Introducing: Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien

Hello, Earwitness listeners! We want to share a new podcast that we think you'll love - Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien

About the show: One of America’s greatest unsolved mysteries, and the two women at its core; One black, one white. One poor, one rich. They never actually met. But their lives came to intersect through one tragic day when Mary Pinchot Meyer was mysteriously murdered on her daily walk in broad daylight in 1964. A black man stood accused, and a barrier-breaking civil rights lawyer, Dovey Roundtree, rose to his defense. Award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien weaves a tale of crime and culture that still resonates with our socio-political climate today.

Listen here and subscribe to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
You're familiar with Georgetown, right, that posh neighborhood in Washington,
d C. With stately homes and cobblestone streets. Well, just
steps away from all of that, there's a dirt road,
a towpath where you might find locals jogging. Over fifty
years ago, it was the place where two women's stories collided.

(00:26):
It started with a murder October twelfth, nineteen sixty four.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
She had been shot twice in the head and in
the back, behind the heart.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
Mary Pinchot Meyer was found dead on that very same towpath.
She was an artist, a woman on the verge of
coming into her own.

Speaker 3 (00:46):
She had everything at her disposal of the elite of
the elite, and she rejected it to become an artist
in a garage.

Speaker 1 (00:56):
And then her life was cut short. But what happened now,
that's why we're here. Just forty five minutes after Mary's death,
her killer had been arrested, or so the police claimed.
But if a black man is in the vicinity of
a crime against a white woman, he is considered guilty
before you know, even formally charged. Only one woman, Dovey

(01:21):
Johnson Rowntree, would defend him.

Speaker 4 (01:23):
I could make things right out, though in some things
I have made right.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
Dovey was a lawyer during Jim Crow. She wasn't allowed
to drink from the same water fountains as white people,
yet in court she was the only thing standing between
a man and his execution. This is murder on the Towpath,

(01:48):
and I'm your host, Solidad O'Brien. We're going to take
you back to the nineteen sixties, a time of political
and cultural upheaval, when society felt constantly on the brink
of war, when segregation was the law of the land.

Speaker 4 (02:04):
Some people saw that as a triumph, that this was
the best case scenario because there wasn't a lynching, or
there wasn't some act of racial violence. In terms of retaliation.

Speaker 1 (02:16):
This is a story of two women who wanted to
reach their fullest potential, even if society had very different
plans for them.

Speaker 4 (02:24):
There's a strenuous thing with law school.

Speaker 1 (02:28):
You imagine nobody but your law We're going to take
you back to that courtroom where people found themselves asking
did this man really kill Mary Pincho Meyer.

Speaker 2 (02:39):
They didn't find the gun, which was troubling.

Speaker 1 (02:45):
But what most people didn't know and what could have
altered the course of this case was that Mary had
had an affair with a very powerful man.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
I pledge you that we shall now that commit not
provoked aggression.

Speaker 1 (03:02):
That man was John F. Kennedy. Listen and subscribe to
Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien starting April twenty third,
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.