Where is eddie crimmins today

Alice needed to call her lawyer to go through the upcoming custody hearing and discuss further issues. The maid had told the court that Alice had partied for days on end, leaving the maid to look after the children. Her lawyer was busy and told her to call back later when he was free, so instead, Alice went to the store to pick up dinner for that night. She returned with soda, veal and beans, fed her children and called her lawyer again.

Although the night was warm and the apartment had air conditioning, Alice wanted to see if Eddie was at his apartment, so the three of them went for a drive. They returned after an hour, and Alice bathed her children and got them ready for bed. Once the children were asleep, Alice phoned Tony Grace, a wealthy contractor and one of her suitors. Later that night, Alice received a call from another friend, Joe Rorech.

He was beginning to fall apart, and his drinking had caused problems in his personal life and business. Joe asked Alice to come and have a drink with him, but she declined. At midnight, Alice took Eddie jr to the bathroom, and when they returned to the room, she helped him back into bed.

Detective Piering queried the strange placement of the lock, and Alice told him that her son often woke up in the middle of the night and ate the refrigerator's contents. It was a huge surprise to her owner. Alice fell asleep and woke up around 2. She finally went to bed at around 3. Eddie was interviewed by Detective George Martin.

Usually, a quiet beer drinker, the order of gin and tonics and his loud, flowing conversation with the barman left people wondering whether he was giving himself an alibi.

After hearing both accounts, Piering grew more convinced that this woman had done something to her children, now he just needed to prove it. While being questioned, their home was searched and processed poorly by forensics. There were few images taken of the crime scene due to a lack of instruction from officers to the photographer. Piering only had one suspect, and that was Alice Crimmins. Missy was found in a vacant lot, and she was still wearing her pyjamas.

Alice collapsed to the floor and cried, but Piering told the jury during his testimony that Alice stopped sobbing as soon as the cameras were turned off. There were also carrots, beans, potato, seeds and chewing gum in her digestive system. No suspects were ever identified, and the longer the case went on, the more Piering believed Alice had killed her children.

Both parents were questioned constantly as the case unfolded and were each told by Piering to give the other up for a lighter sentence, but neither folded; there was nothing to admit.

The case seemingly went cold, and everything returned to a new normal. Alice and Eddie moved back together to comfort each other through the grieving process, but Alice continued to date other men. Life continued for everyone except Detective Piering and his team of officers.

They recorded whatever came from the bugged apartment, including every phone call, every visitor, each conversation and all sexual liaisons in the apartment. Piering was convinced that Alice would eventually admit to killing her children, so officers sat at their posts all day, every day for nearly three years. He wanted to know about their injuries and the findings made about the medical examiner.

He appeared to be keeping an eye on the investigation. At some point, Eddie was asked by police to take a lie detector test, which he agreed to, but the day before he was due at the station, he visited the library. He spent the whole day in the building, reading every book about polygraphs. The next day, he passed the test. Knowing that Eddie had planted a crude 'bug' on her telephone, she was hoping to retaliate by finding him to be living with a woman.

She drove around for more than an hour until it was almost dark and then gave up the search. Upon returning home, Alice prepared the children for bed about 9 p. Theresa Costello, aged fourteen, Alice's former babysitter, later told the police that it was at this very moment that, passing below the bedroom window on her way to a babysitting job, she heard the Crimmins children saying their prayers. Alice brought a replacement screen from her room to the children's bedroom but noticed that it had been fouled by her dog, Brandy.

She therefore reset the children's punctured screen in the window without bothering to bolt it into place. Mindful of the coming agency visit, she disposed of wine and liquor bottles and made a pile of old clothing; by p. The program did not make her forget that Tony Grace had not returned the call she had made earlier in the day. She reached him at a Bronx bar and to her jealous questions he responded that he was alone.

After she hung up, Alice received a call from a man Grace had apparently replaced in her affections, a house renovator named Joe Rorech. For a while they had shared the favors of Joe Rorech, but "Tiger" had soon moved on to new attachments. In their conversation last night, Joe Rorech asked Alice to join him at a bar in Huntington, Long Island, but she evaded the invitation, pleading the unavailability of a babysitter.

