Director Ralph Cinque discusses his new film Dovey’s Promise. He writes:
“The murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer and subsequent trial of Raymond Crump are a buried part of American history and a forbidden segment of the JFK assassination saga. What the government tries to claim is that Dovey Roundtree was a great woman, deserving of much praise, but she was wrong about this, that Raymond Crump was guilty, and he only got off because there was a lack of physical evidence against him. But, that is not true, as my film demonstrates. Dovey was NOT wrong.”
For more on the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer check out my interview with Peter Janney, author of Mary’s Mosaic. Also, for a rundown of the “Cohencidences” connecting the biggest crimes in American history, check out Wyatt Peterson’s new article “Parallels: JFK, RFK, 9/11.” Wyatt will discuss that great article while co-hosting False Flag Weekly News this Friday.
It’s JFK assassination anniversary season again. We, the voting machines, just elected another president who’s promising to release the JFK files but didn’t keep his promise last time and probably won’t again this time. But it’s an interesting moment in history anyway. So, Ralph, let’s dive into the whole JFK thing by way of your new film, Dovey’s Promise.
Well, let me just brief your audience on it if you don’t mind. This was a trial that took place in the 1960s. The crime occurred 1964 and the trial occurred in 1965. It’s connected to JFK. The victim, Mary Pinchot Meyer, was the secret lover of JFK. And she was much more than that. I want to emphasize to your viewers that this was much more than a sex thing. They were very, very close as friends and confidants. And they actually knew each other since they were teenagers. They met at a dance when they were just teenagers and had intermittent contact throughout their adult lives. And even when he was a senator from Massachusetts, when he and Jackie were living in Georgetown, they were neighbors to the Myers. Mary Pinchot’s grandfather had been a famous governor of Pennsylvania. He was also the first head of the National Park Service. He was a very big environmentalist. And so they were a very well-to-do and very wealthy family. After World War II, she ended up marrying a man whose name was Cord Meyer. And he came from a wealthy family too. And he had some parallels with JFK because they were both very accomplished and they were both very heroic in the war. They both suffered terrible, terrible injuries in the war. Cord Meyer lost an eye. He came back wearing a glass eye.
They got married and they started a family. And of course, JFK went on to marry Jackie. But what happened was that so she had intermittent contact with JFK because they were neighbors and in the same social circle. And it’s no secret that JFK was just a huge philanderer. He kind of was an addict that way. And there were various times that he had sort of, you know, tried to make headway with her. But she was very different that way. She just had no inclinations whatsoever to just have casual flings or affairs. If you read the biography of her by Peter Janney, Mary’s Mosaic (you see) she was always very serious about her relationships and never had any frivolous affairs. So you might say she had a history of…putting JFK off that way.
But what happened was that Cord and Mary ended up getting divorced. And it was partly because they suffered a tragedy together that they just never really recovered from. And that is the death of their middle son, who was hit by a car right in front of their house and was killed. And after they got divorced… She didn’t immediately start an involvement with JFK, but it wasn’t long before she did. But it was based very much on this sort of purpose that they shared, which was the idea that the Cold War could be ended and there could be a reduction or elimination of nuclear weapons. And this was something that they were both very passionate about. So that drew them together. But it was also a sexual relationship.
And that started after he was president, right?
What I have seen is that basically, January of 1961 is considered the start of their intimate relationship. And then throughout his term, she visited the White House many times. That’s on the official record. Basically whenever Jackie wasn’t there, Mary was there.
If he’d just converted to Islam he could have had two wives—unless one of them was like my wife who definitely would not go for that kind of thing.
But yes, they definitely had this very, very close connection. And so naturally, when he was assassinated, she was devastated. And she was very vocal about the fact that she didn’t believe the Warren Commission. And she saw all the signs that it was a CIA hit. And she was determined to expose them. And she was going around saying that to important people.
So then 11 months after he was murdered by supposedly a lone nut in Dallas, she gets murdered randomly by another supposed lone nut in Georgetown on the towpath, which is a park that goes through the city. It goes right along the Potomac river. They had a man-made canal built back in the 19th century that they used to haul cargo barges. They would have trains of mules that would pull the barge on the canal, which was next to the river. And after that became antiquated and unnecessary, they just turned it into a hiking trail, a park. And that’s how it was being used. And it’s still being used like that to this day.
