The Cinderella Murder Read online

  Her morning ritual complete, she settled into the gray swivel chair across from the sofa and flipped through the agreement Mrs. Dempsey had signed, indicating her willingness to participate in Under Suspicion. The idea for a news-based reality show that revisited unsolved crimes had been Laurie’s. Instead of using actors, the series offered the victim’s family and friends the opportunity to narrate the crime from a firsthand perspective. Though the network had been wary of the concept—not to mention some flops in Laurie’s track record—Laurie’s concept of a series of specials got off the ground. The first episode had not only aired to huge ratings, it had also led to the case’s being solved.

  It was nearly a year since “The Graduation Gala” had aired. Since then they had considered and rejected dozens of unsolved murders as none had been suitable for their requirements—that the nearest relatives and friends, some of whom remained “under suspicion,” would be guests on the program.

  Of all the cold cases Laurie had considered for the show’s next installment, the murder twenty years ago of nineteen-year-old Susan Dempsey had been her first choice. Susan’s father had passed away three years ago, but Laurie tracked down her mother, Rosemary. Though she was appreciative of any attempt to find out who killed her daughter, she said she had been “burned” by people who had reached out to her before. She wanted to make sure that Laurie and the television show would treat Susan’s memory with respect. Her signature on the release meant that Laurie had earned her trust.

  “We need to be careful,” Laurie reminded Grace and Jerry. “The ‘Cinderella’ moniker came from the media, and Susan’s mother despises it. When talking to the family and friends, we always use the victim’s name. Her name was Susan.”

  A reporter for the Los Angeles Times had dubbed the case “the Cinderella Murder” because Susan was wearing only one shoe when her body was discovered in Laurel Canyon Park, south of Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills. Though police quickly found the other near the park entrance—presumably it had slipped off as she tried to escape her killer—the image of a lost silver pump became the salient detail that struck a chord with the public.

  “It is such a perfect case for the show,” Jerry said. “A beautiful, brilliant college student, so we have the hot UCLA setting. The views from Mulholland Drive near Laurel Canyon Park are terrific. If we can track down the dog owner who found Susan’s body, we can do a shoot right by the dog run where he was heading that morning.”

  “Not to mention,” Grace added, “that the director Frank Parker was the last known person to see Susan alive. Now he’s being called the modern Woody Allen. He had quite a reputation as a ladies’ man before getting married.”

  Frank Parker had been a thirty-four-year-old director when Susan Dempsey was murdered. The creator of three independent films, he was successful enough to get studio backing for his next project. Most people had first heard of him and that project because he had been auditioning Susan for a role the night she was killed.

  One of the challenges for Under Suspicion was persuading the people who were closest to the victim to participate. Some, like Susan’s mother, Rosemary, wanted to breathe new life into cold investigations. Others might be eager to clear their names after living, as the show’s title suggested, under a cloud of suspicion. And some, as Laurie had hoped would be the case with Frank Parker, might reluctantly agree to go along so they appeared to the public to be cooperative. Whenever whispers about the Cinderella case arose, Parker’s handlers liked to remind the public that the police had officially cleared him as a suspect. But the man still had a reputation to protect and he wouldn’t want to be seen as stonewalling an inquiry that might lead to solving a murder.

  Parker had gone on to become an Academy Award–nominated director. “I just read the advance review for his next movie,” Grace said. “It’s supposed to be a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination.”

  Laurie said, “That may be our chance to get him to go along with us. It wouldn’t hurt to have all that attention when the Oscars come along.” She began to jot notes on a pad of paper. “Contacting the other people who were close to Susan is what we have to start on now. Let’s follow up with calls to everyone on our list: Susan’s roommates, her agent, her classmates, her lab partner at the research lab.”

  “Not the agent,” Jerry said. “Edwin Lange passed away four years ago.”

