June 4, 2025 • 49 mins
A lost diary and a mysterious phone call cause conspiracy theorists to wonder if Mary knew too much. If so, did the CIA take her out? The theories might seem far-fetched. But unsolved murders beg for explanation - it's embedded in our psychology to want answers.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Imagine waking up one morning in the spring of nineteen
seventy six. You live in Washington, d c. So as
part of your morning routine, you make coffee, walk outside
and grab the morning edition of the Washington Post. As
you sit and take your first hot sip of caffeine,
(00:21):
you glance at the day's headlines. One catches your eye.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
JFK had a fare with artists smoked grass.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
By nineteen seventy six, the public had already learned about
JFK's extramarital proclivities, but this time around, the real news
was who this affair was with, Because not only was
the president carrying on with a gorgeous artist and socialite,
and not only had she done drugs with the president
(00:52):
in the private residence of the White House.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
They smoked three of the joints, and then JFK told
her no more. Suppose Theians did something now, she said.
He also told her, this isn't like cocaine. I'll get
you some of that.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
But this woman, Mary Pinchot Meyer, had been murdered too,
just eleven months after the president's own assassination. And that's
the moment you realize this story is a lot more
complicated than you initially imagined. It appeared in the National Inquirer,
a sensational supermarket tabloid, and next they reported.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Meyer kept a diary of her romance with Kennedy and
that the diary was destroyed after her death by James Angleton,
a Central Intelligence Agency official and friend of the Meyer family.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
What not, only is it odd that this woman had
been murdered months after the president himself, but somehow, for
some reason, a CIA official had taken her diary and
it was never seen again. If you haven't already let
out a big old huh before seeing this fact, you
(02:04):
sure have now the real news wasn't that the president
had had another affair. Reading between the lines, it now
seemed possible that the murder of his lover wasn't random
because the date Mary Meyer was murdered was also mere
weeks after the release of the Warren Commission's official report,
(02:24):
a report that doubled down on the official lone gunman
narrative of JFK's assassination. People in Mary's inner circle were
already wondering what really happened to JFK, so it seemed
extra odd that someone so closely connected to him was
murdered too.
Speaker 4 (02:45):
To have her die ten days after this report, which
people I think felt was not a fully explanatory of
what happened, you know, led them to say the conspiracy
theorists would say that she had to be silenced because
she knew something that wasn't in there.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Now that the affair was newspaper fodder, more conspiracy theories
began to crop up in connection to the murder of
Mary Meyer.
Speaker 5 (03:16):
So the portrait of her developed very slowly, like a
old polaroid photograph. It coalesced over a period of time,
and it got more interesting over a period of time,
more interesting and more mysterious. As it became more interesting
and mysterious, the conspiracy theories developed, and people began conjecturing
(03:42):
that it was impossible that she could simply have been
the victim of a senseless, random kind of crime, that
somebody must have had some reason to want a.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Killer, and to this day those theories persist.
Speaker 6 (04:01):
Here's Nina. If you google.
Speaker 4 (04:03):
Mary Meyer right now, and now we're at twenty twenty,
you will still come up with entry after entry about
various conspiracy theories that people have come up with about
what happened to her, and that's the place that she
holds in history to this day.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
From Luminary, Film, Nation Entertainment, and Neon Hum Media, this
is Murder on the Towpath.
Speaker 6 (04:34):
I'm Solidad O'Brien.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
In this episode, we're going to dig into the conspiracy
theories behind Mary's murder. Those who believe there was a
conspiracy to murder Mary think it stems from one simple fact.
Mary quote knew too much. Specifically, she knew too much
(05:00):
about how JFK was really killed.
Speaker 5 (05:03):
Did she know something about Kennedy? Did she know something
about Kennedy's murder? Did she know information that somebody at
the CIA wanted to keep her from revealing? And these
over the Internet. Over the years, these theories proliferated.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
If the CIA was covering up something about Kennedy's death,
then Mary knew about it, then presumably she was a threat.
And while there are some who might keep quiet about
information like that, Mary wasn't known to be one of them.
Her friends knew her as outspoken, and that was true,
especially when it came to her feelings about the CIA.
(05:47):
And so the conspiracy goes, she had to be taken
out because she knew something about the CIA and Kennedy's assassination. Okay,
before we go any further, let's stop here and say
something that needs to be said. When we set out
to tell the story of Mary's murder, we knew we
(06:07):
were going to have to cover some murky ground because
to this day, her murder is officially unsolved. Even Washington
DC police decided long ago to consider the case closed, or,
as Bob Bennett explained it.
Speaker 7 (06:23):
The police don't usually after an acquittal go out and
investigate to find someone else unless there's good reason to.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
And apparently police didn't believe there was any good reason
to do so. So when the main question behind a
murder is left unanswered, namely who killed Mary, conspiracies can thrive.
But because Mary was tied to JFK, that's not all
there is to it. Even to this day, more than
(06:58):
sixty percent of a Marriamricans believe Lee Harvey Oswald did
not act alone, which is to say the majority of
Americans don't believe they're getting the full story behind the
Dallas shooting of JFK. That fact alone might change some
people's opinions about who conspiracy theorists really are. They're not
(07:20):
always fringe loonies in their basements concocting alternative narratives.
Speaker 6 (07:25):
In fact, it's mainstream.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
To believe some conspiracy theories. We wanted to get a
better understanding of why some people gravitate toward conspiracy theories,
so we called up someone who studies them.
Speaker 8 (07:38):
My name is Joe Pierre. I'm a psychiatrist and a
professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
Doctor Pierre says research shows why some folks are more
likely to believe in conspiracy theories than others.
Speaker 8 (07:54):
There are some what I call cognitive quirks that are
more associated with belief and conspiracy theory than not. Some
of them include things like the need for certainty or
the need for closure. The idea that people don't tolerate
ambiguity and narratives and they want to really get a
more definitive answer, and that that seems to be associated
(08:16):
with belief in conspiracy theory.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
Some conspiracy theorists need closure, they crave certainty, so if
something doesn't add up, they might keep looking for connections
until a story emerges. We'll hear more from doctor Pierre
later in this episode, but based on that idea alone,
you can see why Mary's murder intrigued conspiracy theorists. Her
(08:40):
story has lots of unanswered questions. Now, one of the
most well known conspiracy theories behind Mary's murder is laid
out by writer Peter Janny in a book called Mary's Mosaic.
Janny has spent years trying to answer what really happened
to Mary why Because he grew up down the street
(09:03):
from the Myers, their families were friendly, and Peter's father,
like Mary's ex husband, he also worked at the CIA.
Peter Janny spent years researching this case, and he uncovered
some pretty strange facts about Mary Meyers's death.
Speaker 6 (09:21):
But what Jenny then.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Does is takes those facts and builds a unified theory
that argues that the CIA conspired to murder JFK and Mary.
That conspiracy has been rejected by many who've reported this story,
including Lance Morrow, Nina Burley, and Ron Rosenbaum. And as
(09:43):
for Mary's inner circle, her close friends and her sister
Tony remained nearly mute on the subject of Mary's murder
or any conspiracies connected to it. That said, Janny believes
the CIA killed the president because JFK wanted world peace.
While the agency had incentives to ramp up the Cold War,
(10:07):
only one of them, the president or his military, could
prevail in the end, and Mary became collateral damage. Why
is it that some people find Jenny's conspiracy theories so
far fetched? We're going to do our best to answer
(10:27):
that question, But before we get into Mary's murder, we're
going to give you a cliff notes version of the
reasons why some believed the CIA killed JFK. It's a
story that really begins with a little bit of presidential history,
namely JFK's relationship with the CIA and his own military.
(10:48):
While Kennedy moved his policy goals in the direction of
world peace, the CIA wanted to show the strength of
the American military complex, especially as the Cold War was
heating up. As a result, Kennedy and the CIA ended
up on opposite sides of two big clashes. The first
(11:09):
was the Bay of Pigs.
Speaker 9 (11:11):
Valve has be gone on the dictatorship of Bedel Castro.
Landings were effected by rebels of several places on the
Cuban coast, and the rebellion against the Red Tennis dictator.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
Was off.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
When the CIA led invasion to remove Fidel Castro from power.
Looked like it was going to be a failure. Kennedy
refused to send additional backup. This infuriated Alan Dulles, the
legendary CIA director. To add insult to injury, Kennedy fired Dulles.
(11:43):
The President wanted him to know exactly who was in charge.
The second clash, of course, was the Cuban missile crisis.
He called General Eisenhower to bring him up to speed.
Speaker 10 (11:55):
Wet Friday night, get a message from Khushiev which said
that you would withdraw these missiles and technicians and so on,
dividing weep and that planned with Dave Cuba.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Kennedy wanted to save the world from nuclear annihilation, something
both he and Mary felt strongly about. But when he
tried to de escalate the crisis by offering to remove
US missiles from Turkey if Russia removed theirs from Cuba, well,
the CIA thought the President was making America look weak.
