May 7, 2025 • 36 mins
Mary Pinchot came from a rich, eccentric family. The kind of folks who rode horses naked on their estate and hobnobbed with Kennedys. She was fiercely committed to world peace, but ended up marrying a CIA man named Cord Meyer. It was only after a tragic accident that she became known for her distinctive paintings. What started as a hobby became a lifeline in the years before her death.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It was December nineteen fifty six, a week before Christmas.
Mary and Cord Meyer had once been very in love,
hopeful for the future. They'd been brought together by their
shared passion for world peace, just as the Second World
War was ending. Back then, they were young intellectuals in
(00:22):
love with books, ideas, and each other. Their bond was strong,
but by Christmas nineteen fifty six, what once seemed unbreakable
had started to crack at its very foundation. This would
be the Meyer's last Christmas all together as a family.
They installed a tree in their spacious farmhouse in the
(00:45):
suburbs of Washington, d c. Mary had hidden the presence
inside closets away from her three boys. Quentin, the oldest
was ten, Michael was nine, and the youngest, Mark was six.
The Meyer children's needs were always met, but there was
one thing they really wanted, a TV. The nineteen fifties
(01:09):
were the dawn of TV in the American living room.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
It's Swiss dream Sandwich.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
Who are you.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Last, Papa, I'll call Princess Margaret.
Speaker 4 (01:23):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
TV wasn't brand new, more than half of American families
owned one, but Mary didn't like TV, thought it would
make her sons lazy. It was one of those small
but significant ways she was willing to go against the grain.
The Myers were not getting a television, so when their
two older sons, Quentin and Michael, wanted to watch their
(01:48):
favorite Western, they had to go to the neighbors. They
had to cross Route one twenty three to get to
their friend's house. The boys knew to be careful crossing.
Just two years earlier, their golden retriever had been killed
on the road right in front of their house. The
route wasn't well lit, and on this fateful December day,
(02:12):
sunlight had already given way to nightfall.
Speaker 5 (02:15):
What all American Boy.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
On TV as the good guys were battling the bad guys.
Quentin and Michael knew dinner time was fast approaching. They
had promised to be home for supper, so they headed home.
The older boy, Quentin, dashed across the road first and
reached his family's lawn. Michael followed close behind. At home,
(02:43):
Mary was likely preparing the final touches on dinner when
she heard a horrible noise. One of Mary's biographers, Nina Burley,
told us more about that moment.
Speaker 6 (02:55):
She heard something by the road.
Speaker 7 (02:56):
The middle Sun ran across the street in the dark
and was hit by a car and died by the
side of the road.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Quentin saw his brother curled up on the road, lifeless.
It was quentin screams that caught Mary's.
Speaker 7 (03:11):
Attention, and she ran down and there was a car
that had hit her son, and the driver was hysterical. So,
you know, there's her son dead on the side of
the road and she's trying to calm the driver, which
course is unusual behavior, but again this is these are
(03:36):
for people who are, you know, trained from birth to
maintain kind of a facade of being unemotional, and incredibly
it rose to the foe at that moment.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Perhaps Mary was in shock, or maybe she didn't want
to give in to the horror of that moment, so
she kept her compared. But the accident was kind of
a catalyst. It changed her, changed her priorities. After that
horrible evening, she chose a new course. Mary didn't want
to be married anymore, she didn't want to live in
(04:14):
the suburbs. She'd get a painting studio in Georgetown and
start to take a daily walk on the towpath from
Luminary Film Nation Entertainment in association with Neon Hummedia. I'm
solid at O'Brien and this is Murder on the Towpath,
(04:36):
a story of two incredible women who never met, but
whose lives became forever intertwined by tragedy. By the time
of Mary's murder, Dovey Rowntree knew she had come from
a prominent family, but she didn't have the full story.
(04:57):
Had she known what kind of powerful people may had
known her entire life, maybe Dovey would have felt less
optimistic about her case. Defending Ray Here's historian Alexis Co.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Mary Meyer had the sort of background that you would
see in the New York Times Vows section. She was
born into wealth. Her uncle was Teddy Roosevelt's chief Forrester.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Mary had lived a charmed life. She lived on Park
Avenue in Manhattan and went to the Brearley School on
the Upper east Side. Brearley was academically rigorous and of
course exclusive. Girls with last names like Matisse, Roosevelt, and
Graham attended. Mary studied math, history, Greek, Latin, and French.
(05:43):
She played basketball and smoked cigarettes. In between classes. She
duck into a smoking room at Brierley that was for
seniors only. Mary would continue to smoke socially for the
rest of her life. She first crossed paths with JFK
long before he was president. It was a winter formal
(06:04):
in nineteen thirty six. Mary was just fifteen among the
new England prep school set. Winter was the season of
the formal dance. Bill Atwood, a future ambassador to the
un invited Mary to a weekend of festivities at Choate
Rosemary Hall. In the dance hall, there were tuxedos with
(06:28):
coattails and intricate formal dresses. John F. Kennedy had graduated
from Choate the year before and was already a freshman
at Princeton, but he turned up that night on the
Choate dance floor alone. He was confident, not embarrassed to
return to a high school dance, not embarrassed to go stag.
(06:50):
As Bill and Mary danced, JFK's eyes rested on her.
He tapped Bill on the shoulder and cut in. According
to Bill's memoir, Kennedy cut in on his dances with
Mary again and again that night. Mary had an effect
on the future president. He wouldn't soon forget her. But
it wasn't just wealth and beauty. That made Mary Pinchot
(07:11):
stand out. Her family was also liberal and unconventional. Here's
Nina again.
Speaker 7 (07:18):
Well, she was raised bohemian by the standards of that day.
They summered on this property in Pennsylvania where they swam nude.
Everybody was nude. They went horseback riding nude. You know,
things in the nineteen twenties and thirties that you would
associate with Mary Bohemian, upper crust society people.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
There was plenty of space to frolic at Gray Towers.
That's what they called the family estate outside Milford, Pennsylvania.
Mary and her father Amos, played tennis together growing up.
He was the parent she looked to please.
Speaker 7 (07:57):
Her dad started the American Civil Ardie Union. Her mother
was his second wife and had been a writer for
the Nation.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Mary's mother, Ruth, spent hours behind closed doors writing her
stories and was much more hands off when it came
to parenting. Her father had left his first wife to
marry her. Divorce was generally unheard of in the early
nineteen hundreds. Mary's father knew his choice would open him
up to scrutiny, but he took the risk anyway. In
(08:27):
that way, Mary took after her father. But when it
came time for college, Mary did follow in her mother's
footsteps and went to Vasser. She daydreamed about studying to
become a doctor. But the truth is that's not really
why Mary went to college. Here's historian Alexis Co.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
We tend to think of Vasser because it's produced women
like Lee Miller, the artist and photographer, and other women
who have gone into the arts, as a progressive institution
that perhaps is launching women in the world, But it wasn't.
