How old is Erica Crow in The Westing Game?

Crow is fifty-seven years old, but seems much older. 

Crow is Sam Westing’s ex-wife.  She is working as a maid at Sunset Towers, but obviously she also has a Westing connection.  She is often described as very old, when she is really only fifty-seven years old.  Life has been hard for her though. 

Crow’s clothes were black; her skin, dead white. She looked severe. Rigid, in fact. Rigid and righteously severe. (Ch. 3) 

Sandy McSouthers’s entry on Crow is telling.  It tells the tale of a lonely woman and an unhappy life.  Crow married young, but when her daughter died that was the end of the marriage.  Sandy uses Westing’s other alias in the entry. 

BERTHE ERICA CROW. Age: 57. Mother died at childbirth, raised by father (deceased). Education: 1 year of high school. Married at 16, divorced at 40. Exhusbands name: Windy Windkloppel. (Ch. 19) 

Poor Crow.  The record includes “chronic alcoholism” and arrests for vagrancy.  The eccentric maid of Sunset Towers seems to have quite a past.  She has been prematurely aged by alcohol and sadness.  She seems to relate to Angela well, seeing her daughter in the girl who is about to get married.  Like Crow, Angela is misunderstood and underestimated.

While Crow's odd behavior and checkered past seem to make her a prime suspect, she is really just a grieving mother.  She did not kill Sam Westing, of course, since he is not dead.  Yet despite what she knows and has been through, she pretty much keeps to herself and bumbles around throughout the game.