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Economic Opportunity in Washington.
    The following morning, on a sweltering July day, the trial convened in the newly air-conditioned fourth-floor courtroom of Washington’s U. S. District Court Building. It was packed to capacity with onlookers. Many would return day after day for the duration of the trial. Also present every day was Martha Crump, Ray Crump’s mother, always accompanied by members of her church community. The courtroom’s racial mix and class disparities reflected the divide between the murdered woman and the accused defendant, all interspersed with a noticeable number of unsmiling white men in impeccably tailored suits, reminding Roundtree of the significance of this case. “So manymen in gray suits showed up,” she recalled in 1991. “They were government people. I knew that. But I could never understand why so many at the time.” 8
    The news media was a significant presence in the courtroom. Sam Donaldson, a young broadcast news reporter for the CBS affiliate, WTOP-TV, in Washington, sat directly behind the defense team, as did two nuns. Roundtree had no idea who they were, but she recalled that at different times, both Donaldson and the nuns said something similar to her: “You’ll pull it out …” Her response to all of them: “Well, you must know something I don’t know.” 9
    Indeed, Hantman’s long, thundering opening statement seemed to spell doom for the defendant he said had “deliberately, willfully, and maliciously shot and killed Mary Pinchot Meyer.” 10 In graphic terms, Hantman portrayed Crump in a violent struggle with the victim, insinuating, with no evidence to support his position, that the murder had been the result of a sexual assault gone awry. Nothing about the victim, Hantman told the jury, would have attracted the attention of a thief, given that she carried no wallet and wore no jewelry. 11 Crump had tried to take her by surprise from behind, Hantman maintained, but she had struggled so powerfully that he had been forced to resort to brutality—shooting her in the head to subdue her, then dragging her twenty-five feet while she continued to struggle, before fatally shooting her again. An effective storyteller, Hantman captured and held the jury’s attention with his vivid portrayal of Mary Meyer on her knees, fighting for her life even with a bullet in her head, tearing the defendant’s jacket and his trouser pocket. 12
    Hantman continued in morbid detail: “We will show you that the blood stains on the tree were only two, two-and-a-half feet from the ground. We will show you that Mary Pinchot Meyer got away from the defendant. She ran back across the towpath toward the canal itself, away from the embankment; that she fell on that side of the towpath closest to the canal; that this defendant Raymond Crump, seeing the deceased getting away from him and believing that she might be able to identify him later, shot Mary Pinchot Meyer again right over the right shoulder.” 13 Designed for high-impact courtroom drama upon the jury, the Hantman delivery was intended to be as brutal as it was damaging.
    Next, Hantman gave the police reconstruction of Ray Crump’s alleged attempt to flee the murder scene after tow truck driver Henry Wiggins had spotted him standing over “the lifeless corpse.” The government’s prosecutor extolled the professionalism and alacrity of the police response in closing off all of the exits in the towpath area “within four minutes” of the broadcastbulletin about the murder. Documenting that Crump was apprehended several hundred feet from the murder scene, but only after he “ran over the embankment, ran west 684 feet where he got rid of his light tan zipper jacket,” and then, “426 feet beyond that, further west, [he] got rid of his plaid cap with a bill on it,” Hantman maintained that Crump had “continued to run in a westerly direction towards Fletcher’s Landing for some 1,750 feet beyond this, at which point he saw Officer