. Maybe the best way to put it was she was one of a kind, not one to care what other people thought.

Vassar classmate Frances Field told Nina Burley as much. She remembers an incident during finals time their senior year. The study room was dead quiet. Stress was high. Mary got up to use the bathroom. But before she left, she paused by a vase, bent down, and took a bite out of a tulip. Mary chewed her mouthful without saying a thing.

Like her mother, Mary was also a writer. She published a short story in the Vassar Review in 1941. It was called Futility. And the window it provides into Mary's mind?

That's author Ron Rosenbaum. Mary's story revolves around a young woman named Ruth, who's something of an outsider.

Ruth is at a cocktail party, and the room is almost grotesquely decorated. Expensive but gauche, silver wallpaper, a shiny mantle with a fish tank above it. Inside are overfed goldfish. Here's an excerpt from Mary's story.

Ruth isn't impressed by any of these trappings. She tells the host she's leaving. She can't make her excuses quickly enough.

Ruth is leaving because she has a plan. She's going to get surgery, elective surgery. Surgeons will switch Ruth's nerves, so her optical nerves are connected to her hearing, and her hearing to her eyes. Everything she sees, she'll hear, and everything she hears, she'll see. It doesn't exactly make sense, but that is the point. Mary's heroine craves the unconventional, the weird.

Or, as Ruth says as she leaves the party, It will all be different tomorrow.

Ruth wants to cure her boredom through radical change. Did Mary want that too? Her heroine was willing to do whatever it took. Here's Ron Rosenbaum again.

Mary Pinchot might show up to the party, but that didn't mean she'd follow any of the rules. And whatever she did do, she did with a confidence that usually made others notice.

Mary started writing features for United Press International, a newspaper syndication service.

Mary knew she'd eventually get married and have children. But for now, she wanted something more. The war took its toll on so many young people, made them realize the senselessness of killing, the futility and waste of it all. She wanted a world free of war. She wanted a husband who also believed in that cause. And as the wounded young men started coming home from battle, Mary found Cord Meyer.

The official report was given to President Johnson on September 24, 1964. Less than three weeks later, Mary was dead on the towpath.

Another conspiracy theorist in the 90s looked into Mary's murder. A man named Leo DeMoor. He claims that he learned key information about Mary's death from her diary. the diary that no one else has ever claimed to have seen after Angleton took it. In a 1993 conversation with his lawyer, Damore claims he got his hands on a copy of it.

Damore said Angleton had given the diary to someone Damore knew, and through that person, Damore read what was inside of it. He claims that Mary confronted her ex-husband, Cord, after the Warren Commission report came out. She apparently told Cord that more than one gunman was involved, and the CIA, too.

From there, Cord supposedly told James Angleton about Mary's growing agitation over the commission's findings. Janney seized on this reporting from DeMoore, then argued that Mary was ready to raise a stink publicly about the CIA's involvement in JFK's death. So what could she have known?

After JFK's assassination, Mary allegedly sought answers from two of the president's closest advisors, Dave Powers and Kenny O'Donnell. By then, O'Donnell had told conspiracy theorist Leo Damore in an interview that things in Dallas went down differently than the commission reported.

And those two presidential advisors told Mary herself that they'd seen two bullets come from in front of JFK's motorcade. Meaning, at the very least, more than one gunman had been involved in the shooting. Right around this time, Mary told her friends she felt she was being followed.

She'd found a garden door and a basement door to her Georgetown home open after she'd been out, and told another friend she was scared of finding someone inside. Meanwhile, Angleton bragged that he tapped Mary's phones and her bedroom. The wife of another CIA official confirmed this with biographer Nina Burley. And if you believed Moore and Janney, that was the beginning of the end for Mary.

Angleton was a godfather to Mary's children. But more importantly, in this case, he was chief of the CIA's most secretive department. In the far-fetched world of conspiracy theories, the CIA had a motive for wanting to kill Mary. But whether you find that to be plausible or not, whether you believe in this conspiracy or not, two facts from the time of Mary's murder don't really add up.