  It was one less person on camera, but the agent’s absence wouldn’t affect their reinvestigation of the case. Edwin had been planning to run lines with Susan prior to her audition but got a phone call that afternoon informing him that his mother had had a heart attack. He had hopped immediately into his car, calling relatives constantly on his cell phone, until he arrived in Phoenix that night. He had been shocked to hear of Susan’s death, but the police never considered the agent a suspect or material witness.

  Laurie continued her list of people to contact. “It’s especially important to Rosemary that we lock in Susan’s boyfriend, Keith Ratner. Supposedly he was at some volunteer event, but Rosemary despised him and is convinced he had something to do with it. He’s still in Hollywood, working as a character actor. I’ll make that call and the one to Parker’s people myself. Now that Susan’s mother is officially on board, I hope that will convince everyone else. Either way, get ready to spend time in California.”

  Grace clapped her hands together. “I can’t wait to go to Hollywood.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Laurie said. “Our first stop is the Bay Area. To tell Susan’s story, we have to get to know her. Really know her. We start with the person who knew her the longest.”

  “We start with her mother,” Jerry confirmed.

  5

  Rosemary Dempsey was Laurie’s reason for moving the Cinderella Murder to the top of her list for the show’s next installment.

  The network had been pressuring her to feature a case from the Midwest: the unsolved murder of a child beauty pageant contestant inside her family’s home. The case had already been the subject of countless books and television shows over the past two decades. Laurie kept telling her boss, Brett Young, that there was nothing new for Under Suspicion to add.

  “Who cares?” Brett had argued. “Every time we have an excuse to play those adorable pageant videos, our ratings skyrocket.”

  Laurie was not about to exploit the death of a child to bolster her network’s ratings. Starting her research from scratch, she stumbled onto a true-crime blog featuring a “Where are they now?” post about the Cinderella case. The blogger appeared to have simply Googled the various people involved in the case: Susan’s boyfriend was a working actor; her college research partner had gone on to find dot-com success; Frank Parker was . . . Frank Parker.

  The blog post quoted only one source: Rosemary Dempsey, whose phone number was still listed—“Just in case anyone ever needs to tell me something about my daughter’s death,” she said. Rosemary told the blogger that she was willing to do anything to find out the truth about her daughter’s murder. She also said that she was convinced that the stress caused by Susan’s death had contributed to her husband’s fatal stroke.

  The overall tone of the blog post, filled with tawdry innuendo, left Laurie feeling sick. The author hinted, with no factual support, that Susan’s desire to be a star may have made her willing to do anything to land a plum role with an emerging talent like Parker. She speculated, again with no proof, that a consensual liaison may have “gone wrong.”

  Laurie could not imagine what it would have been like for Rosemary Dempsey to read those words, written by a person she had trusted enough to confide her feelings to about the loss of both her daughter and her husband.

  So when Laurie called Rosemary Dempsey about the possibility of participating in Under Suspicion, she had understood precisely what Rosemary meant when she said she’d been burned before. Laurie had made a promise to do her very best, both for her and her daughter. And she told Rosemary how she knew from experience what it was like not
knowing.

  Last year, when the police had finally identified Greg’s killer, Laurie had learned what people meant when they used the word “closure.” She didn’t have her husband back, and Timmy was still without his father, but they no longer had to fear the man Timmy had called Blue Eyes. It was closure from fear but not from heartbreak.

  “That damn shoe,” Rosemary had said about the “Cinderella Murder” nickname. “The irony is that Susan never wore anything so flashy. She’d bought those shoes at a vintage store for a seventies party. But her agent, Edwin, thought they were perfect for the audition. If the public really needed a visual image to hang on to, it should have been her necklace. It was gold, with the sweetest little horseshoe pendant. It was found by her body, the chain broken in the struggle. We bought it for her on her fifteenth birthday, and the next day, she landed the lead role as Sandy in her high school’s production of Grease. She always called it her lucky necklace. When the police described it, Jack and I knew we’d lost our baby.”

