Episode 68 - WHO MURDERED JFK'S LOVER? The Mary Pinchot Meyer Mystery

In this podcast we're going to take a very detailed and deep dive into the forgotten mystery surrounding JFK's mistress Mary Pinchot Meyer. It was no secret that JFK had loads of extramarital shenanigans going on and his wife Jackie O. knew all about it. But one thing the general public doesn't know is who exactly shot Mary Pinchot Meyer to death  ‘execution style’ that October morning in 1964, just 11 months after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. This incredible story is loaded with twists and turns that will make your head spin and make you wonder just how much the government may have had their hands in this heinous crime.
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Transcript

Written by Lukas Kounoupis

Prologue

Why don’t you leave suburbia for once—come and see me—either here—or at the Cape next week or in Boston the 19th. I know it is unwise, irrational, and that you may hate it—on the other hand you may not—and I will love it. You say that it is good for me not to get what I want. After all of these years—you should give me a more loving answer than that. Why don’t you just say yes.

That letter was written in October of 1963 by the President of the United States, John F Kennedy, to Mary Pinchot Meyer, his mistress. An affair whose public memory far outlived both of its participants, and yet what would render it so memorable would not occur until after it had ended.

One year later, on October 12th, 1964, eleven months after Kennedy’s assassination, ten days after the release of the Warren Commission report, asserting that there was ‘no evidence’ that Lee Harvey Oswald ‘was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate President Kennedy’, Mary was shot and murdered during her daily walk along the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath in Georgetown, in a manner that has since been commonly referred to as ‘execution style’ – two bullet wounds, the first to the back and side of her head, and the second one through her shoulder blade, severing the artery carrying blood to the heart. FBI forensics experts would testify that the ‘dark haloes on the skin around both entry wounds’ meant that both shots ‘had been fired at close-range, possibly point-blank’. It was that precision and particular placements of the gunshots that led the District of Columbia medical examiner to conclude that the killer was someone highly trained in the use of firearms.

A dead president more myth than president, condemned to eternal speculation regarding the possible involvement of the CIA in his assassination. A president’s mistress often reported in the months afterwards to have adopted an intense interest in and suspicion regarding the assassination’s official narrative. And the mistress’s former husband, a high-level CIA official. What bound and will forever bind these three individuals together is a series of events that might simply be a collection of purely random occurrences and coincidences forcibly linked and jammed together in a contrived manner to appease conspiracy nuts, or that might be the perfectly designed mess of apparently random occurrences and coincidences, and that might, that just might, exist purely to cover up an even grander mess – the grandest mess, that fateful day on November 22nd, 1963…

Act I + II

Just what makes the murder of Mary so enduringly suspicious? So perennially incompatible with any mundane explanation, any explanation that seeks to completely exonerate it of the possibility of any hidden, unknown influence? There is an undeniably considerable amount of question marks to get even the greatest conspiracy loather to, if not assume some conspiracy in the role of instigator, if not even question the outright dismissal of that possibility, to at the very least raise a brow, or two. 

- The manner of the shooting, and the entire crime itself. The expert opinions of both FBI forensics and medical examiners do maintain a quick, clean and highly efficient method of approach. No physical assault, no sexual angle to the crime. No common thug, no random, sloppy attack. What was the motive? What did the assailant want? To just walk up to a person and execute them? What did they stand to gain from that? 

- Mary allegedly carried no purse, and no valuables all. So, no physical angle to the crime, and no material gain, either. Again, what was the motive? What would be the motive for the average assailant, once these options have been removed? Can one even consider an ‘average’ assailant anymore – taking into account the already anything but average execution, and now added onto that the unlikelihood of any average motive? 

- Mary was said to have been outspoken about Jack Kennedy’s assassination, and quite skeptical of the recently released Warren report. Did she know something worth silencing her over? And even if she didn’t, perhaps merely her allegedly vocal skepticism of the Warren report – as Kennedy’s former mistress – was enough?

