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
You see, pretty different from the impromptu diary-searching party that Rosenbaum described.
Maybe so. But all seemed to be in agreement that Angleton eventually ended up with it. To this day, Peter Janney claims only the CIA knows what's really inside Mary's diary. And he suggests it was much more than just an artist's sketchbook.
As part of his book tour, Janney was interviewed by the Boston Globe about what exactly Mary's diary might have said. He said the diary contained incriminating information about Angleton and the Dallas assassination. That's why he had to take it. But that's just speculation. Meanwhile, Lance Morrow puts it this way.
And that brings us to another mystery. An odd phone call placed the afternoon Mary died. As you recall, Mary's body was officially identified the night of her murder. Ben Bradley went to the morgue to vouch that Mary was Mary. In his 1965 courtroom testimony, Bradley claimed the first time he realized Mary was dead was at the morgue.
Years later, though, it would become clear that both Bradley and the CIA knew about Mary's death well before sunset.
Why would a couple of top CIA officials know about Mary's death before her identity was confirmed? Cicely Angleton says she just happened to hear a news bulletin that October day for reasons unknown. Just like Lance Morrow, she heard about the murder of a white woman on the Georgetown towpath shortly after noon. Cicely Angleton knew Mary liked to take walks there around midday.
So upon hearing about the murdered woman, she feared the worst and called her husband, James Angleton, at the CIA.
That account of why the CIA knew of Mary's death early is innocent enough. But another call is far more damning. This call came from within the CIA. It was made by a CIA officer named Wister Janney. If that name sounds familiar, well, that's because you heard it before. Wister Janney is Peter Janney's father.
And one of the linchpins of Peter Janney's argument that the CIA killed Mary is connected to this phone call his father made that day. In his memoir, Ben Bradley reports that he actually learned of Mary's murder when he received a phone call just after lunch from a friend. That friend was Wister Janney, also employed by the CIA. Like we mentioned earlier, the Janneys grew up with the Myers.
Peter Janney's best friend had been Mary's middle son, Michael, who was tragically hit by a car. And so, years later, when Peter Janney discovered, with horror, that his father had known about the murder hours before anyone else... With that, it dawned on him that his father seemed to know in advance that Mary would be murdered.
And so, when Peter read his father had made the phone call to Ben Bradley that afternoon, his conviction that the CIA was behind Mary's death and that his own father was in on the plot became more than a conspiracy. For Jannie, it became a horrifying truth. It tied what he had lived as a child to new information he learned as an adult. For him, it cracked open the case. Listen, we're humans.
It's really hard to accept that bad things happen randomly, that Mary could get shot on the towpath for no good reason. It makes sense why Janney would take one new piece of information and derive from it a much bigger meaning. Because, as Dr. Pierre says, people who believe in conspiracy theories also tend to believe...
Okay, fine. Outstanding questions about the diary and a mysterious phone call aside, say the CIA did kill Mary. How would it have gone down? You might not be surprised. Janney has a detailed answer for that, too. His theory revolves around another man who claims he was on the towpath the day of Mary's murder, a man named William Mitchell.
It would turn out Mitchell was just the kind of character that would make Janney believe Mary's death is tied to a larger web. You see, William Mitchell had gone to the D.C. police the day after Mary's murder to say that he'd been on the towpath that fateful day. Remember the jogger from episode two? Down on the towpath, Dovey and her law partners recreated the scene just before the murder.
One of them played Ray, another Mary, and another this jogger, William Mitchell. Mitchell said he worked at the Pentagon, specifically for the Department of Defense, just a few miles down the road from Georgetown. And he told the police at midday, just like Mary, he had left work for his daily constitutional.
Now, we haven't mentioned this yet, but Mitchell also testified at Ray's trial about what he had seen that day. He said in court that on his jog, he'd passed a woman whose clothing matched Mary's, and shortly after, he passed a black man following her from behind. He described Mary's clothes precisely. Then he described Raymond Crump's build and clothing.
Mitchell helped the prosecution put Ray Crump Jr. on the towpath. He'd done his part to help the prosecution's case. And he was an upstanding Army officer who worked at the Pentagon. So the prosecution couldn't ask for a more credible witness, right? Well, not exactly. Janney and his research team — yeah, by now he had a team — found that Mitchell's military records didn't make sense.
Mitchell's stories about his past, his whereabouts, and his official military records contradicted each other, time and time again. Fishy. But it wasn't just that. No one could verify Mitchell had even been on the towpath the day of Mary's murder. And Janney and his researchers found that Mitchell had changed his name throughout the years.
At some point, he also started using a second social security number. To Janney, that was extra fishy. Janney even went so far as to serve William Mitchell with a complaint, alleging that he had been part of a conspiracy to murder Mary Meyer. It required Mitchell to appear in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.
When the two men finally met, Janney reported that William Mitchell answered, "'I don't remember,' or, "'I don't remember that,' to nearly every single question he was asked about his past and about the day of Mary's murder." Assuming what Janney says is true, that's a bit odd. I mean, to not remember anything?
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