Original subtitles

Alice Crimmins was just about

the hottest ticket in Queens in 1965.

She had it down, boy.

Beautiful, sexy, soon-to-be divorcée.

I lived a couple doors down back then

and I can tell you, all us girls wanted to be her.

But that summer, something so awful happened...

Eddie.

Missy.

It's time...

something so horrifying that none of us

would ever be jealous of Alice again.

All that attention she'd gotten would become a living hell.

Eddie?

Missy?

And to this day,

I still wonder what really happened.

Are the kids with you?

Eddie, don't play games with me.

Eddie, please don't do this to me.

I-I woke up and I went in their room.

They're not here. They're not anywhere.

They're not here.

They're not here.

Missy?

Queens was a safe part of New York City.

I know because I lived right there in Kew Gardens.

It was working people and families.

Nothing really bad ever happened there.

That was the Bronx or even Manhattan.

But when those kids disappeared, that changed everything.

Nothing would ever be the same for any of us.

And Alice's nightmare was just beginning.

That's me.

And that's our street.

Nice, right?

I was right there when the first police car showed up.

But I didn't give it a second thought.

How could I have known what this would turn into?

First, a couple of uniformed officers show up.

Then the word spreads that there are kids missing

and a couple of detectives come over.

The children's bedroom window is open,

the screen propped against the wall.

And what they call a porter's cart,

which is a baby stroller with a box on top,

is now right under the window.

The overwhelming majority of cases of missing kids

are resolved with the child being found

and being some rational explanation.

In fact, investigators found out that these kids

have been known to have crawled out of the window.

But in the past, they really didn't go that far.

They would stay in the yard, maybe go next door.

Eddie was 5 and Missy was 4

and they went everywhere together.

He was very protective of her.

People often remarked on how close they were.

And when was the last time you saw them again?

Around 8:30 or 9:00. That's when I put them to bed.

Alice told detectives

that she had taken the kids out for a picnic in the afternoon...

And that they left the park around 4:30.

Then she said they went to a deli

and that she bought a package of frozen veal and some soda,

took them home, gave them dinner.

After dinner she suggested to the kids,

"Hey, let's go for a ride."

And she took them on a drive.

And had them in bed

by a little after 9:00 in the evening.

I am praying that you keep mommy and daddy safe.

And the neighbor told police

that she walked past the building.

For my birthday, I want a big red...

And she heard Missy and Eddie

saying their prayers at that time.

She said that she checked up on Eddie

and took Eddie to the bathroom at about midnight.

So that was the last time she had seen the children

Alice had said she didn't know if she'd locked the door.

Their room had a hook-and-eye latch lock on it.

The story is that Eddie Jr.

Had raided the refrigerator before.

So there was a lock on the bedroom door,

keeping the kids in from doing that.

She went in.

She saw that the kids had slept in their beds.

There was no sign of any struggle,

but that they were gone.

Uniformed officers start the search.

Missy!

You're looking in basements.

You're looking in, you know, bushes, backyards.

You're trying to comb the area.

I haven't seen them, no.

No one's seen these kids.

They were questioning neighbors.

When the cops showed up and started asking questions,

I've got to admit, it was exciting.

I got caught up in it.

And there was this rumor in the neighborhood

of a bushy-haired stranger who had tried to lure

a little boy out of his apartment.

He was really trying to coax this little boy

out of the apartment.

You ever seen him before? No.

So I was looking out from the window.

I really didn't see exactly his hair color.

But every neighborhood has that story

about some mysterious creep who snatches kids, right?

In 1965, the term "stranger danger"

was not even known.

It just wouldn't have been a priority

for police to go and investigate those leads.

Besides, why would they go looking

for some phantom pervert

when there was real drama right in front of them?

Alice and Eddie

were in the middle of a divorce, custody fight.

The neighbors thought, it's a custody thing.

Alice and Eddie Crimmins,

boy, boy, there was a soap opera.

She kicked him out a year ago

and told him she wanted a divorce.

Now, they were both Roman Catholic,

so this was a big deal.

Eddie just wouldn't accept it.

He moved out but he rented a room close by

and he'd always show up places trying to keep his hooks in her.

Hold this.

Here.

You can put it right over there.

This was the early days of women's lib

and she was apparently enjoying a sex life

that was really frowned upon in Queens,

and she was pretty open about it.

Do you live around here? Yeah, I've seen you around.

In the complex?