So it was on October 12th, 1964, Mary was out for her usual daily walk on the towpath. And she was attacked first by hand. Somebody had started, you know, grabbing her and attacking her by hand, and then he took his gun out and shot her in the head. Somehow miraculously she stayed on her feet even though she had a bullet in her head and she tried to run off but she collapsed. And the assailant then dragged her back to where the struggle had started. And then he took his gun out and shot her in the back fatally, shooting her through the lung and rupturing her aorta and killing her on the spot.
Shortly after that, they arrested this very poor and very kind of hapless young black man whose name was Raymond Crump. And he was mentally handicapped, okay? He definitely was not all there. He had some incapacity that way.
And he was a drinker. And he’d been lured down there to drink and make out with somebody.
Yeah, right, right. There was a woman. And that’s something, by the way, that… We put in the film, but I often tell people that this film, it is basically a true story, but we did make some dramatic adaptations just for the sake of the entertainment value. And one of them was that in real life…well, first of all, let me back up a minute and say that what happened initially was that because he was dirt poor, he just had to settle for a young public defender. And I’m sure that that was the plan all along.
But then when his mother contacted Dovey Roundtree. The two of them went to the same church, a very famous church in Washington, D.C., called the Allen Chapel AME Church, which stands for African Episcopal Methodist Church. And she begged her to go and talk to her son and see if she could help him.
And so Dovey did. And she became instantly so convinced that he could not possibly have done it that she agreed to defend him for one dollar. Now, that shook everything up because he wasn’t supposed to have a good lawyer. He was supposed to have a crummy lawyer. And he ends up getting a great lawyer and a very famous lawyer, which only increased the notoriety of the case.
And I think it’s fair to say that this trial in the 1960s, right in the middle of the decade, was like the OJ trial it was like the trial of the century. That’s how big it was. There was daily coverage every day in the newspapers about it famous people went to the trial. For example Sam Donaldson, the reporter who went on to great fame for covering Ronald Reagan, attended every day of the trial.
So this was a very, very big trial, and it got a lot of publicity at the time. But after that, it basically sort of disappeared. And today, at least until recently… You might say it’s part of taboo history. And what I mean is that it’s not in the history books. If you read a history of the 1960s, it’s not going to mention the Raymond Crump trial or the Towpath murder trial. It’s not in the history books of the 20th century. It’s not taught in school. Kids don’t learn about it. And I have never, ever seen it discussed on television.
The only way people hear about this is through Peter Janney’s book Mary’s Mosaic. And the fact is that Peter’s book is the thing that brought attention back to this case. And it’s the reason why online there is a lively discussion about this case. Peter’s book is kind of a masterpiece. Really well done. And it’s brilliantly written, too. It’s just such good writing. I found it to be a page-turner. So, yes, I highly recommend the book.
Let’s point out that Peter knew Mary Pinchot Meyer. He was the best friend of her son who was killed. Can you imagine? He gets killed in front of the house in the street. Mary runs out of the house, holds her dying son in her arms, and he dies right there in the street. The tragedy of that is just unspeakable. Peter was personally very affected by it, not only because he was so close to Michael, but because he was very close to Mary too. She was like a surrogate mother to him. I get the feeling that he spent a lot of time at the Meyer household and that in some ways he felt closer to Mary than he felt to his own mother.
Yeah, she seemed like a very unusual woman. She was highly intelligent. She married Cord Meyer back when Cord was one of the world’s leading peace activists. And she was right there with him as a leading peace activist right after World War II. And of course, she didn’t like the way that Cord turned alcoholic and joined the CIA. That was part of the problem between them. But she was a brilliant woman and she was an artist as well. I think she painted.
Right, she was an artist. She was a poet. I think it’s in the book that she had a half sister who was quite a bit older than she was, who tragically committed suicide. And Mary wrote a beautiful poem about her half sister. So she was, yeah, a very talented and creative person.