Vasser was a place women went because they wanted to
go to college. It was close to the city, though,
(09:06):
so they could date professional men and they could get
on their way to becoming homemakers. And I think that
that was what she was supposed to be, and that's
what she was.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
For a while, Vasser women were divided into two camps,
career types and those who got hitched and had children.
But Mary was also hard to categorize. One famous classmate,
Scotti Fitzgerald, daughter to f Scott, called her an independent
soul and even compared her to a fawn. Maybe the
(09:39):
best way to put it was she was one of
a kind, not one to care what other people thought.
Vasser classmate Francis Field told Nina Burley as much. She
remembers an incident during finals time their senior year. The
study room was dead, quiet, stress was high. Mary got
up to use the bathroom, but before she left, she
(10:02):
paused by a vase, bent down and took a bite
out of a tulip. Mary chewed her mouthful without saying
a thing.
Speaker 8 (10:10):
Mary was one of those people that I think by
making her representative of something, you miss a lot of
their uniqueness.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Like her mother, Mary was also a writer. She published
a short story in the Vasser Review in nineteen forty one.
It was called Futility and the Window it provides into
Mary's mind.
Speaker 9 (10:38):
Well, it was a very strange story, and it indicated
she had an unconventional imagination.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
That's author Ron Rosenbaum. Mary's story revolves around a young
woman named Ruth who's something of an outsider.
Speaker 9 (10:55):
It separated her from the chich that surrounded her, separated
her in the story and also separated her from the
actual people.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Ruth is at a cocktail party and the room is
almost grotesquely decorated, expensive but ghush silver wallpaper, a shiny
mantle with a fish tank above it. Inside our overfit goldfish.
Here's an excerpt from Mary's story.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
Everything in this room is cold and angular, she thought,
the furniture all chromium and corners, the women chicly cadaverous,
the conversation brittle and smart and insignificant.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Ruth isn't impressed by any of these trappings. She tells
the host she's leaving. She can't make her excuses quickly enough.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
Writing down the elevator, Ruth looked at herself in the mirror,
and she saw the floors slipping away behind her, one
by one as the elevator descended, and that, she thought,
is a portrait of my life, year by year.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Ruth is leaving because she has a plan. She's going
to get surgery. Elective surgery. Surgeons will switch Ruth's nerves
so her optical nerves are connected to her hearing, and
her hearing to her eyes. Everything she sees she'll hear,
and everything she hears she'll see. It doesn't exactly make sense,
(12:26):
but that is the point. Mary's heroine craves the unconventional,
the weird, or, as Ruth says as she leaves the party,
it will all.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
Be different tomorrow. Everything that I see and hear people
that I meet, Every sensation will be new and exciting
and different and interesting, Doctor Morrison promised me.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
So Ruth wants to cure her boredom through radical change?
Did Mary want that too? Her heroine was willing to
do whatever it took. Here's Ron Rosenbaum again.
Speaker 9 (13:00):
I think the importance of the story was not its
literary merit, but that it showed that this was an
unconventional person who thought that she was not going to
be just another link in the vast daisy chain.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Mary Pinchot might show up to the party, but that
didn't mean she'd follow any of the rules. And whatever
she did do, she did with a confidence that usually
made others notice. After graduation, the world was going to.
Speaker 7 (13:38):
War, and one of the aspects of her very tragic
really generation, even though they call it the greatest generation
the World War two boys, is that, you know, the
boys all left in nineteen thirty nine forty and the
women were left behind.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
In New York, Mary started writing features for United Press International,
a newspaper syndication service.
Speaker 7 (14:05):
So she went to work as a journalist, and lots
of women went to work. That's where you get Rosie
the Riveter right. All the men are gone and the
women are now doing the jobs the men used to do.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
Mary knew she'd eventually get married and have children, but
for now she wanted something more. The war took its
toll on so many young people, made them realize the
senselessness of killing, the futility and waste of it all.
She wanted a world free of war. She wanted a
husband who also believed in that cause, And as the
(14:41):
wounded young men started coming home from battle, Mary found
Cord Meyer. He was a man of many talents, a
poet and intellectual, but the thing he wanted most was
world peace. In their short lives, Mary and Cord had
seen plenty of death and darkness. Mary had lost an
(15:01):
older sister to suicide. Cord enlisted in the Marines after
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. He had seen soldiers die. But
on their wedding day in the spring of nineteen forty five,
they both looked overwhelmed with happiness, Hopeful the war was
in its waning days. Hitler would be gone weeks later.
(15:23):
Death on such a large scale had never been seen
by anyone before. It left a mark, but maybe now
there were better days ahead, especially for Mary and Cord
because they'd found each other. As Nina Burley describes it, she.
Speaker 7 (15:41):
Was an educated woman and a reader, and she had ideas.
And her husband was also a reader, well educated, and
when they got together they bonded over ideas and not
just their passion, but they had ideas they share.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
The young couple was married in the Pinchot family's apartment
on Park Avenue. Mary wore a green and white day
dress with a string of pearls and a pair of
reading glasses around her neck. Cord wore his marine dress uniform.
In one image of that day, Mary arm in arm
with Cord, cranes her gaze upward toward her new husband,
(16:24):
wide eyed and flashing a white smile through red lips.
It's as if she sees her future in Chord. By
the time they married, Cord new war was absurd. He
had been sent home after he lost an eye in
a grenade explosion. He had become a pacifist. On the
day of the nuptials, Cord got some good news. He
(16:46):
learned he'd get to go to a UN convention in
San Francisco to work toward world peace. Mary joined him there.
The perfect honeymoon for two idealists, not on a beach,
but at an international conference to end all war, but
in San Francisco. Chord became quickly disillusioned. The US, France,
(17:08):
and China demanded veto power over UN resolutions. Coord knew
world peace had no chance if one country's interests won out.
Cord was interviewed at the convention by a reporter for
The New York Times. He barely mustered any optimism. He
just said it had been a step in the right direction.
(17:31):
There was one more journalist at the convention who wanted
to talk to Ord, but Chord wouldn't allow it.
Speaker 7 (17:38):
Kennedy shows up there as a journalist, which it's so
hard to believe Kennedy as a journalist, But for one
shining moment, he had a press passed and he went
to this conference about world peace.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
That's right. Coord refused JFK's request for an interview. Kennedy
wrote skeptical remarks about Ord's semistic takeaway from the convention
in a personal notebook. The two men, who were both
war vets from prominent New England families, couldn't find common ground,
but fate kept Kennedy in Mary's close orbit and then
(18:15):
on their way back east, the newlyweds got unforgettable news
that shook the world.