Wow. You look great. Thank you.

I live right down the road. Wow.

My gosh, I know I've seen you before.

Yeah, this is here. This is the place.

What's your name? Joe.

Joe. Alice.

Yeah. Alice. Good to meet you, too.

Can I talk to you for a second?

Yeah, go ahead.

You want to do this in front of the kids?

And the really sad thing was,

it was the kids who got caught in the middle

over and over.

Stop!

Eddie!

Eddie!

So that would raise your antenna right away,

saying that's pretty likely now

that this disappearance has something to do with that.

We know you guys are having some problems.

- If this is a prank... - No.

Custody thing... This is not a prank.

You better tell us right now.

The two detectives in this case

were the classic old-timer, young guy team.

George Martin was getting close to retirement

and Jerry Piering was in his 30s.

Alice, if you don't mind,

I'd like to ask you some questions

in the other room.

Then they decide to split them up.

Listen Eddie, I want to ask you a few more questions.

Let's start with yesterday at around 6:00 P.M.

Eddie says that the day the kids went missing

he began the day by playing golf at a public golf course.

He went and had some pizza at a fast food place,

had some gin and tonics at a bar.

Then you went home?

And then I went home.

And you didn't hear anything strange during the night?

I already told you this.

Please just answer the questions.

No.

Do you have any boyfriends?

Two.

Just two?

Yes.

You didn't have any of these boyfriends over last night?

No.

Jerry Piering doesn't like the looks of Alice Crimmins.

He's seen women like this.

She's a little bit of a wise guy.

She's too good looking.

Her clothes are way too tight.

It just makes him bristle.

Why isn't this mother whose kids are missing

looking upset?

Why isn't she weeping?

Why isn't she distraught?

Why does she have all this makeup on?

He thought she was just a very over-sexed divorcée

who was keeping her kids locked up while she had this

you know, very hot sex life.

Okay. Thank you, Mrs. Crimmins.

Did it pour that afternoon.

I'll never forget it.

It was like we'd all been holding our breath all morning

and then just...

the heavens opened up.

And when we saw Alice climb into a car

with one of the detectives,

we thought, "Thank God. The kids have turned up."

And Alice is putting on mascara,

looking in her mirror,

and she doesn't know where they're going.

But it turns out that detective sure did.

I don't know if it was how Alice acted or what,

but he had a feeling

that there was something she wasn't telling him

and damned if he didn't try to shock it out of her.

And he just grabs her by the arm and leads her into the weeds.

Looking back on it,

I guess none of us ever really thought

it wouldn't turn out okay.

And then, all of a sudden, we're living in this horror show

and it was only gonna get worse.

It was almost 50 years ago,

and I remember it like it was yesterday.

That little girl lying dead in a vacant lot.

The discovery of the body of the little girl,

that totally changes the tenor of the investigation.

Look, we weren't naive.

Queens was New York City.

We knew about crime,

but a 4-year-old gets taken from her bedroom

and gets strangled

just eight blocks from her home...

from our homes...

how are we supposed to make sense of that?

And Alice, the mother... that's her right there.

That morning no one outside Kew Gardens ever heard of her,

and now it seemed like the whole world

was staring her down.

It's amazing how quickly photographers show up.

She just burst into tears and rushes into her house.

So those were the first tears that the detectives saw.

And that's considered a sign of guilt.

She cried for the camera but not for her daughter.

When Missy is found dead,

her body goes to the medical examiner.

They determined that she was asphyxiated.

The chief medical examiner

could not pinpoint a time of death,

except between 10:00 P.M. and 4:00 A.M.

And everyone was thinking the same thing,

but no one wanted to say it out loud...

Where was little Eddie?

They were beating the bushes, literally,

going through the parks, going through the streets.

And it's about four days later when they discover

little Eddie's body, the 5-year-old boy.

And he's wrapped in a blue blanket

in a lot adjacent to the Van Wyck Expressway.

They never can establish a cause of death

because the body is so decomposed.

Most of the violence that occurs with children, especially,

comes at the hands of their parents.

Of course, the mother was with the kids last

and she had physical custody of the kids,

at least for that night.

But you can't dismiss the fact that the father

had access to their place.

We all got married young back then... 19, 20.

It was what you did,

especially if you were a good Catholic girl.

And who doesn't want a big party with the fancy dress?

But when you kissed all your friends and family goodbye,

you went home with your new husband,

and a lot of girls really didn't understand

what they had signed up for.

