Free Mary's Mosaic by Peter Janney Page A

Pentagon in the fall of 1964, claimed to have been out for his daily lunchtime run on the towpath the day of the murder. He had come forward to police, he said, because he recognized the victim from newspaper accounts, and believed she was being followed by a “Negro male,” who was wearing clothes identical to those Henry Wiggins had seen. At the trial,Mitchell identified himself no longer as a military man but as a mathematics instructor at Georgetown University. He gave the same address he had given to police nine months earlier: 1500 Arlington Boulevard, in Arlington, Virginia, an apartment complex known at the time as the Virginian. 73
    The presence of Lieutenant William L. Mitchell had troubled Dovey Roundtree from the very beginning. What else, Roundtree wondered, might Mitchell add to the information he’d already given? How might he elaborate on what he’d told police the day after the murder? Mitchell had refused to return her phone calls in the months before the trial; she had little to go on. But whatever he said, whatever claims he might make in his testimony, she feared the jury was certain to believe him, simply because he appeared to be the quintessence of credibility: educated, a retired military officer, a Georgetown University mathematics instructor. And he was white. At a murder trial where the innuendo of an attempted sexual assault by a black man upon a white woman had captivated the attention of an entire city, William L. Mitchell indeed presented a formidable threat. Might the jury even go so far as to overlook the discrepancy in Wiggins’s height and weight testimony, given Mitchell’s corroboration to police of the clothing description that was nearly identical to what Wiggins had seen? Potentially, this spelled doom for Ray Crump, Roundtree told Leo Damore years later, because Ray had lied on two important counts: his clothing, and his reason for being in the area on the day of the murder. Without testimony from Crump’s girlfriend, Vivian, Roundtree still feared the possibility of ruination for her client.
    As a witness for the prosecution, Mitchell was a cool customer. He didn’t fall into the same traps that had tripped up Henry Wiggins. When asked by Hantman to identify the exhibits of Crump’s and Mary Meyer’s clothing, Mitchell made certain to say only that they were “similar to the clothes worn by the individual,” not the exact clothes he had seen that day. He described the “Negro male” he had seen following Mary as “about my height, about five-feet eight [inches],” 74 and then added that he, Mitchell, weighed “about 145 pounds.” The reader will recall that this was the precise weight that police recorded for Crump after his arrest on the day of the murder. 75
    Mitchell was careful to stop short of saying that Ray Crump was the man he had seen. Doing so would have invited a fierce cross-examination from Roundtree, which might have aroused suspicion and damaged Mitchell’s testimony. Instead, Mitchell slyly and repeatedly implied that the man he’d seen was indeed Crump. The man he saw, he told the court, “had his hands in the pockets of his jacket when I passed him.” He carried “no fishing rod.” 76
    Hantman asked Mitchell if he had seen anyone else on the towpath the day. Mitchell testified that he had twice passed “a couple walking together,” as well as a younger runner—”about twenty”—wearing Bermuda shorts. 77 The runner in Bermuda shorts was never identified, and he never came forward. Patrolman Sylvis had already testified about seeing the couple, a point that corroborated Mitchell’s account, bolstering his credibility, but Sylvis had obtained no identification and the couple never came forward to police. Aside from his own claim, no one ever substantiated that Mitchell had been on the towpath that day, or any other day.
    In spite of Mitchell’s calm demeanor, Roundtree probed for weak spots in his testimony, in which Mitchell reported