Speaker 7 (18:21):
They're literally in a train going back from their honeymoon
and they stop in Chicago and pick up a newspaper.
The headline is that this incredible weapon of mass destruction
has been dropped.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
For Cord, the writing was on the wall. His world
peace mission felt doomed.
Speaker 7 (18:44):
The most important moment in these lives of people born
in nineteen twenty was the dropping of the Adam bomb
on Hiroshima, followed by the dropping of the second Adam
bomb on Nagasaki.
Speaker 10 (18:58):
Needlessly, I realized the tragic significance of the atomic bombs
we have used in order to sharpen the agony of war,
in order to say the lines of thousands and thousands
(19:20):
of young Americans.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
The newsreels showed the unimaginable, and everyone was watching for.
Speaker 7 (19:28):
People who didn't grow up with nuclear weapons, for humans
that didn't grow up with the knowledge like we did
that humans can now incinerate the planet. This was a
traumatic experience because they remembered what it was like before
(19:48):
and they were grappling with this existential new situation.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Cord wrote a letter to the New York Times the
pillar of Smoke over Japan on August eighth, in large
letters for all who dared to read not only the
end of that war, but the end of our own security.
For a few years, Coord set out on the lecture circuit,
going from college to college. He made advocating for world
(20:14):
peace alluring, apparently because students pinned images of Chord the
Pacifist with an eyepatch on the walls of their dorm rooms.
But Coord was growing pessimistic. The US fight against Communism
had ramped up, and nuclear testing continued. So when Coord's
father set him up with a meeting, Coord was despondent
(20:36):
enough to listen to what the CIA had to say.
Speaker 5 (20:40):
Here's Lance Morrow, and then he went over to the CIA,
almost mysteriously that he Alan Dalles recruited him, or seems
to have recruited him for the CIA.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Coord hoped the agency could help quell the threat of
nuclear war.
Speaker 6 (20:58):
And so the CIA.
Speaker 7 (21:00):
The excuse that they would make for what they were
doing was that they had to prevent this from happening.
They had to keep control over everything.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
If Cord couldn't work toward world peace through international cooperation,
maybe this was the next best option, Cord took the job.
In nineteen fifty one, Mary, her husband Cord, and their
three young boys moved to a well to do suburb
of Washington, d c. Mary was excited. Now she could
(21:33):
take care of her boys in a big farmhouse, and
she could meet up with old Vassar friends who had
settled in the district.
Speaker 8 (21:39):
And she was having this suburban life across the river
in McLean, Virginia.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
But for years tension had been brewing in.
Speaker 7 (21:47):
Her marriage, and so they no longer had this kind
of intellectual relationship that had inspired her in the first place.
So that was a problem.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
There. Shared hopes for a peaceful future head all but vanished.
Here's Nina Burley again.
Speaker 6 (22:04):
He was depressive and he stopped.
Speaker 7 (22:06):
He sort of went into a kind of a more
withholding physician visa vi her.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
They started taking their grievances about each other to an
especially personal space Chord's diary.
Speaker 7 (22:21):
Cord was keeping a journal, and apparently Mary had access
to it at some points.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
I know it sounds odd or even unhealthy, but it
indicates how unhappy they were still. For Coord, his diary
was the place he felt comfortable expressing his frustrations.
Speaker 7 (22:40):
Otherwise, he was very repressed, and he was drinking a lot,
and he kept a journal because one of his issues
was that he felt that he was a writer and
he was not able to write, and he was not
also getting public acclaim the way Kennedy was, because if
you work in the CIA, you can't get public acclaim.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
His diary wasn't something that was meant to be kept
private from his wife, at least not according to Mary's
handwritten annotations inside of it.
Speaker 7 (23:09):
And so you can see in the journal his writing
and then her notes on the side, like something straight
out of Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Chord would write about his disappointments over his career and
the dimming prospects of peace, and then Mary would dive in.
Speaker 7 (23:27):
At one point, Chord wrote of the growing Korean conflict quote,
I am without hope, and yet I live from day
to day as before. And in the margins, Mary wrote,
in her large loopy script, quote, when you say you
are without hope, you imply that you thought humans were
not what they are humans unquote.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
There were more personal jabs too.
Speaker 7 (23:50):
Another example, he wrote poem about a beautiful woman who
quote who wears her beauty carelessly, like a bright dress
Sla lent for a night by some indulgent guest. And
in the margins, Mary drew an arrow to the last
lines and observed she bites her fingernails, fails to shave
under her arms, has no sense of humor, and is
(24:12):
a totally mundane soul. But silence fires the imagination of
the spiritually timid.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Mary was not a gentle editor.
Speaker 7 (24:21):
So she's making fun of him in his own journal.
Very toxic relationship.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
It wasn't easy to be the wife of a CIA
man to begin with, What do you tell the children?
Speaker 6 (24:37):
Their kids thought that they worked at the post office.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
A cord was definitely not delivering the mail. And over time,
this high stakes secrecy took its toll.
Speaker 8 (24:48):
The strain on the families of the CIA in the
nineteen fifties during the Cold War was extreme. There was
a great deal of alcoholism, There was a great deal
of suicide. It was a great deal of fan family dysfunction,
very very unhappy kids, very unhappy wives. Guys who would
disappear forever and ever on these CIA missions. They could
(25:12):
never talk about what they were doing. The drinking was fantastic.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
This is Lance Morrow again.
Speaker 8 (25:20):
Cord used to go and get blitzed every lunchtime at
a favorite French restaurant. And it was a world under
a great deal of stress.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Some CIA men had lived through war, they'd seen death
from the front lines, and they woke up to the
reality of nuclear weapons.
Speaker 7 (25:38):
All these men had PTSD before they called it PTSD,
and especially when they all went into the CIA and decided,
you know, now we're going to we're going to keep
this world under control and we're never going to have
a world war like that again, so we have to
control everything around the planet. Of course, that stressed them out.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
Meanwhile, women were compelled to be caretakers and homemakers, both
out of duty to their husbands and families and of
course systemically by design.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
In the late fifties and early sixties, women were still
seen as homemakers. Women couldn't get a credit card without
having their husband's approval their signature.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
That's Alexis co. Men put women.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
On a pedestal, which is a great way to keep
women in their place.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
And that place. For CIA wives, it was a job
they took very seriously, hosting dinner parties.