Alice had the two children very young.

Eddie worked out at the airport as an airline mechanic.

He worked long hours

and he liked to stay out boozing.

And Alice was a bored, young housewife.

She had thought there must be something more to life.

So she got herself a job as a cocktail waitress,

got babysitters,

started hanging out at night herself.

Alice got interested in a lot of men

and Eddie got jealous.

Eddie got furious.

The had split up over this.

And Eddie had moved out,

was living in a little room nearby

to keep his eye on Alice.

And he really didn't want to get divorced.

He wanted to try to get back with her.

He was totally obsessed.

There were all kinds of stories in the neighborhood

about Eddie Sr.

He really lost it when Alice kicked him out.

She would laugh it off,

but we all thought he seemed kind of scary.

He had installed a little microphone in her bedroom,

and he would sneak into the basement and listen in

when she was having her male guests over.

And a few times, you know, Eddie broke in.

I mean, he has to know she's gonna be with guys.

With all that craziness and now two dead kids?

Everyone knew the police weren't going to leave

Alice and Eddie alone any time soon.

And get this, just like on the TV,

when the cops talked to them again,

Eddie's story started to change.

And at this point, Eddie is saying

that he did not remain at home.

He drove to the apartment and watched for signs of Alice.

That places him at the exact scene of this crime.

He was very insistent that Alice talk to him,

and she was turning him down.

He was kind of coming apart at the seams.

You know, you wonder if there was a revenge factor.

And so, they were suspicious of his story.

And not for nothing.

Alice's story was starting to sound strange too.

She alleges she went to this gas station

at 9:00 P.M.

The workers at the gas station later say

that they remember it being closer to 5:30.

When Missy is found dead,

in her stomach were a partially digested dinner

of peas, carrots,

some macaroni-type food and some string beans.

But Alice swore she fed them veal, not macaroni.

Detective Piering claimed that he saw

an empty box of manicotti in the garbage.

And if you're a liar about that,

aren't you lying about what happened to your children?

So the cops told them

there's one easy way to prove you're telling the truth.

So Eddie says, "Okay,"

and he took the lie detector test.

And passed it.

So Eddie is eliminated as a suspect.

So he said to Alice,

take the lie detector test and they'll stop.

Then finally she agreed.

They took her in

and they start with the preliminary questions...

"What's your name? Where do you live?

Who's president?"

And they started asking questions about the case.

And that was the last time you saw your son?

And she claimed she saw cigarettes burning

trough the two-way mirror.

And she heard them laughing in the next room.

So she ripped all the stuff off and stalked off.

When you're dealing with the death of a child,

you would absolutely expect

that the parent would do anything in the world

to cooperate in the investigation, anything.

And so, if someone refuses,

you have to really question, "Why are they doing this?"

None of us knew what she was thinking.

And it wasn't just the lie detector.

The way she behaved after?

The talk in the neighborhood wasn't about poor Alice anymore.

The murder of her children

didn't cramp Alice Crimmins' style.

She was seen out partying

a week after the discovery of the children's murders.

She was still out at the bars,

still dancing up a storm, still drinking,

still inviting men to her apartment.

She just wasn't the grieving mother.

I don't know how you grieve or what stages you go through,

but I know one thing...

you don't dance and party the next week.

And for the police,

it was all the proof they needed.

She was practically rubbing their noses in it.

As the detectives saw it,

her motive was to get the children out of the way

so that they would not interfere with her swinging lifestyle.

She was the only person in the house with the children

when they vanished.

She had the motive. She had the opportunity.

Now they just needed to figure out

how to get Alice to talk

or find someone who would.

The police figured that if Alice Crimmins' kids

were getting in the way of her sex life

there had to be some man out there

who wanted them gone too.

Takes two to tango, right?

There were two big boyfriends at the time.

There was Tony Grace,

a big contractor from Long Island

who was mob connected,

or so the theory was.

On the night the kids went missing,

Alice told the police she'd called

to see what he was doing.

Hello?

Tony Grace had a lot of money,

so he could splurge

and surround himself with a faux harem.

And he's twice as old as Alice.

Are you going to come over and see me tonight?

Listen, I wish. But not tonight.

According to him, the night of the children's disappearance,

he just kind of brushed her off, and that was the end of it.

He has a great alibi.

He was out with four women, the bowling girls.

They were married women who went out bowling,

looking for guys.

