Am almost finished reading Mary's Mosaic (2012) by Peter Janney, the psychologist son of Wistar Janney, a former high-level CIA officer.
The younger Janney is convinced that the CIA murdered a friend of his family, Mary Pinchot Meyer, an offspring of the powerful liberal Pinchot family and one of JFK's girlfriends. Further, Peter recalls discrepancies in his dad's behavior on the day of the murder of the socialite, who was estranged from top CIA man Cord Meyer. Specifically, after talking to his mother and brother and examining later accounts of what occurred, Janney came to believe that Wistar Janney knew Pinchot Meyer was dead before the police had tentatively identified the body.
Janney's idea is that she was killed to silence her about what she knew about JFK's assassination.
Janney has done a service by drawing together much disparate information and by contributing his own discoveries, which include the fact that a "Pentagon officer" who was a witness at the ensuing murder trial shows signs of having been a professional intelligence operative, in particular the witness has what seems to be an unverifiable legend about his past.
The government's case against the poor black suspect was weak, and he was acquitted. Nevertheless, "reasonable doubt" doesn't mean that Ray Crump wasn't a strong suspect, though Janney doesn't accept that point.
Janney, who is fully focused on the fact that the coup d'etat against the Kennedy brothers could only have been pulled off by the CIA, extends this awareness to the case of Mary Myer, whom he knew personally during his childhood. Interestingly, the CIA official who had obtained propagandistic control of much of the U.S. media was none other than Cord Myer.
The fact that James Angleton was on the spot trying to retrieve Mary's diary is explicable on grounds that he was friends with Mary's sister in law, Tony Pinchot Bradlee, and her husband Ben Bradlee, the noted Washington journalist. Yet, as various 1970s inquiries discovered, Angleton had been handling the CIA's work with the Warren commission and went on to try to sell the spin to credulous writers that Lee Oswald was the shooter, but that he may have been reporting to the Cubans or the Soviets.
The fact that an intelligence operative witness materialized to bolster the case against Crump may be seen in another light. Pinchot Meyer was a powerful Washington socialite. Her friends in the Georgetown set might have used their reach to have the intelligence system provide a false witness so as "not to let that bastard get away with murder."
But what of Wistar Janey's phony behavior when he that evening feigned surprise on getting a phone call that Mary had been killed? (In fact, Peter discovered, Wistar had earlier that day telephoned Ben Bradlee and Cord Myer with the bad news.) I can imagine this scenario: a CIA Washington unit kept tabs on the police radio in the event of anything coming up that might be of intelligence interest. Hearing that a woman had been killed on a Georgetown tow path, the CIA scrambled some people to get down to the scene and get photos. When the photos were examined, she was quickly recognized and Wistar was notified because he was close friends of Cord and the Bradlees.
The identification was withheld for several hours to allow for a CIA crew to remove from Mary's apartment and art studio anything pointing to CIA connections (Cord's identity was not yet public knowledge).
The senior Janney may have been following security protocols when he played dumb about his initial knowledge of the slaying.
One more point. A tow truck driver reported the shooting after being called to repair a stalled Nash Rambler. While the police activity was in progress, the Rambler went missing and the service station hadn't yet made any records of the incident.
One possibility is that, during the confusion, the owner returned to the scene, got in his vehicle, tried it, and found that it started (perhaps it had only been "flooded"), allowing him to drive it off. Or, perhaps the CIA confiscated the car in order to have its experts go over it looking for clues. Police know not to challenge "national security" orders. (After all, this woman was a CIA official's estranged wife.)
And Janney has not put much attention on one other possibility: An angry husband. The husband is usually a chief suspect in a wife's murder. Certainly Meyer and a few associates had the means to have Pinchot Meyer killed. This would not imply a CIA conspiracy to kill her, but rather implies a small rogue operation. I do not suggest this is what happened. However, I am hesitant to endorse Janney's conspiracy theory, despite much excellent work.
So, unless I happen upon another nugget in Janney's book, I would say he has not offered a compelling case that the CIA had Pinchot Meyer hit. In fact, Janney's speculation as to how a hit crew would have operated raises a number of puzzles that I won't entertain at this point.
Nevertheless, Mary Pinchot Meyer was slain some seven months after Kennedy's killing -- a period of sudden deaths of a number of persons with possibly important knowledge concerning the JFK assassination.
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