Soledad O'Brien
speaker
904 appearances
45 recordings
7 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 28 Feb
Soledad O'Brien’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
She also said she knew Ray owned only one fishing rod. She saw it in a closet in his family's apartment later that day. Dovey cross-examined Elsie. The Evening Star documented the exchange. Why was Elsie so certain of what Crump wore on the day of the murder? Elsie responded, Mr. Crump's wife and I are in the habit of checking to see who's coming or going. Isn't that being nosy? Dovey asked.
You could call it that, the housewife answered. Dovey wasn't getting anywhere. The media didn't think so either. The Washington Star's headline the next day read, Meyer Witness Links Cap to Crump. That didn't sound good. Dovey knew she had to be strategic. Pantman may be aggressive, but maybe she could outmaneuver him in other ways.
She tried to win over the jury by showing that Ray was a man worth tending to, not a monster, but a slight, short man who was somebody's son. Hantman brought another witness to the stand. It was one of Ray's friends, Robert Woolbright. Robert was the guy who was supposed to take him to the construction job that day. He stopped by Ray's. But that morning, Ray was nowhere to be found.
He told the jury he didn't see his friend on the job either. This anecdote didn't make Ray a murderer, but the prosecution was painting a picture for the jury. They were saying Ray was an unreliable man, shifty, someone who didn't keep his word, someone whose own friend would testify against him. We still don't know why Robert Woolbright did that.
Hantman said all of these testimonies were a textbook case of circumstantial evidence. In other words, he was asking the jury to connect the dots. You don't need to look far. The murderer is in plain sight. Right here, in the blue suit, in front of you. Sounds strange to say it, but Dovey and Hantman saw eye to eye on one thing. There was no direct evidence linking Ray to the crime.
Without it, Hantman had to try for a conviction in a roundabout way. He portrayed Ray as a killer and a liar who was found near Mary's body and hoped the jurors would convict him of murder without direct evidence. Dovey had other plans. At every turn, she was going to point out the lack of evidence that tied Ray to Mary's death. Take the gun, for example. Police never found the murder weapon.
After the shooting, 40 police officers combed through 1,500 feet of dirt. The park police even drained the canal, hoping to find a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson laying at the bottom of that murky water. But they didn't, and they certainly never found a pistol on Ray. The government worked hard to find it, and still, nothing. Dovey knew there was no real evidence connecting Ray to the crime.
She just needed to convince the jury of that, too.
To build their case, the prosecution brought out technical experts. First, an FBI hair and fiber expert testified. The man, Paul Stombaugh, compared a hair taken from Crump's head with hairs found near the scene of the crime. He told the jury they matched. He said there were no dissimilar characteristics.
But this was a time before DNA testing, so all the FBI expert could say, with that weird phrase, was that the hair on the jacket and cap looked like it could be Ray's hair. There was no way of knowing if the strands of hair were genetically identical. not exactly science. If Ray were tried today, that alone could have changed the course of the trial.
Under cross-examination, Dovey forced him to admit what was actually true, that hair cannot positively be traced to a particular source. Stambaugh sat back down. Up next was another FBI figure, this time a gunpowder expert named Warren Johnson. He said the gunpowder residue found on Mary's blouse and sweater showed the murderer put a gun up to Mary's body, or very, very near contact.
But at the same time, no gunpowder compounds were found on the jacket and cap that were supposedly Ray's. Hantman argued it was because Ray was wet when the police found him. He suggested Ray had deliberately fallen into the water to clean himself off. Then the prosecution brought out their next bit of evidence. And boy, was it big. Literally.
The Evening Star said it was 30 feet long. And some records say the map was as large as 55 feet wide. Point is, this map was hard to miss. It's pretty likely the prosecution was resting a large part of their case on the map. Hantman even wanted to keep the map up during the trial. But Judge Corcoran thought it could sway the jury.
So every time Hantman examined a new witness about the crime scene, he'd clumsily put the map back up like a 10th grade geography teacher. The map itself covered a substantial area, everything between Key Bridge and Chain Bridge. It wasn't just the crime scene where Mary died. It included potential exits, too, where the killer could have escaped after the murder.
The mapmaker was a lifelong government employee. His name was Joseph Roncesvalle, and he was an engineer. He testified that there were multiple official exits to the towpath, including Key Bridge, Chain Bridge, Foundry Tunnel, and Fletcher's Boathouse. Remember, the police caught Ray within 45 minutes of the murder.
The police had probably been manning those exits within 10 to 15 minutes of Mary's body being found. So essentially, the mapmaker was saying the murderer was trapped in the area. There was no way he could have escaped. So the killer had to be Ray. That's what the prosecution argued. Dovey quickly seized on the mapmaker's argument in her cross-examination.
She asked him if he had ever walked the towpath area. He hadn't. Dovey's long days traversing the towpath were about to pay off. Unlike the mapmaker, she had been to the towpath. A lot. By this point, she had memorized its pathways. She listed off all the numerous small and unofficial entry and exit points in the area.
And it was clear to me the killer didn't have to leave the towpath through an official exit. Natalie and I noticed that immediately when we walked there. I mean, you're so close to roads on both sides, so sure, there's not an official exit. But if you walk over here, right, if we head kind of toward the Potomac and we walk through this bramble... There's a path right here.
I'm sure that's not an official path, but clearly somebody else has come down here, and you can see where they've tucked through there, and they could make their way. I mean, it's a 30-foot drop, but you could see how you could scoot down there, not easily. You can also see sort of a tunnel that brings you somewhere other than... Oh, yeah, yeah. Try not to fall off this edge here.
But yeah, look at that. There's a little tunnel that you can see pretty clearly. That's not an official exit by any stretch of the imagination, but could you get out? You could. Could you go down these stairs, maybe run over that way? Could you jump into the water? I mean, those aren't official exits, but they're ways out. You could run across the marsh. You and I, if we go to the other side...
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