Gotta admit, I never have heard this one before.

Ten months after JFK’s assassination, Mary Pinchot Meyer was gunned down. Hours later, the CIA’s counterintelligence chief was caught picking the lock to her art studio to seize her diary.

A Georgetown socialite, painter, ex-wife of a top CIA official, and a rumored lover of the president, Meyer had been deeply shaken by Kennedy’s death in November 1963. While the nation grieved, she became convinced that the assassination was not the work of a lone gunman. She began quietly asking questions, purportedly telling friends like Timothy Leary that the murder was a conspiracy orchestrated by powerful elements within the government.

Less than a year later, on October 12, 1964, Meyer’s search for answers came to a violent end. She was taking her daily walk along the towpath of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in Georgetown. Just after noon, a mechanic working on a nearby car heard a woman cry out for help, followed by two gunshots. Meyer was found dead, shot once in the head and once in the back at close range.

Police arrested Ray Crump Jr., a young man found wandering nearby completely soaked, though he claimed he had fallen into the Potomac River while fishing. No murder weapon was ever found, and forensic evidence failed to link Crump to the crime. His lawyer successfully argued that the police case was entirely circumstantial, leading to his acquittal. The murder remains officially unsolved.

The aftermath of her death read like a spy novel. When Meyer’s brother-in-law, Newsweek editor Ben Bradlee, rushed to her Georgetown art studio to secure her private diary, he arrived to find James Jesus Angleton—the aforementioned CIA chief and a friend of Meyer’s—already there. Eventually, Bradlee’s wife found the diary and handed it over to Angleton under the agreement that he would destroy it. Years later, Angleton admitted he had kept the journal, which was said to contain details of her affair with Kennedy. Its contents were never fully publicized, cementing Meyer’s legacy as a central figure in Cold War conspiracy lore.

Hm. Interesting, veddy. More:

When Mary Meyer died, no one knew about her affair with John Kennedy, or about her ex-husband’s job managing the CIA’s clandestine services. In newspapers, Cord Meyer—wounded World War II hero and young idealist who helped found the United World Federalists—was identified as an author, with a vague government job. The papers noted that Mary, 43, was a Georgetown artist, born to a wealthy Pennsylvania family, daughter of Amos Pinchot, the Progressive lawyer, and niece of Gifford Pinchot, the conservationist and Teddy Roosevelt’s chief forester. Her younger sister, Tony, was married to Ben Bradlee, then of Newsweek, later of the Washington Post. It was Bradlee who identified the body at the morgue.

Then other news supervened. There was a presidential election coming, Johnson (who had recently signed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution) versus Goldwater (the warmonger, according to the 1964 narrative). Khrushchev was deposed. China exploded its first nuclear bomb.

But over the years, sensational fragments of the story (JFK, CIA) turned up. Inevitably, conspiracy theories emerged. Who killed Mary—really? Was Ray Crump set up? By whom? Why?

As real evidence went mute, the public imagination worked on two possible narratives.

The first was what might be called the Oliver Stone Solution—that is, to posit a conspiracy elaborate enough and sinister enough to do imaginative and, as it were, cinematic justice to the murder of a woman with such suggestive, powerful connections. The journalist Nina Burleigh sifted through plot possibilities in her excellent book on Meyer, A Very Private Woman (1998), and quoted the critic Morris Dickstein on the temptations of the 1960s’ paranoid style—”a sense at once joyful and threatening that things are not what they seem, that reality is mysteriously overorganized and can be decoded if only we attend to the hundred little hints and byways that beckon to us.”

Thus in the Stone Solution, popular on the Internet, Meyer was done in by “the same sons of bitches that killed John F. Kennedy,” as one writer, C. David Heymann, claims he was told by the dying Cord Meyer. Another writer, Leo Damore (also dead), argued that Crump “was the perfect patsy, better even than Lee Harvey Oswald. Mary Meyer was killed by a well-trained professional hit man, very likely somebody connected to the CIA”—the idea being that she knew “too much for her own good.”

The second scenario might be called the Richard Wright Solution, after the author of the 1940 novel Native Son, whose protagonist, Bigger Thomas, is tormented by the oppressions of poverty and racism: “To Bigger and his kind white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead, or like a deep swirling river stretching suddenly at one’s feet in the dark.” In this scenario, Crump one day left his home in black Southeast Washington, crossed the segregated city, passing the Capitol and the White House, and entered white Georgetown. And there—on the home turf of mandarins, of Joe Alsop and Kay Graham and Scotty Reston and Dean Acheson—his path intersected for a moment with Mary Meyer’s.

You could choose your movie. Solution One drew Mary Meyer into the world of James Ellroy, the grassy knoll, Jim Garrison, the Mafia, Judith Exner, Fair Play for Cuba, Operation Mongoose and so on. Solution Two inserted Mary Meyer by accident into an entirely different story: the primal drama of race in America.

The author gropes further with it from there, trying to make it all make sense somehow. As with JFK’s death, though (not to even mention the Epstein foofaraw—YIKES!!), I’d bet way too much water has gone under the bridge for us to ever know for sure the real truth about what happened—memories have faded; investigators, eyewitnesses, and/or protagonists have passed away; evidence been discarded or otherwise lost; public interest wandered.