At 12:45 p.m. on October 12th, 1964, jogger Henry Wiggins heard a woman scream, “Somebody help me! Somebody help me!” He looked down from the toe path overlooked toward the Chesapeake and Ohio canal.

Below on the wooded trail, he saw a slender black man in a light jacket standing over a woman lying on the ground.

Then Wiggins heard two gunshots.

Bang! Bang! The woman stopped moving.

The man in the light jacket walked away calmly down the path.

Wiggins ran to find a phone.

Within minutes, police arrived at the canal to path.

The victim was Mary Pincho Meyer, 43 years old, Georgetown socialite, artist, ex-wife of a senior CIA official, sister-in-law of Washington Post editor Ben Bradley, and secret mistress of President John F. Kennedy.

During the final two years of his life, Meyer had been shot twice.

Once in the head, once in the back at close range, execution style.

 

 

Within hours, police arrested a 25-year-old black laborer named Ray Crump Jr.

He was wet, disoriented, found near the crime scene.

He had no weapon, no blood on his clothes, no physical evidence linking him to the murder, but he was black.

And this was 1964 Washington DC.

and Mary Meyer was white and wealthy.

The case seemed simple.

Random street crime.

Wrong place.

Wrong time.

Justice served.

But that night, as police processed the crime scene, something else was happening at Mary Meyer’s Georgetown home, CIA counter intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton was picking the lock to her art studio, searching for her diary.

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Back to Mary Meyer.

Mary Ano Pincho was born October 14th, 1920 into American aristocracy.

Her father, Amos Pincho, was a wealthy lawyer and progressive party founder.

Her uncle, Gford Pincho, was Theodore Roosevelt’s chief conservationist.

Her mother was a journalist.

Her sister, Antuinette Tony Pono, would marry Ben Bradley.

Mary attended Vasser College, beautiful, intelligent, independent-minded.

In 1945, she married Cord Meyer Jr.

, a promising young writer and World War II veteran who had lost an eye in combat.

Cord joined the CIA in 1951.

By the late 1950s, he had risen to become one of Alan Dulles’s top clandestine executives, a key figure in covert operations.

Mary hated her husband’s CIA work.

She hated the secrecy.

 

 

She hated the moral compromises.

She hated what it was doing to Cord Soul.

On December 18th, 1956, tragedy struck.

Their 9-year-old son, Michael, was hit by a car and killed while crossing a street near their home.

The marriage, already strained, couldn’t survive the loss.

In 1958, Mary divorced Cord and moved to Georgetown.

She rented a converted garage studio behind her sister Tony’s house on N Street.

She began painting seriously, part of Washington’s color school movement.

She attended poetry readings, gallery openings, intellectual salons, and she reconnected with an old friend, John F.

Kennedy.

Mary had known Jack Kennedy since 1936 when both were teenagers attending private schools.

They’d moved in the same social circles for decades.

But after Mary’s divorce and Jack’s inauguration as president in 1961, their relationship became intimate.

According to James Truit, a close friend of Mary’s, their first rendevous occurred after Meer was chauffeurred to the White House in a limousine driven by a secret service agent where she was met by Kennedy and taken to a bedroom.

Truett stated that Meyer and Kennedy regularly met, sometimes two or three times each week, until Kennedy’s assassination on November 22nd, 1963.

The affair was conducted with remarkable discretion.

Mary would arrive at the White House through private entrances she’d leave through the same hidden routes.

White House logs list 30 visits by Mary Meyer between October 1961 and November 1963.

But those are only the recorded ones.

Jackie Kennedy may have known or suspected.

Strangely, she often invited Mary to White House events, perhaps to keep an eye on her, perhaps out of genuine friendship.

Despite the betrayal, Mary attended JFK’s 46th and final birthday party aboard the presidential yacht Seoia in May 1963.

6 months later, Kennedy was dead.

And according to multiple sources, Mary kept a diary of the entire affair.

Mary Meyer told her close friends Anne and James Truit that she was keeping a diary not just about the affair, though that was certainly documented, but about conversations about Kennedy’s thoughts on peace, on ending the Cold War, on withdrawing from Vietnam, and about something else, drugs.

According to James Truit’s later testimony, Meyer offered marijuana cigarettes to Kennedy after a meeting on April 16th, 1962.

After [snorts] they smoked three joints, Meyer reportedly commented, “This isn’t like cocaine.

I’ll get you some of that.

” Mary Meyer was rumored to have introduced Kennedy to marijuana and LSD, though solid historical evidence for this claim is debated.

But Mary’s interest in psychedelics was documented.

She had connections to Timothy Liry, the Harvard psychologist conducting LSD research.