After talking to Joe, Alice returned to her television set. At midnight she took little Eddie to the bathroom but could not wake Missy; she thought she had re-latched the bedroom door. The door was kept locked, she explained, to keep Eddie from raiding the refrigerator. Afterwards, Alice took the dog Brandy for a walk, then sat on the front stoop for a while. She told Piering that she may not have bolted the front door at the time.

When at last she was getting ready for bed, her husband called and angered her by repeating the maid's claim that Alice owed her money. Alice calmed down by taking the dog out again and, after a bath, went to sleep between and 4 a. Alice and Eddie, childhood sweethearts, had been married seven years. They were reasonably happy for a while but, soon after the birth of their son, they quarreled frequently about Eddie's staying out late working or drinking with friends. After Missy was born, Alice decided to have no more children and Eddie, brought up a good Catholic as was she never forgave her after he found birth control devices in her purse.

Their relationship went from bad to worse until, on June 22, , he went to the Family Court to seek custody of the two children. By then, the couple were already separated, the children living on with Alice at the Regal Gardens. The custody petition charged that, immediately after the separation, Alice "began to indulge herself openly and brazenly in sex as she had done furtively before the separation.

The following morning, the children awake to see a strange man in the house. Combining a high degree of jealousy with a flair for the technology of snooping, Eddie had devoted many of his leisure hours to surveillance of her relations with men.

He had much to observe, for when Alice gave up her secretarial work to become a waitress at a series of Long Island restaurants and bars, her opportunities for male acquaintance multiplied.

To keep his compulsive watch, Eddie bugged her telephone and installed a microphone in her bedroom which he could monitor from a listening post he had established in the basement below. Once he had burst in on Alice and a usually overdressed waiter named Carl Andrade, who had fled naked out of the window to his car. Eddie liked to think that the purpose of his spying was to gather evidence for the custody case, but he ultimately admitted that he had often invaded Alice's apartment when she was out just to be near her "personal things.

Eddie's preoccupation with his wife's love life dominated his activities on July 13, as he recounted them to the police. Afterwards he drank three beers in the clubhouse with a friend and watched the New York Mets baseball game on television, leaving around 2 p. He then drove to Huntington to see whether Alice was visiting Joe Rorech but was disappointed to find no sign of her four-year-old Mercury convertible there. He arrived home at 5 p. Then, about 11 p. John's University, bought a pizza and a large bottle of Pepsi Cola, and returned home.

Alice, though, was still very much on his mind. After driving back to the Union Turnpike and drinking gin and tonic at a bar until a. He went home and called up Alice to talk about the maid. When Alice hung up, he watched a movie on television, read briefly and fell asleep by 4 a. A detective who checked out Eddie's story found that the movie he claimed to have seen on the CBS channel had actually been on much earlier.

In addition to questioning Alice, Jerry Piering, a fledgling in his job, directed the police inspection and photographing of the apartment, apparently with more enthusiasm than expertise.

Piering later claimed that when he first came into the children's room, he observed a thin lawyer of dust on the bureau top, which in his mind eliminated the possibility that the children had left the room through the window since they would have had to cross over the bureau.

However, technicians had covered the top of the bureau with powder for detecting fingerprints before the bureau could be photographed in its original condition.

It was Piering's further recollection that when he had moved a lamp on the bureau, it had left a circle in the layer of dust. This story was later disputed by Alice's brother, John Burke, and others, who agreed that the lamp on the bureau had tripod legs.

Also, many people had come into the room before Piering arrived; Eddie Crimmins had leaned out of the window to look for the missing children, and, of course, Alice on the previous evening had removed and replaced the screen; it seemed unlikely that Piering's dust film would have remained undisturbed amid all this activity. In any event, neither the layer of dust nor the impression left by the lamp base was noted in Piering's first reports. In the early afternoon of July 14, , the Crimmins case was transformed from mysterious disappearance into homicide.

A nine-year-old boy, Jay Silverman, found Missy's body in an open lot on nd Street, about eight blocks from the Regal Gardens. A pyjama top, knotted into two ligatures, was loosely tied around her bruised neck. An autopsy, performed with the participation of Dr. Milton Helpern, New York City's distinguished Chief Medical Examiner, found no evidence of sexual assault; hemorrhages in the mucous membranes in the throat and vocal cords confirmed that Missy had been asphyxiated.