(12:33):
By then, Kennedy no longer trusted his military or the CIA,
and that's when, according to Janny's theory, the CIA decided
to assassinate the President.
Speaker 9 (12:46):
M Dallas. Two priests who were with President Kennedy say
he is dead out for woods.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
News reports said it was the work of one deranged gunman,
but those closest to Kennedy weren't so sure. CIA director
John mccoone went to Bobby Kennedy's house that day and
the two discussed the assassination. Historian Arthur Schlessinger and Bobby
Kennedy's son RFK Junior later reported Bobby suspected a conspiracy
(13:18):
behind his brother's murder. Many close to Kennedy thought something
smelt fishy. One of the seven members of the Warren
Commission charged with investigating the president's death was none other
than Alan Dulles, the same man Kennedy fired the year before.
Apparently he shared a book saying American assassinations, unlike European assassinations,
(13:44):
were usually the work of a lone gunman. Ultimately, the
commission argued one man shot JFK.
Speaker 9 (13:53):
The report's three hundred thousand words traced the facts through
questioning of every possible witness. The commission reports that the
fatal shots that entered President Kennedy's head and throat were
fired by Lee Harvey Oswald from the Texas School Book Depository,
acting solely by himself and that there was no conspiracy,
either foreign or domestic.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
The official report was given to President Johnson on September
twenty fourth, nineteen sixty four. Less than three weeks later,
Mary was dead on the towpath. Another conspiracy theorist in
the nineties looked into Mary's murder, a man named Leo
(14:31):
de Moore. He claims that he learned key information about
Mary's death from her diary. The diary that no one
else has ever claimed to have seen after Angleton took it.
In a nineteen ninety three conversation with his lawyer, de
Moore claims he got his hands on a copy of it.
(14:53):
De Moore said Angleton had given the diary to someone
de Moore knew, and through that person to Moore read
what was inside of it. He claims that Mary confronted
her ex husband Cord after the Warren Commission report came out.
She apparently told Cord that more than one gunman was
involved and the CIA two. From there, Cord supposedly told
(15:18):
James Angleton about Mary's growing agitation over.
Speaker 6 (15:22):
The commission's findings.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Janny seized on this reporting from De Moore, then argued
that Mary was ready to raise a stink publicly about
the CIA's involvement in JFK's death, So what could she
have known. After JFK's assassination, Mary allegedly sought answers from
two of the president's closest advisors, Dave Powers and Kenny O'Donnell.
(15:50):
By then, O'Donnell had told conspiracy theorist Leo de Moore
in an interview that things in Dallas went down differently
than the Commission reported, and those two presidentidential advisers told
Mary herself that they'd seen two bullets come from in
front of JFK's motorcade, meaning at the very least more
(16:10):
than one gunman had been involved in the shooting. Right
around this time, Mary told her friends she felt she
was being followed. She'd found a garden door and a
basement door to her Georgetown home open after she'd been out,
(16:31):
and told another friend she was scared of finding someone inside. Meanwhile,
Angleton bragged that he tapped Mary's phones and her bedroom.
The wife of another CIA official confirmed this with biographer
Nina Burley, and if you believed Moore and Janny, that
was the beginning of the end for Mary. Angleton was
(16:54):
a godfather to Mary's children, but more importantly, in this case,
he was chief of the CIA's most secretive department. In
the far fetched world of conspiracy theories, the CIA had
(17:15):
a motive for wanting to kill Mary. But whether you
find that to be plausible or not, whether you believe
in this conspiracy or not, two facts from the time
of Mary's murder don't really add up. The first is
her diary and the second is a phone call. No
one close to Mary agrees on what her diary contained,
(17:39):
No one agrees on how it was found. No one
agrees where it was found. All anyone seemed to agree
on was that Mary's diary eventually ended up in the
hands of CIA spy James Angleton. Well, what's even weirder
about Mary's diary is that widely respected journalist Ben Bradley
(18:00):
gave it to the CIA agent. That fact first became
public knowledge when Bradley's memoir was published in the mid nineties.
Speaker 6 (18:10):
Here's Nina Burley.
Speaker 4 (18:11):
He admits for the first time that he took this
diary and gave it to James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's
counterintelligence super spook. And I thought, what is that all about.
I'm from the generation that grew up thinking. You know,
I was in grade school when Watergate happened, and I
(18:35):
revered Ben Bradley, and I thought he was the father
of investigative journalism. And what was he doing secretly giving
the diary of a murder victim to the CIA and
then not telling anyone while a man was on trial
for murder, and not revealing it for another three decades.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
When you've got an esteem journalist in cahoots with a spy,
it fans the flames. Lance Morrow felt the same way.
Speaker 5 (19:07):
Ben Bradley was, in addition to being her brother in law,
was a professional journalist, and thinems to me absolutely incredible
and appalling that a professional journalist would just turn over
the diary to Angleton and say, well, here is here.
You know how to handle this sort of thing. In
(19:27):
other words, you know how to dispose of this kind
of thing. That was very, very strange.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
But to this day, the diary is the missing piece
of the puzzle that leads so many to believe there's
a conspiracy behind Mary's murder.
Speaker 4 (19:46):
I mean, the main evidence that it had to do
with the CIA is the fact that they have Angleton
there at nights taking her material, and he's a very
malign person in the history of the CIA. He was
known to go and get documents immediately after people's deaths
to make sure that information was not released.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
So what was in Mary's diary that made it so dangerous,
No one really knows.
Speaker 11 (20:14):
I described Mary's diary as kind of a black box,
a rorshack onto which people could project, however baseless, their
theories about the great mysteries of our time. You know,
we don't know what was in the diary, so people
(20:36):
are free to speculate.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
What adds to the enduring mystery is that no one
close to Mary told the same story. They each told
different accounts of how Mary's diary was retrieved and in
some cases destroyed. Ben Bradley says the day he went
to search for Mary's diary, when.
Speaker 11 (20:56):
He arrived at Mary's studio, Angleton was already there, picking
the lock and supposedly to find the diary. Angleton angrily
denies this.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
Each story about Mary's diary starts out or less the
same way. On the night of Mary's murder, the story
goes Tony Bradley, Mary's sister got a call in Georgetown.
Speaker 4 (21:26):
And Truett was living in Japan with her husband, a journalist,
and she got wind of Mary's death, and before the
day was out she had phoned up Tony Bradley, Ben
Bradley's wife and Mary's sister, and said, you need to
go over to that studio and get this diary that
she kept, because there's a lot in it that people.
(21:49):
We don't want people to know. You won't you know,
she wouldn't want people to read it.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
If you think something about this sounds strange, you wouldn't
be alone. No one knows how Anne Truett in Japan
learned about Mary's murder and died in two thousand and four,
but while she was alive, she remained quiet on the matter,
and had Mary really told her best friend that she
wanted Angleton to have.
Speaker 6 (22:15):
It if she died.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
This was hard to believe, given Mary's distaste for the CIA.
The most fleshed out version of the diary Hunt comes
from Ron Rosenbaum, who wrote about Mary's murder in nineteen
seventy six. According to Rosenbaum's conversations with various sources, the
diary Hunt turned into a sort of impromptu memorial party
(22:40):
for Mary five days after her murder.
Speaker 11 (22:47):
I think there was a sort of tipsy and mournful
gathering of Mary's friends shortly after her death.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Several people were at Mary's house, including Mary's sister, Tony, Cord,
and Angleton and his wife. Angleton showed up with spy gear,
white gloves, a drill in his little black spy bag.
There was wall tapping, bricks were turned over in the yard.
Rosenbaum reported that everyone drank whiskey and Mary's ex husband Cord,
(23:23):
lit a smoky fire. Someone else walked out into the
yard and called to Mary. Up above, Mary, where's your
damn diary? According to Rosenbaum, Tony located her sister's diary
in her painting studio along with artwork.
Speaker 6 (23:40):
She was preparing for her next show.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
The diary itself was in a locked steel box, and
according to Tony, it was more of a sketch book
with some vague references to an affair. Angleton is reported
to have taken it Ben Bradley's count Meanwhile, it varies
so dramatically from what Angleton said that it caused a
(24:05):
rift between the men.
Speaker 11 (24:06):
The two of them have been a few ever since
the early sixties.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
In his memoir A Good Life, Bradley claimed he first
arrived at Mary's studio the following day, just him and Tony,
and that's when he found Angleton already present. C Span
interviewed Bradley about this episode in nineteen ninety five during
his publicity tour for his memoir. Here's Bradley himself saying
(24:35):
he saw Angleton at Mary's studio, already looking for Mary's
diary when he arrived.
Speaker 8 (24:41):
So Angleton.
Speaker 12 (24:44):
That we.
Speaker 8 (24:47):
Soon divined that's why he was there.