In his 1983 memoir, Flashbacks, Liry claimed Mary had told him she was part of a plan to turn on Washington’s power elite to psychedelics as a path toward peace.

Whether this is true or Liry’s self agrandisement is unknowable, but it’s clear Mary Meyer had unconventional views for a Georgetown socialite.

She was anti-war.

She questioned cold war orthodoxy.

She believed in pacifism, disarmament, cultural transformation.

And she was having these conversations with the president of the United States during the Cuban missile crisis during the escalation in Vietnam during the most dangerous period of the Cold War.

What did Kennedy tell her? What did she write down? What secrets did her diary contain? We’ll never know because 11 months after Kennedy’s assassination, Mary Meyer was murdered and within hours the CIA seized her diary.

Monday, October 12th, 1964.

It was Columbus Day, a beautiful autumn afternoon in Washington.

Mary Meyer decided to take a walk along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal to path, a secluded trail popular with joggers and walkers.

She left her Georgetown home around 12:30 p.m.

She wore tan slacks, a blue Angora sweater, and cloth gloves.

She carried no purse, no identification, just her usual habit of walking alone along the canal.

At approximately 12:45 p.m., Henry Wiggins, a mechanic working on a car near the canal, heard a woman scream.

He looked toward the tow path and saw a slender black man in a light colored jacket standing over a woman on the ground.

Then two shots rang out.

Bang! Bang! Wiggins ran to find a phone.

He called police at 12:48 p.m. 3 minutes after the screams.

 

 

Police arrived within minutes.

They found Mary Meyer’s body on the toe path.

She had been shot twice.

Once in the left temple, once in the back at close range, the shots were fired from different angles, suggesting the killer shot her once, then repositioned and shot her again as she lay on the ground.

execution style.

No weapon was found, no shell casings, no witnesses except Wiggins and one other person who saw a man running from the area.

At 100 p.

m.

, less than 15 minutes after the murder, police stopped a man near the canal.

His name was Ray Crump Jr.

He was 25 years old, 5′ 3 in tall, approximately 130 lb.

He was wet, muddy, disoriented.

He claimed he had been fishing and had fallen in the canal.

Crump matched the general description Wiggins had given.

Black male, light jacket.

But there were problems.

Wiggins had described the killer as 5’8 in tall, 185 lb, 5 in taller, and 55 lb heavier than Crump.

Other witnesses gave conflicting descriptions, and Crump had no weapon, no blood on his clothes, no forensic evidence linking him to the crime.

But police had their suspect.

And within 24 hours, DC authorities announced they had solved the murder of Mary Pincho Meyer.

Random street crime.

A robbery gone wrong.

Justice would be swift.

Except Mary Meyer carried no purse.

Nothing was taken.

And several people in Washington knew this was no random crime.

October 12th, 1964.

Evening.

The same day Mary Meyer was murdered.

 

 

It took hours for police to identify the body.

Mary had carried no ID.

There was only a faded laundry tag reading Meyer in one of her gloves.

Ben Bradley, Meyer’s brother-in-law and Newsweek Washington bureau chief, first learned Mary might have been killed when a friend called him that afternoon, asking if he’d been listening to the radio.

Someone matching Mary’s description had been murdered on the top.

By evening, the family had confirmed the worst.

Mary Meyer was dead.

Then something extraordinary happened.

Anne Truit, Mary’s close friend who was living in Tokyo at the time, placed an international phone call to the Bradley House.

She was looking for James Jesus Angleton.

Angleton and his wife Sicily were at the Bradley House that evening offering condolences.

On the phone from Tokyo, Anne Truit told them about the diary.

Mary had given specific instructions in the event of anything happening to Mary.

While Anne was in Japan, James Angleton should take the diary into his safekeeping.

Think about that.

Mary Meyer had arranged for the CIA’s counter intelligence chief to secure her diary if she died.

This wasn’t paranoia.

This was preparation.

That night, the same night Mary was murdered, Ben Bradley, his wife Tony, Mary’s sister, James Angleton, and Sicily Angleton made a decision.

If they found the diary, they would keep its existence secret from authorities.

This was obstruction of justice in a federal criminal case in a murder investigation, and they all agreed to it.

According to Ben Bradley’s 1995 memoir, A Good Life, they first searched Mary’s Georgetown house, when Bradley and Tony arrived, they were surprised to find Angleton already inside.

We asked him [snorts] how he’d gotten into the house, and he shuffled his feet.

Later, we learned that one of Jim’s nicknames inside the agency was the locksmith, and that he was known as a man who could pick his way into any house in town.

The diary wasn’t in the house, so they went to Mary’s studio, the converted garage behind the Bradley house, and there they encountered Angleton again, this time in the process of picking the studio lock with special CIA tools.