But anyway, this whole case was intentionally was driven into the shadows because of its connection to the JFK assassination. The trial was so dramatic and involved such famous people that you would think that Hollywood would have jumped on this to make their own courtroom drama to make money. But no, it was hands off, because the corporate media…I mean, there wasn’t a law against it, but there was a protocol against it that this is off limits because we have to leave the JFK story alone. Let the sleeping dogs lie. You don’t want to rattle that bear.
So because of the connection to JFK and the implications that it had for the JFK assassination, this story became off limits and it fell on an independent filmmaker filmmaker like me to actually bring this courtroom drama to the big screen.
We’re supposed to believe that was just a coincidence that both JFK and Mary Pinchot Meyer just happened to be murdered by lone nut assassins. But it’s really too much of a coincidence and not very credible.
There are some other interesting coincidences. For example, James Angleton, who later turned out to be just about everybody’s leading suspect in orchestrating the JFK assassination, happened to be the guy who showed up right after this murder at Mary’s house.
On the day of the murder!
The day of the murder, he shows up and steals her diary. You can’t make this stuff up. He’s the chief of counterintelligence for the CIA.
Right. He (Angleton) went to Ben Bradley, who was Mary’s brother-in-law, and the two of them together went into Mary’s house and they ransacked it basically to find her diary. And they found it and Angleton left with it. And he claims that he later destroyed it, that he burned it. Now, you might wonder, what was the legal basis that they would do that? Because when a person dies, then instantly there are protocols. In other words, it’s not like anybody can go into their house and take their stuff. There are rules of probate that determine who can actually go through any of her belongings.
You might say the justification for why it was okay that they did that, was that they said that they talked to Mary’s good friend, Ann Truitt, who lived in Japan at the time in Japan, and that Ann approved it because she said that Mary would have wanted them to do it to make sure that her diary wasn’t read by anybody that shouldn’t read it. But the point I want to make is that that is a ludicrous thing to claim because no matter how good of friends they were, no one ever said she was Mary’s executor, and I can’t imagine why Mary would assign someone to be her executor who was living in Japan.
So if she wasn’t the executor of her estate, she had no legal right to authorize them to go into her property and steal her diary either. So this was clearly illegal, and it demonstrates that the fact that the CIA was already monitoring her and already had concerns about her, and it makes it even more suspicious that the CIA is the one that killed her.
Michael Collins Piper’s book Final Judgment points at Angleton as the key guy in the CIA. And of course there’s also some other work (like David Talbot’s Brothers and The Devil’s Chessboard) that points at Alan Dulles. But Angleton is at least tied with Alan Dulles as everybody’s number one suspect.
Absolutely. He was the head of counterintelligence at the CIA. So Peter Janney’s book stirred up some interest, a lot of interest, in this case. And now today there’s quite a bit of blogging that goes on about it. But it’s even affected the government, because for the most part, the operational plan, the MO, was to just ignore this case and just let it stay in the shadows, and not even talk about it. But then there was an article that appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, which is the magazine of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., that was about the case. And the author of it was a guy who was a young cub reporter at the time of the murder and who was involved in reporting on the case when it happened in 1964. So he had a direct involvement with it himself. And he talked about his own experience and going to the crime scene and stuff like that.
But in a very glib, subtle kind of way, he threw in what was surely the most important thing he had to say, which was that even though the great Dovey Roundtree with her brilliant lawyering got Raymond Crump acquitted, that most likely he was guilty and that we should just assume that, yeah, he killed Mary Pinchot Meyer.
Now, I want to explain briefly why that’s impossible, that there’s no sound mental reason to think that that could possibly be true. The first reason is that when the crime occurred in articles about it every day in the Washington Post said the most likely motive for the crime was robbery. Well, that never made sense because the attacker had a gun and he didn’t use it at first. He left the gun aside. He just had it tucked wherever it was tucked. And he just attacked her physically.
Now, why would a robber do that? A robber doesn’t want to reach into the pocket of the victim and take the money himself. He wants the victim to see the gun and turn over his or her money because nobody wants to die over pocket money. So the fact that he left his gun aside and attacked her physically —That in itself proves that he wasn’t just a robber out to rob her. So that means that not Raymond Crump nor anyone else could have been bent on robbing her considering what the assailant did.