The first is her diary, and the second is a phone call. No one close to Mary agrees on what her diary contained. No one agrees on how it was found. No one agrees where it was found. All anyone seemed to agree on was that Mary's diary eventually ended up in the hands of CIA spy James Angleton.

Well, what's even weirder about Mary's diary is that widely respected journalist Ben Bradley gave it to the CIA agent. That fact first became public knowledge when Bradley's memoir was published in the mid-90s.

When you've got an esteemed journalist in cahoots with a spy, it fans the flames. Lance Morrow felt the same way.

But to this day, the diary is the missing piece of the puzzle that leads so many to believe there's a conspiracy behind Mary's murder.

Imagine waking up one morning in the spring of 1976. You live in Washington, D.C., so as part of your morning routine, you make coffee, walk outside, and grab the morning edition of The Washington Post. As you sit and take your first hot sip of caffeine, you glance at the day's headlines. One catches your eye.

So what was in Mary's diary that made it so dangerous? No one really knows.

What adds to the enduring mystery is that no one close to Mary told the same story. They each told different accounts of how Mary's diary was retrieved and, in some cases, destroyed.

Each story about Mary's diary starts out, more or less, the same way. On the night of Mary's murder, the story goes, Tony Bradley, Mary's sister, got a call in Georgetown.

If you think something about this sounds strange, you wouldn't be alone. No one knows how Anne Truitt in Japan learned about Mary's murder. Anne died in 2004, but while she was alive, she remained quiet on the matter. And had Mary really told her best friend that she wanted Angleton to have it if she died? This was hard to believe, given Mary's distaste for the CIA.

The most fleshed-out version of the diary hunt comes from Ron Rosenbaum, who wrote about Mary's murder in 1976. According to Rosenbaum's conversations with various sources, the diary hunt turned into a sort of impromptu memorial party for Mary, five days after her murder.

Several people were at Mary's house, including Mary's sister, Toni, Cord, and Angleton and his wife. Angleton showed up with spy gear, white gloves, a drill, in his little black spy bag. There was wall tapping. Bricks were turned over in the yard. Rosenbaum reported that everyone drank whiskey and Mary's ex-husband, Cord, lit a smoky fire.

someone else walked out into the yard and called to mary up above mary where's your damn diary According to Rosenbaum, Tony located her sister's diary in her painting studio, along with artwork she was preparing for her next show. The diary itself was in a locked steel box. And according to Tony, it was more of a sketchbook with some vague references to an affair.

Angleton is reported to have taken it. Ben Bradley's account, meanwhile? It varies so dramatically from what Angleton said that it caused a rift between the men.

In his memoir, A Good Life, Bradley claimed he first arrived at Mary's studio the following day, just him and Tony. And that's when he found Angleton already present. C-SPAN interviewed Bradley about this episode in 1995 during his publicity tour for his memoir. Here's Bradley himself saying he saw Angleton at Mary's studio, already looking for Mary's diary when he arrived.

By 1976, the public had already learned about JFK's extramarital proclivities. But this time around, the real news was who this affair was with. Because not only was the president carrying on with a gorgeous artist and socialite, and not only had she done drugs with the president in the private residence of the White House...

Nina Burley fleshes it out a bit more. When Tony and Ben Bradley arrived at Mary's studio.

You see, pretty different from the impromptu diary-searching party that Rosenbaum described.

Maybe so. But all seemed to be in agreement that Angleton eventually ended up with it. To this day, Peter Janney claims only the CIA knows what's really inside Mary's diary. And he suggests it was much more than just an artist's sketchbook.

As part of his book tour, Janney was interviewed by the Boston Globe about what exactly Mary's diary might have said. He said the diary contained incriminating information about Angleton and the Dallas assassination. That's why he had to take it. But that's just speculation. Meanwhile, Lance Morrow puts it this way.

And that brings us to another mystery. An odd phone call placed the afternoon Mary died. As you recall, Mary's body was officially identified the night of her murder. Ben Bradley went to the morgue to vouch that Mary was Mary. In his 1965 courtroom testimony, Bradley claimed the first time he realized Mary was dead was at the morgue.

Years later, though, it would become clear that both Bradley and the CIA knew about Mary's death well before sunset.

