Long before there was a Susan Smith or a Casey Anthony, there was Alice Crimmins. When the New York housewife called the police to report her two young children missing in the summer of 1965, the focus was on her custody battle with her estranged husband and the children’s father, Edmund Crimmins.
When it came out that Alice had been having sex with multiple men and that she was less than ideal as a mother, the case became a media circus. With two trials filled with bombshell testimony and courtroom theatrics, Alice got years of attention and seemed to dodge punishment. In all of the craziness, the lives of little Missy and Eddie Crimmins seemed to take a backseat. But it is the memories of the two children which will stay with us and all of those who followed the case, because what happened to them is, truly, unthinkable.
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I am inclined to believe Roruk’s (sp?) story to Carposi (sp?), though I do agree with Jill and Dick that some elaboration is in order to fully make sense of Roruk’s seemingly inchoate narrative. Purportedly, Alice wanted the kids in her custody or dead. I forget who said this, might have come from Roruk. So that would be one way of eliminating the alternative of relinquishing custody to Edmond (nm, sp?). Our other alternative is to have Edmond, the husband, killed instead of the kids, since it was purportedly he who could have exposed sensitive information. We might imagine that this alone would not dissolve the problem. So for some reason the existence of the kids in conjunction with a drawn out custody battle could have compromised a powerful politician’s career. Why would this be? Were the kids his, after all, and not Edmond’s? Perhaps Alice’s sexual awakening predated her marriage to Edmond. I was drawing parallels to the Casey Anthony case until this transpiration at the end; but it splits from the Anthony case if in place was an overarching logic that more or less necessitated the outcome. I want to look more into this. Great job on this episode, Dick and Jill.