The contents of the stomach were sent to an expert, who reported finding, among other things, a macaroni-like substance. This discovery rang a bell with Detective Piering, who recalled that on the morning of July 14 he had seen in Alice's trash can a package that had held frozen manicotti and had also noticed a plate of leftover manicotti in her refrigerator. However, none of this evidence had been preserved -- nor had Piering's discoveries been referred to in his contemporaneous reports.

Following the discovery of Missy's body, the search for young Eddie intensified. A false alarm was raised in Cunningham Park when what looked like a blond-headed body turned out to be a discarded doll. On Monday morning, July 19, Vernon Warnecke and his son, walking together to look at a treehouse used by the children in the neighborhood, found Eddie Crimmins on an embankment overlooking the Van Wyck Expressway.

The boy's body was eaten away by rats and insects and in an advanced state of decay. The site was about a mile from Alice Crimmins's apartment and close to the grounds of the New York World's Fair that was then in progress. After the children were buried, Alice and her husband, reunited by their tragedy, faced a relentless police investigation which explored many trails, always only to return to Alice.

Detectives pursued reports of strange intruders in the Crimmins neighborhood, including a so-called "pants burglar" who broke into homes only to steal men's trousers. A closer look was taken at the boyfriends whose names filled Alice's black book.

He now stated that he had driven over the Whitestone Bridge to a restaurant called Ripples on the Water with a group of "bowling girls," young married women who partied around town under the pretext that they were going bowling.

Grace maintained that he had stayed away from Alice during the period of the custody battle and had not seen her much recently. She had called him several times on July 13 but he was preoccupied with business and had taken his wife to dinner without remembering to call Alice back. At 11 p. He had put her off by telling her that he was about to leave and had denied her well-founded suspicion that he was with the bowling girls. Joe Rorech told Detective Phil Brady that he had called Alice twice on the night of the disappearance, first after 10 p.

Rorech had been drinking all night and admitted he might have misdialed the number. On December 6, the police administered the first of two sodium pentothal "truth tests" to Rorech. Satisfied with the results, and finding Rorech's self-confidence weakened by business reverses, they conscripted him as a spy.

Joe took Alice to motel rooms where recorders had been planted, but their conversations contained nothing of interest. At first Eddie Crimmins had been more inclined to cooperate with the police than Alice. He submitted to a session with the lie detector, and persuaded Alice to take the test. However, after she agreed and the preliminary questions were completed, she refused to continue.

With the exception of Detective Brady, the police now decided to forget about Eddie and concentrate on Alice. Before the Crimminses moved into a new three-room apartment in Queens to avoid the eyes of their unwanted public, the police, succeeding to the role long played by Alice's jealous husband, planted ultrasensitive microphones and tapped the telephone wires.

Detectives monitored the apartment around the clock from the third floor pharmacy of a neighboring hospital, but could not pick up a single incriminating statement. Their failure was not remarkable since Alice seemed well aware of the police presence, beginning many of her conversations, "Drop dead, you guys!

As their high-tech recording devices picked up Alice's cries of physical need, her pursuers became more certain of her guilt, convinced as they were that grief for the dead children would demand an adjournment of the flesh. According to reporter Kenneth Gross, who has written the principal account of the case, police investigators vented their hostility against Alice by interfering with the love affairs that they were recording so assiduously. When the tireless eavesdroppers overheard Joe Rorech and Alice making love, they informed Eddie Crimmins, who promptly called and was assured by Alice that she was alone.

The police, hoping for a confrontation between lover and outraged husband, flattened Rorech's tires, but he managed to have his car towed safely out of the neighborhood before Eddie got home.

When Alice moved out of the apartment to live with an Atlanta man for whom she was working as a secretary, the police thoughtfully advised the man's wife, and when she came to New York, helped her destroy Alice's clothing. Undaunted by this harassment, Alice reappeared in her familiar nightspots, now as a customer instead of cocktail waitress. The investigation dragged on for a year and a half without result, and meanwhile there was a growing public clamor for action.

At this point New York politics intervened to step up the pace of events: Nat Hentel, an interim Republican appointment as Queens District Attorney, was soundly defeated for re-election and decided to convene a grand jury before his term of office expired. The grand jury failed to return an indictment, and a second grand jury impaneled under Hentel's Democratic successor "Tough Tommy" Mackell also disbanded without indictment in May of the following year. Then, on September 1, , Assistant District Attorney James Mosley went before still another grand jury to present the testimony of a "mystery witness," who was soon identified as Sophie Earomirski.

