'Sexpot' trial tale: Crimmins custody fight in 1960s ends in death
BY Mara Bovsun
SPECIAL TO THE NEWS
Sunday, June 26th 2011, 4:00 AM
The children had gone missing.
That was all that their father, Edmund Crimmins, could say when he called police around 10 a.m. on July 14, 1965. His blond, blue-eyed daughter, Missy, 4, and her brother, Eddie, 5, had vanished from the first-floor apartment in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, where they lived with their mother, Alice, 26. The couple was separated, and had been living apart for months.
The wife's story was that she had tucked the children in around 9 p.m. the night before. At midnight, when she peeked in on them, they were snug in their beds, fast asleep.
By morning, when she checked again, they were gone.
Alice called her estranged husband to see if he had them. The couple was in a nasty custody battle, scheduled to come to court within the week.
But they were not with their dad, who rushed to the apartment to search and call police.
Alice told police that she always locked the children in their room. The purpose was to keep Eddie, who was a little chubby, from getting up in the night and raiding the fridge. With no way to open the door, their exit, whether they were snatched or decided on an adventure, had to be via the window.
"Fishy," was how the investigators described the story, especially in light of the custody battle. Also, police who questioned Alice thought her too calm for a mother facing her worst nightmare.
Her appearance didn't win any sympathy either. Shapely and flame-haired, she greeted officers in eye-popping turquoise hip-huggers with a bright, flowery blouse. Her makeup was perfect, and every strawberry-blond strand was in place.
One detective summed it up: "She looks like a cold bitch."
A veil of suspicion fell over her, as more than 150 officers, some in helicopters, combed the area for signs of the lost children.
A few hours after Edmund made the missing-persons call, a boy playing in a lot across the street from the Crimmins apartment found Missy. Her tiny corpse, with her pajama bottoms wrapped around her neck, was in a clump of weeds.
When shown the body, Alice did not cry, and that heightened police suspicions.
But there was nothing upon which to hang a murder conviction.
Five days later, another tiny corpse, decomposed beyond recognition, turned up alongside an expressway. It was Eddie.
By this time, police were certain that the children had died by their mother's hand. They had no solid evidence, but there was simply something about Alice.
Just 18 when she married her tall, handsome airline mechanic, Alice quickly tired of the domestic life and looked elsewhere for excitement. She found it in the arms and beds of a string of lovers.
Driven nuts by her cheating, Edmund moved out, but he kept tabs on her activities, bugging her bedroom so he could hide in the basement and listen in on her lovemaking. He decided her swinging life was not a healthy environment for his children, and sued for custody.
BOTH PARENTS, it seemed, had motive for taking the children, but police lost interest in Edmund after he agreed to take a polygraph test. At first, Alice did too, but then changed her mind, mid-question, and ran shrieking from the room.
This might have seemed as good as a confession, but detectives still failed to dig up anything to justify an arrest.
For about 18 months, Alice was under a microscope, her phone bugged, her every movement monitored. For detectives it was quite a peep show. Alice was a veritable garden of vice. She took a job as a cocktail waitress, she talked tough, she drank, she made a fine art of bed-hopping.
An anonymous letter to the Queens district attorney finally got the case moving. It was from one of Crimmins' neighbors, who recalled an incident from that hot, July night when the children disappeared. The writer had gone to the window for a breath of fresh air and saw three people - a woman fitting Crimmins' description, a man and a boy - walking toward a car. The man had a bundle under his arm, mummy-wrapped, and about the size of a 5-year-old girl.
Detectives tracked down the writer, Sophie Earomirski, and convinced her to testify. They also found one of Alice's lovers, who said she admitted her daughter's murder to him.
Newspapers called it the "Sexpot" trial when Crimmins came before a jury on May 6, 1968, for the killing of her daughter. With scant concrete evidence, prosecutors hammered away at her promiscuity. An all-male jury found her guilty of manslaughter, and she was sentenced to five to 20.
The conviction was thrown out on appeal.
A second trial, in 1971, ended with Crimmins convicted of first-degree murder in the death of her son, and first-degree manslaughter for the daughter, which carried a life sentence. Off she went to prison again, only to be released two years later, when both convictions were reversed. In 1975, the manslaughter conviction was reinstated, and she was back behind bars again.
She did not stay there long. By the end of 1977, Crimmins was paroled and married to a wealthy contractor. She was under parole supervision until 1993.
Crimmins dropped from public view, but her story has lived on in true-crime books, movies, plays and fiction. Her saga launched the mystery writing career of best-selling author Mary Higgins Clark, who based her first suspense novel on the case. She called it "Where Are the Children?"