 - Mary’s former marriage to a high-ranking CIA officer. Is there a chance she ever discovered, overheard something she shouldn’t have? And again, even if she didn’t, was the possibility dangerous enough?

- Even more brow-raising than the circumstances throughout the crime itself, are the ones that unfolded during its aftermath; When journalist Ben Bradlee – Mary’s brother in law – entered Mary’s apartment in the wake of the murder, he encountered James Jesus Angleton, chief of CIA counterintelligence, one of the top spies of the planet. In many versions of the story Angleton came by twice in a focused search for documents. 

Mary’s diary has become something of a fabled item, often said to have contained undisclosed information regarding Kennedy’s assassination. According to journalist James Truitt, Meyer had told his wife Anne she was keeping a diary and had asked her to safeguard it ‘if anything ever happened’ to her. Anne Truitt, who was living in Tokyo when Meyer was murdered, called Tony (Mary's sister) and Ben Bradlee and told them of the diary and its location.

It is worth pointing out that James Angleton's wife, Cicely Angleton, was another close, personal friend of Mary Meyer.Did she know something about the diary? 

It is also worth pointing out that those who did read the diary reportedly said it confirmed Meyer's intimate friendship with Kennedy, but gave no suggestion it contained any information about his assassination.

What could have been in there that was so vital to have someone like Angleton sent to retrieve it? Merely scandalous content related to a dead president, love letters – or something more?

(Ray Crump Jr. and Dovey Johnson Roundtree)

There is also the small matter of the ‘black man in a light jacket, dark slacks, and a dark cap standing over the body of a white woman’, as witnessed by Henry Wiggins, a car mechanic. Wiggins reported to have heard a woman cry out ‘Someone help me, someone help me.’ He heard two gunshots and ran to the edge of the wall overlooking the towpath, and saw him. 

Ray Crump Jr. was arrested and charged with Mary’s murder. Police tests were unable to show that Crump had fired the .38 caliber Smith and Wesson gun. There were no trace of nitrates on his hands or clothes. Despite an extensive search of the area no gun could be found. This included a two day search of the tow path by 40 police officers. The police also drained the canal near to the murder scene. Police scuba divers searched the waters away from where Mary was killed. However, no gun could be found.

Was Crump meant to be a patsy? Much like another oft-assumed scapegoat, in another controversial investigation of a high-profile assassination? Another Lee Harvey Oswald? But – this time – a Lee Harvey Oswald that didn’t stick? 

It’s a more than noteworthy aspect of this story, and one that is far too often overlooked, that Mary Meyer was not the only remarkable woman at the center of this tale. This is in reference to the memorable defense of Crump, a defense that by all accounts – purely historically speaking – should not have taken place, should not have been afforded to Crump, who was poised to take the fall for everything, to be the neat little bow that would neatly file this one away along with countless others like it, and as such delegitimize even the mildest questioning of what would have been a widely accepted explanation. The woman in question is none other than Dovey Johnson Roundtree. 

Roundtree – who passed away in 2018, at the age of 104 – was a renowned civil rights activist and attorney. She took on the defense of Ray Crump Jr. for a fee of one dollar, basing a significant part of her defense on Crump’s undeniably timid and feeble-minded state, arguing that because he was so timid and feeble-minded, if he indeed was guilty he would surely have confessed during police interrogation.

In a case that drew record crowds of lawyers, law students, and reporters to the United States District Court, the potentially brow-raising question marks did not subside. 

• None of the newspaper reports of the trial identified the true work of Mary’s former husband, Cord Meyer. He was described as a government official or an author, but never as the senior CIA officer that he was.  
• The trial judge was Howard Corcoran. He was the brother of Tommy Corcoran, a close friend of Lyndon B. Johnson. Corcoran had been appointed by Johnson soon after he became president. It is generally acknowledged that Corcoran was under Johnson’s control. His decision to insist that Mary’s private life should not be mentioned in court was very important in disguising the possible motive for the murder. This information was also kept from Crump’s lawyer, Dovey Roundtree. Although she attempted to investigate Mary's background she found little information about her: ‘It was as if she existed only on the towpath on the day she was murdered.’
• Bradlee was the first witness called to the stand. Alfred L. Hantman, the chief prosecutor, asked him under oath, what he found when he searched Mary's studio. Bradlee replied that he found a pocketbook, keys, wallet, cosmetics, and pencils. He did not tell the court that he found a diary that he had passed on to James Jesus Angleton.
• During the trial Wiggins was unable to positively identify Raymond Crump as the man standing over Meyer's body. The prosecution was also handicapped by the fact that the police had been unable to find the murder weapon at the scene of the crime or to provide a credible motive for the crime. 

