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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You can walk the towpath and count exactly how many steps it takes to get from the bridge to Mary's studio. That's exactly what Dovey and her law partners did that day. They walked back and forth from Foundry Underpass to Fletcher's Boathouse. They role-played. One would play Mary, the other her killer.
And sometimes one of them would play the role of a jogger who had passed Mary right before her murder. He'll become important later in our story. Dovey and her law partners even reenacted the gunshots. Instead of using guns, they smashed paper bags to see if Henry Wiggins would have been able to hear the pops from three-quarters of a mile away on Canal Road. We actually tried this ourselves.
Our producers Catherine and Natalie came with me to the towpath in Georgetown. Today, there's a bike path below the towpath, next to the Potomac. It's a similar distance between where Henry would have been and the murder scene. Could people hear the bag popping from that far away?
Dovey and her colleagues were getting creative, but they would do anything to give Ray a fighting chance. By the time she reached her 30s, Dovey had already faced injustice. Mrs. Hurley had wrongly accused her of stealing. A farm owner had maimed her grandmother. The Klan had terrorized her family. Hate seemed to be spreading at a global level, too. It was the 1940s.
Fascism was a cancer sweeping through Europe, and Dovey was hell-bent on stopping it. She joined the Army, becoming part of the first class of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps in World War II, and eventually becoming a captain. But she noticed the hypocrisy. She was fighting for freedom abroad while she lacked those freedoms at home every day. Dovey wasn't one to let all these injustices stand.
She wanted to do something about it. That's how she ended up at Howard University School of Law. In 1947, she was just one of five women in her class. Not everyone was thrilled that Dovey had arrived. On her first day, when she registered for classes, the receptionist asked her if she was registering for her husband or her brother. The message was clear. She didn't belong there.
And Dovey being Dovey, while she was attending law school, battling racism and sexism, she also had two part-time jobs. Eventually, her male classmates couldn't help but notice she was brilliant. Dovey said they actually asked to study with her.
She did have a grip on the law. Every week, Dovey and about six other students met at her house to study together. Dovey graduated in 1950. It was one of the proudest moments in her life. But even graduation was bittersweet. Yes, she had achieved, but how far had she come given that segregation was still the law of the land?
By now, Grandma Rachel was in her 80s, but she wouldn't miss Dovey getting her diploma. Rachel and Leela took the train up from North Carolina to attend the ceremony. Dovey went to Union Station to meet them. As soon as Dovey saw her mom and her grandmother, she knew something was wrong. Grandma Rachel was crying. Trouble had found them on the train.
Dovey reserved seats for her family, but by the time they got there, all of the seats in the black car were taken, packed with families. Luggage was overflowing onto the aisle. Meanwhile, the white seats were half empty. When they went to sit there, the conductor yelled at them. He refused to honor their reserved seats. So they put them in the back.
They had to go back to the black section of the train and stand for the 10-hour ride.
Rachel stood on her mangled feet for the whole trip. From North Carolina to Virginia and Maryland, she held onto seat edges and leaned any way she could to give her feet a break. By the time they got to Washington, Grandma Rachel collapsed on the toilet seat in the bathroom. She stayed there until the train pulled into Union Station.
They caught a cab back to Dovey's apartment. When they were safely home, Dovey looked at Rachel's feet. They were bloodied and bruised. Dovey called a doctor, but she also called her law partner. This was about more than Rachel's health. This was a matter of the law.
The Southern Railway needed to be held accountable.
Several weeks later, just after graduating from law school, Dovey marched into the U.S. District Court for D.C. to file a breach of contract complaint. The railway denied Dovey's mother and grandmother seats when seats were available. It took a year, but eventually the Southern Railway settled with her. Dovey bit her lip and teared up. She cried in front of the defendant's attorney and the judge.
Yes, it was a lot of money at the time, but it hurt her to see her mother and grandmother's pain reduced to a monetary value. Fifteen years later, she'd march into that building again to defend Rae. It had been a long time, but the memory of her grandmother's injustice was fresh. This time, she wasn't looking for financial compensation. She wanted justice for Ray Crump.
Next time on Murder on the Towpath, Dovey was preparing to go to trial to save Ray Crump and continue her life's work of defending the defenseless, of passing it on. But what did Dovey or anyone really know of the woman he was accused of killing? It was obvious Mary had been well-connected in certain D.C. circles. She was related to Ben Bradley. She walked with Jackie Kennedy.
But could those connections have played a role in her death?
What if Mary's murder wasn't so random after all? From Luminary, Murder on the Towpath is a production of Film Nation Entertainment in association with Neon Hum Media. Our executive producers are me, Soledad O'Brien, Alyssa Martino, Milan Papelka, and Jonathan Hirsch. Lead producer is Shara Morris. Associate producers are Natalie Rinn and Lucy Licht. Senior editor is Catherine St. Louis.
Music and composition by Andrew Eapin. Sound design and mixing by Scott Somerville. Fact-checking by Laura Bullard. Special thanks to Allison Cohen, Sarah Vacchiano, Rose Arce, Kate Mishkin, Tanner Robbins, and Michaela Salella.
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