Mary's Mosaic (22 page)

When the screaming stopped, Wiggins testified, he “heard a shot,” again coming from the direction of the canal. In response, he “ran diagonally across the road” toward the three-foot wall overlooking both the canal and the towpath on the southern side of the canal. In the midst of crossing Canal Road, Wiggins explained, he heard “another shot just as I was reaching the wall of the canal.” Hantman asked “how much of a time interval” had elapsed between the first and second shot, and Wiggins testified that it was only “a few seconds.”
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(His partner, Bill Branch, would later testify he thought it was closer to ten seconds).

Peering over the wall, Wiggins testified that he observed “a man standing over a woman lying on the towpath. The man was standing behind the body, facing my direction. The man’s head, was bent down a little; he wasn’t crouched. He was standing.” Hantman wanted to know how much time had elapsed between Wiggins hearing the second shot and his seeing the man. “Just a fraction of a second,” Wiggins testified. Hantman then asked what time of day it was when he had seen the man. In his testimony, Wiggins couldn’t say
for certain. “It was around 12:20
P.M
., somewhere around there; it may have been later,” he said.
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Henry Wiggins was certain about one point in particular: he had had a clear, unobstructed view of the man standing over the dead woman at a distance of 128.6 feet.
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He told the court that the man had “looked up towards the wall of the canal where I was standing.”
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Next, Hantman asked Wiggins to describe what the man in question had been wearing. Wiggins recalled that the man wore a cap “that buttons onto the brim,” with a light-colored jacket, dark trousers, and dark shoes, all of which the prosecution contended that Ray Crump had been wearing that day. Hantman introduced each article of clothing as government exhibits. The clothes did, in fact, belong to Ray Crump, who had been seen wearing them as he left his home the morning of the murder.

But according to Wiggins, he had only seen the man standing over the body for “around a minute,” and he “didn’t get a very good look at his face.” He qualified this last detail by adding, “but I did get a glance at it.” Hantman
asked Wiggins to state the race of the man he had seen. “He was colored,” Wiggins replied. “I think I would estimate his weight around 185 or 180. He was medium build.”

“Were you able to determine how tall he was?” Hantman asked.

“Well, I couldn’t make an exact estimate to that,” Wiggins responded.
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Dovey Roundtree would soon seize upon Wiggins’s uncertainty. Hadn’t the prosecution vaunted Wiggins’s training “in the careful observation of people”? The following morning, the prosecution’s star witness would squander his credibility in less than an hour. Hantman needed Wiggins to identify the clothes Ray Crump was wearing on the day of the murder, and confirm the exhibited items. Roundtree knew where he was heading and objected. Judge Corcoran sustained her objection, saying, “I don’t see how he [Wiggins] can say it was [Crump’s actual clothing] unless he walked up to the defendant and took it off of him.” His one concession to the prosecution was to “allow lookalike testimony” only.
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Hantman became irritated. “I don’t see how the Court could strike it if that is the witness’s testimony.” Judge Corcoran’s response was sharp and unequivocal: “If that is his testimony, it is subject to challenge.”
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The irritation was mutual. That Hantman had been, for the second day, engaged in loud gum-chewing did not endear him to the judge. In fact, Judge Corcoran had taken his young clerk, Robert Bennett, into his chambers during one earlier recess and had admonished him “never to chew gum” when presenting in a courtroom.
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In spite of the fracas with the judge, Hantman pressed on with Wiggins, who appeared not to comprehend the significance of the exchange over the admissibility of his testimony about the clothing.

Again, the exchange was not lost on the defense. Wiggins had unintentionally started to dig his own grave. Dovey Roundtree would merely gave him a bigger shovel to dig deeper.

Wiggins had already identified Ray Crump as the man he saw standing over the victim. Roundtree used this opportunity to highlight the discrepancy between what Wiggins had reported to the police and the actual size of the defendant.

Roundtree turned to face the jury.

If Wiggins was beginning to squirm, the increasingly exasperated, gumchewing Hantman had to have been agitated. His star eyewitness, and his case, were crumbling on the second day of the trial. During his redirect, Hantman asked Wiggins again whether his view of the murder scene had been obstructed in any way. Wiggins reiterated that nothing had blocked his view. Yet Wiggins had contradicted his own testimony. Hantman had opened a problematic door. Dovey Roundtree merely walked Wiggins through it. Seeking to bolster Wiggins’s credibility regarding Crump’s clothing, Hantman had attempted something similar with Wiggins’s description of the suspect’s height and weight—both of which in no way matched Crump’s. Inadvertently, Hantman had damaged the credibility of his star eyewitness so badly that his case would never recover. The description Wiggins had given police just minutes after the murder took place—”five feet eight, medium build, 185 pounds”—would be reiterated by nearly every one of the twelve policemen and detectives called to testify at the trial, except for two who remembered the height as “five feet ten inches.” This was the description, they all testified, of the man they were told to look for, and it didn’t come close to describing the defendant. Ray Crump shared just one physical feature with the man described on the police radio broadcast on the day of the murder: He was black.

By midmorning of day two, the defense strategy of reasonable doubt had started a crusade. With nearly each of the prosecution’s twenty-seven witnesses, Dovey Roundtree would become a heat-seeking missile: If there was a weakness or discrepancy to be exploited, she would find it and expose it to the jury.

B
ill Branch, Henry Wiggins’s tow truck assistant on the day of the murder, took the stand right after Wiggins. Branch had told police that after Wiggins left the murder scene to call police, he, Branch, was too afraid to keep watch over the wall that overlooked the canal towpath. Instead, he sat in the stalled Nash Rambler and waited. Yet on the witness stand, he testified that he had remained at the wall overlooking the murder scene until Wiggins returned with police. Roundtree confronted Branch with the report he had given to police: “I [Bill Branch] didn’t see anyone around her [the murder victim] at that time, I went back to the car.”
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His tail now between his legs, Branch finally took refuge in a convenient loss of memory—”I don’t remember.”
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It now appeared that Hantman, who had painstakingly rehearsed and written out the testimony of each of his twenty-seven witnesses,
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had coached Branch to alter his statement to police. Surely, Hantman was aware of Branch’s written police statement—that he had stayed in the car, and not remained at
the wall overlooking the towpath. In addition to exposing Branch’s charade, Roundtree had also managed to reveal one very important fact: Between the time that Wiggins had left and returned with the police, no one had been monitoring the murder scene.

A
fter the day two lunch recess, the trial proceeded with the testimony of two police officers, patrolman Roderick Sylvis and Detective John Warner. A puzzling question had now been pushed to the foreground: if the man Henry Wiggins had seen standing over the corpse of Mary Meyer wasn’t Ray Crump, then who was it? Together, the testimony of Roderick Sylvis and John Warner would reveal one of the most important facts never before understood:Someone else was eluding capture by police.

Hearing the police radio broadcast at 12:26
P.M
., police officer Roderick Sylvis and his partner, Frank Bignotti, sped to Fletcher’s Boat House to close off the exit.
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They arrived, Sylvis told Hantman, at “12:30
P.M
. or 12:29
P.M
.,” having driven their patrol car through the narrow underpass beneath the canal itself. Now facing north, with the towpath and canal in full view and the shore of the Potomac River behind them, they waited for “about four or five minutes.”
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Anyone attempting to leave the entire C & O Canal towpath area would either have to walk through the narrow underpass or cross the canal in an old leaky rowboat that was attached to a rope and pulley on each side of the canal. In fact, that meant there were two exits at Fletcher’s Landing—two entirely different ways to exit the area—that offered immediate access to Canal Road and beyond.
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