Crump was acquitted of all charges. The case remains unsolved. 

Was this an instance of a remarkable individual unaccounted for by the powers-that-be? A rare exception? An unlikely intervention by someone and successfully throwing a wrench into the system’s programmed response? Disrupting the formation of yet another cover-up narrative? 

Or, was it actually an instance of an incredibly gifted and skilled attorney managing to exonerate a guilty man? A man who would go on to live what has been described as a ‘horrific’ life of crime, so at the least on the surface not seeming incapable of such an act? The only certainty in this case are question marks. 

(William L. Mitchell and Peter Janney)

So, does it all end there? Does it all end with mysteries unsolved, unsatisfying, threads unfinished and dangling, and no puzzle piece to be found that illuminates the rest, that grants shape to something so famously shapeless, incongruous? Not quite. There is one outstanding piece left on the table, though its shape and placement, and whether it even fits at all, all remain to be – hopefully – one day seen. 

There is one figure that permeates this entire narrative from its very, absolute beginning – from before its beginning even, arguably – to what would normally be described as long after its ending, if this was a normal case that had in any conventional fashion ever ‘ended’, and this figure permeates it in a manner that is both so central and inseparable, and yet also detached and potentially meaningless. 

On October 12th, 1964, minutes before the first gunshot was fired – at least so it was claimed – Air Force Lieutenant. William L. Mitchell would unbeknownst to him – or, perhaps, depending on who you ask, very much beknownst – become, in the words of prosecutor Alfred Hantman, ‘the last person to see Mary alive’.

The morning after the murder, Mitchell came to the police and stated that, while he was on his daily lunchtime run, he had witnessed – first – a woman whose description closely matched that of Mary, and then, a black man walking in the same direction as her, about 200 yard behind her. He became the second witness of Crump. 

Mitchell has long been a central figure of discourse and speculation. His influential and pivotal role that day as the second witness, in combination with theories that he had undisclosed ties to government intelligence services, has led many people to believe that he was planted there that day with that specific assignment, to further establish and ensure the guilty image of Crump. 

No one man – at least when it comes to what is publicly known and available – has dedicated as much effort, research, and time most of all, to investigating  the possible role of William L. Mitchell, as Peter Janney. A writer, psychologist, and lecturer, Janney had close ties to the Meyers from an early age, as well as general environment and people that would surround this case; his father (whom Janney has stated he considers to have been part of the conspiracy to assassinate Mary) was a senior CIA career official, while his mother graduated from Vassar College in the same class as Mary. Janney was also good friends with Mary’s son, Michael, and very fond of Mary. 

He is best known as the author of Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace, in which he makes the argument that Mary’s murder was orchestrated by the CIA in order to prevent her publicizing what she had discovered concerning Kennedy’s assassination.

In his book he states: 

No one…ever questioned who Lt. William L. Mitchell actually was, or what he was doing on the morning of October 12, 1964. Instead, everyone – the police, the media, the entire city – took Mitchell at his word – yet no one has ever corroborated Mitchell’s presence on the towpath the day of Mary Meyer’s murder. Truthfully, there is no certainty Mitchell was actually there that day, because his entire story is unsupported by anyone other than himself.