That’s a great point, Ralph. Let me just briefly interject that possibly the reason this journalist is saying, “well, yeah, Crump probably did it,” is that Crump was set up as a patsy by professionals. They created enough coincidences: Oh, he was he was sort of near the scene. And there was this claimed witness report that the guy saw somebody who looked sort of like Crump. Although, as it turned out, Dovey Roundtree proved it couldn’t have been Crump because this guy that the witness was too big. But they had that guy dressed exactly the way Crump had been dressed. So the reason that they fooled these people is because these people don’t have enough imagination to recognize that when a team of professional assassins sets up something like this, they go to the trouble of dressing up their patsy exactly the way that they’re dressing up the stooge who’s dressed up like the patsy. They call in a tow truck to get the witness. The journalist who wrote that article probably doesn’t understand that the American military intelligence community knows how to assign these teams to do these kinds of professional operations.
There’s an expression that I use that I call Americana. I call it a mental illness. And what it is is that people have this disease and they are so convinced that America is a good country and that terrible things that have happened in the Soviet Union and Red China and Nazi Germany could never happen here because we’re a good country. So if it comes down to a choice to believing that, say, the government killed Kennedy or a lone nut killed Kennedy— they’re going to default to the lone nut because they’re just incapable of even going to the mental space of thinking that the government could have killed him.
And then the government’s killing all these witnesses too, killing all these people. It’s horrible. Who wants to think that?
Let me just finish the thought I was starting before. So (for the motive of the Mary Meyer murder) robbery doesn’t work at all. And it didn’t work from day one. So by the time the trial came around in 1965 they added rape as a motive. So it was robbery and rape, or maybe robbery or rape. They were just putting it out there just so that there was something else. And basically “he was a robber, a rapist, the works.” But that never made any sense either, because the site where the crime occurred, even though it was in a natural setting, close to the water with trees and grass, it was only 128 feet, which is about 40 yards, from busy Canal Street in Georgetown with cars zooming by, mothers with baby carriages walking by.
And it was wide open (to view). I’ve seen a picture of it from Canal Street. Somebody with a camera stood right on Canal Street and took a picture of the crime scene. It’s like a picture window. So how could anyone decide to try to rape somebody right there? Because there were people on the sidewalk who could see you plainly. Plus, there were other people in the park. It was a well-used walking trail.
Now, I’m sure at the time that the CIA killed her, they probably had lookouts on both sides of the trail so that they were sure that there was going to be no interruption. They weren’t going to take a chance on that. But an actual rapist wouldn’t have that advantage. They would know very well that someone could come walking by at any time. Rape is something that is done in seclusion. It is done in isolation. And this was not such an environment.
But there’s more. Because in rape, there is always a very great disparity in the strength and power of the rapist as compared to the victim, because it takes a lot of overwhelming power to be able to assert yourself on someone in that way. I mean, if it’s anything close, the victim is going to fight back and make it extremely difficult to do. And in this case, the assailant supposedly was three inches shorter than the victim. He was 5’3 1/2″. That was his actual height. It was on his driver’s license. And she was 5’6 1/2″. And on his driver’s license, it listed his weight as 130 pounds, and her weight was 128 pounds. So they were essentially the same weight. She was three inches taller. She was a very fit, athletic woman.
So this little man, Raymond Crump, certainly did not have the kind of physical superiority and strength to overcome her to the point that he could, what, pull her clothes off her and get his own clothes down and get his erection going and penetrate her. It’s just ridiculous to think that he could have done that.
So…The truth was that there was never any credibility to either one of those motives, and that’s why there really is no chance that Raymond Crump would have done it.
But there’s one final thing about the rape thing that I think is laughable, is that if you’re going to try to claim that he did this to rape her. Then what was his reason for going to the park in the first place? Because we know the real reason. He went there to have consensual sex with a woman named Vivian. And this is an example of somewhere where we took dramatic license because in real life, Dovey Roundtree never met Vivian. She was able to reach her by phone and Vivian didn’t want to meet with her. And of course she balked at the idea of testifying because she was afraid that her husband would physically kill her if he found out about the affair she had had. And we put that in the movie. But the way we did it was we actually put them together. We had them at a park where Debbie just came upon her because her investigator found out she was there. They talked about it in person, so we could dramatize it. That was one of the liberties that we took.
