The Cinderella Murder Read Free Page A

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

    R osemary 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 wasconvinced that the stress caused by Susan’s death had contributed to her husband’s fatal stroke.
    The overall tone of the blog post,