The fact that the CIA’s most controversial counter intelligence specialist had been caught in the act of breaking and entering and looking for her diary, Bradley wrote, was not something he considered appropriate for public disclosure.

Tony Bradley found the diary.

About 50 pages, many contained paint swatches and notes on mixing colors, but approximately 10 pages contained what Bradley called phrases about a love affair which clearly was with JFK.

They read it.

They saw the affair documented.

They saw Kennedy’s name and they made their decision.

Tony gave the diary to Angleton with instructions to destroy it.

According to Bradley, they concluded this was in no sense a public document despite the braaying of the knee-jerks about some public right to know.

James Angleton took the diary.

He claimed he burned it at CIA headquarters along with Mary’s personal correspondence, but he didn’t.

Angleton was a liar.

The diary likely survived for years as potential blackmail material before eventually being destroyed.

Or perhaps it still exists somewhere.

And here’s the most damning part.

The next day, Ben Bradley testified at Ray Crump’s preliminary hearing.

He was asked under oath whether he had made any effort to gain entry to Mary Meyer’s house or studio.

 

 

He said no.

He committed perjury.

Ray Crump Jr.

sat in a DC jail charged with first-degree murder.

He faced the death penalty.

He had no money for a lawyer.

He had no connections.

He was a poor black man accused of killing a wealthy white woman in 1964.

The case seemed hopeless.

Then Dovy Johnson Roundtree took the case.

Roundtree was one of Washington’s most respected criminal defense attorneys.

She was black, a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a civil rights pioneer who had successfully argued the first Jim Crow bus case before the Interstate Commerce Commission.

For Roundtree, civil rights was a sacred mission.

And when she looked at the evidence against Ray Crump, she saw injustice.

There was no murder weapon.

Police had searched the canal, the woods, the area around the crime scene.

No gun, no shell casings, nothing.

There was no forensic evidence, no blood on Crump’s clothes, no gunpowder residue on his hands, no hair, fibers, or physical evidence linking him to Mary Meyer.

The eyewitness descriptions were contradictory.

Henry Wiggins, the primary witness, described the killer as 5’8 and 185 lb.

Crump was 5′ 3 and 130 lb.

And there was a problem with the timeline.

Crump had been stopped by police at 100 p. m.

15 minutes after the murder.

He was wet and muddy, claiming he had fallen in the canal while fishing.

If he was the killer, he would have had only 15 minutes to shoot Mary Meyer, dispose of the weapon where police could never find it, change or clean his clothes to remove all blood evidence, and be found wet and disoriented near the crime scene.

Roundtree pushed for a trial postponement.

She investigated independently.

She visited the crime scene repeatedly, despite receiving threatening late night phone calls each time she did, and she discovered something disturbing.

The government seemed more interested in closing the case quickly than in finding the truth.

The trial began July 20th, 1965, 9 months after Mary’s murder.

The prosecution’s case was circumstantial.

Crump was near the scene.

He matched the general description.

He had a criminal record.

That was it.

Roundtree’s defense was devastating.

She put Crump on the stand.

Risky but necessary.

He testified about fishing, about falling in the canal, about being scared when police approached.

Then, Round Tree cross-examined the witnesses.

She exposed the contradictions in their descriptions.

She highlighted the lack of physical evidence.

She pointed out that police had no murder weapon.

In her closing argument, Roundtree stood before the all black jury and said, “When you go into the jury room, you will take with you his image, and you must answer, I submit the question.

Does he weigh 185 lb? That was the lookout given to the world at large, that there was a man 5’8 on the toe path that did indeed murder this poor lady.

This is not Raymond Crump Jr.

” She turned and looked at Crump, then back to the jury.

I leave this little man in your hands.

On July 29th, 1965, after deliberating for 11 hours, the jury returned a verdict.

Not guilty.

Ray Crump walked free and the murder of Mary Pincho Meyer became officially unsolved.

Decades later, in her 2009 autobiography, Mighty Justice, Roundtree expressed shock at learning about the diary from Bradley’s 1995 memoir.

She wrote, “How differently my line of cross-examination would have run had I been aware of James Angleton’s awareness of the diary’s existence and his interest in finding it, reading it, and destroying it.

” Bradley had testified at the trial.

He had identified Mary’s body in the morg.

He was asked about access to her property.

He said nothing about the diary, about Angleton, about the search.

Had Roundtree known, she could have pursued an entirely different defense strategy.

She could have suggested Mary was killed because of what she knew, what she had written, what secrets she possessed, but she didn’t know because Bradley lied under oath.

And Angleton had destroyed evidence.