Sophie's original entrance into the case had been anonymous. On November 30, , she had written to then District Attorney Hentel telling him how happy she was to read that he was bringing the Crimmins case to a grand jury. She reported an "incident" she had witnessed while looking out of her living room window on the early morning of July 14, Shortly after 2 a. The woman, who was lagging about five feet behind the man, was holding what appeared to be a bundle of blankets shining white under her left arm, and with her right hand led a little boy walking at her side.

The man shouted at her to hurry up and she told him "to be quiet or someone will see us. The woman picked up the little boy and sat with him on the back seat; she had dark hair, and her companion was tall, not heavy, with dark hair and a large nose. Sophie apologized for signing merely as "A Reader. Shortly after he was entrusted with the Crimmins case by Mackell, Mosley came across Sophie's letter, and the hunt for her began. The police obtained samples of the handwriting of tenants living in garden apartments from which the scene described in the letter could have been viewed, and they identified Sophie, who recognized Alice's photograph as resembling the woman she had seen.

Sophie's testimony before the third grand jury was decisive, and Queens County finally had its long-coveted indictment, charging Alice Crimmins with the murder of Missy. The prosecution had persuaded the grand jury that there was reasonable cause to believe that the bundle of blankets Sophie had seen contained the little girl's dead body.

On May 9, , the trial began in the ground floor courtroom of the Queens County Criminal Court Building amid widely varying perceptions of the defendant.

To the sensationalist press, Alice was a "modern-day Medea" who had sacrificed her children to a deadly hatred for her husband, and the pulp magazine Front Page Detective , invoking another witch from antiquity, called her an "erring wife, a Circe, an amoral woman whose many affairs appeared symptomatic of American's Sex Revolution. Between these two wings of public opinion there was a dominant vision of Alice as a man-hunting cocktail waitress, and her longer years as housewife, mother and secretary receded into the background.

The prosecution case was presented for the most part by James Mosley's aspiring young assistant, Anthony Lombardino, but Mosley himself scored the first important point while questioning Dr. Milton Helpern. The forensic expert testified that the discovery of as much food as was found in Missy's stomach was consistent with a post-ingestion period of less than two hours.

If Helpern was right, then assuming that Alice had been the last to feed the children, she could not have seen them alive at midnight, as she claimed. Lombardino insisted that the prize job of examining the prosecution's star witness, Joe Rorech, was his -- his alone.

Since the police had first enlisted Rorech's aid, Joe's difficulties had continued to mount; his marriage was in trouble and he had been upset by a brief period of arrest as a material witness. In his testimony he made it plain that he had lost any vestige of loyalty to his former mistress. The defense, led by Harold Harrison, was unmoved when Rorech indirectly quoted Alice, "She did not want Eddie to have the children.

She would rather see the children dead than Eddie have them. Rorech, though, had something more to disclose that would change the course of the trial.

Though the police had learned nothing incriminating from electronic eavesdropping, Joe testified to a long conversation with Alice at a motel in Nassau County. After weeping inconsolably, she had said again and again that the children "will understand, they know it was for the best.

Stung by the witness's words, Alice jumped out of her chair and banged her fists on the defense table, crying, "Joseph! How could you do this?

This is not true! Oh, my God! In fact, he may have been preoccupied by a dilemma of his own: the next morning he went before Judge Peter Farrell and unsuccessfully sought to withdraw from the case on the grounds that prior to the trial had had represented Joe Rorech as well as Alice, to whom Joe had introduced him. After Rorech's damning testimony, the appearance of Sophie Earomirski, The Woman in the Window, came as an anticlimax.

Sophie elaborated the scene she had recalled in her anonymous letter by adding a pregnant dog. She told the jury that the woman had responded to her male companion's order to hurry by explaining that she was waiting for the dog. She had said, "The dog is pregnant," and the man had grumbled, "Did you have to bring it? The defense tried to destroy Sophie's credibility, but the scope of the attack was narrowly limited by Judge Farrell.

The judge excluded an affidavit of Dr. Louis Berg to the effect that a head injury suffered by Mrs. Earomirski at the World's Fair had resulted in "permanent brain damage. A press photograph records Sophie's exit from the courthouse, her hand raised in triumph like a triumphant boxer, still champion, on whom the challenger could not lay a glove.

