Mary's Mosaic (23 page)

After waiting “about four or five minutes,” no longer content, the two officers hatched a plan: Sylvis would walk along the towpath toward the murder scene, while Bignotti would walk through the woods adjacent to the railroad tracks parallel to the towpath, both heading east toward the murder scene. Leaving the entire Fletcher’s Boat House area unattended, they risked allowing the killer to walk out unnoticed. Yet even that oversight paled to what was about to unfold.

Sylvis and Bignotti exited their patrol car and spent about five minutes positioning themselves for their eastward trek toward the murder scene. As soon as they started out, “maybe 50 feet at the most” from Fletcher’s Boat House, Sylvis testified, they spotted a young white couple walking westward on the railroad tracks. The two officers approached the couple, informing them “that there had been a shooting on the canal.” Sylvis inquired as to whether they had seen anyone leaving the area. “They did not observe anyone,” Sylvis
recalled during his testimony.
⁵²
How long had the interrogation of the couple taken? The question had not been asked during his testimony. However, reviewing his testimony in an interview for this book in 2008, Sylvis was adamant that he had asked the young white couple a number of questions, and it had taken “at least five minutes, probably more.”
⁵³
That meant the time had to be approaching 1:00
P.M
. before the two policeman began bushwhacking their way eastward toward the murder scene, a measured distance of 1.6 miles away. “I remember I proceeded very cautiously,” Sylvis recalled, adding that he had been “taking a lot of time to be observant.”
⁵⁴

Walking slowly and vigilantly for “approximately a mile east on the towpath,” Sylvis told the court, he observed “a head jut out of the woods momentarily, just for a second, and went back. A head of a man, somebody stuck their head out of the woods, and were looking up at me, and pulled back again.” From a distance of “about 150 or 160 feet,” Sylvis identified the head to be that of a “Negro male.” He didn’t remember the man wearing a cap of any kind.
⁵⁵
Sylvis then “proceeded very slowly towards the spot,” sure the man had seen him. He yelled to his partner Bignotti for assistance, but Bignotti didn’t respond, so Sylvis tried to “wave down someone on Canal Road” to assist him. That meant that it took him even longer to arrive at the spot where the “Negro male” had peeked out from the woods.
⁵⁶

How long had it actually taken officer Sylvis to walk “approximately a mile” before he saw the head of a “Negro male” jut out of the woods? Conservatively, it had to have been at least fifteen minutes or more. During his testimony, Sylvis told Hantman that it took him “approximately 10 or 15 minutes” additionally to reconnect with his partner after he had seen the mystery “Negro male.” Reunited, Sylvis and Bignotti spent even more time searching the area together. “We stayed there for a few more minutes and looked around the area where I had seen the head, and then proceeded on back toward Fletcher’s [Boat House],” testified Sylvis.
⁵⁷

Officer Roderick Sylvis’s answer to Hantman’s inquiry was very likely accurate. The problem, however, was that he had blown the answer he had
rehearsed with Hantman, and Hantman knew it. At this very moment, the government’s case against Ray Crump was in peril, and about to be pushed off the edge of a cliff. Why? Because it had already been established during the trial that Ray Crump had been arrested at 1:15
P.M
. In fact, Crump had been in the company of Detective John Warner at a location of one-tenth of a mile
east of the murder scene
for a period of at least ten to fifteen minutes—before he was arrested at 1:15
P.M
. The significance of this detail was that the “head” of the “Negro male” seen by patrolman Roderick Sylvis could not have been Ray Crump’s.

Hantman, apparently aware he was standing in quicksand, tried another tactic: He asked Sylvis another rehearsed question.

Forty-five minutes. This was the answer that appeared to lift Hantman out of the jam. If Sylvis and Bignotti arrived at Fletcher’s Boat House at approximately 12:30
P.M
. and they returned to their patrol car by 1:15, they came back just in time to conveniently hear the police radio broadcast that a suspect had been arrested. But there was just one problem with this version of events: There were no police radios at the crime scene or adjacent to the site of Crump’s arrest. Someone would have had to walk back to a police vehicle at the Foundry Underpass to make the call, but no such a call—if one ever took place—was ever mentioned in the trial transcript or any police report.

