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hair, the clothing he had been wearing that day—the beige-tan zippered jacket, the dark-plaid golf cap, dark corduroy trousers, black shoes—and an open package of Pall Mall cigarettes. A complete list of all persons at the scene, interviewed, or connected with the crime would also be produced. It was straightforward enough. What struck Roundtree as ominous, however, was the signature on the statement of evidence. Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Duncan had been replaced by one of the toughest prosecutors in the criminal justice department: Alfred (“Al”) L. Hantman.
    “Oh, brother!” Dovey remembered thinking. “What are they doing to me!”
    Her heart sank as she contemplated what was before her. 3 With Hantman onthe case, she knew they were bringing in the heavy artillery. As Assistant Chief of the Criminal Division in the Justice Department, Hantman would have a full staff, as well as a small army of ancillary personnel.
    Alfred L. Hantman was, indeed, a big gun. Seasoned, tough, savvy, he was a 1948 graduate of George Washington University Law School and had been an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. He was counted among the top three attorneys in the criminal division of the Justice Department, where his career would span twenty-three years. Hantman had already tried a range of felonies, including murders; observers described him as “a screamer and a bully” in the courtroom. Tall, prepossessing, an imposing figure with bristling eyebrows and an extraordinary legal mind capable of prodigious feats of memory, he conveyed a formidable authority; and defense attorneys were known to work into the wee hours of the morning preparing to face him in a courtroom. Respected for being “a worker in the vineyard,” Al Hantman was not, however, part of the old-boy aristocratic Ivy League club to which his boss, U. S. Attorney David Acheson, belonged.
    Dovey Roundtree was well aware of Hantman’s reputation, and she was troubled by this turn of events. With Hantman’s appearance for the prosecution, she recalled later, she believed that “they were out to kill this boy.” 4 In the District of Columbia, first-degree murder carried the death penalty. What Roundtree didn’t know at the time was that a confidential internal Justice Department memo, dated February 24, 1965—five months before the start of the trial—noted the following: “[Hantman’s] case is very weak from an evidentiary standpoint, and he needs all the evidence that he possibly can get to support his case.” 5 (See Appendix 2 .)
    Of course, Al Hantman was aware that his case against Crump was entirely circumstantial. For that reason, he would attempt every possible maneuver to gain advantage in the months leading up to trial, including dueling with the defense over pretrial motions, evidentiary hearings, and the admissibility of various pieces of evidence. The rulings were almost always in Hantman’s favor, an advantage that he maximized, and sometimes embellished. In one pretrial conference, Hantman went so far as to allege that Ray Crump had cleaned Mary Meyer’s house—a complete fabrication that nonetheless introduced the possibility of the defendant’s prior association with the victim. In response, Dovey Roundtree produced every single payroll receipt that Crump had received from the Brown Construction Company. In doing so, she made it clear that she would countenance no further deceptions of that sort. 6
    Making matters worse for Roundtree, the judge assigned to the trial was an unknown quantity. The Honorable Howard F. Corcoran had just been appointed by President Johnson to be a U.S. District Court Judge for the District of Columbia. It was an appointment that surprised many. At his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing, when asked about his actual trial experience, the prospective federal judge replied, “Zero.” In spite of the embarrassed silence that followed, his nomination was approved. One