The principal strategy of the defense was to put Alice on the stand to deny the murder charge and to show that she was not made of granite, as portrayed by certain sections of the media. When Baron's questioning turned to the children, Alice began to tremble and whispered to Judge Farrell that she could not continue.

Farrell declared a recess. When the trial resumed, Alice concluded her testimony with a strong denial of Rorech's account of her confession.

The decision to permit Alice to testify gave prosecutor Lombardino the opportunity he had been waiting for: to question her closely about her love life. All the most titillating incidents were brought out: the night Eddie had caught her in bed with the amorous waiter Carl Andrade, an afternoon tryst with a buyer at the World's Fair, a cruise with Tony Grace to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, and nude swimming at Joe Rorech's home when, Lombardino was careful to stress, the children were dead.

To reporter Kenneth Gross it seemed that Lombardino had torn away the last shred of Alice's dignity when he inquired whether she remembered making love with her children's barber in the back of a car behind the barbershop; Alice admitted having had ten dates with the barber, but, straining at a gnat, couldn't recall the incident in the car. Lombardino continued the catalogue of Alice's conquests with obvious relish until the judge ordered him to conclude.

The trial ended after thirteen days on Monday, May 27, and early the next morning the jury returned a verdict of guilty of manslaughter in the first degree; one of the jurors said that a large majority had voted for conviction on the first ballot, but that he had doubts about the proof and did not regard her as a danger to society. At her sentencing hearing, Alice protested her innocence and angrily told Judge Farrell, "You don't care who killed my children, you want to close your books.

You don't give a damn who killed my kids. Alice's conviction was far from the last chapter of the case. In December the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court, an intermediate appeals court, ordered a new trial because three of the jurors had secretly visited the scene of Sophie Earomirski's identification of Alice.

One of the jurors had made his visit alone at about two in the morning, hoping to verify what Sophie could have seen at that hour. The court reasoned that "the net effect of the jurors' visits was that they made themselves secret, untested witnesses not subject to any cross-examination. When the case was retried in , a change in counsel and the presiding judge and the cooling of community passions resulted in a more restrained courtroom atmosphere.

Gone from the prosecution team was Tony Lombardino, replaced by Thomas Demakos, the experienced chief of the District Attorney's trial bureau. The judge to whom the second trial was assigned, George Balbach, planted court attendants in the courtroom and adjacent corridors to assure better order. Perhaps the most significant change was at the defense table, where Herbert Lyon, a leader of the Queens trial bar, now sat in the first chair.

Lyon had devised a more conservative defense plan that would place greater stress on Alice's grief and loss and keep her off the witness stand so that the prejudicial parade of her love affairs could not be repeated.

The stakes had been raised in the second trial, which began on Monday, March 15, As Alice's first jury had found her guilty of manslaughter in the death of Missy, principles of double jeopardy prohibited her from being charged with a greater offense against her daughter, but the prosecution had compensated for that limitation by obtaining an additional indictment for the murder of young Eddie.

Though the state of his remains ruled out proof of cause of death, Demakos offered the evidence of Dr. Milton Helpern that murder could be "inferred" because of the circumstances of his sister's death. Joe Rorech, obliging as ever, adapted his testimony to the new prosecution design; according to his revised story, Alice had told him that she had killed Missy and "consented" to the murder of her son. The presentation of defense evidence was already in progress when Demakos, over vigorous objection by Lyon, was permitted to bring a surprise witness to the stand.

DeVita's story but did much to neutralize its impact by introducing an unheralded witness of his own, Marvin Weinstein, a young salesman from Massapequa, Long Island. Weinstein swore that on the morning of July 14 he, together with his wife, son and daughter, had passed below Sophie Earomirski's window on the way to his car; he had carried his daughter under his arm "like a sack" and they were accompanied by their dog -- who might well have looked pregnant for she had long ago lost her figure.

As a final jab at the State's case, Lyon called Vincent Colabella, a jailed gangster who had reportedly admitted to a fellow prisoner that he had been Eddie's executioner, only to deny that report when questioned by the police.