JUSTICE STORY - NY DAILY NEWS
BY Mara Bovsun
SPECIAL TO THE NEWS
Sunday, June 26th 2011, 4:00 AM
The children had gone missing.
That was all that their father, Edmund Crimmins, could say when he called police around 10 a.m. on July 14, 1965. His blond, blue-eyed daughter, Missy, 4, and her brother, Eddie, 5, had vanished from the first-floor apartment in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, where they lived with their mother, Alice, 26. The couple was separated, and had been living apart for months.
The wife's story was that she had tucked the children in around 9 p.m. the night before. At midnight, when she peeked in on them, they were snug in their beds, fast asleep.
By morning, when she checked again, they were gone.
Alice called her estranged husband to see if he had them. The couple was in a nasty custody battle, scheduled to come to court within the week.
But they were not with their dad, who rushed to the apartment to search and call police.
Alice told police that she always locked the children in their room. The purpose was to keep Eddie, who was a little chubby, from getting up in the night and raiding the fridge. With no way to open the door, their exit, whether they were snatched or decided on an adventure, had to be via the window.
"Fishy," was how the investigators described the story, especially in light of the custody battle. Also, police who questioned Alice thought her too calm for a mother facing her worst nightmare.
Her appearance didn't win any sympathy either. Shapely and flame-haired, she greeted officers in eye-popping turquoise hip-huggers with a bright, flowery blouse. Her makeup was perfect, and every strawberry-blond strand was in place.
One detective summed it up: "She looks like a cold bitch."
A veil of suspicion fell over her, as more than 150 officers, some in helicopters, combed the area for signs of the lost children.
A few hours after Edmund made the missing-persons call, a boy playing in a lot across the street from the Crimmins apartment found Missy. Her tiny corpse, with her pajama bottoms wrapped around her neck, was in a clump of weeds.
When shown the body, Alice did not cry, and that heightened police suspicions.
But there was nothing upon which to hang a murder conviction.
Five days later, another tiny corpse, decomposed beyond recognition, turned up alongside an expressway. It was Eddie.
By this time, police were certain that the children had died by their mother's hand. They had no solid evidence, but there was simply something about Alice.
Just 18 when she married her tall, handsome airline mechanic, Alice quickly tired of the domestic life and looked elsewhere for excitement. She found it in the arms and beds of a string of lovers.
Driven nuts by her cheating, Edmund moved out, but he kept tabs on her activities, bugging her bedroom so he could hide in the basement and listen in on her lovemaking. He decided her swinging life was not a healthy environment for his children, and sued for custody.
BOTH PARENTS, it seemed, had motive for taking the children, but police lost interest in Edmund after he agreed to take a polygraph test. At first, Alice did too, but then changed her mind, mid-question, and ran shrieking from the room.
This might have seemed as good as a confession, but detectives still failed to dig up anything to justify an arrest.
For about 18 months, Alice was under a microscope, her phone bugged, her every movement monitored. For detectives it was quite a peep show. Alice was a veritable garden of vice. She took a job as a cocktail waitress, she talked tough, she drank, she made a fine art of bed-hopping.
An anonymous letter to the Queens district attorney finally got the case moving. It was from one of Crimmins' neighbors, who recalled an incident from that hot, July night when the children disappeared. The writer had gone to the window for a breath of fresh air and saw three people - a woman fitting Crimmins' description, a man and a boy - walking toward a car. The man had a bundle under his arm, mummy-wrapped, and about the size of a 5-year-old girl.
Detectives tracked down the writer, Sophie Earomirski, and convinced her to testify. They also found one of Alice's lovers, who said she admitted her daughter's murder to him.
Newspapers called it the "Sexpot" trial when Crimmins came before a jury on May 6, 1968, for the killing of her daughter. With scant concrete evidence, prosecutors hammered away at her promiscuity. An all-male jury found her guilty of manslaughter, and she was sentenced to five to 20.
The conviction was thrown out on appeal.
A second trial, in 1971, ended with Crimmins convicted of first-degree murder in the death of her son, and first-degree manslaughter for the daughter, which carried a life sentence. Off she went to prison again, only to be released two years later, when both convictions were reversed. In 1975, the manslaughter conviction was reinstated, and she was back behind bars again.
She did not stay there long. By the end of 1977, Crimmins was paroled and married to a wealthy contractor. She was under parole supervision until 1993.
Crimmins dropped from public view, but her story has lived on in true-crime books, movies, plays and fiction. Her saga launched the mystery writing career of best-selling author Mary Higgins Clark, who based her first suspense novel on the case. She called it "Where Are the Children?"
JUSTICE STORY - NY DAILY NEWS