Speaker 7 (26:37):
What those women were able to do was you know,
they were entertainment and they were social. They had dinner parties,
and they kept the men amused.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
And at those gatherings, they knew they weren't supposed to
repeat what they overheard.
Speaker 7 (26:51):
And in those interactions, these social interactions, they did pick up,
you know, lots of gossip. Let's say Ellen Dulles thought
about a certain you know journalist being a spy. You know,
they would pick up little bits and pieces here and there.
And the danger of that kind of a woman in
(27:16):
that society for the men is that they're going to
blab it, or they're going to tell somebody else what
was going on, or you know, if this is the
Cold War, I mean the Cold War, and you know,
the stakes are incredibly high.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
And given these high stakes, an independent thinker like Mary
Meyer would have been looked at with suspicion.
Speaker 7 (27:37):
Washington at the time was just riven with spies. And
so you know, if you have a woman like that
in your crowd who is not on board with what's happening,
which she eventually was not, then you know that person
could pose a challenge to people like Dulles or you know,
(28:03):
James Angleton, the super paranoid counterintelligence chief because she was
very attractive, so she presented a challenge. Because women are
by definition subversive because they're not members of the power structure,
there so not to be entirely trusted.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
So women, Mary included, continued to play the roles assigned
to them, driving kids in carpools, gardening, and cooking family dinners.
But Mary also did something for her self care before
we called it that. She took art classes at American University,
and when she had time, she painted in the shed
(28:50):
in her backyard. Still being a mother took precedence. Both
Mary and Dovey came up long before Betty fri Dan
argued that women should and could work outside the home.
The Feminine Mystique was only published in nineteen sixty three,
just a few years before I was born and the
year before Mary's murder. In the nineteen fifties, most women
(29:14):
lived with certain limits.
Speaker 7 (29:15):
They didn't fully step out and into these roles of
I'm the artist, I'm the lawyer. You know, I'm a
career woman. That didn't even occur to them. She was
busting out of that a little bit by the time
she got divorced.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Maybe Mary thought she'd be a CIA wife forever, but
she chose independence. After her son died, her life took
a different turn, and that was true for Dovey too.
She'd married her college sweetheart, William Rowntree, but Dovey and
William wanted different things by the time she decided to
(29:49):
pursue the law. Here's Dovey speaking to the National Visionary
Leadership Project.
Speaker 4 (29:55):
Well, he knew he had a job coming up in
civil service, and he thought he'd try that. He'd rather
try that, and I could go on to law school.
And you know, we have a marriage. But there's a
strenuous thing with law school. You ain't marriagine nobody but
the law.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Dovey said, she didn't want to be reined in by
her husband. She took a job in another state. He
went into the civil service, and they parted ways. Incredibly,
both Mary and Dovey got divorced at a time when
ending a marriage was in common, when doing so would
(30:34):
have opened them up to no small amount of ridicule.
Mary's father had divorced his first wife. Still, he was
a man, he had money. Mary was not only a
woman but a mother, choosing independence over family in the fifties,
it was so unusual. Most women wouldn't dream about it,
let alone do it. As for Dovey, well, she had
(30:57):
neither an example to follow, or she had only her
own will, her own goals to follow. Both Mary and
Dovey were ahead of their time. Lance Morrow saw the
similarities between them.
Speaker 8 (31:11):
He said, Dovey had an independence, which, as I said,
reminded me a little of Mary. And Dovey went her
own way. You know, when her husband, mister Rowntree, objected
to her going to Howard University law school, Dovey just
basically said, okay, fine, well see you round. She was
(31:34):
going to pursue her law career and she was going
to do what she wanted to do. And Mary was
the same way.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
By nineteen fifty four, Cord, unfulfilled by his job, was
continuing to drink heavily, but was also rising quickly through
CIA ranks. Mary's patients wore thin. She went on a
European trip with her sister Tony. Each sister had a
fair with new men. Tony's was with Ben Bradley, and
(32:03):
they married. The following year, Mary met a man that
a family friend described as an Italian count. She went
back home to the suburbs, feeling liberated, and Cord sensed
a shift. It was the beginning of the end of
their relationship. He thought he could wait out his wife's
(32:24):
love affair, but the distance between them grew. Mary stopped
attending CIA dinners and social outings, and then came that
awful day, that December day that would break up her
family for good.
Speaker 7 (32:46):
The Middle Sun ran across the street in the dark
and was hit by a car and died by the
side of the road.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
Mary ran downhill to her son's body. He had died
instantly in the crash. She kept her composure in the moment,
but later it all sunk in. She gave away Michael's
Christmas presents and found other ways to cope. She encouraged
Michael's friends to come visit and pick one of his
toys to keep for themselves. I'm a mother of four.
(33:17):
The idea of Mary giving away those toys is absolutely heartbreaking.
Was it because she couldn't bear to look at them,
or did she want his toys to bring joy to
other children, a way of having his memory live on.
It's hard to fathom the depths of Mary and Chord's sadness.
Speaker 7 (33:35):
The death of course was devastating. She never got over it.
He probably didn't either, as you don't when you lose
a child.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Cord was hoping that this tragedy would bring them closer together,
but it was not to be.
Speaker 7 (33:50):
That accident actually was the catalyst for her divorce and
really for her changing her life from you to being
more of an artist and practicing more creative.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
In her grief over her son, over her marriage, over
the hopes for her future, Mary needed to regain her
sense of self. She would breach society's expectations of her.
She would start volunteering at an art gallery and establishing
her own home. She'd get a painting studio in Georgetown.
She'd begin painting in the morning and taking a daily
(34:22):
walk along the Georgetown Towpath. And just like Mary's short
story at Vasser, everything was about to be new and
exciting and different and interesting. Next time, on Murder on
the Towpath, we returned to Mary's murder trial, where Ray
Crump is facing the death penalty. The police found him
(34:45):
soaking wet near the towpath. But could someone else have
committed the crime and had time to escape? To find out,
I go to the scene of the crime to the
towpath itself. It's almost not secluded enough to make you
feel afraid or to get a sense of foreboding about
what's coming. On Mary's last walk, in her moments of solitude,
(35:09):
she was surrounded by beauty, an exposed path in nature,
Mary wouldn't have had reason to be scared at all
from luminary Murder on the Towpath is a production of
Film Nation Entertainment in association with Neon Hum Media. Our
(35:30):
executive producers are me Solidad O'Brien, Alyssa Martino, Milan Papelka,
and Jonathan Hirsch. Lead producer is Schera Morris. Associate producers
are Natalie Rinn and Lucy Licht. Senior editor is Katherine
Saint Louis. Music and composition by Andrew Eapen, Sound design
and mixing by Scott Somerville. Fact checking by Laura Bullard.
