Free Mary's Mosaic by Peter Janney

Moreover, neither the defense nor the prosecution questioned the time—”about one o’clock”—that Byers asserted he received the call, nor why he had been asked only to search for a jacket, and not a golf cap. (The cap, the reader will recall, was found the day after the murder on the Potomac River shoreline, 684 feet from the murder scene.)
    If the prosecution wanted to maintain that Crump wasn’t arrested, by all accounts, until 1:15 P.M ., how did police know to start looking for a jacket at “approximately one o’clock”? That was very possibly before Crump had even been spotted by any police officer, much less apprehended, and before Henry Wiggins identified Crump, subsequent to his arrest at 1:15 P.M ., as the man he had seen standing over the victim wearing a jacket and cap.
    Detective Warner, by all accounts the first police officer to encounter Ray Crump, had likely done so in the vicinity of 1:00 P.M ., but he had had no means of communication with any other police officer until Sergeant Pasquale D’Ambrosio spotted him with Crump right before 1:15 P.M . D’Ambrosio had first arrived at the murder scene at 12:35 P.M . The Chief Detective, Lieutenant Arthur Weber, also the ranking homicide officer, and detectives Crooke and Coppage arrived at the murder scene at approximately 1:00 P.M . 71 There were no portable police radios at the crime scene. If there had been, Henry Wiggins and patrolman James Scouloukas would not have had to return to the police cruiser parked at the Foundry Underpass to call in a radio broadcast description of the killer.
    The implication of Byers’s testimony is inescapable: Someone, other than police, was monitoring the murder scene and the events unfolding around it. And it appears that someone, other than police, who had access to police band radio frequencies radioed Byers and gave him instructions to start looking for the jacket, and told him where to look for it. Whoever the caller was, he had to have known that Crump was no longer wearing his jacket before he was firstspotted by Warner (somewhere in the vicinity of 1:00 P.M .) and subsequently arrested by Detective Crooke at approximately 1:15 P.M .
    When the trial recessed for a three-day weekend on Thursday, July 22, Dovey Roundtree was still holding her own; her strategy of establishing reasonable doubt at almost every juncture was bearing fruit. Before the recess, Roundtree again focused the jury’s attention on the description Henry Wiggins had given police of the man he saw standing over the body: 5 feet 8 inches, weighing 185 pounds. In her cross-examination of Chief Detective Arthur Weber, a twenty-three-year veteran and the ranking officer of the D.C. Homicide Squad in charge of the investigation, attorney Roundtree further highlighted this discrepancy:
     
   Weber:  
  We were looking for—to the best of my recollection—a Negro who had on a light-colored jacket and a dark cap.  
   Roundtree:  
  Did that lookout not also include the fact that he weighed 185 pounds?  
   Weber:  
  From my recollection that I remember from the [PD-251] lookout, I had—one of my ways of doing this—I had a picture in my mind of a stocky individual.  
   Roundtree:  
  Did that not include also the fact that the lookout indicated he was about five feet eight or ten inches?  
   Weber:  
  In my mind, yes.    72
    The chief detective’s admission underscored the defense’s position that the man Wiggins had seen could not have been the defendant, Ray Crump. That this came from the most senior ranking police officer at the murder scene, the man in charge of the entire investigation, would not be lost on the jury. But there was still one eyewitness left to testify, and that individual was potentially lethal to the defense.
    T he lean, trim William L. Mitchell took the witness stand the afternoon of Monday, July 26. The reader will recall that Mitchell, an Army lieutenant stationed at the