Dovey Roundtree seized on the discrepancy in patrolman’s Roderick Sylvis’s testimony in her cross-examination:

Hantman immediately objected, stating that what Roundtree had alleged had not been Sylvis’s testimony, in spite of the fact that it had been. This may have been one of the few moments during the trial where Dovey Roundtree missed a significant opportunity. Why didn’t she ask Judge Corcoran to have the stenographer read back Sylvis’s testimony, confirming that Sylvis had just testified that it had been “1:45 or 1:50 [
P.M
.]” when he saw the mystery “Negro male”? Sylvis, for his part, must have realized that he had been “off message,” because in the next instant he corrected his testimony and said that he first saw the head of the man poking out of the woods at “approximately 12:45 [
P.M
.].”
⁶¹

That would have been physically impossible. Having already testified that he had arrived at Fletcher’s Boathouse at “12:30
P.M
. or 12:29
P.M
.,”
⁶²
then waited “about four or five minutes,” before deciding on a plan with his partner, only to then spend “at least five minutes, probably more” interrogating the young white couple before beginning to vigilantly walk “a mile east on the tow path,” Sylvis would have had to have been a world-class runner to spot the mystery “Negro male” man at 12:45
P.M
. It was, in fact, accurate that about an hour later, “about 1:45 [
P.M
.] or 1:50 [
P.M
.],”—Sylvis’s initial response to Hantman—that he spotted the head of the mystery “Negro male,” who could not have possibly been Ray Crump.

When Roundtree confronted Sylvis with the discrepancy, he had to have realized that by first telling the court that it was 1:45
P.M
. when he saw the “Negro male,” he had risked sabotaging the prosecution’s case against Crump. Sylvis now wanted the court to believe that it had occurred at 12:45. But his initial answer to Hantman’s inquiry of “about 1:45 or 1:50 [
P.M
.]” was the correct answer, and he confirmed that with me in 2008.
⁶³
Crump, it will be shown, was already in the custody of Detective John Warner east of the murder scene as early as 1:00, which could only mean there was a second “Negro male” on the towpath that day and that he had eluded capture—as well as the attention of the court proceedings.

Indeed, a cornerstone of the prosecution’s case was that the man Sylvis had spotted was, in fact, the fleeing Ray Crump. Prosecutor Hantman hammered that point home repeatedly throughout the trial. Should that assertion be successfully challenged, the case against Crump would crumble. That was about to happen, although it would again elude the scrutiny of the defense and remain hidden in the trial transcript until now.

Detective John Warner, scheduled to testify after Sylvis, had not been in the courtroom during Sylvis’s testimony. It was customary to keep witnesses
from hearing other testimony in order to reduce the possibility of collusion and fabrication. Warner was therefore unaware of the various conflicting time stamps that had jeopardized the prosecution’s case. Warner testified that he had arrived at the Key Bridge entrance of the canal towpath at 12:29
P.M
. with his partner, Henry Schultheis. They waited there until 12:40, he said, at which point Warner decided he “was going to cover the area between the railroad tracks and the towpath in the wooded area,” while his partner would cover “the area to the left of the railroad tracks to the [Potomac] river bank.”
⁶⁴
Warner proceeded to walk westward toward the murder scene through the woods adjacent to the railroad tracks for what he estimated had been “forty-five minutes” before discovering the wet, somewhat disoriented Ray Crump more than one-tenth of a mile east of the murder scene itself.
⁶⁵
If Warner’s recollection was accurate, he would have come across Crump at approximately 1:25, ten minutes later than the official time stamp of Crump’s arrest at approximately 1:15.

Under direct examination by Hantman, Warner proceeded to alter his testimony, saying that it had been 1:15
P.M
. when he first saw Crump at a location one-tenth of mile east of the murder scene. Hantman appeared to be irritated with Warner for not following the script, so Warner, under cross-examination by Roundtree, eventually changed his testimony again to 1:14
P.M
. (In their testimony during the trial, several detectives and police officers had already established that Detective Bernie Crooke had arrested Ray Crump on the railroad bed directly below the murder scene at approximately 1:15
P.M
.)

The government’s case was slowly spiraling out of control, yet the Roundtree defense team appeared to be missing another critical moment. Detective John Warner’s testimony was undermining the prosecution’s case. Warner told Hantman that he stopped Crump on the railroad tracks and identified himself as a police officer, and Crump took out his sodden wallet and handed over his D.C. driver’s license. Crump, Warner testified, hadn’t been running when he discovered him; “he was walking.”
⁶⁶
Warner had looked at the name and photograph on the license to confirm Crump’s identity. He hadn’t needed to read the physical description—5 feet 3½ inches and 130 pounds—to realize that Crump wasn’t a match for the general broadcast, which had put the height of the suspect, according to Warner, at 5 feet 10 inches, though he wanted to maintain during the trial that he hadn’t noticed Crump’s physical description on his license. In the unlikely event that that were true, why wouldn’t he have arrested Crump immediately?