Following Mitchell’s 2014 deposition, in which he testified under oath regarding his potential ties to intelligence services, ‘No. Never. I never went into any kind of intelligence’, Janney would go on to engage the U.S. Army, the National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) in St. Louis, and the Defense Finance Accounting Services (DFAS) in a two-year battle to release Mitchell’s military service records and his ‘201 Personnel File,’ as permitted by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Many of these records clearly documented Mitchell’s intelligence affiliations and thus contradicted his 2014 deposition testimony. In January 2016, Mitchell was asked to respond to twenty questions concerning discrepancies in his deposition testimony as well as new information revealed in government documents. Through his attorney, he declined to respond.

In the summer of 2012, Janney allegedly tracked Mitchell down, living in California and working as a professor at Cal State Hayward (renamed California State University, East Bay, since 2005), and went to – in his own words – ‘confront him’, despite warnings from friends, two of them cited being: ‘What are you gonna do if he pulls a gun on you? What are you gonna do if she shoots you?’ 

In August of 2012, four months after the publication of his book, Peter Janney claims to have showed up at William L. Mitchell’s doorstep. Apparently ‘terrified’, he had hidden a digital tape recorder within a binder notebook that he carried with him in order to record ‘all conversation’ he had with Mitchell. The meeting, perhaps rather predictably, did not go well. According to Janney’s telling of the story, he knocked on Mitchell’s door and introduced himself ‘as politely as [he] could’, and Mitchell ‘just got belligerent’, ‘very upset’ that Janney had found him, and ‘shut the door in [his] face’. Without much – if any – benefit of hindsight needed, it may be that bringing along the book in which the case is made that Mitchell was an active participant in a conspiracy to murder Mary and offering Mitchell a copy did not constitute the most efficient de-escalator of an inherently tense situation. 

Janney adamantly insists that William L. Mitchell was ‘working covertly for the CIA’ and was ‘part of a 5 or 6 man assassination team that ran this operation on October 12th’. Whether he has indeed uncovered with his research some hitherto unnoticed by anyone else, earth-shattering truth, a truth that will sadly continue to go largely unnoticed, and pass quietly into derided obscurity and, at best, internet forums and true crime podcasts, due to how earth-shattering and as such ridiculous it appears, or whether this is simply the over-reaching of a man so personally invested in this case, yet another manifestation of this story’s impact, simply decades later, a late remnant, a last tremor of that earthquake that was Mary’s murder – itself a tremor of that larger one that was a president’s assassination – one final little wave of some great, old flood, constitutes just one more onto the bountiful pile of ‘whethers’ that this story has, and will continue to give birth to. 

Act III

It is the mark of a truly culturally, socially resonant story, evidence of just how deeply it embedded itself in the people it touched, refusing to get out, that as the years and decades roll on past, the ripples of its impact, great and small, are still felt, and regardless of whether a certain one is great or small, how undeniably great the net that they yet cast. How many lives impacted, quiet lives that like those quiet truths will too pass quietly away, their truths untold. 

In 1992, Janney met author Leo Damore, who for the past two years had been working on his own book regarding Mary’s murder, back then tentatively titled Burden of Guilt. The two became friends and had numerous meetings, during which Damore shared with Janney much of what he had researched and uncovered regarding the relationship between Kennedy and Mary, and how he believed her murder had been orchestrated. By this time, Damore had already published an 80s bestseller, Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Coverup, presenting the claim that Ted Kennedy and his attorneys had quashed an investigation into the accident and resulting death of Mary Jo Kopechne, a campaign worker for Robert F. Kennedy who died in a car accident while being driven by Ted Kennedy. A book not directly pertinent to Mary’s life, but potentially very much pertinent to Damore’s life. 

In 1995, Damore committed suicide, before he could finish the manuscript of his book. His son, Nick Damore, has famously said that the last time he saw his father, Leo had told him ‘if anything ever happens to me, there’s a box under my bed for you.’ That night, he claims to have crawled under his father’s bed and seen a metal strongbox. 

About two weeks later, Leo Damore – aged 66 – killed himself in the bathroom of his Connecticut apartment. Nick never saw that metal strongbox again, nor did he ever find his father’s unfinished manuscript. 

