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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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Behind the Bastards · Part Three: The Pol Pot Episodes: How A Nice, Quiet Kid Murdered His Country · 1 May 2025 podcast

The police arrived in a heartbeat. Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested. He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black. Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree. Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist. Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.

It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.

John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O’Brien · Married to the Law · 30 Apr 2025 podcast

Emmett Till was visiting Mississippi when he and his cousins decided to go to a grocery store. Emmett was all of 14, a black boy hanging out with other children. A white woman would later say Emmett had whistled at her. She also claimed he touched her. More than 60 years later, she would recant her testimony. Emmett's body was found floating in a river.

The woman's husband and brother-in-law kidnapped and brutally murdered him. His body was so mangled, his own mother could barely identify him. You probably heard this story before, but I'm telling it to you again because this was the racial landscape of 1960s America, the world Ray Crump was living in when he was arrested for the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer.

So if you think about it, things could have gone way worse for Ray.

That's Dr. Marcia Chatelain.

When a black man is arrested for murdering a prominent white woman, it comes with the baggage of our fraught racial history.

After his arrest, Ray's mother, Martha, knew her son was in trouble, but she didn't have the money for a lawyer. She was a laundry woman. Every day, she commuted to the white part of Washington, D.C., and returned home to the black part, which was one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. On the weekends, she was a regular at Second Baptist Church.

Now, more than ever, she needed her prayers answered. And they were. At church, she heard about a lawyer whose reputation preceded her. A black woman named Dovey Johnson Roundtree.

Martha wanted Dovey to represent her son. People around D.C. said she was tenacious and clever. But Martha wanted her for more than her legal smarts. She was black. And Ray's mother felt she would be invested in her son's case in a way a white lawyer wouldn't be. Martha was banking on Dovey thinking her child was as good as anyone else's.

The thing was, legal aid had already offered Ray an attorney. A white guy. An experienced guy. For free. But Martha wanted Dovey to take her son's case. So she pleaded with her to defend Ray. Save his life. Now, at that time, Dovey and Martha had just the facts about Mary's murder from the papers. A white woman was shot to death. She was prominent, part of Washington's elite.

It happened on the towpath in Georgetown, and a black man was arrested. Martha was sure Ray wasn't the killer. She thought he was too simple, too plain. She babied her 25-year-old son like he was still a kid, even though he was actually the oldest of her three boys. If Dovey took on the case, the cards would be stacked against her, and the deck was already high.

Here was a black female lawyer from the segregated South asking a jury to acquit a black man accused of shooting a white woman in 1964 with an eyewitness who said he saw the whole thing. The task would be monumental. Dovey didn't take the case at first, but she would because Martha's hope was true. Dovey did think Ray was as good as any other man. His black skin didn't make him inferior.

Her grandma Rachel's experiences had taught her that. From Luminary, Film Nation Entertainment, and Neon Hum Media, this is Murder on the Towpath, a story of two incredible women who never met, but whose lives became forever intertwined by tragedy. I'm your host, Soledad O'Brien. Last week, we started to tell you about an affair, Mary Pinchot Meyer and JFK.

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