On the afternoon of Sunday, September 28th, 1930, a chambermaid on the fifth floor of the Mayflower Hotel could not get into Room 5xx. The phone in the room had been ringing all morning with no answer. The door was double locked from the inside. When the assistant manager finally produced the only key that could throw the thumb latch, what the staff found inside set off one of the most peculiar police investigations in 1930s Washington.
Lieut. Col. Richard Bennett Creecy, U.S. Marine Corps, lay dead on the bathroom floor with a bullet through his heart. His wife, Louise Reifsnider Creecy, lay between the twin beds in a pool of blood, her skull hacked open by a short-handled ax. A brand new .38 Colt revolver lay near the officer’s body. A brand new hatchet lay near hers.
The deputy coroner took one look and ruled it a murder-suicide. Police homicide detectives, the Marine Corps Commandant, and the entire Creecy family refused to accept that. By Monday morning, the front page of The Evening Star was running this headline:
A scene the police could not reconcile
The Creecys had checked into the Mayflower on September 23rd. Col. Creecy was the assistant commandant of the Garde d’Haïti, the constabulary that the Marines ran during the U.S. occupation of Haiti, and he was due back at his post on October 6th. He and Louise had spent Saturday evening, the 27th, with his elderly parents at the Gordon Hotel a few blocks away. The elder Col. E. C. Creecy, 84, told the Star his son and daughter-in-law had been “just like children, so playful that to us old folks they seemed foolish.” They had train tickets and Pullman seats reserved for the noon train to New York the next day, waiting at the hotel porter’s desk.
Sometime between leaving the Gordon and noon Sunday, both of them were attacked.
By the time hotel staff entered the fifth floor room around 4 p.m. Sunday, rigor mortis had set in on Col. Creecy. Mrs. Creecy had bled so heavily that Emergency Hospital had to resort to blood transfusions on arrival. The room itself was undisturbed. The Evening Star noted that police “found no signs of disorder in the room other than the prone bodies of its two occupants.” About $300 in cash and a large amount of Mrs. Creecy’s jewelry sat in plain view on the dresser.
The door catch had been thrown from inside. The only key to that latch was kept in the hotel safe. The adjacent room was vacant for the weekend, and police checked the window ledge for footprints or fingerprints. Nothing. The only other route in was a sixty-foot scale up the dining-room wall to the fifth floor windows, which Lieut. Edward J. Kelly, the chief of D.C.’s homicide squad, deemed “possible but not probable.” The room, in other words, was sealed.
Why nobody believed it was a suicide
What set the Evening Star coverage apart from the early Washington Post account, and what made Lieut. Kelly publicly back off the murder-suicide theory inside 24 hours, was the absence of anything resembling a motive. Quoting the Star:
Dissatisfied with their earlier “attempted murder-suicide” theory, police today were delving deep into every detail to determine what happened in the fifth floor room of the Mayflower Hotel before they entered yesterday afternoon to find wealthy Lieut. Col. Richard Bennett Creecy, Marine Corps, lying dead on the floor, a bullet wound through his heart, and his wife, Mrs. Louise Reifsnider Creecy, lying critically wounded on the floor nearby, her head horribly gashed by a short-handled ax.
Col. Creecy was 49 years old, had been married 24 years, had a $20,000 annual income (north of $400,000 today), and was returning to a post he had asked for and described in letters to Brig. Gen. Rufus H. Lane as one he was “particularly happy” with. His wife was independently wealthy, the daughter of a prominent Westminster, Maryland canner. They had no children but were, in the words of his brother E. C. Creecy, “a more devoted couple than I ever knew. When she was ill in the tropics, he would drop everything and prepare his wife’s food with his own hands.”