(35:53):
Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Sarah Vacchiano, Rose Arsa, Kate Mischkin,
and MICHAELA. Selella, and to Liesel Schillinger for reading Mary's
short story.
It was December nineteen fifty six, a week before Christmas.
Mary and Cord Meyer had once been very in love,
hopeful for the future. They'd been brought together by their
shared passion for world peace, just as the Second World
War was ending. Back then, they were young intellectuals in
(00:22):
love with books, ideas, and each other. Their bond was strong,
but by Christmas nineteen fifty six, what once seemed unbreakable
had started to crack at its very foundation. This would
be the Meyer's last Christmas all together as a family.
They installed a tree in their spacious farmhouse in the
(00:45):
suburbs of Washington, d c. Mary had hidden the presence
inside closets away from her three boys. Quentin, the oldest
was ten, Michael was nine, and the youngest, Mark was six.
The Meyer children's needs were always met, but there was
one thing they really wanted, a TV. The nineteen fifties
(01:09):
were the dawn of TV in the American living room.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
It's Swiss dream Sandwich.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
Who are you.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Last, Papa, I'll call Princess Margaret.
Speaker 4 (01:23):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
TV wasn't brand new, more than half of American families
owned one, but Mary didn't like TV, thought it would
make her sons lazy. It was one of those small
but significant ways she was willing to go against the grain.
The Myers were not getting a television, so when their
two older sons, Quentin and Michael, wanted to watch their
(01:48):
favorite Western, they had to go to the neighbors. They
had to cross Route one twenty three to get to
their friend's house. The boys knew to be careful crossing.
Just two years earlier, their golden retriever had been killed
on the road right in front of their house. The
route wasn't well lit, and on this fateful December day,
(02:12):
sunlight had already given way to nightfall.
Speaker 5 (02:15):
What all American Boy.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
On TV as the good guys were battling the bad guys.
Quentin and Michael knew dinner time was fast approaching. They
had promised to be home for supper, so they headed home.
The older boy, Quentin, dashed across the road first and
reached his family's lawn. Michael followed close behind. At home,
(02:43):
Mary was likely preparing the final touches on dinner when
she heard a horrible noise. One of Mary's biographers, Nina Burley,
told us more about that moment.
Speaker 6 (02:55):
She heard something by the road.
Speaker 7 (02:56):
The middle Sun ran across the street in the dark
and was hit by a car and died by the
side of the road.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Quentin saw his brother curled up on the road, lifeless.
It was quentin screams that caught Mary's.
Speaker 7 (03:11):
Attention, and she ran down and there was a car
that had hit her son, and the driver was hysterical. So,
you know, there's her son dead on the side of
the road and she's trying to calm the driver, which
course is unusual behavior, but again this is these are
(03:36):
for people who are, you know, trained from birth to
maintain kind of a facade of being unemotional, and incredibly
it rose to the foe at that moment.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Perhaps Mary was in shock, or maybe she didn't want
to give in to the horror of that moment, so
she kept her compared. But the accident was kind of
a catalyst. It changed her, changed her priorities. After that
horrible evening, she chose a new course. Mary didn't want
to be married anymore, she didn't want to live in
(04:14):
the suburbs. She'd get a painting studio in Georgetown and
start to take a daily walk on the towpath from
Luminary Film Nation Entertainment in association with Neon Hummedia. I'm
solid at O'Brien and this is Murder on the Towpath,
(04:36):
a story of two incredible women who never met, but
whose lives became forever intertwined by tragedy. By the time
of Mary's murder, Dovey Rowntree knew she had come from
a prominent family, but she didn't have the full story.
(04:57):
Had she known what kind of powerful people may had
known her entire life, maybe Dovey would have felt less
optimistic about her case. Defending Ray Here's historian Alexis Co.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Mary Meyer had the sort of background that you would
see in the New York Times Vows section. She was
born into wealth. Her uncle was Teddy Roosevelt's chief Forrester.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Mary had lived a charmed life. She lived on Park
Avenue in Manhattan and went to the Brearley School on
the Upper east Side. Brearley was academically rigorous and of
course exclusive. Girls with last names like Matisse, Roosevelt, and
Graham attended. Mary studied math, history, Greek, Latin, and French.
(05:43):
She played basketball and smoked cigarettes. In between classes. She
duck into a smoking room at Brierley that was for
seniors only. Mary would continue to smoke socially for the
rest of her life. She first crossed paths with JFK
long before he was president. It was a winter formal
(06:04):
in nineteen thirty six. Mary was just fifteen among the
new England prep school set. Winter was the season of
the formal dance. Bill Atwood, a future ambassador to the
un invited Mary to a weekend of festivities at Choate
Rosemary Hall. In the dance hall, there were tuxedos with
(06:28):
coattails and intricate formal dresses. John F. Kennedy had graduated
from Choate the year before and was already a freshman
at Princeton, but he turned up that night on the
Choate dance floor alone. He was confident, not embarrassed to
return to a high school dance, not embarrassed to go stag.
(06:50):
As Bill and Mary danced, JFK's eyes rested on her.
He tapped Bill on the shoulder and cut in. According
to Bill's memoir, Kennedy cut in on his dances with
Mary again and again that night. Mary had an effect
on the future president. He wouldn't soon forget her. But
it wasn't just wealth and beauty. That made Mary Pinchot
(07:11):
stand out. Her family was also liberal and unconventional. Here's
Nina again.
Speaker 7 (07:18):
Well, she was raised bohemian by the standards of that day.
They summered on this property in Pennsylvania where they swam nude.
Everybody was nude. They went horseback riding nude. You know,
things in the nineteen twenties and thirties that you would
associate with Mary Bohemian, upper crust society people.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
There was plenty of space to frolic at Gray Towers.
That's what they called the family estate outside Milford, Pennsylvania.
Mary and her father Amos, played tennis together growing up.
He was the parent she looked to please.
Speaker 7 (07:57):
Her dad started the American Civil Ardie Union. Her mother
was his second wife and had been a writer for
the Nation.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Mary's mother, Ruth, spent hours behind closed doors writing her
stories and was much more hands off when it came
to parenting. Her father had left his first wife to
marry her. Divorce was generally unheard of in the early
nineteen hundreds. Mary's father knew his choice would open him
up to scrutiny, but he took the risk anyway. In
(08:27):
that way, Mary took after her father. But when it
came time for college, Mary did follow in her mother's
footsteps and went to Vasser. She daydreamed about studying to
become a doctor. But the truth is that's not really
why Mary went to college. Here's historian Alexis Co.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
We tend to think of Vasser because it's produced women
like Lee Miller, the artist and photographer, and other women
who have gone into the arts, as a progressive institution
that perhaps is launching women in the world, But it wasn't.