Speaker 10 (24:49):
But how he got in we didn't know because it
was locked and we found him.
Speaker 8 (24:53):
We didn't find it in Mary's house.
Speaker 11 (24:55):
We found it later in a studio, and we found
Jim Angleton trying to pick a lock tog get his
way in.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Nina Burley fleshes it out a bit more. When Tony
and Ben Bradley arrived at Mary's studio.
Speaker 4 (25:09):
Lo and behold, who do they see but James Jesus Sangleton,
godfather to their children, to Mary's children, one of Cord's
best friends, and just happens to be counterintelligence Chief of
the CIA, one of the most paranoid super spooks in
American history, jimmying the Locke and trying to get in
(25:33):
to the studio, and then the story gets a little murky.
Does he get in? Do they go in together? Ben
has recorded in his memoir that he went in found
this document, a diary which he described as having lots
of color swatches in it, but also some text in
(25:57):
her handwriting, and that from him cursory glance at it,
he recognized that it was personal and that it was revealing,
and that it might be revealing things about Kennedy, and
so they gave the diary to Angleton.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
You see, pretty different from the impromptu diary searching party
that Rosenbaum described, So.
Speaker 11 (26:25):
It's hard to know whether what account to trust. Whether
he was really picking the lock or he had.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
A key maybe so, but all seemed to be an
agreement that Angleton eventually ended up with it. To this day,
Peter Jenny claims only the CIA knows what's really inside
Mary's diary, and he suggests it was much more than
just an artist's sketch book.
Speaker 12 (26:52):
It became clear to me that Mary Meyer had kept
a diary in which she was putting the pieces of
the assassination together during nineteen sixty four, and one of
the things that she discovered was not only was there
a conspiracy to take out the sitting president in Dallas
(27:14):
in nineteen sixty three, but that there was even bigger
conspiracy to cover it up in all of nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
As part of his book tour, Jenny was interviewed by
The Boston Globe about what exactly Mary's diary might have said.
He said, the diary contained incriminating information about Angleton and
the Dallas assassination. That's why he had to take it,
but that's just speculation. Meanwhile, Lance Morrow puts it this.
Speaker 5 (27:43):
Way, The diary business is somewhat mysterious. Nobody knows whether
there was anything of consequence in.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
It, and that brings us to another mystery. An odd
phone call placed the afternoon Mary died. As you recall,
Mary's body was officially identified the night of her murder,
Ben Bradley went to the Morgue to vouch that Mary
was Mary. In his nineteen sixty five courtroom testimony, Bradley
(28:15):
claimed the first time he realized Mary was dead was
at the Morgue. Years later, though it would become clear
that both Bradley and the CIA knew about Mary's death
well before sunset.
Speaker 4 (28:30):
I think from the way that the accounts were pieced together,
her death was pretty well known by the middle of
the afternoon in the top echelons of the national security community,
because you have accounts of Courtmyre and Engleton and other
(28:51):
people talking about it.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
Why would a couple of top CIA officials know about
Mary's death before her idea edgity was confirmed. Cecily Angleton
says she just happened to hear a news bulletin that
October day for reasons unknown. Just like Lance Morrow, she
heard about the murder of a white woman on the
Georgetown towpath shortly after noon. Cecily Angleton knew Mary liked
(29:19):
to take walks there around midday, so upon hearing about
the murdered woman, she feared the worst and called her husband,
James Angleton, at the CIA.
Speaker 11 (29:31):
He was in the middle of a meeting at CIA
headquarters when he got an urgent call from his wife,
who apprised him of the fact that there had been
a murder of a woman on the towpath yet to
be identified. But she was afraid that it was Mary,
(29:53):
and she wanted him to get down there. I guess
I'll find out what happened.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
That account of why the CIA knew of Mary's death
early is innocent enough, but another call is far more damning.
This call came from within the CIA. It was made
by a CIA officer named Wister Janny. If that name
sounds familiar, well that's because you heard it before. Wister
(30:29):
Janny is Peter Janny's father, and one of the lynchpins
of Peter Janny's argument that the CIA killed Mary is
connected to this phone call his father made that day.
In his memoir, Ben Bradley reports that he actually learned
of Mary's murder when he received a phone call just
(30:51):
after lunch from a friend. That friend was Wister Janny,
also employed by the CIA. Like we mentioned earlier, the
Jannis grew up with the Myers. Peter Janny's best friend
had been Mary's middle son, Michael, who was tragically hit.
Speaker 6 (31:09):
By a car.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
And so years later, when Peter Janny discovered with horror
that his father had known about the murder hours before
anyone else with that, it dawned on him that his
father seemed to know in advance that Mary would be murdered.
And so when Peter read his father had made the
(31:31):
phone call to Ben Bradley that afternoon, His conviction that
the CIA was behind Mary's death and that his own
father was in on the plot became more than a
conspiracy for Janny. It became a horrifying truth. It tied
what he had lived as a child to new information
(31:53):
he learned as an adult. For him, it cracked open
the case. Listen, we're humans. It's really hard to accept
that bad things happen randomly. That Mary could get shot
on the towpath for no good reason. It makes sense
why Janny would take one new piece of information and
(32:16):
derive from it a much bigger meaning, because, as doctor
Pierre says, people who believe in conspiracy theories also tend
to believe.
Speaker 8 (32:26):
Things do happen for some ultimate reason, whether it's related
to supernatural forces with God or something like that, versus
more of a belief that things just happen randomly. And
so that helps to explain why you might see people
looking at the same information but interpreting them very differently
and sort of through the lens of their own psychology
(32:47):
or their own personal experience.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
Okay, fine, outstanding questions about the diary and a mysterious
phone call. Aside, say the CIA did kill Mary, would
it gone down. You might not be surprised. Janny has
a detailed answer for that too. His theory revolves around
another man who claims he was on the towpath the
(33:12):
day of Mary's murder, a man named William Mitchell. It
would turn out Mitchell was just the kind of character
that would make Janny believe Mary's death.
Speaker 6 (33:24):
Is tied to a larger web.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
You see, William Mitchell had gone to the DC police
the day after Mary's murder to say that he'd been
on the towpath that fateful day. Remember the jogger from
episode two.
Speaker 6 (33:39):
Down on the towpath.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
Dovey and her law partners recreated the scene just.
Speaker 6 (33:44):
Before the murder.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
One of them played Ray, another Mary, and another this jogger,
William Mitchell. Mitchell said he worked at the Pentagon, specifically
for the Department of Defense, just a few miles down
the road from Georgetown, and he told the police at midday,
just like Mary, he had left work for his daily constitutional.
Now we haven't mentioned this yet, but Mitchell also testified
(34:09):
a raised trial about what he had seen that day.
Speaker 6 (34:12):
He said in.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Court that on his jog he'd passed a woman whose
clothing matched Mary's and shortly after he passed a black
man following her from behind. He described Mary's clothes precisely.
Then he described Raymond Crumb's build and clothing. Mitchell helped
the prosecution put Ray Crump Junior on the Towpath. He'd
(34:36):
done his part to help the prosecution's case, and he
was an upstanding Army officer who worked at the Pentagon,
So the prosecution couldn't ask for a more credible witness, right, well,
not exactly. Jenny and his research team, by now he
had a team found that Mitchell's military records didn't make sense.
(35:00):
Mitchell's stories about his past, his whereabouts, and his official
military records contradicted each other time and time again fishy.
But it wasn't just that no one could verify Mitchell
had even been on the Towpath the day of Mary's murder,
and Janny and his researchers found that Mitchell had changed
(35:22):
his name throughout the years. At some point, he also
started using a second social Security number. To Janny, that
was extra fishy. Janny even went so far as to
serve William Mitchell with a complaint, alleging that he had
been part of a conspiracy to murder Mary Meyer. It
(35:44):
required Mitchell to appear in the Superior Court of the
District of Columbia. When the two men finally met, Jenny
reported that William Mitchell answered I don't remember or I
don't remember that to nearly every single question he would
He asked about his past and about the day.
Speaker 6 (36:02):
Of Mary's murder.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Assuming what Jenny says is true, that's a bit odd,
I mean to not remember anything. So Janny and his
military researcher put two and two together and came up
with a theory that William Mitchell worked for the CIA.
(36:25):
When a patchwork of military records and aliases and social
security numbers don't tell a rational story, the researcher said,
it's a telltale sign that a person works in intelligence. Yep,
it still sounds a bit crazy, right, But Janny takes
his theory one step further. Yes, Mitchell did have several
(36:47):
aliases and more than one social Security number. But Jenny
then theorized that Mitchell was not only CIA but also
part of the team that took Mary out. He argues
Mitchell was part of a large and well prepared team.
