You would sit there with a book or a newspaper and just half listen to the police radio, which is a constant chatter in your ear.

You're listening, but you're not listening, but certain cueues will alert you.

It was October twelfth, nineteen sixty four.

Lance Morrow was listening to the Metro police scanner.

He was fresh out of Harvard working as a cub reporter for a DC newspaper.

He happened to be at police headquarters that day, just filling in for a coworker.

I know that feeling when you're just sitting there waiting for something newsworthy to happen.

He didn't wait long.

So I'm sitting there just about getting on toward noon, and I heard on the police radio cruiser twenty five, Cruiser twenty six, cruiser twenty seven proceed to I believe it was the thirty eight hundred block of Canal.

The cruisers racing to the scene weren't just any police cars.

Well, the first thing I knew was that that was three homicide cruisers being called for some reason, and that's extremely unusual.

They were responding to a murder.

I'd never run into that.

The second thing I knew was that was in Georgetown.

Lance grew up in Georgetown.

He knew the streets like a local cab driver, and he knew the people just as well.

And my parents knew Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon pretty well.

He was used to living in the background of history.

Rarely had he been caught in the crossfires of it.

But a murder in Georgetown at midday, now that was unheard of.

It was just below Georgetown University by the river, and as it turned out, it was on the canal.

And I jumped in a car.

I got there an amazingly short time.

Lance parked his car on Canal Road.

Just below it, there was the canal itself, and running beside that canal was a dirt road called a towpath.

He spotted two African American men fixing a stalled car on the road in front of him.

The guys were mechanics from the local ESO station.

They called the police and they told Lance they heard the whole thing go down.

There was a guy shooting a woman across the canal from where they stood.

They heard shots and ran across the road, looked across the canal, saw a guy struggling with a woman.

I talked to these guys.

They were still there, and I said, what happened?

And they told me that one of them pointed to something that looked like a laundry bag almost or a bag of clothing, and he said, that's her.

That's her.

And I said, who is it.

He said, that's the one that was shot.

This is Murder on the Towpath.

And I'm your host, Soledad O'Brien.

I've been a journalist for over three decades.

I've covered politics, I've reported on crime, justice and race in America, and I'm really interested in the way they can all intersect.

That's one of the things that drew me to this story.

It weaves together all those things around a single event, a murder, A murder that would become emblematic of the nineteen sixties, a time of political and cultural upheaval, A story that ruffled feathers even back then.

A legendary newspaperman, a CIA director, and even JFK himself play a part.

What's fascinating is that this tale has never really gone away.

Decades later, people argue about what happened.

Relatives of the victim hesitate to speak about her publicly.

Relatives of the alleged killer do too.

It's a story so complex and mysterious that conspiracy theorists have come out of the woodwork.

Even to this day, people still ask who killed this woman in broad daylight.

Over the next eight episodes, I'll introduce you to the two women at the heart of the story.

Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter, a pacifist, and a woman who grew up rich but didn't like to follow rules.

Dovey Johnson Rowntree became a civil rights lawyer at a time when black people were systematically stripped of their rights.

She was a.

Minister too, and determined to use the law to defend all God's children.

The lives of these two women ran parallel to one another until one horrible day in nineteen sixty four.

Both were smart and confident, They had brilliant minds, and in other worlds, I wonder if they might have even met, but they had now her cross paths in the district.

Except after one of them was killed.

At that moment in nineteen sixty four, their lives suddenly intersected, and now their legacies are forever intertwined.

Let's start at the moment that would bring them together the day one of them was murdered.

Her name was Mary Pincho Meyer, and her final day started like any other.

It was two days before her forty fourth birthday, one of those crisp days that actually makes you happy.

Summer is over, cool enough for a sweater, but still bright and sunny, with a blue sky streaming above.

Mary was painting.

She loved to paint.

It was somewhere between a hobby and a job for her.

She had spent thirteen years married to a cia man named cord Meyer, holding down the fort while he traveled and spoke around the country.

By this time, Mary resented her then husband and what he represented.

After their divorce, their two sons went away to boarding school, Mary suddenly had a lot of time alone and could devote it to her craft.

On most days, she'd hold herself up in her studio and just paint and paint and paint.

Her studio was how you would imagine an artist haven would be.

It was a converted garage with two skylights, littered with notebooks.

Artists have things called paint books.