And there was her other more steady boyfriend,

Joseph Rorech.

Hello?

Hey, Joe.

Joe Rorech was much cuter than Tony,

younger but not as rich.

She'd go out with him when Tony wasn't around,

but I heard Alice was kind of getting bored with Joe.

Joe Rorech was quite a character.

He had been a home contractor.

You know, a good-looking guy,

wavy hair, well-greased... 60s grease.

I'll talk to you soon.

And he also had a wife and many children

out on Long Island.

But they didn't seem to get in his way.

But the night the kids disappeared,

Joe had an alibi.

He wasn't with his family, but he had an alibi.

The cops figured they couldn't pressure Tony.

He knew all kinds of powerful people.

But Joe, who was Joe?

He might be willing to talk.

Mr. Rorech... can we call you Joe?

Sure.

Good.

Joe, I need your help.

Of course.

That's why I came down here.

Good.

Let me ask you about Alice Crimmins.

What about her?

Turns out he couldn't tell them anything about Alice,

but everyone knows

if the cops got you on something,

they can make you do anything.

And boy, boy, did they have something on Joe.

Why don't you tell me about Ramona.

Because from what I've heard,

she's more of a Ramone than a Ramona.

Right?

He was bisexual.

He actually dated a guy who dressed as a woman.

And he was so terrified that they would tell his wife.

You're going to keep dating Alice Crimmins.

You're going to get her to tell you what happened.

And they'd say, "Listen, Joe, you've got to help us."

And we'll watch out for you."

Okay.

Whatever you want.

This was the real turning point for detectives.

They thought, aha, now we've got Joe Rorech

and she's going to tell him everything.

And the police, taking a cue from Eddie Crimmins

started listening in on her too.

So they had everything bugged,

her bedroom, her phone.

They obviously were listening in on everything she did.

I know, it seems a little sneaky

but you've got to remember there were two dead kids here.

And they were so convinced Alice did it.

They had to be there when she made a mistake.

And the amazing thing was, Alice knew they were doing it

and it didn't stop her.

In fact, she figured she'd give them a show.

Can you imagine?

This went on for a long time...

listening to Alice Crimmins' sex life basically,

getting nothing that gave them a case.

The police still couldn't get anything solid on Alice.

In fact, aside from all the action in the bedroom,

Alice dropped the hot-to-trot routine

and cleaned up her act a little.

The attractive red-haired cocktail waitress,

the flame-haired swinger in the tabloids.

I mean, it was constant headlines.

And so, she went to work as a secretary.

And so, the cops decided to dial up the pressure.

She got jobs under her maiden name of Burke,

and Piering would call up her employers and say,

"You know who you got working for you?"

"That notorious lady from Queens",

"that Alice Crimmins who killed her kids."

And she'd get fired.

I haven't seen that kind of surveillance

on some of the top organized crime hit men in the city.

To think that they could do that

and that the district attorney would even allow that

is mind-boggling.

It's just really hard to believe when you see how far they went

to try to break this woman.

They taped her,

they pressured her for two years.

They listened 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

And in all that time, she said not one incriminating thing.

They had a district attorney who said,

"You know, we don't have... there's no evidence here."

And they were going to stop the investigation

but Piering said, "Wait, wait. Give me a little more time."

These cops were fathers.

When that's emotional like that, there's this urgency,

this feeling of, "We need to solve this

and we need to find justice for these children."

Piering had them go back

through the thousands of tips they got in the mail.

And they find this letter from someone

who says that she was looking out her window that night

and saw something.

Signed "anonymous."

So the police had their first lead in two years,

but how do you find someone who wants to stay anonymous?

After two years, they really don't have anything

to tie Alice Crimmins to the killing of her kids,

except this anonymous letter to the D.A.'s office...

This tree is actually blocking the line of sight.

From someone who says

that she was looking out her window that night

and she sees a woman walking,

carrying a bundle under her arm wrapped in a blanket,

leading a little boy by the hand,

walking with a man.

When they open a car door, the man takes the bundle,

tosses it in the back seat and hears the woman say,

"Don't do that to her. Don't throw her."

Do you see the one with the light in it?

Yeah.

It's either that or the one on the right.

Probably the best investigative work

was in tracking down the letter writer.

It was aces. It was great.

They figured out the sight lines.

They figured out who had air-conditioning.

They knock on doors, they find Sophie Earomirski.

Sophie has a kind of a funny history,

you know, she has a few mental problems.