(37:07):
They learned Mary's routine and chose the towpath to make
her murder look like a random act of violence. If
she'd been murdered in her bed, it would have seemed
more personal. Finally, on the day that a believable patsy
showed up on the Towpath, a patsy who happened to
be Raymond Crump there for his affair with Vivian, the
(37:27):
operation team would have quickly procured a hitman who closely
enough resembled Ray, closed that closely enough matched what Ray
was wearing, and then sent the hitman to do the
dirty work. There are a lot of jumps here, but
the theory goes Mitchell was a CIA operative with one
(37:49):
cut and dry mission in Mary's death, to put the
blame on Ray Crump. Some people are more prone to
leave conspiracy theories than others, so we really wanted to
dig into the psychology behind them. When we spoke with
psychology professor Joe Pierre earlier in the episode, he had
(38:11):
a lot more to say about that world, and it
helped illuminate why so many would feel the allure of
a conspiracy with Mary's murder.
Speaker 8 (38:20):
The way I like to define a conspiracy theory, I
like to say that a conspiracy theory rejects the authoritative
account of reality in favor of some plot that involves
a group of people with a malevolent intent that's deliberately
kept secret from the public. So in that sense, there's
really two components. It's the rejection of the conventional wisdom,
(38:43):
the conventional version of events, and then there's an embrace
of a more shadowy, secret narrative to explain the underlying truth,
as it were.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
So in this case, the conventional narrative is Ray Crump
killed Mary and got away with it. Another rogue murderer
killed Mary and got away with it. And it's as
simple as that, a random act of violence. It's straightforward,
it's logical, and it's hard to wrap your head around.
(39:16):
So there's another explanation that's a lot more compelling, very Hollywood,
even because conspiracy theories make for riveting stories. Watching puzzle
pieces come together is satisfying. Understanding why bad things happen
by the end of a movie is comforting.
Speaker 8 (39:35):
So I think all of us, to a certain extent,
find those kind of narratives appealing, and in some sense
they're often more appealing than the dull narrative that is
the real.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
Life, but Mary's story it also has something else of
significant note attached to it that gets people who are
prone to conspiracy to pay attention.
Speaker 8 (40:00):
JFK, big headline news, major life events are the kind
of thing that spawns conspiracy theories, particularly when those events
have a kind of traumatic element to them.
Speaker 6 (40:13):
And in the case of Mary's murder, a number of.
Speaker 1 (40:16):
Things other than the popularity of JFK and the tragedy
of his debt can account.
Speaker 6 (40:21):
For its persistence.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
The precise shots to Mary's temple at Heart, which made
the killing look controlled, almost professional, the fact that no
murder weapon was ever found, an odd phone call, an
untraceable military man who claims to have witnessed Crump following
Mary on the toepad, and finally.
Speaker 8 (40:43):
The diary is a kind of missing smoking gun. Right,
So what we have is this mysterious diary which may
or may not contain information beyond documentation or the affair
with JFK, but may or may not include other information.
And that sort of to a certain extent, supplies the
narrative of why she might have been targeted or why
(41:06):
she was important. And so inasmuch as we don't have
that piece of information again, it just invites this flood
of counterinformation.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
And for more than fifty years, the case itself has
remained unsolved. A killer hasn't been convicted for Mary's murder.
Speaker 8 (41:24):
So that's sort of an example where we really just
don't have a kind of ironclad narrative. There is a
lot of ambiguity even in the real life telling of
those events.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
And yet there are plenty of people connected to this
case who don't want to talk about Mary's murder at all,
and they never have Mary's family, her friends for them.
Professor Pierre points out part of the reason that might
be true is that conspiracy theories prolong pain.
Speaker 8 (41:56):
They know, based on their own experience, they have a
sense of of what the true narrative is of those events.
So to hear people spinning a different tale that contradicts
their own experience, you know, that's again upsetting or even
insulting in a way.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
Meanwhile, many of the journalists who've investigated Mary's murder have
a hard time wrapping their heads around a CIA driven plot.
Speaker 6 (42:23):
Here's Lance Morrow.
Speaker 5 (42:25):
I don't believe that the CIA was involved. I don't
if it was a conspiracy. It was a fantastically complicated conspiracy,
and I'm at a loss to understand why anybody would
arrange it that way when it would have been so
much easier to kill her in her house at night
(42:46):
in Georgetown and just make it look like a burglary
where there would be no witnesses.
Speaker 1 (42:51):
Nina Burley doesn't think Mary was killed because she knew
too much either.
Speaker 4 (42:56):
I don't really think that there is a lot of
plausible evidence that it was a conspiracy that she was
killed by the CIA. In fact, I would have preferred
it to be a conspiracy. It's a better book, It's
a better it's a movie.
Speaker 1 (43:15):
As for dove Well, Nina Burley also asked about this
when she interviewed Dovey.
Speaker 4 (43:21):
She definitely didn't say I believe this was a conspiracy
by the CIA. You know, the thing that struck me
more was the whole conversation about forgiveness. But I do
think that she alluded to, you know, there were certainly
other possibilities for what happened here.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
And finally, the man we spoke to who is perhaps
most adamantly against the idea of conspiracy being related to
Mary's death, that would be Ron Rosenbaum.
Speaker 11 (43:53):
There are people conspiracy theorists who exploit her death. Still
to this day, tired of having to refute and debunk
the baseless, evidenceless conspiracy theories that I think exploit this
woman and commodify hurry, privacy and intimacy in a shameless
(44:21):
way I find upsetting.
Speaker 6 (44:26):
So there you have it.
Speaker 1 (44:27):
For the most part, all these writers, these individuals surrounding
this complex story, they have the same set of facts,
yet their conclusions can be very different. And we haven't
even acknowledged the simplest explanation of all, what if Ray
did kill Mary? The pieces of that puzzle aren't all
(44:50):
in place either, but that theory requires fewer mental gymnastics
than a CIA plot. After all, a witness placed him
at the crime scene. He was caught shortly after the
murder took place.
Speaker 6 (45:03):
But in the end, we just don't know.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
So what does all this mind bending say about us?
What does it say about the way we take in
information and process it, about the way we understand Mary's murder?
Speaker 6 (45:18):
Why are we all.
Speaker 1 (45:19):
On such different pages? Joe Pierre has a pretty good
answer for that.
Speaker 8 (45:27):
There's something called the white Christmas effect.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
It's something that has been studied in psychology research. He says,
and the results are pretty fascinating.
Speaker 8 (45:37):
If you tell people in advance that they're going to
hear a recording of something that sounds like white noise,
but embedded within it, you're going to hear the song
the White Christmas. And then we play that white noise
and we ask you to press a button to identify
when you're hearing the song. People will listen to the
white noise, they'll press the button saying that they've heard it,
(45:58):
even when the song was not act embedded into that
white noise. It's like if I am someone who is
interested in conspiracy theories, who's interested in true crime, and
if you asked me to take a look at this case,
well then yeah, I could sift through all the materials
that I read and say, yes, absolutely, there's evidence here, here, here, here,
(46:20):
Because if my brain is looking for that information, we
know that human brains are very good at finding it.
And so that's where I think we have to be
skeptical when we hear about conspiracy theories.
Speaker 6 (46:32):
For each one of us.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
It seems the story of Mary's murder, if there's a
conspiracy behind it or not, might be the perfect test
case for the White Christmas effect. But like the movie
where the song's performed All the Snow that made Christmas
in Vermont White, it was produced on a California soundstage.
(46:55):
It merely gave the illusion that the whole thing took
place in Vermont. But my friends, it did not, And
in the case of Mary's murder, the CIA's involvement is
no more believable than all that fake snow, at least
for a slew of reporters who know the story best.
(47:25):
As questions surrounding Mary Meyer's death remain unanswered through the decades,
the legacy of each woman would start to be written.
Dovey Rowntree would go on to write a book about
her amazing life. Friends and family would remember her even
if public discourse didn't, for the improbable strides she made
(47:46):
in her professional and spiritual pursuits. But Mary, there are
those who to this day are struggling to bring her
life's work and true legacy into light. But the forces
they're working against remain mysterious.
Speaker 6 (48:05):
It's this sort of surge for truth, like who does
have it?
Speaker 12 (48:09):
The paintings? Who doesn't have them?
Speaker 5 (48:11):
If they have it and they don't want to share it,
why next time?
Speaker 1 (48:16):
On the final episode of Murder on the Towpath from Luminary.
Murder on the Towpath is a production of Film Nation
Entertainment in association with Neon Humm Media. Our executive producers
are me Solidad O'Brien, Alyssa Martino, Milan Papelka, and Jonathan Hirsch.
(48:41):
Lead producer is Sharah Morris. Associate producers are Datalie Wrinn
and Lucy Licht. Senior editor is Katherine Saint Louis. Music
and composition by Andrew Eapen, sound design and mixing by
Scott Somerville.
Speaker 6 (48:56):
Fact checking by Laura Buller.