Why would a couple of top CIA officials know about Mary's death before her identity was confirmed? Cicely Angleton says she just happened to hear a news bulletin that October day for reasons unknown. Just like Lance Morrow, she heard about the murder of a white woman on the Georgetown towpath shortly after noon. Cicely Angleton knew Mary liked to take walks there around midday.

So upon hearing about the murdered woman, she feared the worst and called her husband, James Angleton, at the CIA.

That account of why the CIA knew of Mary's death early is innocent enough. But another call is far more damning. This call came from within the CIA. It was made by a CIA officer named Wister Janney. If that name sounds familiar, well, that's because you heard it before. Wister Janney is Peter Janney's father.

And one of the linchpins of Peter Janney's argument that the CIA killed Mary is connected to this phone call his father made that day. In his memoir, Ben Bradley reports that he actually learned of Mary's murder when he received a phone call just after lunch from a friend. That friend was Wister Janney, also employed by the CIA. Like we mentioned earlier, the Janneys grew up with the Myers.

But this woman, Mary Pinchot Meyer, had been murdered, too, just 11 months after the president's own assassination. And that's the moment you realize this story is a lot more complicated than you initially imagined. It appeared in the National Enquirer, a sensational supermarket tabloid.

Peter Janney's best friend had been Mary's middle son, Michael, who was tragically hit by a car. And so, years later, when Peter Janney discovered, with horror, that his father had known about the murder hours before anyone else... With that, it dawned on him that his father seemed to know in advance that Mary would be murdered.

And so, when Peter read his father had made the phone call to Ben Bradley that afternoon, his conviction that the CIA was behind Mary's death and that his own father was in on the plot became more than a conspiracy. For Jannie, it became a horrifying truth. It tied what he had lived as a child to new information he learned as an adult. For him, it cracked open the case. Listen, we're humans.

It's really hard to accept that bad things happen randomly, that Mary could get shot on the towpath for no good reason. It makes sense why Janney would take one new piece of information and derive from it a much bigger meaning. Because, as Dr. Pierre says, people who believe in conspiracy theories also tend to believe...

Okay, fine. Outstanding questions about the diary and a mysterious phone call aside, say the CIA did kill Mary. How would it have gone down? You might not be surprised. Janney has a detailed answer for that, too. His theory revolves around another man who claims he was on the towpath the day of Mary's murder, a man named William Mitchell.

It would turn out Mitchell was just the kind of character that would make Janney believe Mary's death is tied to a larger web. You see, William Mitchell had gone to the D.C. police the day after Mary's murder to say that he'd been on the towpath that fateful day. Remember the jogger from episode two? Down on the towpath, Dovey and her law partners recreated the scene just before the murder.

One of them played Ray, another Mary, and another this jogger, William Mitchell. Mitchell said he worked at the Pentagon, specifically for the Department of Defense, just a few miles down the road from Georgetown. And he told the police at midday, just like Mary, he had left work for his daily constitutional.

Now, we haven't mentioned this yet, but Mitchell also testified at Ray's trial about what he had seen that day. He said in court that on his jog, he'd passed a woman whose clothing matched Mary's, and shortly after, he passed a black man following her from behind. He described Mary's clothes precisely. Then he described Raymond Crump's build and clothing.

Mitchell helped the prosecution put Ray Crump Jr. on the towpath. He'd done his part to help the prosecution's case. And he was an upstanding Army officer who worked at the Pentagon. So the prosecution couldn't ask for a more credible witness, right? Well, not exactly. Janney and his research team — yeah, by now he had a team — found that Mitchell's military records didn't make sense.

Mitchell's stories about his past, his whereabouts, and his official military records contradicted each other, time and time again. Fishy. But it wasn't just that. No one could verify Mitchell had even been on the towpath the day of Mary's murder. And Janney and his researchers found that Mitchell had changed his name throughout the years.

At some point, he also started using a second social security number. To Janney, that was extra fishy. Janney even went so far as to serve William Mitchell with a complaint, alleging that he had been part of a conspiracy to murder Mary Meyer. It required Mitchell to appear in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.