The pages are quite It's a high quality paper thicker and most of the pages had swatches of paint on it, and then slight descriptions of how that color was achieved.

That's Ben Bradley.

I remember him from when I was a kid.

He was a newspaper legend.

You might remember him too from Watergate.

He was editor in chief of the Washington Post when they broke the story.

He also happened to be Mary's sister's husband.

Mary was exploring a new artistic style.

She was painting these concentric, colorful circles on round canvases, known in the art world as Tondo's.

They gave you a window into Mary's art and the way her mind worked.

Her routine was the same.

Every day.

Mary went into her studio, turned up the electric space heater, poured coffee from her thermos, lit up a cigarette, and then she would paint for hours on end until that time of the day when concentration becomes difficult and the mind grows hazy.

Like clockwork.

Around noon, Mary would go for a walk on the towpath just when she was losing focus.

Mary savored walking on the towpath in the winter.

She'd even ice skate along the ice that blanketed the canals.

Her daily walks gave her the time space to think, get inspired, and that was what Mary was doing on October twelfth, nineteen sixty four.

Before heading out, Mary had put on her gloves and pedal pushers.

She layered herself with a cable knit blue Angora sweater.

The inside of her gloves had a cleaner's mark that said Meyer that would later help police identify the body.

She slipped her red tube of lipstick in her pocket and put on her white paint splattered PF flyers.

That day, she had a chore to do, a fun one.

She had a cat that had laid some kittens.

That's Nina Burley.

She wrote a biography of Mary, called a very private woman.

She was just about to put a sign out to say free kittens, and she headed out of her house and walked down the cobblestone streets.

She walked down the street to the what they call the towpath alongside the canal.

Mary's converted studio looked like all the other garages on the alleyway.

Some of her closest friends and family lived nearby.

Mary's sister Tony lived in the townhouse on one end.

She was the sister married to Ben Bradley and before they moved to the White House, the Kennedys lived nearby.

In fact, Mary and Jackie Kennedy would sometimes take their walks on the towpath together.

Mary was of that ilk she could ask Jackie to walk with her.

We know she crossed m Street because that day a long black car with official plates slowed and a rear window rolled down.

It was her friend, Polly Wisner.

Polly's husband was the head of the CIA's covert operations for many years.

He worked with Mary's ex husband Cord at the CIA.

Polly had one of those mid Atlantic accents that old movie stars like Catherine Hepburn had.

She waved and said goodbye Mary with one of those long a's.

Polly was the last friend to see Mary alive.

From the moment Mary was shot on the towpath, it would take just forty five minutes for them to arrest a suspect.

Forty five minutes.

I mean, this was a very fast moving situation.

That's Lance Morrow again, the cub reporter who had gotten to the scene quickly.

He had stopped to talk to the car mechanics, then race down to the towpath.

He knew a secret way.

I knew that there was a tunnel underneath the canal, and I knew it was there, so I ran to that tunnel.

It was about fifty yards from where I was standing.

You had to part fines to go into it.

But I ran through the tunnel, and all the time I was fairly frightened because I thought that the killer was still loose.

So I ran through the tunnel, came up into the sunlight through the vines that hung over the entrance on the other side, came up onto the towpath, and I ran to where the body was, and I saw a woman lying crumpled up in the fetal position.

The woman had been shot twice, a bullet to the brain and a bullet to the heart.

This is not what reporters like us expect to see the actual body of the murder victim.

I saw no blood.

It was surreal, and so she.

Looked like she was asleep.

She was dressed in an angora and pedal pusher pats and what looked like ballet slippers to me, but there's something like that slip on things.

She had an air of money about her, in the sense that you could see that her hair was She was a very good looking woman.

I could see her profile, although she was turned away from me sort of, but I could see that her her haircut was expensive, if that makes sense.

Lance could tell the victim was a woman of means and beauty, but at that point no one knew who she was.

After seeing her on the ground, one officer said, I've seen a lot of dead women, but none who looked beautiful when dead.

She even looked beautiful with a bullet in her head.

When I read that line, I was kind of horrified.

I mean, there's something twisted about a woman being judged on her looks even in her death.

But the truth is Mary was striking.

She was always the prettiest woman in the room.

She had that it quality that drew people to her, especially men.

Mary sported short, blonde hair and had piercing blue eyes.

She was thin, athletic, had an air of grace kelly about her.

Mary was born into high society, but it was more than that.

She was inherently regal.