October 12th, 1964, Mary Pincho Meyer was murdered 11 months after President Kennedy’s assassination.

The timing is striking.

On September 24th, 1964, 18 days before Mary’s murder, the Warren Commission released its final report concluding Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

The official narrative was set.

No conspiracy, lone gunman.

Case closed.

10 days after the Warren Commission report, Mary Meyer was shot execution style on a Georgetown to path.

Was this coincidence or was Mary killed because of what she knew? The conspiracy theories are endless.

Theory one, CIA hit.

Mary knew too much about Kennedy’s plans for peace, about his intention to end the Cold War, about his Vietnam withdrawal.

She had documented conversations with JFK.

She possessed information that contradicted the Warren Commission’s conclusion.

The CIA killed her and destroyed the diary to eliminate a witness who could expose the truth about Kennedy’s murder.

Theory two, mob retaliation.

Mary’s ex-husband, Cord Meyer, had CIA connections to organized crime.

Mary knew about these connections.

She knew about the CIA mafia plots to kill Castro.

She was killed to keep her silent about mob involvement in Kennedy’s assassination.

Theory three, KGB operation.

Mary was targeted by Soviet intelligence as revenge for antis-siet operations her ex-husband had conducted.

Her murder was designed to look like a random street crime to avoid detection.

Theory four, random street crime.

Mary Meyer was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Ray Crump attempted to rob her, panicked, shot her, and fled.

The jury acquitted him due to lack of evidence, but he was guilty.

The CIA’s seizure of the diary was a separate issue protecting Kennedy’s legacy, not covering up murder.

The evidence doesn’t conclusively support any theory, but several facts are undeniable.

One, Mary Meyer was murdered execution style.

Two shots, close range, different angles.

This was not a typical robbery or random attack.

Two, nothing was stolen.

Mary carried no purse, no valuables.

If robbery was the motive, why shoot her? Three, the diary disappeared within hours of the murder, seized by the CIA’s counter inelligence chief.

Four, key witnesses lied under oath about the diary’s existence.

Five, the government rushed to trial, presenting weak evidence against a suspect who didn’t match witness descriptions.

Six, police never seriously investigated alternative suspects or theories.

Was it a professional hit made to look like street crime? The characteristics suggest yes.

Execution style killing.

No witnesses except at a distance.

Killer calmly walking away.

Weapon never found.

No forensic evidence.

Was Mary killed because of what she knew? Possibly, but we’ll never know what was in the diary.

Angleton destroyed it or claimed he did.

October 12th, 1964.

Mary Pincho Meyer left her Georgetown home for a walk.

90 minutes later, she was dead.

Within hours, CIA counter intelligence chief James Angleton broke into her studio and seized her diary.

Within days, he destroyed it along with any evidence of what Mary knew about President Kennedy, about his plans, about his thoughts during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam escalation.

The diary that might have revealed Kennedy’s true intentions disappeared.

The woman who knew his secrets was silenced and the case remains unsolved 60 years later.

Ben Bradley admitted in his 1995 memoir that he lied at Ray Crump’s trial.

He confessed to searching for the diary with Angleton.

He acknowledged the CIA’s role in destroying evidence, but by then statutes of limitations had expired.

Bradley and Angleton could not be prosecuted for obstruction of justice, perjury, or destruction of evidence.

Angleton died in 1987, taking his secrets with him.

Bradley died in 2014.

Cord Meyer died in 2001.

In a deathbed interview, Meyer was asked who he believed murdered his ex-wife.

He responded, “The same sons of that killed John F.

Kennedy.

” What did Cord mean? Did he have knowledge or was it just bitterness and suspicion? We’ll never know.

Mary Pincho Meyer’s murder is one of Washington’s most haunting cold cases.

Not because we don’t know who was charged.

Ray Crump was tried and acquitted.

But because we don’t know the truth.

Was Mary killed because she was JFK’s mistress? Because she knew about peace plans the CIA opposed? because she possessed a diary documenting conversations that contradicted official narratives? Or was she simply unlucky, a woman who took a walk on a beautiful October afternoon and encountered random violence? The diary would have answered these questions, but James Angleton made sure we’d never read it.

And that ultimately is the real crime.

Not just Mary Meyer’s murder, though that remains unpunished, but the destruction of evidence, the obstruction of justice, the lies told under oath by powerful men who decided the public had no right to know.

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Thank you for watching and thank you for understanding that sometimes the most important evidence is the evidence they destroyed.

Because on October 12th, 1964, Mary Peno Meyer was murdered.

Within hours, the CIA seized her diary and the truth about what she knew died with her.

The diary vanished.

Justice vanished.

And 60 years later, we’re still asking who killed JFK’s mistress.