And then the weapons. Col. Creecy was a known marksman with one and only one pistol: a Colt .45-caliber service automatic. He had used it for 27 years. The weapon found at the scene was a brand new Colt .38 revolver. The hatchet was also brand new. His brother told the Star:
I want that gun traced before I’m satisfied it was attempted murder and suicide. I can’t believe Dick would have done a thing like that. Why man, it is impossible. Some men are interested in tools, and if Dick had been that sort, I might have believed he had bought a hatchet, but he wasn’t the sort that was interested in tools.
The Colt Firearms Co. was wired in Hartford the morning the body was found, and Lieut. Kelly’s homicide squad started running the serial numbers backward from the factory toward the ultimate buyer. Marine Corps Commandant Maj. Gen. Ben H. Fuller appointed a separate board of inquest, headed by Col. Louis McCarty Little. Two parallel investigations were now running, neither of them satisfied with the coroner’s certificate.
The Selfridge coin flip
Buried in the Star coverage was a detail that, if you know your aviation history, hits like a freight train. From the September 29th front page:
Col. Creecy back in 1908 flipped a coin with Lieut. Selfridge, U. S. A., after whom Selfridge Field, Mich., is named, to see whether he or Selfridge would fly with Orville Wright on a test of the Wright machine made for the Government. Lieut. Selfridge was killed when the plane crashed in the flight.
That crash, on September 17th, 1908 at Fort Myer, killed the first human being ever to die in an airplane. Selfridge Field outside Detroit was named for the loser. Creecy, then a young Marine lieutenant detailed to the aeronautical board, was a close friend of Selfridge and helped carry his unconscious body off the field. Twenty two years later he was dead on the floor of the Mayflower Hotel.
An old Washington family
Richard Bennett Creecy was born in Washington on March 5th, 1881, raised in Georgetown, and commissioned a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps on July 14th, 1903. His 27 years in uniform included tours in the Philippines, Panama, Cuba, Veracruz, Mexico, France during the World War, and Haiti, plus shipboard duty on most of the major Marine billets at sea. He had reached the rank of lieutenant colonel without ever, by his family’s account, suffering the kind of tropical fever that might explain a sudden break.
His father, Col. Edward C. Creecy, was a Confederate-era Naval Academy appointee with one of the better stories in the Creecy file. Per the original Washington Post account of the case, Edward’s mother had carried a letter of recommendation from her family’s Louisiana friend, Sen. Jefferson Davis, to President Lincoln shortly after the secession crisis. Lincoln read the Davis letter, laughed, and made out the appointment to Annapolis, telling her: “We need more young men from that part of the country. Don’t tell anyone whose recommendation got him in.”
So the man on the bathroom floor of the Mayflower Hotel was the son of a Marylander appointed to the Naval Academy by Abraham Lincoln on the secret recommendation of Jefferson Davis, and the friend who had once won the coin toss against the first man ever to die in an airplane.
The verdict, the burial, and what we still don’t know
Louise Reifsnider Creecy never regained consciousness. She died at Emergency Hospital several days later without ever telling anyone what happened in Room 5xx. The homicide investigation gradually wound down. The pistol trace, never publicly reported in detail, apparently turned up nothing that would force a re-opening. After a Navy Department board led by Rear Admiral David F. Sellers, the judge advocate general, the official verdict came back in the most coldly bureaucratic language imaginable: Col. Creecy was “held sane at the moment of taking his life,” and his death was “the result of his own misconduct.”
That phrasing, “his own misconduct,” is what a Navy uses when it doesn’t want to pay survivor benefits and doesn’t want to call something it can’t explain a murder. It is not a finding of fact. It is a finding of policy.
Richard Creecy is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, Section 7, Site 8341. Louise is not buried beside him. She rests with her parents at Westminster Cemetery in Carroll County, Maryland, an hour up the road from the Mayflower. Nearly a century later, the room is still there. The verdict is still there. And the brand new revolver and brand new hatchet, purchased somewhere by someone, still don’t have a paper trail anyone has produced.
If you find yourself at the bar at the Mayflower on Connecticut Avenue, raise one for the Creecys and the locked-room mystery that the homicide squad never quite closed.