When the two men finally met, Janney reported that William Mitchell answered, "'I don't remember,' or, "'I don't remember that,' to nearly every single question he was asked about his past and about the day of Mary's murder." Assuming what Janney says is true, that's a bit odd. I mean, to not remember anything?

So Janney and his military researcher put two and two together and came up with a theory that William Mitchell worked for the CIA. When a patchwork of military records and aliases and social security numbers don't tell a rational story, the researcher said, it's a telltale sign that a person works in intelligence. Yep, it still sounds a bit crazy, right?

But Janney takes his theory one step further. Yes, Mitchell did have several aliases and more than one social security number. But Janney then theorized that Mitchell was not only CIA, but also part of the team that took Mary out. He argues Mitchell was part of a large and well-prepared team. They learned Mary's routine and chose the towpath to make her murder look like a random act of violence.

What? Not only is it odd that this woman had been murdered months after the president himself, but somehow, for some reason, a CIA official had taken her diary and it was never seen again. If you haven't already let out a big old, huh, before seeing this fact, you sure have now. The real news wasn't that the president had had another affair.

If she'd been murdered in her bed, it would have seemed more personal. Finally, on the day that a believable patsy showed up on the towpath, a patsy who happened to be Raymond Crump there for his affair with Vivian, the operation team would have quickly procured a hitman.

who closely enough resembled Ray, clothes that closely enough matched what Ray was wearing, and then sent the hitman to do the dirty work. There are a lot of jumps here, but the theory goes Mitchell was a CIA operative with one cut-and-dry mission in Mary's death, to put the blame on Ray Crumple.

Reading between the lines, it now seemed possible that the murder of his lover wasn't random. Because the date Mary Meyer was murdered was also mere weeks after the release of the Warren Commission's official report. A report that doubled down on the official lone gunman narrative of JFK's assassination. People in Mary's inner circle were already wondering what really happened to JFK.

Some people are more prone to believe conspiracy theories than others. So we really wanted to dig into the psychology behind them. When we spoke with psychology professor Joe Pierre earlier in the episode, he had a lot more to say about that world. And it helped illuminate why so many would feel the allure of a conspiracy with Mary's murder.

So in this case, the conventional narrative is Ray Crump killed Mary and got away with it, or another rogue murderer killed Mary and got away with it. And it's as simple as that, a random act of violence. It's straightforward, it's logical, and it's hard to wrap your head around. So there's another explanation that's a lot more compelling. Very Hollywood even.

Because conspiracy theories make for riveting stories. Watching puzzle pieces come together is satisfying. Understanding why bad things happen by the end of a movie is comforting.

But Mary's story, it also has something else of significant note attached to it that gets people who are prone to conspiracy to pay attention. JFK.

And in the case of Mary's murder, a number of things, other than the popularity of JFK and the tragedy of his death, can account for its persistence. The precise shots to Mary's temple and heart, which made the killing look controlled, almost professional. The fact that no murder weapon was ever found. An odd phone call.

An untraceable military man who claims to have witnessed Crump following Mary on the toe pad.

And for more than 50 years, the case itself has remained unsolved. A killer hasn't been convicted for Mary's murder.

And yet there are plenty of people connected to this case who don't want to talk about Mary's murder at all. And they never have. Mary's family, her friends. For them, Professor Pierre points out, part of the reason that might be true is that conspiracy theories prolong pain.

So it seemed extra odd that someone so closely connected to him was murdered, too.

Meanwhile, many of the journalists who've investigated Mary's murder have a hard time wrapping their heads around a CIA-driven plot. Here's Lance Morrow.

Nina Burley doesn't think Mary was killed because she knew too much either.

As for Dovey, well, Nina Burley also asked about this when she interviewed Dovey.

And finally, the man we spoke to who is perhaps most adamantly against the idea of conspiracy being related to Mary's death, that would be Ron Rosenbaum.

So there you have it. For the most part, all these writers, these individuals surrounding this complex story, they have the same set of facts. Yet their conclusions can be very different. And we haven't even acknowledged the simplest explanation of all. What if Ray did kill Mary?

