On October 12, 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer was murdered on the canal towpath in Georgetown (1). A divorced artist from a prominent family, Meyer was known by insiders to have been President John F. Kennedy's main female consort during his White House years, though the story never leaked to the public.
Her murder and the ensuing trial of Raymond Crump, Jr., a black laborer found by the police in the vicinity of the murder, drew a good deal of attention at the time. Crump had been identified by a gas station attendant helping start a car on a road overlooking the canal. Hearing cries of "Somebody help me. Somebody help me" and two shots, the attendant ran to look. He subsequently claimed to have seen a black man dressed like Crump standing over the body a few seconds after the shots, and he said that the man put something dark into his pocket.
An Air Force lieutenant jogging on the towpath later reported that he had passed a woman resembling Meyer walking westward as he headed back eastward, and then a man roughly resembling Crump 200 yards behind her.
Crump was encountered by a policeman not far from the crime scene after police, alerted by the gas station attendant, had blocked the exits to the wooded area between the canal and the Potomac River. Crump was wet and jacketless on a chilly day, and his fly was open. He told the police that he had fallen asleep and his fishing rod had slipped into the water (it was later found at home). A jacket that fit Crump and that his wife said was his was found in the vicinity. A meticulous hunt including frogmen found no weapon. Crump was arrested on the basis of the evidence available.
The gunshot wounds that killed Meyer were in the back of the head and in the heart. Both wounds showed signs of being inflicted by shots fired very close to the skin.
In spite of suggestive circumstantial evidence against Crump, a D.C. jury found him not guilty. The prosecution had missed bringing some key evidence to the attention of the jury. Another exonerating factor was the presentation of Crump by his lawyer as a poor, confused, harmless little man who was being blamed for a crime he hadn't committed. The real murderer had escaped before the police closed off the exits from the area. She later told a journalist that Crump had been very uncommunicative and that he had cried when she visited him in prison. Three members of his mother's church testified that he was an upstanding young man.
Crump subsequently led a horrific life of crime, with 22 arrests in the Washington, D.C. area, including cases of assault with a deadly weapon, arson, and rape. It is very possible that he committed other crimes of which he was not suspected.
Mary Pinchot Meyer had previously been married to senior CIA official Cord Meyer. The day following the murder, CIA counterspy chief James Angleton was found inside her Georgetown house hunting for her diary, thought to have included sensitive information about Kennedy. When the diary was finally found some time later, it was given to Angleton. It was subsequently said to have been destroyed by CIA.
Various researchers and observers have examined the case. Their opinions are divided. Some have tried to tie Meyer's murder to the assassination of Kennedy the previous year, and a few even suggest that the CIA was involved in both. However, there is another explanation.
A Theory of the Case
When this writer was serving in the Department of State in the 1980s, a CIA officer told him that the KGB had murdered Kennedy's girlfriend. The KGB had made the murder look like a sexual attack that went awry, but CIA found out that in fact it was a KGB job.
How CIA learned this is not clear. The information could have come from a Soviet defector. CIA was evidently reluctant to reveal what it knew, so the case has gone officially unsolved for 43 years. Now this writer has taken a closer look at the case and considers that the American public's right to know its own history overrides any lingering concerns about revealing sources and methods, both very old by now.
The simplest, most telling explanation would be that Meyer knew something very damaging to the KGB, so it decided to eliminate her. A KGB contact in a D.C. neighborhood would serve as a cut-out who hired Crump to murder Meyer in a way that looked like a sexual assault that went awry. Crump was instructed to act dumb and even like a plausible sexual attacker, yet could remain confident that no D.C. jury would find him guilty as long as he safely disposed of the murder gun. Crump would presumably never know that it was the KGB that was paying for his work as a contract killer.
The Meyer murder may have resulted from what Meyer had been doing as a confidante of Kennedy during his presidency. The case suggests that the KGB was engaged in some way in Kennedy's personal life--to spy on him, to influence him, to blackmail him, or to get revenge on him for the humiliation of the Soviet Union in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. This last motive could also have led the KGB to arrange for the assassination of Kennedy, and the use of a cut-out and contract killer in that case would have paralleled their use in the Meyer murder. The arguments for reevaluating from the perspective of the KGB role in the Meyer murder the possible role of the KGB in the assassination of John F. Kennedy are spelled out at www.scientiapress.com/findings/kgbkennedy.htm.
The theory that the KGB hired Crump to murder Meyer makes excellent sense of the available evidence regarding the case. Crump was a violent, ruthless man. His lingering in the vicinity of the crime strongly suggests that he wanted to be arrested. His weeping and other behavior were nothing more than acting. He was a contract killer who, according to this theory, unwittingly did the bidding of the KGB.
Note
(1) The fullest account is in Nina Burleigh, A Very Private Woman: The Life and Unsolved Murder of Presidential Mistress Mary Meyer. New York: Bantam, 1998. Useful Internet articles are at http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmeyerM.htm and http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/death12.htm. The account offered here relies largely on these three sources while drawing different conclusions. CIA's reticence on the Meyer case has important parallels: www.scientiapress.com/findings/fatalmoments.html.
For discussion of detective techniques, see Intriguing Anomalies: An Introduction to Scientific Detective Work.