On the stand Colabella chuckled as he disowned any knowledge of the crime; he said that he had never seen Alice Crimmins before. In his closing argument, Lyon cited Sophie Earomirski's testimony that she had been led to tell her story by the voices of the children crying from the grave; if they were crying, Alice's defense lawyer suggested, they were saying, "Let my mother go; you have had her long enough!

The jury deliberations began after lunch on Thursday, April 23 and ended at p. Alice was found guilty of murder in the first degree in the death of her son and of manslaughter in the strangling of Missy. On May 13, Alice Crimmins was remanded to Bedford Hills prison, and there she stayed for two years while her lawyers continued the battle for her freedom in the appellate courts. In May the Appellate Division ruled for a second time in her favor. The court threw out the murder conviction on the grounds that the State had not proved beyond reasonable doubt that young Eddie's death had resulted from a criminal act.

With respect to the manslaughter count relating to Missy, the court ordered a new trial on the basis of a number of errors and improprieties, including the prosecutor's comment that Alice lacked the courage to admit the killing of Missy: this argument amounted to an improper assertion that the prosecutor knew her to be guilty and, in addition, was an improper attack on her refusal to testify.

Alice was freed from prison following this ruling, but the rejoicing in her camp was premature. The tortuous path of the judicial proceedings had two more dangerous corners. The first setback was suffered when the Court of Appeals in February announced its final decision in the appeals relating to the verdicts in the second trial.

The court sustained the decision of the Appellate Division only in part; it agreed with the dismissal of the murder charge but reversed the grant of a new trial in the manslaughter conviction for the killing of Missy, returning that issue to the Appellate Division for reconsideration.

Explaining the latter ruling, the Court of Appeals conceded that Demakos's comment on Alice's refusal to testify violated her constitutional privilege against self-incrimination. However, in seeming contradiction of its skeptical view of the prosecution case in the first trial, the court decided that the constitutional error was harmless in view of the weighty evidence of Alice's guilt. The Appellate Division confirmed the manslaughter conviction in May , and Alice was once again sent back to prison to continue serving her sentence of from five to twenty years.

Persevering in his efforts for her vindication, Lyon still had one card to play, an appeal from the denial of his motion for retrial, based on newly discovered evidence.

A would-be witness, an electronics scientist named F. Sutherland Macklem, had given the defense an affidavit to the effect that, shortly after one o'clock on the morning of July 14, , he had picked up two small children, a boy and a girl, hitchhiking in Queens County. The boy had told him he knew where his home was, and Macklem had let them out, safe and sound, at the corner of nd Street and 71st Avenue.

The affiant did not learn the children's names, but stated that the boy could well have identified his companion as "Missy" instead of "my sister," as he had first thought. He admitted that he had identified his passengers as the Crimmins children only after reading newspaper accounts of the first trial, three years after the incident.

On December 22, , the New York Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court's rejection of this defense initiative. The court was influenced by the affiant's seven year delay in coming forward, and commented scathingly that the affidavit "offers an imaginative alternative hypothetical explanation [of the crime], worthy of concoction by an A. Conan Doyle. In January Alice Crimmins became eligible for a work-release program and was permitted to leave prison on week days to work as a secretary.

In August the New York Post reported that Alice had spent the previous Sunday "as she has spent many balmy summer Sundays of her prison term -- on a luxury cruiser at City Island.

In July , Alice married the proprietor of the luxury cruiser, her contractor boyfriend, Anthony Grace. The Post was indignant over the nuptials, furnishing telephoto shots of Alice in a bikini and T-shirt, and headlining a follow-up story with a comment of the Queens District Attorney, "Alice should be behind bars!

On September , Alice Crimmins was granted parole, after thirty months in prison and nine months in the work-release program. When a new petition for retrial was denied in November, she slipped into what must have been welcome obscurity; she had become that stalest of all commodities, old news. The Crimmins case remains an intractable puzzle. In his opening argument in the second trial, Herbert Lyon invited the jury to regard the case as a troubling mystery that had not been solved.

It is always difficult to persuade the community to live at ease with an unknown murderer, but never more so than when a child or spouse has been killed and the evidence suggests that the household was the scene of the crime or of the victim's disappearance. As in the Lindbergh kidnapping or the murder of Julia Wallace, there is a strong tendency to suspect an "inside job.

Alice Crimmins, who slept close by but claimed to have heard nothing out of the ordinary during the murder night, naturally came under suspicion.