Vasser was a place women went because they wanted to
go to college. It was close to the city, though,
(09:06):
so they could date professional men and they could get
on their way to becoming homemakers. And I think that
that was what she was supposed to be, and that's
what she was.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
For a while, Vasser women were divided into two camps,
career types and those who got hitched and had children.
But Mary was also hard to categorize. One famous classmate,
Scotti Fitzgerald, daughter to f Scott, called her an independent
soul and even compared her to a fawn. Maybe the
(09:39):
best way to put it was she was one of
a kind, not one to care what other people thought.
Vasser classmate Francis Field told Nina Burley as much. She
remembers an incident during finals time their senior year. The
study room was dead, quiet, stress was high. Mary got
up to use the bathroom, but before she left, she
(10:02):
paused by a vase, bent down and took a bite
out of a tulip. Mary chewed her mouthful without saying
a thing.
Speaker 8 (10:10):
Mary was one of those people that I think by
making her representative of something, you miss a lot of
their uniqueness.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Like her mother, Mary was also a writer. She published
a short story in the Vasser Review in nineteen forty one.
It was called Futility and the Window it provides into
Mary's mind.
Speaker 9 (10:38):
Well, it was a very strange story, and it indicated
she had an unconventional imagination.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
That's author Ron Rosenbaum. Mary's story revolves around a young
woman named Ruth who's something of an outsider.
Speaker 9 (10:55):
It separated her from the chich that surrounded her, separated
her in the story and also separated her from the
actual people.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Ruth is at a cocktail party and the room is
almost grotesquely decorated, expensive but ghush silver wallpaper, a shiny
mantle with a fish tank above it. Inside our overfit goldfish.
Here's an excerpt from Mary's story.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
Everything in this room is cold and angular, she thought,
the furniture all chromium and corners, the women chicly cadaverous,
the conversation brittle and smart and insignificant.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Ruth isn't impressed by any of these trappings. She tells
the host she's leaving. She can't make her excuses quickly enough.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
Writing down the elevator, Ruth looked at herself in the mirror,
and she saw the floors slipping away behind her, one
by one as the elevator descended, and that, she thought,
is a portrait of my life, year by year.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Ruth is leaving because she has a plan. She's going
to get surgery. Elective surgery. Surgeons will switch Ruth's nerves
so her optical nerves are connected to her hearing, and
her hearing to her eyes. Everything she sees she'll hear,
and everything she hears she'll see. It doesn't exactly make sense,
(12:26):
but that is the point. Mary's heroine craves the unconventional,
the weird, or, as Ruth says as she leaves the party,
it will all.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
Be different tomorrow. Everything that I see and hear people
that I meet, Every sensation will be new and exciting
and different and interesting, Doctor Morrison promised me.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
So Ruth wants to cure her boredom through radical change?
Did Mary want that too? Her heroine was willing to
do whatever it took. Here's Ron Rosenbaum again.
Speaker 9 (13:00):
I think the importance of the story was not its
literary merit, but that it showed that this was an
unconventional person who thought that she was not going to
be just another link in the vast daisy chain.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Mary Pinchot might show up to the party, but that
didn't mean she'd follow any of the rules. And whatever
she did do, she did with a confidence that usually
made others notice. After graduation, the world was going to.
Speaker 7 (13:38):
War, and one of the aspects of her very tragic
really generation, even though they call it the greatest generation
the World War two boys, is that, you know, the
boys all left in nineteen thirty nine forty and the
women were left behind.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
In New York, Mary started writing features for United Press International,
a newspaper syndication service.
Speaker 7 (14:05):
So she went to work as a journalist, and lots
of women went to work. That's where you get Rosie
the Riveter right. All the men are gone and the
women are now doing the jobs the men used to do.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
Mary knew she'd eventually get married and have children, but
for now she wanted something more. The war took its
toll on so many young people, made them realize the
senselessness of killing, the futility and waste of it all.
She wanted a world free of war. She wanted a
husband who also believed in that cause, And as the
(14:41):
wounded young men started coming home from battle, Mary found
Cord Meyer. He was a man of many talents, a
poet and intellectual, but the thing he wanted most was
world peace. In their short lives, Mary and Cord had
seen plenty of death and darkness. Mary had lost an
(15:01):
older sister to suicide. Cord enlisted in the Marines after
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. He had seen soldiers die. But
on their wedding day in the spring of nineteen forty five,
they both looked overwhelmed with happiness, Hopeful the war was
in its waning days. Hitler would be gone weeks later.
(15:23):
Death on such a large scale had never been seen
by anyone before. It left a mark, but maybe now
there were better days ahead, especially for Mary and Cord
because they'd found each other. As Nina Burley describes it, she.
Speaker 7 (15:41):
Was an educated woman and a reader, and she had ideas.
And her husband was also a reader, well educated, and
when they got together they bonded over ideas and not
just their passion, but they had ideas they share.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
The young couple was married in the Pinchot family's apartment
on Park Avenue. Mary wore a green and white day
dress with a string of pearls and a pair of
reading glasses around her neck. Cord wore his marine dress uniform.
In one image of that day, Mary arm in arm
with Cord, cranes her gaze upward toward her new husband,
(16:24):
wide eyed and flashing a white smile through red lips.
It's as if she sees her future in Chord. By
the time they married, Cord new war was absurd. He
had been sent home after he lost an eye in
a grenade explosion. He had become a pacifist. On the
day of the nuptials, Cord got some good news. He
(16:46):
learned he'd get to go to a UN convention in
San Francisco to work toward world peace. Mary joined him there.
The perfect honeymoon for two idealists, not on a beach,
but at an international conference to end all war, but
in San Francisco. Chord became quickly disillusioned. The US, France,
(17:08):
and China demanded veto power over UN resolutions. Coord knew
world peace had no chance if one country's interests won out.
Cord was interviewed at the convention by a reporter for
The New York Times. He barely mustered any optimism. He
just said it had been a step in the right direction.
(17:31):
There was one more journalist at the convention who wanted
to talk to Ord, but Chord wouldn't allow it.
Speaker 7 (17:38):
Kennedy shows up there as a journalist, which it's so
hard to believe Kennedy as a journalist, But for one
shining moment, he had a press passed and he went
to this conference about world peace.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
That's right. Coord refused JFK's request for an interview. Kennedy
wrote skeptical remarks about Ord's semistic takeaway from the convention
in a personal notebook. The two men, who were both
war vets from prominent New England families, couldn't find common ground,
but fate kept Kennedy in Mary's close orbit and then
(18:15):
on their way back east, the newlyweds got unforgettable news
that shook the world.