The pieces of that puzzle aren't all in place either, but that theory requires fewer mental gymnastics than a CIA plot. After all, a witness placed him at the crime scene and he was caught shortly after the murder took place. But in the end, we just don't know. So what does all this mind-bending say about us? What does it say about the way we take in information and process it?

About the way we understand Mary's murder? Why are we all on such different pages? Joe Pierre has a pretty good answer for that.

It's something that has been studied in psychology research, he says. And the results are pretty fascinating.

For each one of us, it seems, the story of Mary's murder, if there's a conspiracy behind it or not, might be the perfect test case for the white Christmas effect. But like the movie where the songs performed, all the snow that made Christmas in Vermont white, it was produced on a California soundstage. It merely gave the illusion that the whole thing took place in Vermont.

Now that the affair was newspaper fodder, more conspiracy theories began to crop up in connection to the murder of Mary Meyer.

But, my friends, it did not. And in the case of Mary's murder, the CIA's involvement is no more believable than all that fake snow, at least for a slew of reporters who know the story best. As questions surrounding Mary Meyer's death remain unanswered through the decades, the legacy of each woman would start to be written. Dovey Roundtree would go on to write a book about her amazing life.

Friends and family would remember her, even if public discourse didn't, for the improbable strides she made in her professional and spiritual pursuits. But Mary? There are those who, to this day, are struggling to bring her life's work and true legacy into light. But the forces they're working against remain mysterious.

Next time, on the final episode of Murder on the Towpath. From Luminary, Murder on the Towpath is a production of Film Nation Entertainment in association with Neon Hum Media. Our executive producers are me, Soledad O'Brien, Alyssa Martino, Milan Popelka, and Jonathan Hirsch. Lead producer is Shara Morris. Associate producers are Natalie Rinn and Lucy Licht. Senior editor is Catherine St. Louis.

Music and composition by Andrew Eapin. Sound design and mixing by Scott Somerville. Fact-checking by Laura Bullard. Special thanks to Allison Cohen, Sarah Vacchiano, Rose Arce, Kate Mishkin, Tanner Robbins, and Michaela Salella. Thanks also to British Pathé for providing some of the archival audio you heard in this episode.

And to this day, those theories persist.

From Luminary, Film Nation Entertainment, and Neon Hum Media, this is Murder on the Towpath. I'm Soledad O'Brien. In this episode, we're going to dig into the conspiracy theories behind Mary's murder. Those who believe there was a conspiracy to murder Mary think it stems from one simple fact. Mary, quote, knew too much. Specifically, she knew too much about how JFK was really killed.

If the CIA was covering up something about Kennedy's death and Mary knew about it, then presumably she was a threat. And while there are some who might keep quiet about information like that, Mary wasn't known to be one of them. Her friends knew her as outspoken, and that was true especially when it came to her feelings about the CIA.

And so, the conspiracy goes, she had to be taken out because she knew something about the CIA and Kennedy's assassination. Okay, before we go any further, let's stop here and say something that needs to be said. When we set out to tell the story of Mary's murder, we knew we were going to have to cover some murky ground. Because to this day, her murder is officially unsolved. Even Washington, D.C.

police decided long ago to consider the case closed.

And apparently, police didn't believe there was any good reason to do so. So when the main question behind a murder is left unanswered, namely, who killed Mary, conspiracies can thrive. But because Mary was tied to JFK, that's not all there is to it. Even to this day, more than 60 percent of Americans believe Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone.

Which is to say the majority of Americans don't believe they're getting the full story behind the Dallas shooting of JFK. That fact alone might change some people's opinions about who conspiracy theorists really are. They're not always fringe loonies in their basements concocting alternative narratives. In fact, it's mainstream to believe some conspiracy theories.

We wanted to get a better understanding of why some people gravitate toward conspiracy theories. So we called up someone who studies them.

Dr. Pierre says research shows why some folks are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories than others.

Some conspiracy theorists need closure. They crave certainty. So if something doesn't add up, they might keep looking for connections until a story emerges. We'll hear more from Dr. Pierre later in this episode. But based on that idea alone, you can see why Mary's murder intrigued conspiracy theorists. Her story has lots of unanswered questions.