But she says she's the letter writer.

And then they ask her,

well, could you see who the woman was?

And sure enough, Sophie says she could.

That's her. That's her.

Alice Crimmins?

Yes.

Alice Crimmins, you're under arrest.

Leave me alone.

Ma'am, please come with us.

Stop! Get off of me!

Ma'am, please. Please.

Make your way to the car. Make it easy on yourself.

Predict that this will be a well-followed trial

by the very appearance of the defendant,

an attractive woman with a mass of flaming red hair.

The first day of her trial,

there are huge crowds of spectators and press.

As the prosecutor saw it,

her motive was to get the children out of the way

so that they would not interfere with her dating life.

And that Alice killed Missy

and in a panic, called one of her boyfriends' goons,

and that they came and helped take Missy's body and Eddie

out of the apartment.

The prosecutors bring Sophie Earomirski in

as a witness.

She says that she can identify Alice Crimmins

as carrying the body of a little child

out of her apartment.

And that, of course...

there's a big gasp in this whole packed courtroom.

It's got to be specific or it doesn't help us.

Joe Rorech takes the stand.

Wait, tell me...

Do you ever even think about it?

Now, Joe had been working with the cops,

wearing a wire to try to get something on Alice,

but he never could.

And he says that Alice Crimmins once broke down in tears

and told him, "I'm sorry, Joe. I killed her."

At this, Alice Crimmins jumps up.

She yells, "Joe, you snake! You liar!"

I mean, it was an incredible moment in the courtroom.

The testimony of the chief medical examiner,

Dr. Milton Helpern,

turned out to be devastating.

His initial finding had been

that he could not pinpoint the time of death

any closer than between 10:00 P.M. and 4:00 A.M.

Alice Crimmins said she saw her children alive at midnight.

Suddenly, out of the blue, two years later in court

the medical examiner reverses that decision.

He testified that the children were dead

by 9:30 at night.

It threw Alice Crimmins' story out the window, so to speak.

Don't think for a second that that went over our heads.

We lived and breathed this story for two years.

We knew every detail.

And now this?

The police had worked on Milton Helpern

for quite a long time

to get him to refine the time of death

and to make it before midnight.

And Helpern finally went along with that.

And I get home, and there's another one

right across the street.

My God. They really got you covered.

And, Joe, you're telling me that after all this time

the one time Alice said something incriminating

was when he wasn't wearing the wire?

Detectives had been unmerciful

in their pressuring of Joseph Rorech,

telling him what could happen to his life

if he didn't cooperate.

So he becomes a really problematic witness

because he had ulterior motives.

And Sophie?

Well, anyone who lived in Kew Gardens knew

you always took her stories with a grain of salt.

She claims she heard the guy saying, "Hurry up"

and the woman saying,

"Don't throw her in the car..." You couldn't hear that,

certainly not from the distance that Sophie was,

a couple hundred feet from that.

And honestly, from where we stood,

it looked like the police were so busy

making a case against Alice

they didn't even bother looking anywhere else.

Investigators later accounted

how Eddie asked them a lot of questions

about the state of his children's bodies,

the bruises, the decomposition.

They were questions that they felt a perpetrator

would be more interested in than a parent.

Grieving parents usually don't want to know

about the injuries to the children's bodies.

And when the children were alleged to have disappeared,

he's there in a car.

Which is pretty interesting.

And what about that prowler?

I know it seemed like a story to scare kids, but who knows?

Wasn't it worth looking into?

The kids had a history of going out the window,

looking for food.

The screen was not bolted in.

And very early that morning,

Eddie could have gotten out of the window,

taken the screen down, moved the cart,

gotten his sister down

and they went off looking for something to eat for breakfast.

They could have gone out the window

and encountered this stranger who fed them another meal

and ended up killing them.

When the trial comes,

a mental health expert did write in and say

that they were conflicted, ethically, about this,

but that they had had a patient who mentioned the murders

and mentioned involvement.

The patient ended up committing suicide.

You let enough time go by and none of these leads

can lead anywhere because they vanish.

Piering had so convinced them that they had the right answer

that they just weren't going to look anymore.

I'm no lawyer, but honestly,

I didn't think they had made much of a case.

And just when I was starting to feel like

Alice had to be innocent, she took the stand,

and the story she told sent all of us into shock.

This was the longest day so far

in the continuing murder trial of Mrs. Alice Crimmins,

and in many ways, perhaps the most dramatic of them all.