She was a mother perhaps harboring the nameless daily hostilities familiar to the annals of family murder and the only adult living in the Kew Gardens Hills apartment, and she had the opportunity to commit the crime -- but can anything more be said to justify the certainty the investigators showed from the start that she was guilty?

If we reject the equation that the State of New York made between sexuality and murderousness, it appears that Alice displayed only one suspicious trait: despite her avowed grief over her lost children, she does not seem to have shown much interest in helping the authorities to identify the killer.

Even this curious passivity may have been due to the defensive posture into which she was immediately thrust by police antagonism and surveillance, and she may also have genuinely believed that the murderer was not be found in her circle of acquaintances, however wide and casual.

The prosecution never attributed a plausible motive to Alice. The presence of Missy and young Eddie in the apartment does not seem to have inhibited Alice's amorous adventures, but if she found the children to be under foot, she could easily have surrendered custody to her husband. It was rumored that she had never liked Missy much, that she had killed her in anger and then called for underworld help to dispose of her son as an inconvenient witness.

Under those circumstances it is hard to visualize the boy going willingly to his doom, a docile figure in the peaceful domestic procession belatedly recalled by Sophie Earomirski in which the murderers and their future victim were accompanied by a pregnant dog.

If the theory of sudden anger did not sell, the police investigators were likely to fall back on Alice's own words, that she would rather see her children dead than lose them to Eddie in the pending custody battle.

Alice enjoyed a tactical advantage as a mother in possession of the children, and there is no reason to conclude that, despite the lessened optimism she detected in her lawyer's voice during their conversation before the children's disappearance, the prospect was hopeless or that she thought so.

If the uncertainty of the divorce court's ruling provided a viable motive, the police had as good a reason to charge Eddie with the crime, but they never took him seriously as a suspect. In the mind of Joe Rorech, the theory of underworld involvement in the murder of Alice's son took on an even more sinister tone. He spelled out his belief that Alice had arranged for three of her girlfriends to sleep with a prominent New York politician, who was afraid that the details of his indiscretion would come out at the custody hearing.

Therefore, the man, who was "deeply involved in New York politics and relied almost solely on the Democratic organization for his bread and butter," had called on his gangland connections to eliminate the children, thereby averting the hearing.

Rorech had no satisfactory answer when Carpozi asked him why the same objective could not have been accomplished with less pain to Alice by the murder of her estranged husband.

Rorech's theory also fails to explain why the politician's scandal was deemed more likely to be publicized in a custody hearing than in the course of a murder investigation that was bound to focus on Alice Crimmins and her florid love life.

If Alice was in fact guilty, the reason for her crime must, despite the best surmises of the police and Joe Rorech, remain wrapped in mystery. Even more puzzling, though, is the autopsy evidence regarding Missy's last meal, which raises doubts concerning the time and place of the child's murder.

This strange facet of the case was prominently featured in the dissenting opinion rendered by Justice Fuchsberg when the New York State Court of Appeals rejected Alice's motion for a new trial in Justice Fuchsberg noted that the testimony of the Queens medical examiner, Dr.

Richard Grimes, indicated that Missy had died shortly after ingesting a meal including a macaroni-like substance that differed substantially from the last dinner that Alice had told the police she served the children.

This evidence suggested to the judge that "the child might have had another meal at some unknown time and unknown place considerably after the one taken at home. Could Alice Crimmins have been so cunning a criminal planner as to have created this enigma by lying to the police about the food she had served on the night of the crime? Apart from the difficulty of finding traits of calculation and foresight in her character, many circumstances militate against the inference that the veal dinner was a fabrication intended by Alice to mislead the investigation.

When she first mentioned the purchase of the frozen veal to Detective Piering, neither of the children's bodies had been found. If she was the murderer and had hidden the corpses, she had reason to hope that they would long remain undiscovered. Even if she feared the worst -- that the victims would soon be found -- it seems doubtful that she was so familiar with the capabilities of forensic medicine that she decided to turn to her own account the possibility that an autopsy might be performed in time to analyze the contents of the last meal.

There would have been a powerful deterrent to Alice's lying about the veal dinner. She told Piering that she had purchased the veal on the afternoon of July 13 in a neighborhood delicatessen; she was presumably well known there, and the grocer who had waited on her could very likely have contradicted her story.

