The Alice Crimmins Case
Turning the Heat Up
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 todays 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!