Now, one of the most well-known conspiracy theories behind Mary's murder is laid out by writer Peter Janney in a book called Mary's Mosaic. Janney has spent years trying to answer what really happened to Mary. Why? Because he grew up down the street from the Myers. Their families were friendly. And Peter's father? Like Mary's ex-husband, he also worked at the CIA.

Peter Janney spent years researching this case. And he uncovered some pretty strange facts about Mary Myers' death. But what Jenny then does is takes those facts and builds a unified theory that argues that the CIA conspired to murder JFK and Mary. That conspiracy has been rejected by many who've reported this story, including Lance Morrow, Nina Burley, and Ron Rosenbaum.

And as for Mary's inner circle, her close friends and her sister, Toni, remained nearly mute on the subject of Mary's murder or any conspiracies connected to it. That said, Janney believes the CIA killed the president because JFK wanted world peace, while the agency had incentives to ramp up the Cold War. Only one of them, the president or his military, could prevail in the end.

And Mary became collateral damage. Why is it that some people find Janney's conspiracy theories so far-fetched? We're going to do our best to answer that question. But before we get into Mary's murder, we're going to give you a Cliff Notes version of the reasons why some believed the CIA killed JFK. It's a story that really begins with a little bit of presidential history.

Namely, JFK's relationship with the CIA and his own military. While Kennedy moved his policy goals in the direction of world peace, the CIA wanted to show the strength of the American military complex, especially as the Cold War was heating up. As a result, Kennedy and the CIA ended up on opposite sides of two big clashes. The first was the Bay of Pigs.

When the CIA-led invasion to remove Fidel Castro from power looked like it was going to be a failure, Kennedy refused to send additional backup. This infuriated Allen Dulles, the legendary CIA director. To add insult to injury, Kennedy fired Dulles. The president wanted him to know exactly who was in charge. The second clash, of course, was the Cuban Missile Crisis.

He called General Eisenhower to bring him up to speed.

Kennedy wanted to save the world from nuclear annihilation, something both he and Mary felt strongly about. But when he tried to de-escalate the crisis by offering to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey if Russia removed theirs from Cuba, well, the CIA thought the president was making America look weak. By then, Kennedy no longer trusted his military or the CIA.

And that's when, according to Janney's theory, the CIA decided to assassinate the president.

News reports said it was the work of one deranged gunman. But those closest to Kennedy weren't so sure. CIA Director John McCone went to Bobby Kennedy's house that day, and the two discussed the assassination. Historian Arthur Schlesinger and Bobby Kennedy's son, RFK Jr., later reported Bobby suspected a conspiracy behind his brother's murder. Many close to Kennedy thought something smelled fishy.

One of the seven members of the Warren Commission charged with investigating the president's death was none other than Alan Dulles, the same man Kennedy fired the year before. Apparently, he shared a book saying American assassinations, unlike European assassinations, were usually the work of a lone gunman. Ultimately, the commission argued one man shot JFK.

We're going to take you back to the 1960s, a time of political and cultural upheaval, when society felt constantly on the brink of war.

This is a story of two women who wanted to reach their fullest potential, even if society had very different plans for them. There's a strenuous thing with law school. You ain't married to nobody but the law. We're going to take you back to that courtroom where people found themselves asking, did this man really kill Mary Pinch O'Meara?

But what most people didn't know, and what could have altered the course of this case, was that Mary had had an affair with a very powerful man. I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke aggression. That man was John F. Kennedy.

You're familiar with Georgetown, right? That posh neighborhood in Washington, D.C. with stately homes and cobblestone streets. Well, just steps away from all of that, there's a dirt road, a towpath, where you might find locals jogging. Over 50 years ago, it was the place where two women's stories collided. It started with a murder. October 12, 1964.

Mary Pinchot Meyer was found dead on that very same towpath. She was an artist, a woman on the verge of coming into her own.

And then her life was cut short. But what happened next? That's why we're here. Just 45 minutes after Mary's death, her killer had been arrested. Or so the police claimed.

If a black man is in the vicinity of a crime against a white woman, he is considered guilty before, you know, even formally charged.