JFK Files: The Unsolved Murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer

Georgetown, the towpath of the C&O Canal, a little after noon on October 12, 1964: two shots, and Mary Pinchot Meyer — a painter who had known President Kennedy, the former wife of a CIA official — is dead. By nightfall the chief of CIA counterintelligence is looking for her diary, and so is her family. This case file follows the record. The one witness to the shots, a mechanic up on Canal Road who ran to a wall and saw a man standing over the body. The arrest, forty minutes later, of Ray Crump Jr., a day laborer found a quarter of a mile away with wet clothes and scratched hands. The FBI's own crime report, which found no trace of her blood on him. The trial in July 1965, where attorney Dovey Johnson Roundtree took the case for a fee of one dollar and built her whole defense on one point: the man the witness described was five inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than her client. The jury acquitted Crump on July 29, 1965. Nobody has been convicted of the murder since. Then the diary. By Ben Bradlee's 1995 memoir, by his wife Tony and by the artist Anne Truitt, who telephoned from Japan that night, James Angleton was looking for Mary's diary — at the house that evening, and the next day at her padlocked studio. The Bradlees say they found it and handed it to Angleton; what became of it afterward is told two different ways. At the trial, Bradlee was asked about the studio and about her property, and never mentioned a diary. What James Truitt said in 1976 about what was written in it, what the released FBI and CIA records on Cord Meyer actually contain, and why the later theory that the CIA had her killed remains a version, not a finding. The questions the file still leaves open, named as open: who fired the shots, why nothing was taken from her, and why officers were sent to look for Crump's jacket fifteen minutes before anyone was under arrest. Earlier case files in this series: "JFK Files: The 8 Minutes Dorothy Kilgallen Spent Alone With Jack Ruby" and "JFK Files: What Investigators Really Discovered". Records and images: pages from the FBI Vault file on Cord Meyer, including a 1953 CIA memorandum to the Director of the FBI; National Park Service films and photographs of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and its towpath; Detroit Publishing Company views of the C&O towpath near Washington from around 1900, held by the Library of Congress; Smithsonian album prints of the Potomac Canal locks and the Wisconsin Avenue Bridge; a Historic American Buildings Survey view of Lock 1 in Georgetown; James Angleton's 1953 passport page and a 1966 photograph of him; present-day photographs of Georgetown's 31st and 33rd Streets by Warren LeMay; a 1994 portrait of Dovey Johnson Roundtree; photographs of Grey Towers National Historic Site in Milford, Pennsylvania. About the host: the man at the desk who talks you through this file is an AI creation — face, gestures and voice alike — and the music was generated too. He holds no badge and no degree, he never met anyone in this story, and he does not speak for the Meyer, Bradlee or Crump families or for any agency. The documents, the canal films and the photographs are genuine and come from the collections named above; the dates and source captions on screen, the highlighted lines on documents and the sound effects are ours. Which account of the diary do you believe — that Angleton destroyed it, or that it came back and was burned at home? Leave your answer in the comments. Next case file: JFK Files: The 8 Minutes Dorothy Kilgallen Spent Alone With Jack Ruby —    • JFK Files: The 8 Minutes Dorothy Kilgallen...   Follow the next case:    / @unsolvedamericana   Case file (0:00) The murder on the canal: evidence and the first arrest (3:05) Eight months in jail: Dovey Roundtree takes the case (5:55) The CIA connection: Wistar Janney, Ben Bradlee, and the missing diary (9:12) What we know—twelve years later and all versions since Records and images: JimEngeltonAmit1966 (retouched) — Matankic, CC BY-SA 4.0; 2016-10-07 14 51 35 View east across the Potomac River… — Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0; Grey Towers National Historic Site (1) — Manuela Michailescu, CC BY-SA 4.0; CO Canal Trail - Winding Path — AgnosticPreachersKid at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. (Wikimedia Commons) #MaryPinchotMeyer #JFKFiles #UnsolvedMurder