Even though Lance had arrived quickly to the crime scene, the police had already come and gone.

If they were going to catch the killer, they needed to block off the exits to the towpath as soon as possible.

Time was running out.

They left Mary out in the open as they searched.

That's how Lance, all of twenty five years old, ended up having a moment alone with her.

I mean, here's this woman.

She looked very serene, her face was very serene, and it was a weird dreamlike quality about it.

Lance is now almost eighty, but he has never forgotten that day.

Trust me.

It's not every day a reporter comes across a dead body.

I've only ever seen them at natural disasters, but a murder in a city park.

Never.

Washington, d C.

Has always been a very segregated city.

Crimes in the city only got the attention of the cops in the media if you had the right address.

If you lived in a black neighborhood, chances were the police weren't rushing to the crime scene.

Same thing with journalists.

And from the address you knew perfectly well whether it was black or white, and if it was white, it was interesting and you would pursue it.

If it was black, unless there was some unusual circumstance about it.

The phrase from the city desk was cheap it out.

Cheap it out, which means give it three paragraphs on the inside.

In other words, the black life in Washington was not covered.

Sounds about right.

I've spent a lot of time in DC, and I can tell you Georgetown is a very swanky place.

The towpath is filled with joggers, couples holding hands.

It's one of the wealthiest ip codes in the country.

The Clintons have a house there, Nancy Pelosi has a condo, and you might spot Jill Biden running.

But it wasn't always like this.

Historically, Georgetown had always been a black neighborhood.

In the early twentieth century, white federal employees trickled into the area, and by the fifties Washington's white elites moved in.

Less than ten percent of the area was black.

Here's Nina the biographer again.

Mary Meyer and Ben Bradley and Jackie Kennedy were people who had come in and gentrified this area in the fifties.

In the forties and.

Fifties, Mary's actual home was near her studio.

It was a little blue townhouse right in the center of Georgetown.

So it was, you know, this little community of people who lived on the other side of this giant park, Rock Creek Park, which separates off Georgetown from the rest of Washington, d C.

And so they lived in a kind of bubble of you know, this is our community, and they didn't lock their doors.

They definitely felt safe there.

Once the white people moved in, the police and reporters took the neighborhood more seriously, which doesn't surprise me.

But the towpath was still a paradoxical place.

You'd find sleeping drunks next to a beautiful view of the canal with lily pads on it.

After Mary waved goodbye to Polly, she passed the entryway to Key Bridge, the large concrete bridge connecting d Seed to Virginia.

Her daily route was straightforward.

She walked west all the way to Fletcher's boat House, a fishing spot since the nineteenth century.

Then Mary would turn around and make her way back east to her studio.

Now, the actual details after Mary enters the towpath are a bit fuzzy.

We don't know exactly how it all went down.

Sources disagree on the order of events, But here's what we've gathered from court documents, eyewitness accounts, and a bunch of books that have pieced together Mary's final moments.

We know she walked along the wooden footbridge to get down to the towpath.

Once she was on the path itself, Mary should have been able to hear the cars humming above her.

The road was above the canal.

If you go there, you can hear the occasional traffic sounds or see the car roofs floating above the gray stone wall.

Around twenty minutes or so into her walk, Mary was attacked from behind.

A man held back her arms, preventing her from getting away.

Mary squirmed desperately trying to break free.

She was strong, maybe she thought she could topple her assailant, but the man was too much for her.

She yelled, somebody help me.

She hoped someone anyone over the stone wall on Canal Road could hear her.

The mechanics heard her, but it was too late.

Then a gunshot.

A mechanic named Henry Wiggins slowly made his way to a stone wall on Canal Road, which overlooked the towpath in the canal.

He didn't see the murder, but he heard all of it.

Lance Morrow said he didn't see any blood when he arrived on the scene, but there's good reason think Henry saw blood.

Quite a lot of it.

She left blood on tree branches where she was trying to pull herself up and escape.

That's Ron Rosenbaum who wrote about Mary in his book The Secret Parts of Fortune.

And then eventually she got back up to the towpath in full view of a guy named Henry Wiggins, who had parked his car on the other side of the Cno Canal near a gas station and was gazing out at the towpath and actually saw the struggle in which Mary was shot.

She was on her knees, clinging to a tree, literally holding on for dear life.

Mary tried to push the killer away while protecting her head leaning on the tree.

The murderer was trying to drag her out of view.

