The Cinderella Murder

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.