Speaker 1 (48:58):
Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Saravacchiano, Rose Arce, Kate Michigan,
Tanner Robbins, and Mikaela Celella. Thanks also to British Pathay
for providing some of the archival audio you heard in
this episode.
Imagine waking up one morning in the spring of nineteen
seventy six. You live in Washington, d c. So as
part of your morning routine, you make coffee, walk outside
and grab the morning edition of the Washington Post. As
you sit and take your first hot sip of caffeine,
(00:21):
you glance at the day's headlines. One catches your eye.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
JFK had a fare with artists smoked grass.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
By nineteen seventy six, the public had already learned about
JFK's extramarital proclivities, but this time around, the real news
was who this affair was with, Because not only was
the president carrying on with a gorgeous artist and socialite,
and not only had she done drugs with the president
(00:52):
in the private residence of the White House.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
They smoked three of the joints, and then JFK told
her no more. Suppose Theians did something now, she said.
He also told her, this isn't like cocaine. I'll get
you some of that.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
But this woman, Mary Pinchot Meyer, had been murdered too,
just eleven months after the president's own assassination. And that's
the moment you realize this story is a lot more
complicated than you initially imagined. It appeared in the National Inquirer,
a sensational supermarket tabloid, and next they reported.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Meyer kept a diary of her romance with Kennedy and
that the diary was destroyed after her death by James Angleton,
a Central Intelligence Agency official and friend of the Meyer family.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
What not, only is it odd that this woman had
been murdered months after the president himself, but somehow, for
some reason, a CIA official had taken her diary and
it was never seen again. If you haven't already let
out a big old huh before seeing this fact, you
(02:04):
sure have now the real news wasn't that the president
had had another affair. Reading between the lines, it now
seemed possible that the murder of his lover wasn't random
because the date Mary Meyer was murdered was also mere
weeks after the release of the Warren Commission's official report,
(02:24):
a report that doubled down on the official lone gunman
narrative of JFK's assassination. People in Mary's inner circle were
already wondering what really happened to JFK, so it seemed
extra odd that someone so closely connected to him was
murdered too.
Speaker 4 (02:45):
To have her die ten days after this report, which
people I think felt was not a fully explanatory of
what happened, you know, led them to say the conspiracy
theorists would say that she had to be silenced because
she knew something that wasn't in there.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Now that the affair was newspaper fodder, more conspiracy theories
began to crop up in connection to the murder of
Mary Meyer.
Speaker 5 (03:16):
So the portrait of her developed very slowly, like a
old polaroid photograph. It coalesced over a period of time,
and it got more interesting over a period of time,
more interesting and more mysterious. As it became more interesting
and mysterious, the conspiracy theories developed, and people began conjecturing
(03:42):
that it was impossible that she could simply have been
the victim of a senseless, random kind of crime, that
somebody must have had some reason to want a.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Killer, and to this day those theories persist.
Speaker 6 (04:01):
Here's Nina. If you google.
Speaker 4 (04:03):
Mary Meyer right now, and now we're at twenty twenty,
you will still come up with entry after entry about
various conspiracy theories that people have come up with about
what happened to her, and that's the place that she
holds in history to this day.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
From Luminary, Film, Nation Entertainment, and Neon Hum Media, this
is Murder on the Towpath.
Speaker 6 (04:34):
I'm Solidad O'Brien.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
In this episode, we're going to dig into the conspiracy
theories behind Mary's murder. Those who believe there was a
conspiracy to murder Mary think it stems from one simple fact.
Mary quote knew too much. Specifically, she knew too much
(05:00):
about how JFK was really killed.
Speaker 5 (05:03):
Did she know something about Kennedy? Did she know something
about Kennedy's murder? Did she know information that somebody at
the CIA wanted to keep her from revealing? And these
over the Internet. Over the years, these theories proliferated.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
If the CIA was covering up something about Kennedy's death,
then Mary knew about it, then presumably she was a threat.
And while there are some who might keep quiet about
information like that, Mary wasn't known to be one of them.
Her friends knew her as outspoken, and that was true,
especially when it came to her feelings about the CIA.
(05:47):
And so the conspiracy goes, she had to be taken
out because she knew something about the CIA and Kennedy's assassination. Okay,
before we go any further, let's stop here and say
something that needs to be said. When we set out
to tell the story of Mary's murder, we knew we
(06:07):
were going to have to cover some murky ground because
to this day, her murder is officially unsolved. Even Washington
DC police decided long ago to consider the case closed, or,
as Bob Bennett explained it.
Speaker 7 (06:23):
The police don't usually after an acquittal go out and
investigate to find someone else unless there's good reason to.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
And apparently police didn't believe there was any good reason
to do so. So when the main question behind a
murder is left unanswered, namely who killed Mary, conspiracies can thrive.
But because Mary was tied to JFK, that's not all
there is to it. Even to this day, more than
(06:58):
sixty percent of a Marriamricans believe Lee Harvey Oswald did
not act alone, which is to say the majority of
Americans don't believe they're getting the full story behind the
Dallas shooting of JFK. That fact alone might change some
people's opinions about who conspiracy theorists really are. They're not
(07:20):
always fringe loonies in their basements concocting alternative narratives.
Speaker 6 (07:25):
In fact, it's mainstream.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
To believe some conspiracy theories. We wanted to get a
better understanding of why some people gravitate toward conspiracy theories,
so we called up someone who studies them.
Speaker 8 (07:38):
My name is Joe Pierre. I'm a psychiatrist and a
professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
Doctor Pierre says research shows why some folks are more
likely to believe in conspiracy theories than others.
Speaker 8 (07:54):
There are some what I call cognitive quirks that are
more associated with belief and conspiracy theory than not. Some
of them include things like the need for certainty or
the need for closure. The idea that people don't tolerate
ambiguity and narratives and they want to really get a
more definitive answer, and that that seems to be associated
(08:16):
with belief in conspiracy theory.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
Some conspiracy theorists need closure, they crave certainty, so if
something doesn't add up, they might keep looking for connections
until a story emerges. We'll hear more from doctor Pierre
later in this episode, but based on that idea alone,
you can see why Mary's murder intrigued conspiracy theorists. Her
(08:40):
story has lots of unanswered questions. Now, one of the
most well known conspiracy theories behind Mary's murder is laid
out by writer Peter Janny in a book called Mary's Mosaic.
Janny has spent years trying to answer what really happened
to Mary why Because he grew up down the street
(09:03):
from the Myers, their families were friendly, and Peter's father,
like Mary's ex husband, he also worked at the CIA.
Peter Janny spent years researching this case, and he uncovered
some pretty strange facts about Mary Meyers's death.
Speaker 6 (09:21):
But what Jenny then.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Does is takes those facts and builds a unified theory
that argues that the CIA conspired to murder JFK and Mary.
That conspiracy has been rejected by many who've reported this story,
including Lance Morrow, Nina Burley, and Ron Rosenbaum. And as
(09:43):
for Mary's inner circle, her close friends and her sister
Tony remained nearly mute on the subject of Mary's murder
or any conspiracies connected to it. That said, Janny believes
the CIA killed the president because JFK wanted world peace.
While the agency had incentives to ramp up the Cold War,
(10:07):
only one of them, the president or his military, could
prevail in the end, and Mary became collateral damage. Why
is it that some people find Jenny's conspiracy theories so
far fetched? We're going to do our best to answer
(10:27):
that question, But before we get into Mary's murder, we're
going to give you a cliff notes version of the
reasons why some believed the CIA killed JFK. It's a
story that really begins with a little bit of presidential history,
namely JFK's relationship with the CIA and his own military.
(10:48):
While Kennedy moved his policy goals in the direction of
world peace, the CIA wanted to show the strength of
the American military complex, especially as the Cold War was
heating up. As a result, Kennedy and the CIA ended
up on opposite sides of two big clashes. The first
(11:09):
was the Bay of Pigs.
Speaker 9 (11:11):
Valve has be gone on the dictatorship of Bedel Castro.
Landings were effected by rebels of several places on the
Cuban coast, and the rebellion against the Red Tennis dictator.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
Was off.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
When the CIA led invasion to remove Fidel Castro from power.
Looked like it was going to be a failure. Kennedy
refused to send additional backup. This infuriated Alan Dulles, the
legendary CIA director. To add insult to injury, Kennedy fired Dulles.
(11:43):
The President wanted him to know exactly who was in charge.
The second clash, of course, was the Cuban missile crisis.
He called General Eisenhower to bring him up to speed.
Speaker 10 (11:55):
Wet Friday night, get a message from Khushiev which said
that you would withdraw these missiles and technicians and so on,
dividing weep and that planned with Dave Cuba.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Kennedy wanted to save the world from nuclear annihilation, something
both he and Mary felt strongly about. But when he
tried to de escalate the crisis by offering to remove
US missiles from Turkey if Russia removed theirs from Cuba, well,
the CIA thought the President was making America look weak.