Then Mary used every ounce of life she had left in her She got up and ran toward the canal and the wall where Henry was, but with a shot to the head, she couldn't make it any further.

She fell to the ground.

That's when the killer insured Mary's fate.

He shot her once more, this time in her back.

The bullet hit her shoulder blade and punctured her a order her heart stopped.

Henry Wiggins, the mechanic.

Hurt it all sadly, tragically, he uh witnessed a murder.

He heard the two shots by the time Henry got to the stone wall, he peered over and saw a black man standing over a woman's body.

The man wore a light tan jacket with a dark dark cap.

Henry and the killer locked eyes.

Henry quickly hid behind the barrier.

He didn't want to be the next victim.

When he peered over the wall again, he saw the man putting a dark object into the pocket of his ipped jacket.

Henry and the killer looked at each other again.

The killer wasn't afraid.

He didn't rush to leave the scene.

That's pretty strange.

Instead, he walked away slowly into the dense screenery next to the Potomac.

He was gone.

Now it was up to the police to find the phantom killer.

Henry didn't waste any time.

He immediately drove his car back to the ESSO station and called the police.

A black man had killed a white woman in broad daylight in Georgetown.

Within four minutes, the manhunt began.

Our reporter Lance Morrow was at the crime scene by then.

A policeman gruffly told him to step aside.

Well, I'll tell you what, It's a good thing I wasn't black, because they had a description of the killer, and the killer was a young black man.

But anyway, the cops knew I was a reporter.

I was standing there with a notebook in my hand and so on, so it was pretty clear who I was, and most of them had seen me around.

The police took over securing the crime scene.

There's a striking image that later made the rounds.

It shows a crowd of men around this dead woman.

There are may be eight of them standing there, and Mary is lying lifeless on the ground.

Guys from the homicide squad, whom I knew, Guys wearing white raincoats and black you know, the cops, and then a few uniform police the homicide squad guys standing over the body, or they was ignoring the body, but they were talking among themselves.

It's a rather odd effect to have the body there and then these guys just standing around talking.

It's an eerie eurie effect.

The police sent a dragnet of cars to the area.

There were very few marked exits to the towpath, and police were sent to cover each one of them.

They figured if they could cover their bases quickly the killer would be trapped.

That's part of the reason why it all happened.

Within minutes.

Time was running out.

Anyone who's visited the towpath knows it's outside.

Sure, yeah, but there are only so many places to get in and to get out.

I've been there.

If you're standing in the spot where Mary died, you either need to dive into the Potomac and swim away, climb a wall and cross canal road, hide in a tunnel, or use the few official exits.

Mary's body lay near a small tunnel that carried water near the canal.

It's called Foundry Branch Tunnel.

Now, if you're looking at a map, this area is where the murder happened.

There were only a few exits.

According to the police, the murderer could not escape.

Officer John Warner was on the ground that day searching for the killer.

He spotted a culvert which eventually dropped fifty feet into the Potomac, and then he emerged into a clearing.

He found a man standing in front of him.

Here's lance again.

Eventually they came out of the woods leading a rather short five five five six, a black man, a young black man.

He was just my age, WHI just twenty five years old and he was wet.

Raymond Crump Junior.

The police asked Ray for his id.

When he fetched it, water spilled from his wallet.

He was a short, young, skinny man.

Leaves and twigs clung to his body, and he was black.

Officer Warner asked him the obvious question, why was he wet?

Ray said he was fishing, but fell asleep at the bank of the river.

He woke up after he had rolled into the water.

Warner asked Ray to show him the exact spot where he was fishing.

The two were walking together when they heard a shout.

That's him.

It was Henry Wiggins from above, pointing down at Ray.

Crump.

He was telling Officer Warner they found their man.

Warner handcuffed Ray and brought him to his colleague, Officer Bernard Crook.

Yeah, that's really his name.

They passed Mary's body.

You think I did that?

Ray asked.

Crook brought a soaking wet Ray to the station house for an interrogation.

Things only got worse for Ray.

One of Crook's men came to the station.

He found a light jacket similar to the one Henry saw on Mary's Killer.

Krook asked Ray to try it on.

It fit perfectly.

Then Ray's story began falling apart.

They never found a fishing pole, he didn't have a fishing pole, and it turned out later that his fishing pole was at his home out in Anacostia, on the other side of the city from Georgetown.