But it would be hard to argue that he went to the park and to have consensual sex with a woman. And then as he’s leaving, he decided to rape another woman. It’s ridiculous.
Here’s a still from the scene where Dovey Roundtree is interrogating this witness, the retired Army lieutenant “William Mitchell” in what was actually the most heated testimony at the trial. Dovey here is laying into him about what he was claiming…
Isn’t he Peter Janney’s lead suspect for the likely head of the kill team?
Yes, you are absolutely right. Now, we don’t bring that out in the movie directly. But we do certainly imply that there was something very, very suspicious about him, and that there was something very important about him.
We’re indebted to Peter Janey for basically bringing this whole story back to life. And hopefully from here, it’s going to continue. And hopefully this film is going to help make more people aware of it and to get more people talking about it. And that ultimately is my goal. Because to me, this is sequel to the JFK assassination. This was damage control for that. They had to kill Mary because she was a threat. She was not only a threat, but she was a very smart, clever threat. They just couldn’t take the chance that she was going to be able to upset the apple cart. They ended up brutally killing her.
And again, it’s something that even to this day, I’m going to say 99.9% of Americans just can’t conceive of the idea that their government would do that. Because it’s important to remember that when we talk about the CIA killing somebody, what we’re saying is that the U.S. government killed them. Because the CIA is an agency of the U.S. government.
Your tax dollars at work.
Exactly.
Speaking of James Douglas (author of JFK and the Unspeakable) he’s also aware that the CIA and the FBI killed Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. And I remember he said at the time that his aspiration was to write books about all of them. I don’t know what he’s doing with that, but that’s what he said.
But are you aware that just days ago that the family of Malcolm X has filed a hundred million dollar lawsuit against the CIA and the FBI over the wrongful death of Malcolm X? Obviously, the media isn’t making too much of it, but I think it’s just a very, very, very big deal.
And with people in the new administration, like a Tulsi Gabbard supposedly being in charge of the entire intelligence community, maybe things will get shaken up a little bit, who knows?
Well, think about this though. Robert F. Kennedy is supposed to be the chairman of the DHHS and he’s going to go after the drug companies, which is good. And even though JFK truth isn’t part of that, the fact is apparently Robert F. Kennedy has got Trump’s ear. And that means that his beliefs about his father and his uncle having been murdered by the CIA is something he may be able to influence Trump about. So, yeah, maybe there are big changes in the offing in the realm of JFK truth.
Right. Another angle to this that we don’t have time to get into is that RFK Jr. is a fanatical Zionist, a genocide supporter whose controller is Rabbi Shmuley. And there’s no way that RFK Jr. cannot understand that whoever picked a Palestinian patsy to take the blame for the murder of his father was doing that for a reason, just as the fact that the Jewish mafia sent Jack Rubenstein to do whatever he did with Oswald is kind of a clue as to the fact that a major factor behind the murder of the Kennedys was John F. Kennedy’s absolute devotion to shutting down the Israeli nuclear program, which led Ben-Gurion to resign and become probably the mastermind of the assassination, who then worked through James Jesus Angleton. That’s the scenario that we get from reading Michael Collins Piper’s Final Judgment, as well as from reading the books of the French historian Laurent Guyenot.
Well, I also knew Michael Collins Piper pretty well. Are you aware that he died under very mysterious circumstances at a hotel in Idaho?
I was just talking about that earlier today! You know, they don’t kill that many people. Most of us in the truth-telling community probably are not losing that much life expectancy. But every once in a while, they do.
I worry about it in my case for what I’ve done in the JFK realm. I mean, I’m very careful. I keep my house locked. I’m looking behind my back all the time. I’m sort of… a little bit paranoid about it, I admit, because of all of killing that they did in the JFK case. And of course, they did a lot of killing. Many dozens of people were killed in 1964. And then again, during the HSCA investigation in the 1970s, you had a flurry of unexpected deaths…
(read the full machine-generated transcript at my Substack)