(12:33):
By then, Kennedy no longer trusted his military or the CIA,
and that's when, according to Janny's theory, the CIA decided
to assassinate the President.
Speaker 9 (12:46):
M Dallas. Two priests who were with President Kennedy say
he is dead out for woods.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
News reports said it was the work of one deranged gunman,
but those closest to Kennedy weren't so sure. CIA director
John mccoone went to Bobby Kennedy's house that day and
the two discussed the assassination. Historian Arthur Schlessinger and Bobby
Kennedy's son RFK Junior later reported Bobby suspected a conspiracy
(13:18):
behind his brother's murder. Many close to Kennedy thought something
smelt fishy. One of the seven members of the Warren
Commission charged with investigating the president's death was none other
than Alan Dulles, the same man Kennedy fired the year before.
Apparently he shared a book saying American assassinations, unlike European assassinations,
(13:44):
were usually the work of a lone gunman. Ultimately, the
commission argued one man shot JFK.
Speaker 9 (13:53):
The report's three hundred thousand words traced the facts through
questioning of every possible witness. The commission reports that the
fatal shots that entered President Kennedy's head and throat were
fired by Lee Harvey Oswald from the Texas School Book Depository,
acting solely by himself and that there was no conspiracy,
either foreign or domestic.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
The official report was given to President Johnson on September
twenty fourth, nineteen sixty four. Less than three weeks later,
Mary was dead on the towpath. Another conspiracy theorist in
the nineties looked into Mary's murder, a man named Leo
(14:31):
de Moore. He claims that he learned key information about
Mary's death from her diary. The diary that no one
else has ever claimed to have seen after Angleton took it.
In a nineteen ninety three conversation with his lawyer, de
Moore claims he got his hands on a copy of it.
(14:53):
De Moore said Angleton had given the diary to someone
de Moore knew, and through that person to Moore read
what was inside of it. He claims that Mary confronted
her ex husband Cord after the Warren Commission report came out.
She apparently told Cord that more than one gunman was
involved and the CIA two. From there, Cord supposedly told
(15:18):
James Angleton about Mary's growing agitation over.
Speaker 6 (15:22):
The commission's findings.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Janny seized on this reporting from De Moore, then argued
that Mary was ready to raise a stink publicly about
the CIA's involvement in JFK's death, So what could she
have known. After JFK's assassination, Mary allegedly sought answers from
two of the president's closest advisors, Dave Powers and Kenny O'Donnell.
(15:50):
By then, O'Donnell had told conspiracy theorist Leo de Moore
in an interview that things in Dallas went down differently
than the Commission reported, and those two presidentidential advisers told
Mary herself that they'd seen two bullets come from in
front of JFK's motorcade, meaning at the very least more
(16:10):
than one gunman had been involved in the shooting. Right
around this time, Mary told her friends she felt she
was being followed. She'd found a garden door and a
basement door to her Georgetown home open after she'd been out,
(16:31):
and told another friend she was scared of finding someone inside. Meanwhile,
Angleton bragged that he tapped Mary's phones and her bedroom.
The wife of another CIA official confirmed this with biographer
Nina Burley, and if you believed Moore and Janny, that
was the beginning of the end for Mary. Angleton was
(16:54):
a godfather to Mary's children, but more importantly, in this case,
he was chief of the CIA's most secretive department. In
the far fetched world of conspiracy theories, the CIA had
(17:15):
a motive for wanting to kill Mary. But whether you
find that to be plausible or not, whether you believe
in this conspiracy or not, two facts from the time
of Mary's murder don't really add up. The first is
her diary and the second is a phone call. No
one close to Mary agrees on what her diary contained,
(17:39):
No one agrees on how it was found. No one
agrees where it was found. All anyone seemed to agree
on was that Mary's diary eventually ended up in the
hands of CIA spy James Angleton. Well, what's even weirder
about Mary's diary is that widely respected journalist Ben Bradley
(18:00):
gave it to the CIA agent. That fact first became
public knowledge when Bradley's memoir was published in the mid nineties.
Speaker 6 (18:10):
Here's Nina Burley.
Speaker 4 (18:11):
He admits for the first time that he took this
diary and gave it to James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's
counterintelligence super spook. And I thought, what is that all about.
I'm from the generation that grew up thinking. You know,
I was in grade school when Watergate happened, and I
(18:35):
revered Ben Bradley, and I thought he was the father
of investigative journalism. And what was he doing secretly giving
the diary of a murder victim to the CIA and
then not telling anyone while a man was on trial
for murder, and not revealing it for another three decades.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
When you've got an esteem journalist in cahoots with a spy,
it fans the flames. Lance Morrow felt the same way.
Speaker 5 (19:07):
Ben Bradley was, in addition to being her brother in law,
was a professional journalist, and thinems to me absolutely incredible
and appalling that a professional journalist would just turn over
the diary to Angleton and say, well, here is here.
You know how to handle this sort of thing. In
(19:27):
other words, you know how to dispose of this kind
of thing. That was very, very strange.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
But to this day, the diary is the missing piece
of the puzzle that leads so many to believe there's
a conspiracy behind Mary's murder.
Speaker 4 (19:46):
I mean, the main evidence that it had to do
with the CIA is the fact that they have Angleton
there at nights taking her material, and he's a very
malign person in the history of the CIA. He was
known to go and get documents immediately after people's deaths
to make sure that information was not released.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
So what was in Mary's diary that made it so dangerous,
No one really knows.
Speaker 11 (20:14):
I described Mary's diary as kind of a black box,
a rorshack onto which people could project, however baseless, their
theories about the great mysteries of our time. You know,
we don't know what was in the diary, so people
(20:36):
are free to speculate.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
What adds to the enduring mystery is that no one
close to Mary told the same story. They each told
different accounts of how Mary's diary was retrieved and in
some cases destroyed. Ben Bradley says the day he went
to search for Mary's diary, when.
Speaker 11 (20:56):
He arrived at Mary's studio, Angleton was already there, picking
the lock and supposedly to find the diary. Angleton angrily
denies this.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
Each story about Mary's diary starts out or less the
same way. On the night of Mary's murder, the story
goes Tony Bradley, Mary's sister got a call in Georgetown.
Speaker 4 (21:26):
And Truett was living in Japan with her husband, a journalist,
and she got wind of Mary's death, and before the
day was out she had phoned up Tony Bradley, Ben
Bradley's wife and Mary's sister, and said, you need to
go over to that studio and get this diary that
she kept, because there's a lot in it that people.
(21:49):
We don't want people to know. You won't you know,
she wouldn't want people to read it.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
If you think something about this sounds strange, you wouldn't
be alone. No one knows how Anne Truett in Japan
learned about Mary's murder and died in two thousand and four,
but while she was alive, she remained quiet on the matter,
and had Mary really told her best friend that she
wanted Angleton to have.
Speaker 6 (22:15):
It if she died.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
This was hard to believe, given Mary's distaste for the CIA.
The most fleshed out version of the diary Hunt comes
from Ron Rosenbaum, who wrote about Mary's murder in nineteen
seventy six. According to Rosenbaum's conversations with various sources, the
diary Hunt turned into a sort of impromptu memorial party
(22:40):
for Mary five days after her murder.
Speaker 11 (22:47):
I think there was a sort of tipsy and mournful
gathering of Mary's friends shortly after her death.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Several people were at Mary's house, including Mary's sister, Tony, Cord,
and Angleton and his wife. Angleton showed up with spy gear,
white gloves, a drill in his little black spy bag.
There was wall tapping, bricks were turned over in the yard.
Rosenbaum reported that everyone drank whiskey and Mary's ex husband Cord,
(23:23):
lit a smoky fire. Someone else walked out into the
yard and called to Mary. Up above, Mary, where's your
damn diary? According to Rosenbaum, Tony located her sister's diary
in her painting studio along with artwork.
Speaker 6 (23:40):
She was preparing for her next show.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
The diary itself was in a locked steel box, and
according to Tony, it was more of a sketch book
with some vague references to an affair. Angleton is reported
to have taken it Ben Bradley's count Meanwhile, it varies
so dramatically from what Angleton said that it caused a
(24:05):
rift between the men.
Speaker 11 (24:06):
The two of them have been a few ever since
the early sixties.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
In his memoir A Good Life, Bradley claimed he first
arrived at Mary's studio the following day, just him and Tony,
and that's when he found Angleton already present. C Span
interviewed Bradley about this episode in nineteen ninety five during
his publicity tour for his memoir. Here's Bradley himself saying
(24:35):
he saw Angleton at Mary's studio, already looking for Mary's
diary when he arrived.
Speaker 8 (24:41):
So Angleton.
Speaker 12 (24:44):
That we.
Speaker 8 (24:47):
Soon divined that's why he was there.
Speaker 10 (24:49):
But how he got in we didn't know because it
was locked and we found him.
Speaker 8 (24:53):
We didn't find it in Mary's house.