Speaker 7 (18:21):
They're literally in a train going back from their honeymoon
and they stop in Chicago and pick up a newspaper.
The headline is that this incredible weapon of mass destruction
has been dropped.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
For Cord, the writing was on the wall. His world
peace mission felt doomed.
Speaker 7 (18:44):
The most important moment in these lives of people born
in nineteen twenty was the dropping of the Adam bomb
on Hiroshima, followed by the dropping of the second Adam
bomb on Nagasaki.
Speaker 10 (18:58):
Needlessly, I realized the tragic significance of the atomic bombs
we have used in order to sharpen the agony of war,
in order to say the lines of thousands and thousands
(19:20):
of young Americans.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
The newsreels showed the unimaginable, and everyone was watching for.
Speaker 7 (19:28):
People who didn't grow up with nuclear weapons, for humans
that didn't grow up with the knowledge like we did
that humans can now incinerate the planet. This was a
traumatic experience because they remembered what it was like before
(19:48):
and they were grappling with this existential new situation.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Cord wrote a letter to the New York Times the
pillar of Smoke over Japan on August eighth, in large
letters for all who dared to read not only the
end of that war, but the end of our own security.
For a few years, Coord set out on the lecture circuit,
going from college to college. He made advocating for world
(20:14):
peace alluring, apparently because students pinned images of Chord the
Pacifist with an eyepatch on the walls of their dorm rooms.
But Coord was growing pessimistic. The US fight against Communism
had ramped up, and nuclear testing continued. So when Coord's
father set him up with a meeting, Coord was despondent
(20:36):
enough to listen to what the CIA had to say.
Speaker 5 (20:40):
Here's Lance Morrow, and then he went over to the CIA,
almost mysteriously that he Alan Dalles recruited him, or seems
to have recruited him for the CIA.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Coord hoped the agency could help quell the threat of
nuclear war.
Speaker 6 (20:58):
And so the CIA.
Speaker 7 (21:00):
The excuse that they would make for what they were
doing was that they had to prevent this from happening.
They had to keep control over everything.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
If Cord couldn't work toward world peace through international cooperation,
maybe this was the next best option, Cord took the job.
In nineteen fifty one, Mary, her husband Cord, and their
three young boys moved to a well to do suburb
of Washington, d c. Mary was excited. Now she could
(21:33):
take care of her boys in a big farmhouse, and
she could meet up with old Vassar friends who had
settled in the district.
Speaker 8 (21:39):
And she was having this suburban life across the river
in McLean, Virginia.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
But for years tension had been brewing in.
Speaker 7 (21:47):
Her marriage, and so they no longer had this kind
of intellectual relationship that had inspired her in the first place.
So that was a problem.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
There. Shared hopes for a peaceful future head all but vanished.
Here's Nina Burley again.
Speaker 6 (22:04):
He was depressive and he stopped.
Speaker 7 (22:06):
He sort of went into a kind of a more
withholding physician visa vi her.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
They started taking their grievances about each other to an
especially personal space Chord's diary.
Speaker 7 (22:21):
Cord was keeping a journal, and apparently Mary had access
to it at some points.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
I know it sounds odd or even unhealthy, but it
indicates how unhappy they were still. For Coord, his diary
was the place he felt comfortable expressing his frustrations.
Speaker 7 (22:40):
Otherwise, he was very repressed, and he was drinking a lot,
and he kept a journal because one of his issues
was that he felt that he was a writer and
he was not able to write, and he was not
also getting public acclaim the way Kennedy was, because if
you work in the CIA, you can't get public acclaim.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
His diary wasn't something that was meant to be kept
private from his wife, at least not according to Mary's
handwritten annotations inside of it.
Speaker 7 (23:09):
And so you can see in the journal his writing
and then her notes on the side, like something straight
out of Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Chord would write about his disappointments over his career and
the dimming prospects of peace, and then Mary would dive in.
Speaker 7 (23:27):
At one point, Chord wrote of the growing Korean conflict quote,
I am without hope, and yet I live from day
to day as before. And in the margins, Mary wrote,
in her large loopy script, quote, when you say you
are without hope, you imply that you thought humans were
not what they are humans unquote.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
There were more personal jabs too.
Speaker 7 (23:50):
Another example, he wrote poem about a beautiful woman who
quote who wears her beauty carelessly, like a bright dress
Sla lent for a night by some indulgent guest. And
in the margins, Mary drew an arrow to the last
lines and observed she bites her fingernails, fails to shave
under her arms, has no sense of humor, and is
(24:12):
a totally mundane soul. But silence fires the imagination of
the spiritually timid.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Mary was not a gentle editor.
Speaker 7 (24:21):
So she's making fun of him in his own journal.
Very toxic relationship.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
It wasn't easy to be the wife of a CIA
man to begin with, What do you tell the children?
Speaker 6 (24:37):
Their kids thought that they worked at the post office.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
A cord was definitely not delivering the mail. And over time,
this high stakes secrecy took its toll.
Speaker 8 (24:48):
The strain on the families of the CIA in the
nineteen fifties during the Cold War was extreme. There was
a great deal of alcoholism, There was a great deal
of suicide. It was a great deal of fan family dysfunction,
very very unhappy kids, very unhappy wives. Guys who would
disappear forever and ever on these CIA missions. They could
(25:12):
never talk about what they were doing. The drinking was fantastic.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
This is Lance Morrow again.
Speaker 8 (25:20):
Cord used to go and get blitzed every lunchtime at
a favorite French restaurant. And it was a world under
a great deal of stress.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Some CIA men had lived through war, they'd seen death
from the front lines, and they woke up to the
reality of nuclear weapons.
Speaker 7 (25:38):
All these men had PTSD before they called it PTSD,
and especially when they all went into the CIA and decided,
you know, now we're going to we're going to keep
this world under control and we're never going to have
a world war like that again, so we have to
control everything around the planet. Of course, that stressed them out.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
Meanwhile, women were compelled to be caretakers and homemakers, both
out of duty to their husbands and families and of
course systemically by design.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
In the late fifties and early sixties, women were still
seen as homemakers. Women couldn't get a credit card without
having their husband's approval their signature.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
That's Alexis co. Men put women.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
On a pedestal, which is a great way to keep
women in their place.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
And that place. For CIA wives, it was a job
they took very seriously, hosting dinner parties.
Speaker 7 (26:37):
What those women were able to do was you know,
they were entertainment and they were social. They had dinner parties,
and they kept the men amused.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
And at those gatherings, they knew they weren't supposed to
repeat what they overheard.
