Alice Crimmins Essay Research Paper THE ALICE

Alice Crimmins Essay, Research Paper

THE ALICE CRIMMINS CASE

Eddie. Have you got the kids.

No

Eddie don t play games with me!

I don t have them, He replied.

Eddie! Don t fool around! Do you have them.

She had begun the conversation in anger but now her voice had risen to fear.

Don t do this to me Eddie!

Their not here Alice, He said.

Eddie please don t do this to me! She was pleading

There not here Alice!

Eddie their missing! (Gross, 8).

It was Peyton Place come to the big town. The tale was murder the star was a curvy, aburn-tressed cocktail waitress charged with killing her four year old daughter. To millions of New Yorkers Alice Crimmins was a tramp responsible for an unspeakable crime. What Alice Crimmins really was a victim of what one of her lawyers called trial by innuendo, a woman persecuted for her defiant anger at a justice system more concerned with her social behavior than solving the murder of her children.

It was Wensday July 14, 1965 Lyndon Johnson had just announced that the United States was taking a decisive step into Vietnam, but another shadow had captured the headlines: Adlai Stevenson had fallen dead of a heart attack on a London street corner, and his picture taken moments before he was stricken gave a final weak smile to the public(Gross, 7).

On the morning of July 14, 1965, Edmund Crimmins reported that his two children were missing from a queens apartment where they lived with his estranged wife Alice. Police searched the neighborhood, hoping to find 5-year-old Eddie Crimmins, Jr., and 4-year-old Alice Marie Missy Crimmins alive (Gross, 12). In early afternoon, Missy s dead body was found in a vacant lot (Gross, 29).

The ground-floor window of the children s room was open, but police were more interested in Alice Crimmins reputation as a swinger. Faced with a dearth of physical evidence, detectives felt that her sexual affairs and her failure to break into tears upon immediately viewing her daughter s body made her a suspect.

Both parents indured intense police questioning about their broken marriage. A court hearing over custody of the children was to have started on July 19. Instead, the badly decomposed body of Eddie Jr. was found that day in scrub near the busy Van Wyck expressway(Gross, 94).

Mutual resentment grew between Alice Crimmins and the police who suspected her. She angrily accused them of not working to find the real killers, and stopped cooperating. Detectives and district attorneys viewed her hostility as evidence of guilt. Wiretaps, electronic surveillance, and hundreds of interviews with neighbors failed to produce any evidence. The district attorneys office tried twice to convince a grand jury to indict her (Gross, 243). This letter from Sophie Earominski made a third try successful.

Dear Mr. Hentel:

Have been reading about your bringing the Crimmins case to the grand jury and am glad to hear it.

May I please tell you of an incident that I witnessed. It may be connected and may not. But I will feel better telling it to you. This was on the night before the children were missing.

But as the press reported a handy man saw them at the window that morning so it might not be related at all.

The night was very hot and I could not sleep. I went into the living room and was looking out the window getting some air. This was at 2 a.m. A short while later, a man and a woman were walking down the street toward 72 Road. The woman was about in five feet in back of the man. She was holding what appeared to be a bundle of blankets that were white under her left arm and was holding a little child with her right hand. He hollered at her to hurry up. She told him to be quiet or someone will see us. At that moment I closed my window which squeaks and they looked up but did not see me.

The man took the white bundle and heaved it into the back seat of the car. She picked up the little baby and sat with him in the back seat of the car. This woman was then with dark hair, the man was tall, not heavy, with dark hair and a large nose. This took place under a street light so I was able to see it quite plainly. The car turned from the corner of 153 St. onto 72 Road and out to Kissena boulevard.

Please forgive me for not signing my name, but I am afraid to.

Wishing you the best of luck.

A reader

P.S.- About one hour later I thought I saw just the man getting into a late model white car (Gross, 121-122).

Alice Crimmins was accused of murdering Missy-there was not enough evidence left of Eddie Jr. s body to support a murder charge.

Her trial began in May 1968, nearly three years after the Crimmins children dissapered. Prosecutors called Dr. Milton Helpren to the stand. The renowned forensic pathologist testified that Missy Crimmins was strangled. He held that food in the child s stomach could not have been ingested more than two hours before her death. Helpren s testimony was irreconcilable with Alice Crimmins insistence that she fed both children at 7:30 p.m., two hours before she put them to bed, and over four hours before she midnight when she last saw them alive (Asbury, 94).

One of Alice Crimmins lovers a contractor named Joe Rorech remembered her telling him a month befo

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