As events turned out, the grocer did not remember what she had purchased, but she could not have counted on that in advance.

If the Crimmins case is viewed with the hindsight of recent years -- when a young mother with a strong sexual appetite is less likely to be pronounced a Medea -- it seems that Alice is entitled to the benefit of the Scottish verdict: Not Proven.

Collected Essays of Albert Borowitz The Alice Crimmins Case. By Denise Noe. The Alice Crimmins case broke in and grabbed headlines for the next twelve years. Like Joey Buttafuco in the s, the name of Alice Crimmins became, in the latter half of the s and most of the s, synonymous with tabloid sensation.

This odd real-life mystery has been dealt with in several works. It also inspired two best-selling novels. Where Are the Children? It was made into a movie of the same title that was released in It starred Tuesday Weld at both her most glamorous and most vulnerable. Neal Bell authored a play called Two Small Bodies that also opened in It was made into a film by Beth B.

The incident that would transfix the public for over a decade involved a previously obscure family with a sad but in many respects, all-too-familiar family history. Edmund Crimmins was a six-foot-tall, sandy-haired and ruggedly handsome man who was starting to get a paunch and double chin. He towered over his wife Alice, a blue-eyed redhead with delicate features who was both slim and buxom. As couples usually are, the two had been very happy during the early years of their marriage.

However, that marriage had crumbled, in large part, because Eddie spent very little time at home with his family; he preferred working overtime or drinking with the boys.

Lonely and frustrated, Alice had found solace in a series of extra-marital affairs. Their children have been described as well-behaved and cheerful youngsters. Unlike many children who are born so close together, they did not seem much afflicted by sibling rivalry. After they separated, Alice, who had previously been a full-time homemaker, had gotten a job as a cocktail waitress. The party was held on a boat and Alice had attended it with Anthony Grace, one of her major boyfriends.

He was a fifty-two-year old wealthy building contractor who sported a pencil thin mustache and was given to silk suits and a diamond pinky ring. Short and thickset, he had many friends amongst prominent New York City politicians and was rumored to have a few amongst its hoodlums. Grace and the other men had playfully locked the women in a washroom.

Then the boat set sail. That babysitter called Edmund Crimmins who immediately came to pick his kids up. He took them to the residence of his mother-in-law, Alice Burke, and decided that he would file a suit for their custody. The trial for that suit was only a week away. Her attorney had told her to expect a court agency inspection in connection with it, so Alice had spent much of the previous evening doing a lot of housecleaning and fixing up.

However, on that hot, sunshiny morning of July 14, she found little Eddie and Missy were not in their rooms. She made a frantic phone call to Edmund who strongly denied taking them, then went over to her place to help her look. Unable to find them, he called police to report that his children were missing. At the station house, one detective immediately wanted the case of the missing children.

He was Detective Gerard H. Piering, a thirty-something father of six who sported an out-of-style crew cut and yearned to make second-grade detective.

He and his more easygoing partner, George Martin, met both parents at the mother's residence. That residence was a ground-floor apartment in a working-class development of red brick called the Regal Garden Apartments.

The window of the children's room was wide open, and a carriage was underneath the window. It appeared that Missy and Eddie had either been enticed out of the window or, as they had done before, crawled outside on their own. When Piering saw Alice Crimmins, the strait-laced Roman Catholic was instantly taken aback: her children were missing yet this mother was neither sobbing nor hysterical.

Rather, she was heavily made-up and sharply dressed, looking chic and sensuous in tight toreador pants and a flower-print shirt and high-heeled white shoes. Thank you very much in advance. Alice Crimmins. Alice and Edmund Crimmins leaving their Kew Gardens Hills home on July 16, , two days after their children "disappeared".

Kew Gardens Hills, NY: Ralph Warnecke, 10, points to the spot in the wooded area where, out for a walk with his father Vernon, 51, he found the body of five-year-old Edmund Crimmins.

Vernon told police he went into the underbrush, poked at a blanket and "out rolled something that looked like a body. Alice was found strangled to death a few hours after she was reported missing. July 19, Crimmins on trial in the murder of her four-year-old daughter, heard the details of an autopsy on the little girl. AP Photo. New York: The defense took over May 21 in the murder case of Mrs.