Speaker 11 (24:55):
We found it later in a studio, and we found
Jim Angleton trying to pick a lock tog get his
way in.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Nina Burley fleshes it out a bit more. When Tony
and Ben Bradley arrived at Mary's studio.
Speaker 4 (25:09):
Lo and behold, who do they see but James Jesus Sangleton,
godfather to their children, to Mary's children, one of Cord's
best friends, and just happens to be counterintelligence Chief of
the CIA, one of the most paranoid super spooks in
American history, jimmying the Locke and trying to get in
(25:33):
to the studio, and then the story gets a little murky.
Does he get in? Do they go in together? Ben
has recorded in his memoir that he went in found
this document, a diary which he described as having lots
of color swatches in it, but also some text in
(25:57):
her handwriting, and that from him cursory glance at it,
he recognized that it was personal and that it was revealing,
and that it might be revealing things about Kennedy, and
so they gave the diary to Angleton.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
You see, pretty different from the impromptu diary searching party
that Rosenbaum described, So.
Speaker 11 (26:25):
It's hard to know whether what account to trust. Whether
he was really picking the lock or he had.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
A key maybe so, but all seemed to be an
agreement that Angleton eventually ended up with it. To this day,
Peter Jenny claims only the CIA knows what's really inside
Mary's diary, and he suggests it was much more than
just an artist's sketch book.
Speaker 12 (26:52):
It became clear to me that Mary Meyer had kept
a diary in which she was putting the pieces of
the assassination together during nineteen sixty four, and one of
the things that she discovered was not only was there
a conspiracy to take out the sitting president in Dallas
(27:14):
in nineteen sixty three, but that there was even bigger
conspiracy to cover it up in all of nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
As part of his book tour, Jenny was interviewed by
The Boston Globe about what exactly Mary's diary might have said.
He said, the diary contained incriminating information about Angleton and
the Dallas assassination. That's why he had to take it,
but that's just speculation. Meanwhile, Lance Morrow puts it this.
Speaker 5 (27:43):
Way, The diary business is somewhat mysterious. Nobody knows whether
there was anything of consequence in.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
It, and that brings us to another mystery. An odd
phone call placed the afternoon Mary died. As you recall,
Mary's body was officially identified the night of her murder,
Ben Bradley went to the Morgue to vouch that Mary
was Mary. In his nineteen sixty five courtroom testimony, Bradley
(28:15):
claimed the first time he realized Mary was dead was
at the Morgue. Years later, though it would become clear
that both Bradley and the CIA knew about Mary's death
well before sunset.
Speaker 4 (28:30):
I think from the way that the accounts were pieced together,
her death was pretty well known by the middle of
the afternoon in the top echelons of the national security community,
because you have accounts of Courtmyre and Engleton and other
(28:51):
people talking about it.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
Why would a couple of top CIA officials know about
Mary's death before her idea edgity was confirmed. Cecily Angleton
says she just happened to hear a news bulletin that
October day for reasons unknown. Just like Lance Morrow, she
heard about the murder of a white woman on the
Georgetown towpath shortly after noon. Cecily Angleton knew Mary liked
(29:19):
to take walks there around midday, so upon hearing about
the murdered woman, she feared the worst and called her husband,
James Angleton, at the CIA.
Speaker 11 (29:31):
He was in the middle of a meeting at CIA
headquarters when he got an urgent call from his wife,
who apprised him of the fact that there had been
a murder of a woman on the towpath yet to
be identified. But she was afraid that it was Mary,
(29:53):
and she wanted him to get down there. I guess
I'll find out what happened.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
That account of why the CIA knew of Mary's death
early is innocent enough, but another call is far more damning.
This call came from within the CIA. It was made
by a CIA officer named Wister Janny. If that name
sounds familiar, well that's because you heard it before. Wister
(30:29):
Janny is Peter Janny's father, and one of the lynchpins
of Peter Janny's argument that the CIA killed Mary is
connected to this phone call his father made that day.
In his memoir, Ben Bradley reports that he actually learned
of Mary's murder when he received a phone call just
(30:51):
after lunch from a friend. That friend was Wister Janny,
also employed by the CIA. Like we mentioned earlier, the
Jannis grew up with the Myers. Peter Janny's best friend
had been Mary's middle son, Michael, who was tragically hit.
Speaker 6 (31:09):
By a car.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
And so years later, when Peter Janny discovered with horror
that his father had known about the murder hours before
anyone else with that, it dawned on him that his
father seemed to know in advance that Mary would be murdered.
And so when Peter read his father had made the
(31:31):
phone call to Ben Bradley that afternoon, His conviction that
the CIA was behind Mary's death and that his own
father was in on the plot became more than a
conspiracy for Janny. It became a horrifying truth. It tied
what he had lived as a child to new information
(31:53):
he learned as an adult. For him, it cracked open
the case. Listen, we're humans. It's really hard to accept
that bad things happen randomly. That Mary could get shot
on the towpath for no good reason. It makes sense
why Janny would take one new piece of information and
(32:16):
derive from it a much bigger meaning, because, as doctor
Pierre says, people who believe in conspiracy theories also tend
to believe.
Speaker 8 (32:26):
Things do happen for some ultimate reason, whether it's related
to supernatural forces with God or something like that, versus
more of a belief that things just happen randomly. And
so that helps to explain why you might see people
looking at the same information but interpreting them very differently
and sort of through the lens of their own psychology
(32:47):
or their own personal experience.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
Okay, fine, outstanding questions about the diary and a mysterious
phone call. Aside, say the CIA did kill Mary, would
it gone down. You might not be surprised. Janny has
a detailed answer for that too. His theory revolves around
another man who claims he was on the towpath the
(33:12):
day of Mary's murder, a man named William Mitchell. It
would turn out Mitchell was just the kind of character
that would make Janny believe Mary's death.
Speaker 6 (33:24):
Is tied to a larger web.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
You see, William Mitchell had gone to the DC police
the day after Mary's murder to say that he'd been
on the towpath that fateful day. Remember the jogger from
episode two.
Speaker 6 (33:39):
Down on the towpath.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
Dovey and her law partners recreated the scene just.
Speaker 6 (33:44):
Before the murder.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
One of them played Ray, another Mary, and another this jogger,
William Mitchell. Mitchell said he worked at the Pentagon, specifically
for the Department of Defense, just a few miles down
the road from Georgetown, and he told the police at midday,
just like Mary, he had left work for his daily constitutional.
Now we haven't mentioned this yet, but Mitchell also testified
(34:09):
a raised trial about what he had seen that day.
Speaker 6 (34:12):
He said in.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Court that on his jog he'd passed a woman whose
clothing matched Mary's and shortly after he passed a black
man following her from behind. He described Mary's clothes precisely.
Then he described Raymond Crumb's build and clothing. Mitchell helped
the prosecution put Ray Crump Junior on the Towpath. He'd
(34:36):
done his part to help the prosecution's case, and he
was an upstanding Army officer who worked at the Pentagon,
So the prosecution couldn't ask for a more credible witness, right, well,
not exactly. Jenny and his research team, by now he
had a team found that Mitchell's military records didn't make sense.
(35:00):
Mitchell's stories about his past, his whereabouts, and his official
military records contradicted each other time and time again fishy.
But it wasn't just that no one could verify Mitchell
had even been on the Towpath the day of Mary's murder,
and Janny and his researchers found that Mitchell had changed
(35:22):
his name throughout the years. At some point, he also
started using a second social Security number. To Janny, that
was extra fishy. Janny even went so far as to
serve William Mitchell with a complaint, alleging that he had
been part of a conspiracy to murder Mary Meyer. It
(35:44):
required Mitchell to appear in the Superior Court of the
District of Columbia. When the two men finally met, Jenny
reported that William Mitchell answered I don't remember or I
don't remember that to nearly every single question he would
He asked about his past and about the day.
Speaker 6 (36:02):
Of Mary's murder.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Assuming what Jenny says is true, that's a bit odd,
I mean to not remember anything. So Janny and his
military researcher put two and two together and came up
with a theory that William Mitchell worked for the CIA.
(36:25):
When a patchwork of military records and aliases and social
security numbers don't tell a rational story, the researcher said,
it's a telltale sign that a person works in intelligence. Yep,
it still sounds a bit crazy, right, But Janny takes
his theory one step further. Yes, Mitchell did have several
(36:47):
aliases and more than one social Security number. But Jenny
then theorized that Mitchell was not only CIA but also
part of the team that took Mary out. He argues
Mitchell was part of a large and well prepared team.
