Free Mary's Mosaic by Peter Janney Page B

with military precision his time on the towpath, and approximately when and where he was located at each of several critical points on the line of the murder. Roundtree focused on another detail that would undermine Mitchell’s well-rehearsed precision: Had he been wearing a watch? Mitchell was forced to concede that he hadn’t; he couldn’t be entirely certain that the times he gave were exact. He admitted that he had based his accounting of the time he returned to the Pentagon on the “clock in the barbershop of the [Pentagon] basement athletic center,” which read “a quarter of one.” It was a small but significant detail, again establishing a degree of reasonable doubt about Mitchell’s account.
    Yet Mitchell’s assertion that the man he passed weighed “about 145 pounds” was troubling to the defense. It was too close for comfort, in spite of Mitchell’s claim that the man he had seen was “about my height, about five-feet eight [inches],” clearly taller than Ray Crump. The weight match wouldn’t be lost on Hantman, who would exploit it for all it was worth, along with one other detail, in his summation. At the end of his testimony, William Mitchell’s sheen was still untarnished; he remained a model citizen, and he had delivered precise eyewitness testimony that corroborated the less-than-stellar witness Henry Wiggins, thereby indirectly and ironically resuscitating the Wiggins testimony. At that point in the proceedings, in the eyes of the jury, it may have still been anyone’s case to win.
    The following day, the prosecution called its final witnesses. Agent Warren Johnson, an FBI firearms expert, told Hantman there were no powder burns or nitrates on Crump’s hands or clothing because he had been in the water that day. Roundtree, however, had already established that the police had never tested Ray Crump, or his clothing, for the presence of nitrates. Moreover, she confronted Johnson with the fact that the standard paraffin test for nitrates in gunpowder typically involves the suspect being asked to wash hishands repeatedly throughout the testing procedure. If a suspect had fired a gun recently, the presence of nitrates would still show up. Since there had been no nitrates discovered on Crump’s clothing or on any part of his body, she argued, there wasn’t any evidence he had fired a firearm that day.
    Agent Johnson’s testimony did confirm—and underscore—that whoever killed Mary Meyer had shot her from close range and was likely highly skilled, possibly ambidextrous, in the handling of a.38-caliber revolver. In describing the shots, Johnson had corroborated Deputy Coroner Rayford’s testimony about which hand had fired which shot. 78
    Next, Special Agent Paul Stombaugh, of the FBI’s crime lab, testified that in twenty-one out of twenty-two characteristics, Ray Crump’s hair sample was a match for a single hair found inside the golf cap recovered the day after the murder. This forensic analysis, he maintained, linked both the jacket and cap to the defendant. The cap and jacket on exhibit did belong to Ray Crump, but the hair match wasn’t evidence that he was guilty of murder.
    In her cross-examination of Stombaugh, Roundtree called into question the entire field of hair and fiber analysis. In preparation for the cross-examination, she had read a number of textbooks, a dozen of which were stacked on the defense table. Stombaugh wasn’t able to answer questions about the latest literature in the field, because he hadn’t read it. He was also unfamiliar with a University of Pennsylvania study Roundtree cited, showing that hair and fiber analysis was far from an exact science. She then compelled Stombaugh to admit that he had never published anything in the field and that he was not, in fact, an expert. But the witness attempted to fight back. He explained that his FBI laboratory relied heavily upon something called neutron activation in analyzing hair and fiber samples. “There is a