Mrs. Crimmins was the only witness on the stand today,

on a day marked by outbursts from all sides.

Reporters always wait for that moment

when a defendant takes the stand,

especially one like Alice Crimmins.

Alice was asked about Joseph Rorech.

And the prosecutor asked,

"Did you ever swim in Joseph Rorech's swimming pool

when his wife was away?"

And she said, "Well, yes I did."

"What were you wearing when you swam

in Joseph Rorech's swimming pool?"

And Alice, direct as ever, said,

"One time a bathing suit, one time nothing at all."

"And when you were swimming in Joseph Rorech's pool

"wearing nothing at all,

where were your children?"

"They were dead," said Alice.

I mean, you can imagine the shock

that went through that courtroom,

just gasps of absolute horror.

What was wrong with her?

What mother does that

with her children still warm in their graves?

It horrified people.

But no matter how sickening it was,

it wasn't proof she killed those kids.

The day of the verdict,

it seemed like all of Queens was there.

And everybody had an opinion.

I come here every day.

I'm here every day taking a look at this case.

Why? Because I help

and I'd love for Mrs. Crimmins to be innocent.

Yeah, that's right. She is innocent.

Finally the verdict came in and she was convicted.

And she just passed out.

She just dropped.

It was just a really stunning kind of a moment.

It seemed everybody in the courtroom was crying,

and I was among them.

I was emotionally unable to accept the idea

that Alice Crimmins had actually put her hands

around this baby's throat

or used something to strangler her.

I just couldn't accept it.

There were hoots and hollers

from the people who thought she did it

and actual tears from the people who thought she was innocent.

I've covered a million trials.

It's inconceivable to me that they could convict somebody

on the strength of what they had.

The motive doesn't really track with Alice.

The police believed that Alice wanted to get rid of the kids

because they were a damper on her swinging lifestyle.

I saw no evidence that the kids

actually were injuring her lifestyle.

If she wanted to be free of the kids,

she would just let Eddie take the kids.

She doesn't have to kill them.

And there is almost always an escalation of violence.

There was no evidence

that these kids were ever physically harmed.

You know, we're supposed to believe

that just one night after a picnic and dinner

that she kills her children.

It doesn't make a lot of sense.

Alice went to jail for almost 10 years

for killing Missy,

but looking back on it, maybe she was sent to jail

for something else too.

This was the time when women's lib

was just taking off.

They were Irish-Catholic cops.

Couldn't be more conservative.

They were fascinated by her,

they were appalled by her,

and they were obsessed with her.

And they never took their eyes off of her.

They pretty much accused Alice of being a bad person

and, therefore, guilty.

She would not show her grief

and she was judged for that and the men in her life.

The jury was 12 married men.

One guy who actually said,

"Well, she's capable of anything if she lived that way."

Do I know whether or not

Alice Crimmins killed her children? No.

But I certainly don't think that she got a fair trial.

Look, one thing is for sure,

someone killed those kids.

And at the time, the thought that whoever did it

wouldn't be caught was terrifying.

If they thought there could be

some mysterious somebody out there,

you know, how do you live with that?

You need to find the killer.

I mean, if you don't find the killer

then none of our kids are safe.

But if you think that it was Alice's internal madness,

you can live with that

and you say, that's what happens when you screw around.

Not knowing makes everybody's life unsafe.

So if the jury said it was Alice, who am I to argue?

That's how it works in this country, right?

I think that we should be able to live with mystery.

I don't know why we can't do it.

Alice Crimmins made herself very scarce after all of that.

The condemnation, the conviction,

the horror, the grief.

She and Tony Grace moved off to Florida.

There were occasional Alice sightings.

She'd be seen on Tony Grace's yacht.

That was about it.

One of the big criticisms Alice got

was that she continued to drink and see men

after her children died,

and that seemed really callous.

On the other hand, people grieve very differently,

and she may have been numbing her grief.

She may have just been seeking some sort of solace in that.

I had dinner with her once and she said,

"You don't understand. My grief is mine.

"It's not theirs.

They can't judge me, and they can't have it."

She carried little photographs

of Missy and Eddie in her wallet.

And she said she would open it herself

and look at their pictures and grieve privately.

She didn't want anyone else to see it.

Then again, it was a long time ago

and a lot of things have changed since then.

Sometimes I wonder if they got it right.

What do you think?