Nick has publicly shared his thoughts regarding the possibility that his father simply 'knew too much’. He shared his opinion that his father ‘didn’t get the message with Chappaquiddick (here referring to Damore’s book), which was – back off a little bit.’ He also mentioned that his father ‘talked about how [he] got threats, calls in the middle of the night, people threatening to burn the house down’.

He went on to express his belief that he ‘was getting too close and at one point he claimed to have gotten the diary that outlined the relationship between Mary and JFK. He also thought he’d found out who had killed her… There were lawsuits, he thought he was being followed. Now he’s potentially going after the CIA and that’s when he starts spiraling down.’

Finally, he mentioned how ‘part of Leo’s story is that he experienced such a clear attempt to stop him from pursuing stories about the Kennedys. I think Leo kept pushing it a little bit. And there’s the drop in the drink thing‘, referencing how, following Leo Damore’s death, a close friend of his reportedly told Nick that ‘a drop in a drink can change anything’. 

Janney has stated in his book his belief that Leo Damore was ‘very likely poisoned into uncontrollable despair’. 

An affair defined by something that occurred after it had ended. A murder case whose most illuminating events – no matter how unsung – might have come long after it had officially ‘ended’, and even longer after it faded from public prominence. Perhaps even yet to come.

In 2007, CIA agent and Watergate figure E. Howard Hunt passed away. Not even three months after his death, his sons, Saint John Hunt and David Hunt, came forward with the claim that their father had recorded several claims about himself and others being involved in a conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. 

On April 5th, 2007, in that day’s issue of Rolling Stone, Saint John Hunt describes how his father drew a diagram of the alleged conspirators (quoting the issue’s extract): 

E. Howard scribbled the initials ‘LBJ,’ standing for Kennedy's ambitious vice president, Lyndon Johnson. Under ‘LBJ,’ connected by a line, he wrote the name Cord Meyer. Meyer was a CIA agent whose wife had an affair with JFK; later she was murdered, a case that's never been solved. Next his father connected to Meyer's name the name Bill Harvey, another CIA agent; also connected to Meyer's name was the name David Morales, yet another CIA man and a well-known, particularly vicious black-op specialist. And then his father connected to Morales' name, with a line, the framed words ‘French Gunman Grassy Knoll.’ 

Opinions regarding the legitimacy of these findings have varied. E. Howard Hunt’s widow and other children have all accused Saint John and David of taking advantage of their father’s loss of lucidity and coaching him for their own financial gain. An examination by The Los Angeles Times of materials offered by the two sons found them to be ‘inconclusive’. 

Quiet truths, that under some different light, proclaimed by a different messenger, manifested in a different time, could have shaken the world.

In February of 2001, writer C. David Heymann requested an interview with Cord Meyer, who at the time, was himself dying of lymphoma. Heymann asked Meyer if he had told the truth in his book,Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA when he had stated that he ‘was satisfied by the conclusions of the police investigation that Mary had been the victim of a sexually motivated assault by a single individual and that she had been killed in her struggle to escape.’ 

Meyer said this in reply: ‘My father died of a heart attack the same year Mary was killed,’ he whispered. ‘It was a bad time.’ And what did he have to say about Mary? Who was responsible for her death? ‘The same sons of bitches,’ he hissed, ‘that killed John F. Kennedy.’

Epilogue

That letter from Kennedy to Mary was written in October of 1963, but never sent. In 2016 it was auctioned, and sold for just under $89,000.

Things unfinished, purposes left undone . Things as they appear on the surface, forever doomed to that undeserving, inadequate perception of their selves, with so much more beneath that – the sad truth is – we might never get to know. 

A relationship much more than an affair, with much left unsaid. 

A painter’s, an artist’s dreams unrealized, so much more than just a ‘mistress’. 

A president’s agenda unrealized, now no more than just a simplified, reductive, reduced, patronizing ‘myth’. . 

A woman’s voice unheard, her words never to be uttered. 

A mystery unsolved, forever that.

Paused forever, as suddenly as when that shot was fired. As suddenly as when the second one was. Paused, when he put the letter back in the drawer.