Speaker 7 (26:51):
And in those interactions, these social interactions, they did pick up,
you know, lots of gossip. Let's say Ellen Dulles thought
about a certain you know journalist being a spy. You know,
they would pick up little bits and pieces here and there.
And the danger of that kind of a woman in
(27:16):
that society for the men is that they're going to
blab it, or they're going to tell somebody else what
was going on, or you know, if this is the
Cold War, I mean the Cold War, and you know,
the stakes are incredibly high.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
And given these high stakes, an independent thinker like Mary
Meyer would have been looked at with suspicion.
Speaker 7 (27:37):
Washington at the time was just riven with spies. And
so you know, if you have a woman like that
in your crowd who is not on board with what's happening,
which she eventually was not, then you know that person
could pose a challenge to people like Dulles or you know,
(28:03):
James Angleton, the super paranoid counterintelligence chief because she was
very attractive, so she presented a challenge. Because women are
by definition subversive because they're not members of the power structure,
there so not to be entirely trusted.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
So women, Mary included, continued to play the roles assigned
to them, driving kids in carpools, gardening, and cooking family dinners.
But Mary also did something for her self care before
we called it that. She took art classes at American University,
and when she had time, she painted in the shed
(28:50):
in her backyard. Still being a mother took precedence. Both
Mary and Dovey came up long before Betty fri Dan
argued that women should and could work outside the home.
The Feminine Mystique was only published in nineteen sixty three,
just a few years before I was born and the
year before Mary's murder. In the nineteen fifties, most women
(29:14):
lived with certain limits.
Speaker 7 (29:15):
They didn't fully step out and into these roles of
I'm the artist, I'm the lawyer. You know, I'm a
career woman. That didn't even occur to them. She was
busting out of that a little bit by the time
she got divorced.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Maybe Mary thought she'd be a CIA wife forever, but
she chose independence. After her son died, her life took
a different turn, and that was true for Dovey too.
She'd married her college sweetheart, William Rowntree, but Dovey and
William wanted different things by the time she decided to
(29:49):
pursue the law. Here's Dovey speaking to the National Visionary
Leadership Project.
Speaker 4 (29:55):
Well, he knew he had a job coming up in
civil service, and he thought he'd try that. He'd rather
try that, and I could go on to law school.
And you know, we have a marriage. But there's a
strenuous thing with law school. You ain't marriagine nobody but
the law.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Dovey said, she didn't want to be reined in by
her husband. She took a job in another state. He
went into the civil service, and they parted ways. Incredibly,
both Mary and Dovey got divorced at a time when
ending a marriage was in common, when doing so would
(30:34):
have opened them up to no small amount of ridicule.
Mary's father had divorced his first wife. Still, he was
a man, he had money. Mary was not only a
woman but a mother, choosing independence over family in the fifties,
it was so unusual. Most women wouldn't dream about it,
let alone do it. As for Dovey, well, she had
(30:57):
neither an example to follow, or she had only her
own will, her own goals to follow. Both Mary and
Dovey were ahead of their time. Lance Morrow saw the
similarities between them.
Speaker 8 (31:11):
He said, Dovey had an independence, which, as I said,
reminded me a little of Mary. And Dovey went her
own way. You know, when her husband, mister Rowntree, objected
to her going to Howard University law school, Dovey just
basically said, okay, fine, well see you round. She was
(31:34):
going to pursue her law career and she was going
to do what she wanted to do. And Mary was
the same way.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
By nineteen fifty four, Cord, unfulfilled by his job, was
continuing to drink heavily, but was also rising quickly through
CIA ranks. Mary's patients wore thin. She went on a
European trip with her sister Tony. Each sister had a
fair with new men. Tony's was with Ben Bradley, and
(32:03):
they married. The following year, Mary met a man that
a family friend described as an Italian count. She went
back home to the suburbs, feeling liberated, and Cord sensed
a shift. It was the beginning of the end of
their relationship. He thought he could wait out his wife's
(32:24):
love affair, but the distance between them grew. Mary stopped
attending CIA dinners and social outings, and then came that
awful day, that December day that would break up her
family for good.
Speaker 7 (32:46):
The Middle Sun ran across the street in the dark
and was hit by a car and died by the
side of the road.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
Mary ran downhill to her son's body. He had died
instantly in the crash. She kept her composure in the moment,
but later it all sunk in. She gave away Michael's
Christmas presents and found other ways to cope. She encouraged
Michael's friends to come visit and pick one of his
toys to keep for themselves. I'm a mother of four.
(33:17):
The idea of Mary giving away those toys is absolutely heartbreaking.
Was it because she couldn't bear to look at them,
or did she want his toys to bring joy to
other children, a way of having his memory live on.
It's hard to fathom the depths of Mary and Chord's sadness.
Speaker 7 (33:35):
The death of course was devastating. She never got over it.
He probably didn't either, as you don't when you lose
a child.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Cord was hoping that this tragedy would bring them closer together,
but it was not to be.
Speaker 7 (33:50):
That accident actually was the catalyst for her divorce and
really for her changing her life from you to being
more of an artist and practicing more creative.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
In her grief over her son, over her marriage, over
the hopes for her future, Mary needed to regain her
sense of self. She would breach society's expectations of her.
She would start volunteering at an art gallery and establishing
her own home. She'd get a painting studio in Georgetown.
She'd begin painting in the morning and taking a daily
(34:22):
walk along the Georgetown Towpath. And just like Mary's short
story at Vasser, everything was about to be new and
exciting and different and interesting. Next time, on Murder on
the Towpath, we returned to Mary's murder trial, where Ray
Crump is facing the death penalty. The police found him
(34:45):
soaking wet near the towpath. But could someone else have
committed the crime and had time to escape? To find out,
I go to the scene of the crime to the
towpath itself. It's almost not secluded enough to make you
feel afraid or to get a sense of foreboding about
what's coming. On Mary's last walk, in her moments of solitude,
(35:09):
she was surrounded by beauty, an exposed path in nature,
Mary wouldn't have had reason to be scared at all
from luminary Murder on the Towpath is a production of
Film Nation Entertainment in association with Neon Hum Media. Our
(35:30):
executive producers are me Solidad O'Brien, Alyssa Martino, Milan Papelka,
and Jonathan Hirsch. Lead producer is Schera Morris. Associate producers
are Natalie Rinn and Lucy Licht. Senior editor is Katherine
Saint Louis. Music and composition by Andrew Eapen, Sound design
and mixing by Scott Somerville. Fact checking by Laura Bullard.
(35:53):
Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Sarah Vacchiano, Rose Arsa, Kate Mischkin,
and MICHAELA. Selella, and to Liesel Schillinger for reading Mary's
short story.
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