(37:07):
They learned Mary's routine and chose the towpath to make
her murder look like a random act of violence. If
she'd been murdered in her bed, it would have seemed
more personal. Finally, on the day that a believable patsy
showed up on the Towpath, a patsy who happened to
be Raymond Crump there for his affair with Vivian, the
(37:27):
operation team would have quickly procured a hitman who closely
enough resembled Ray, closed that closely enough matched what Ray
was wearing, and then sent the hitman to do the
dirty work. There are a lot of jumps here, but
the theory goes Mitchell was a CIA operative with one
(37:49):
cut and dry mission in Mary's death, to put the
blame on Ray Crump. Some people are more prone to
leave conspiracy theories than others, so we really wanted to
dig into the psychology behind them. When we spoke with
psychology professor Joe Pierre earlier in the episode, he had
(38:11):
a lot more to say about that world, and it
helped illuminate why so many would feel the allure of
a conspiracy with Mary's murder.
Speaker 8 (38:20):
The way I like to define a conspiracy theory, I
like to say that a conspiracy theory rejects the authoritative
account of reality in favor of some plot that involves
a group of people with a malevolent intent that's deliberately
kept secret from the public. So in that sense, there's
really two components. It's the rejection of the conventional wisdom,
(38:43):
the conventional version of events, and then there's an embrace
of a more shadowy, secret narrative to explain the underlying truth,
as it were.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
So in this case, the conventional narrative is Ray Crump
killed Mary and got away with it. Another rogue murderer
killed Mary and got away with it. And it's as
simple as that, a random act of violence. It's straightforward,
it's logical, and it's hard to wrap your head around.
(39:16):
So there's another explanation that's a lot more compelling, very Hollywood,
even because conspiracy theories make for riveting stories. Watching puzzle
pieces come together is satisfying. Understanding why bad things happen
by the end of a movie is comforting.
Speaker 8 (39:35):
So I think all of us, to a certain extent,
find those kind of narratives appealing, and in some sense
they're often more appealing than the dull narrative that is
the real.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
Life, but Mary's story it also has something else of
significant note attached to it that gets people who are
prone to conspiracy to pay attention.
Speaker 8 (40:00):
JFK, big headline news, major life events are the kind
of thing that spawns conspiracy theories, particularly when those events
have a kind of traumatic element to them.
Speaker 6 (40:13):
And in the case of Mary's murder, a number of.
Speaker 1 (40:16):
Things other than the popularity of JFK and the tragedy
of his debt can account.
Speaker 6 (40:21):
For its persistence.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
The precise shots to Mary's temple at Heart, which made
the killing look controlled, almost professional, the fact that no
murder weapon was ever found, an odd phone call, an
untraceable military man who claims to have witnessed Crump following
Mary on the toepad, and finally.
Speaker 8 (40:43):
The diary is a kind of missing smoking gun. Right,
So what we have is this mysterious diary which may
or may not contain information beyond documentation or the affair
with JFK, but may or may not include other information.
And that sort of to a certain extent, supplies the
narrative of why she might have been targeted or why
(41:06):
she was important. And so inasmuch as we don't have
that piece of information again, it just invites this flood
of counterinformation.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
And for more than fifty years, the case itself has
remained unsolved. A killer hasn't been convicted for Mary's murder.
Speaker 8 (41:24):
So that's sort of an example where we really just
don't have a kind of ironclad narrative. There is a
lot of ambiguity even in the real life telling of
those events.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
And yet there are plenty of people connected to this
case who don't want to talk about Mary's murder at all,
and they never have Mary's family, her friends for them.
Professor Pierre points out part of the reason that might
be true is that conspiracy theories prolong pain.
Speaker 8 (41:56):
They know, based on their own experience, they have a
sense of of what the true narrative is of those events.
So to hear people spinning a different tale that contradicts
their own experience, you know, that's again upsetting or even
insulting in a way.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
Meanwhile, many of the journalists who've investigated Mary's murder have
a hard time wrapping their heads around a CIA driven plot.
Speaker 6 (42:23):
Here's Lance Morrow.
Speaker 5 (42:25):
I don't believe that the CIA was involved. I don't
if it was a conspiracy. It was a fantastically complicated conspiracy,
and I'm at a loss to understand why anybody would
arrange it that way when it would have been so
much easier to kill her in her house at night
(42:46):
in Georgetown and just make it look like a burglary
where there would be no witnesses.
Speaker 1 (42:51):
Nina Burley doesn't think Mary was killed because she knew
too much either.
Speaker 4 (42:56):
I don't really think that there is a lot of
plausible evidence that it was a conspiracy that she was
killed by the CIA. In fact, I would have preferred
it to be a conspiracy. It's a better book, It's
a better it's a movie.
Speaker 1 (43:15):
As for dove Well, Nina Burley also asked about this
when she interviewed Dovey.
Speaker 4 (43:21):
She definitely didn't say I believe this was a conspiracy
by the CIA. You know, the thing that struck me
more was the whole conversation about forgiveness. But I do
think that she alluded to, you know, there were certainly
other possibilities for what happened here.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
And finally, the man we spoke to who is perhaps
most adamantly against the idea of conspiracy being related to
Mary's death, that would be Ron Rosenbaum.
Speaker 11 (43:53):
There are people conspiracy theorists who exploit her death. Still
to this day, tired of having to refute and debunk
the baseless, evidenceless conspiracy theories that I think exploit this
woman and commodify hurry, privacy and intimacy in a shameless
(44:21):
way I find upsetting.
Speaker 6 (44:26):
So there you have it.
Speaker 1 (44:27):
For the most part, all these writers, these individuals surrounding
this complex story, they have the same set of facts,
yet their conclusions can be very different. And we haven't
even acknowledged the simplest explanation of all, what if Ray
did kill Mary? The pieces of that puzzle aren't all
(44:50):
in place either, but that theory requires fewer mental gymnastics
than a CIA plot. After all, a witness placed him
at the crime scene. He was caught shortly after the
murder took place.
Speaker 6 (45:03):
But in the end, we just don't know.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
So what does all this mind bending say about us?
What does it say about the way we take in
information and process it, about the way we understand Mary's murder?
Speaker 6 (45:18):
Why are we all.
Speaker 1 (45:19):
On such different pages? Joe Pierre has a pretty good
answer for that.
Speaker 8 (45:27):
There's something called the white Christmas effect.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
It's something that has been studied in psychology research. He says,
and the results are pretty fascinating.
Speaker 8 (45:37):
If you tell people in advance that they're going to
hear a recording of something that sounds like white noise,
but embedded within it, you're going to hear the song
the White Christmas. And then we play that white noise
and we ask you to press a button to identify
when you're hearing the song. People will listen to the
white noise, they'll press the button saying that they've heard it,
(45:58):
even when the song was not act embedded into that
white noise. It's like if I am someone who is
interested in conspiracy theories, who's interested in true crime, and
if you asked me to take a look at this case,
well then yeah, I could sift through all the materials
that I read and say, yes, absolutely, there's evidence here, here, here, here,
(46:20):
Because if my brain is looking for that information, we
know that human brains are very good at finding it.
And so that's where I think we have to be
skeptical when we hear about conspiracy theories.
Speaker 6 (46:32):
For each one of us.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
It seems the story of Mary's murder, if there's a
conspiracy behind it or not, might be the perfect test
case for the White Christmas effect. But like the movie
where the song's performed All the Snow that made Christmas
in Vermont White, it was produced on a California soundstage.
(46:55):
It merely gave the illusion that the whole thing took
place in Vermont. But my friends, it did not, And
in the case of Mary's murder, the CIA's involvement is
no more believable than all that fake snow, at least
for a slew of reporters who know the story best.
(47:25):
As questions surrounding Mary Meyer's death remain unanswered through the decades,
the legacy of each woman would start to be written.
Dovey Rowntree would go on to write a book about
her amazing life. Friends and family would remember her even
if public discourse didn't, for the improbable strides she made
(47:46):
in her professional and spiritual pursuits. But Mary, there are
those who to this day are struggling to bring her
life's work and true legacy into light. But the forces
they're working against remain mysterious.
Speaker 6 (48:05):
It's this sort of surge for truth, like who does
have it?
Speaker 12 (48:09):
The paintings? Who doesn't have them?
Speaker 5 (48:11):
If they have it and they don't want to share it,
why next time?
Speaker 1 (48:16):
On the final episode of Murder on the Towpath from Luminary.
Murder on the Towpath is a production of Film Nation
Entertainment in association with Neon Humm Media. Our executive producers
are me Solidad O'Brien, Alyssa Martino, Milan Papelka, and Jonathan Hirsch.
(48:41):
Lead producer is Sharah Morris. Associate producers are Datalie Wrinn
and Lucy Licht. Senior editor is Katherine Saint Louis. Music
and composition by Andrew Eapen, sound design and mixing by
Scott Somerville.
Speaker 6 (48:56):
Fact checking by Laura Buller.
Speaker 1 (48:58):
Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Saravacchiano, Rose Arce, Kate Michigan,
Tanner Robbins, and Mikaela Celella. Thanks also to British Pathay
for providing some of the archival audio you heard in
this episode.
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