The Alice Crimmins Case

Turning the Heat Up

Alice Crimmins (CORBIS)

During those years, the cops followed Alice Crimmins constantly, watched her every move and — as her own husband had — tapped her phone. They had good reason to expect such activity to bear fruit. If Alice was the killer, she had to have accomplices because the locations and times at which the bodies were found meant that someone else had transported at least one dead child (she had been under constant surveillance when little Eddie's body was unceremoniously dumped in a vacant lot). Even if she was such a "cold bitch" that she never needed to unburden herself to anyone, her co-conspirator(s) would surely want to talk about payment or silence or both.

But there were no such conversations.

However, there was much to keep the police listeners entertained since Alice Crimmins and her many sweethearts engaged in sexually oriented conversations. The cops could count themselves doubly lucky, even by today's "dial-a-porn" standards, since they were being paid to listen to titillating sex talk.

The cops also waged a campaign of embarrassment and harassment against Alice Crimmins in the hope that the tension might "break" her. During the months that she and Eddie were reconciled, police phoned him to let him know she was entertaining another man in the marital bedroom. They went to her various employers and informed them that the efficient secretary working for them under the name "Alice Burke" was actually the notorious Alice Crimmins, a promiscuous woman suspected in the deaths of her two young children, leading to her sudden firing.

So Alice Crimmins went from one employer to another, working for a few weeks as a secretary here, a receptionist there, an airline travel agent on one occasion and then, inevitably, unemployed and looking for work again. She drank more heavily and became increasingly hostile to the investigators she knew were trying to pin a double murder rap on her. She learned that her phone was tapped and began opening conversations with a message to the third parties listening: "Hi, boys, drop dead!"