  Laurie had known at that moment that she wanted the murder of Susan Dempsey to be her next case. A young, talented girl whose life had been cut short. Greg was a brilliant young doctor whose life had been cut short. His murderer was dead now. Susan’s was still out there.

  6

  Rosemary Dempsey juggled two overflowing brown paper grocery bags, managing to close the hatchback of her Volvo C30 with her right elbow. Spotting Lydia Levitt across the street, she quickly turned away, hoping to slip from the driveway to her front door unnoticed.

  No such luck.

  “Rosemary! My goodness. How can one person eat so much food? Let me help you!”

  How could one person be so rude? Rosemary wondered. Rude, and yet at the same time so kind?

  She smiled politely, and before she knew it, her across-the-street neighbor was at her side, grabbing one of the bags from her hands.

  “Multigrain bread, huh? Oh, and organic eggs. And blueberries—all those antioxidants! Good for you. We put so much junk into our bodies. Personally, my weakness is jelly beans. Can you believe it?”

  Rosemary nodded and made sure Lydia saw her polite smile. If Rosemary had to guess, she’d have said the woman was in about her midsixties, though God knows she didn’t care.

  “Thank you so much for your help, Lydia. And I’d say jelly beans are a relatively harmless vice.”

  She used her now-free hand to unlock the front door of her house.

  “Wow, you lock your door? We don’t usually do that here.” Lydia set her bag next to Rosemary’s on the kitchen island, just inside the entryway. “Well, about the jelly beans, tell that to Don. He keeps finding little pink and green surprises in the sofa cushions. He says it’s like living with a five-year-old on Easter Sunday. Says my veins must be like Pixy Stix, filled with sugar.”

  Rosemary noticed the message light blinking on her telephone on the kitchen counter. Was it the call she was waiting for?

  “Well, thank you again for the help, Lydia.”

  “You should come down for the book club on Tuesday nights. Or movies on Thursdays. Any activity you want, really: knitting, brunch club, yoga.”

  As Lydia rambled on about the various games Rosemary could be playing with her neighbors, Rosemary thought about the long road that had led her to this conversation. Rosemary had always assumed she’d remain forever in the home where she had raised her daughter and lived with her husband for thirty-seven years. But, as she had learned so long ago, the world didn’t always work precisely as one expected. Sometimes you had to react to life’s punches.

  After Susan died, Jack offered to quit his job and go back to Wisconsin. The stock in the company that he had accumulated over the years and the generous pension and retirement benefits meant that they had plenty of money to take care of them for the rest of their lives. But Rosemary had realized that they had built a life in California. She had her church and her volunteer work at the soup kitchen. She had friends who cared so much about her that they kept her freezer full of casseroles for months, first after she said good-bye to Susan, then to Jack.

  And so she’d stayed in California. After Jack died she did not want to stay in their home. It was too large, too empty. She bought a town house in a gated community outside Oakland and continued her life there.

  She knew that she could either live with her grief or fall into despair. Daily Mass became a routine. She increased her volunteer work to the point where she became a grief counselor.

  In retrospect, she might have been better off with a condo in San Francisco. In the city she would have had her anonymity. In the city she could buy multigrain bread and organic eggs and carry her groceries and check that urgent, blinking phone message without having to fend off Lydia Levitt’s attempts to recruit her into group activities.

  Her neighbor was finally wrapping up the list. “That’s what’s nice about this neighborhood,” Lydia said. “Here at Castle Crossings, we’re basically a family. Oh, I’m sorry. That was a poor choice of words.”

  Rosemary had first met this woman sixteen months ago and yet it wasn’t till this moment that she finally saw herself through Lydia Levitt’s eyes. At seventy-five years old, Rosemary had already been a widow for three years and had buried her only daughter two entire decades earlier. Lydia saw her as an old woman to be pitied.