Krook told Ray he had a stacked deck against him.

Ray began sobbing.

Several days later, the United States charged Ray Crump, Junior with first degree murder.

He was arraigned before the US Commissioner and sent to the DC Jail.

That meant Ray Crump was immediately locked up.

The Washington Post snapped a photo of his arrest.

He's wearing a white shirt with black pants.

A white, bald officer with glasses trails right behind him.

His hands are holding Ray from behind, pushing him towards his fate.

The forty five minutes it would take to find Mary's killer they were up.

Did it happen quickly because she was white?

Because it was a slow day, because it was Georgetown and things like this weren't supposed to happen here.

I don't really know.

Whatever it was a black man had just been taken in for the murder of a white woman, and in nineteen sixty four, and I think even today that was bound to capture everyone's attention.

News of a murder in Georgetown trickled out to the public slowly.

Cecily Angleton was an old friend of Mary's.

She happened to hear about a murder on the towpath and called her husband, James Angleton.

Here's author Ron Rosenbaum.

Again.

He was a well known but not often written about figure in Washington, d C.

A very powerful one.

In other words, James Angleton was a spook, and not just any spy.

James Angleton, as most people know, was head of counterintelligence spy hunting for the CIA and had been for many years.

He was in the middle of a meeting at CIA headquarters when he got an urgent call from his wife, who apprised him of the fact that there had been a murder of a woman on the towpath yet to be identified.

I believe she called up afraid that the murder on the towpath had been married.

It was about the time that Mary would go running.

You know.

This was a very close friend of the fan and they were both concerned about it.

Mary's ex husband, Coord was in a meeting in New York when he got a phone call from his friend, Wister Janney.

He told him that Mary was dead.

Coord immediately flew down to DC to get all the details on the ground.

He knew he had to tell his sons before they heard it on the news.

Since Quentin was already eighteen, Kord told him on the phone.

In his memoir Facing Reality, Chord writes that Quentin handled the death with stoic resignation, but Mark was still so young, only fourteen.

Coord called Milton Academy he would fly to break the news to Mark in person the next morning.

The school assured him Mark wouldn't see any newspapers.

That night, Ben Bradley, Mary's brother in law, went down to the morgue to identify the body.

It was her.

He saw Mary for the last time.

The next morning, Kord met with Mark at Milton.

In his memoir, Chord writes his son was so excited to see him he saw it as a pleasant surprise, and then Chord gave him the terrible news.

He wrapped his arm around Mark, consoling him as his son cried so deeply from such a profound loss.

It was good the school took pains to hide the news from Mark.

Multiple papers wrote that Mary Pinchot Meyer was dead.

The Washington Post said Mary was a Georgetown artist with a hundred thousand friends.

Friends described her as fearless and elegant, one of the most beautiful people they had ever known.

At first, reporters described the murder as a robbery gone wrong, but Mary wasn't caring a purse.

She left it at home that day.

Others suggested sexualvi islence had occurred, but there was no physical evidence of rape.

The New York Times headline read woman painter shot and killed on canal towpath in Capitol They ran a photo of her next to the article, one of the few that exists of Mary in the public domain.

She has short, blonde hair, less Doris Day Bob and more Princess Diana.

She's staring to the right of her into the distance, almost looking horrified at the headline of her own death.

In the week after Mary's murder, someone scrawled a phrase on the key bridge in white paint.

It said move coup Mary.

The phrase is a French idiom.

It roughly translates to bad luck.

Mary, But the phrase can also mean foul play.

Foul play, so maybe it wasn't bad luck at all.

Next time on Murder on the Towpath, Ray Crump needed a lawyer, and there was only one woman who dared defend him.

I could make things right, I thought, and some things I have made right.

She was black herself.

Her name was Dobby Rountree.

Next episode, I'm going to dig into her remarkable life and introduce you to a woman whose legal mind would forever change the course of Mary's case, a case which only gets more shocking and more complicated with time.

That's because what Dovey couldn't have known, what most people didn't know, 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.

I'll unravel the whole story starting next week.

Murder on the Towpath is a production of Film Nation Entertainment and Luminary Media and association with Neon Humm Media.

Our executive producers are me Solidad 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 Katherine Saint Louis.

Music and composition by Andrew Eapen, Sound design and mixing by Scott Somerville.

Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Sarah Bacchiano, Rose Arsa, Kate Michigan, and MICHAELA Celeela