  Rosemary wanted to explain to Lydia that she had made a life filled with activities and friends, but she knew the woman had a point. Her activities and friends were the same as when she had been a San Mateo wife and mother. She had been slow to allow new people into her world. It was as if she didn’t want to know anyone who didn’t also know and love Jack and Susan. She didn’t want to meet anyone who might see her, as Lydia apparently did, as a widow marked by tragedy.

  “Thank you, Lydia. I really appreciate it.” This time, her gratitude was sincere. Her neighbor might not have been tactful, but she was caring and kind. Rosemary made a mental promise to reach out again to Lydia once she was less preoccupied.

  • • •

  Once Rosemary was alone, she eagerly retrieved her voice mail. She heard a beep, followed by a clear voice that hinted at a tone of excitement.

  “Hi, Rosemary. This is Laurie Moran from Fisher Blake Studios. Thank you so much for sending back the release. As I explained, putting the show together depends also on how many of the people involved in the case we can sign up. Your daughter’s agent, unfortunately, has passed away, but we have letters out to all the names you gave us: Frank Parker, the director; her boyfriend, Keith Ratner; and Susan’s roommates, Madison and Nicole. The final call gets made by my boss. But your willingness to participate makes an enormous difference. I truly hope this happens and will get back to you as soon as I have a final answer. In the meantime, if you need me—”

  Once Laurie began reciting her contact information, Rosemary saved the message. She then dialed another number from memory as she began unloading groceries. It was the number of Susan’s college roommate Nicole.

  Rosemary had told Nicole that she had decided to go ahead with the program.

  “Nicole, have you made a decision about the television show?”

  “Not quite. Not yet.”

  Rosemary rolled her eyes but kept her voice even. “The first time they made that kind of special, they ended up solving the case.”

  “I’m not sure I want the attention.”

  “It’s not attention about you.” Rosemary wondered if she sounded as shrill as she felt. “The focus of the show would be on Susan. On trying to solve her case. And you were close to Susan. You’ve seen how when someone brings it up on Facebook or Twitter, there are dozens of opinions, not least of which among them is that Susan was some kind of slut involved with half the men on campus. You could help to erase that image.”

  “How about the others? Did you speak to them?”

  “I haven’t yet,” Rosemary said honestly, “but the producers will make their choice based on the level of cooperation they get from the p
eople involved in the case. You were Susan’s roommate for nearly two years. You know that other people won’t want to cooperate.”

  She didn’t even bother speaking their names. First up was Keith Ratner, whose wandering eye Susan had forgiven so many times. Despite his own transgressions, his possessiveness of Susan and unjustified jealousy had always made him Rosemary’s top suspect. Next was Frank Parker, who had marched on with his fancy career, never giving Rosemary and Jack the common courtesy of a phone call or sympathy card for the loss of their daughter, whose only purpose in going to the Hollywood Hills was to see him. And Rosemary had never trusted Madison Meyer, Susan’s other roommate, who had been only too happy to step into the role that Susan was supposed to audition for that night.

  “Knowing Madison,” Nicole was saying, “she’ll show up with hair and makeup done.”

  Nicole was trying to defuse the tension with humor, but Rosemary was determined to stay on message. “You’ll be important to the producers’ decision.”

  The silence on the other end of the line was heavy.

  “They’ll be deciding soon,” Rosemary nudged.

  “Okay. I just need to check on a couple of things.”

  “Please hurry. The timing is important. You’re important.”

  As Rosemary clicked off the phone, she prayed that Nicole would come through. The more people Laurie Moran could enlist, the greater the hope that one of them would inadvertently give himself or herself away. The thought of reliving the terrible circumstances of Susan’s death was daunting, but she felt as though she were hearing lovable, wonderful Jack’s voice saying, Go for it, Rosie.

  Lovable, wonderful Jack.

  7

  Twenty-eight miles north, on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge, Nicole Melling heard the click on the other end of the telephone line but couldn’t bring herself to hit the disconnect button on the handset. She was staring at the phone in her hand when it started to make a loud beeping sound.