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Kat
I’d been working at the LA Times when the story of Cory Dempsey had broken. I was lucky to have the job. My mother had cashed in a favor with a friend of hers, landing me as a junior reporter under the famed investigative journalist Frank Durham. It was my first big story, and I was eager to prove myself, accompanying him as he made the rounds to press conferences, to the police station, and to meet with sources close to the investigation. I was even present when Frank met with Cory’s family, a rare interview granted with the very strictest of parameters.
That was where I’d first heard Meg Williams’s name. Not in the course of the interview itself—two parents working hard to stay on the right side of public perception, deflecting blame away from themselves for what their son had done to those girls.
But in the corner, where I sat taking my own notes, I heard different things from the cousins who’d driven Mr. and Mrs. Dempsey up from San Diego. Bits and pieces of a whispered conversation I wasn’t supposed to overhear. As far as they knew, I was just a young, female assistant with headphones shoved in her ears, waiting for her boss to finish his interview so she could type up his notes.
“Supposedly, this all happened while Cory was living with his girlfriend. Right under her nose.” A male cousin in his late twenties.
“God, can you imagine finding out your boyfriend did something like that to a young girl?” His female counterpart.
I held my eyes on my notebook, writing the words live-in girlfriend and circling them. And then I kept listening, bobbing my head to a beat that wasn’t there.
“If he was Cory? Yes.”
“Who told you he had a girlfriend?”
The male cousin grimaced. “Nate.”
Nate Burgess, Cory’s closest friend. Frank had included his contact information in the legend he’d given me. I added Nate’s name to the web I’d started sketching out in my notes.
“What else did Nate say?”
“Not much about the high school girls. Claimed he had no idea.”
The woman gave a derisive laugh. “Right.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the man’s gaze cut to me, and he lowered his voice. “He said something interesting though. About the girlfriend, Meg.”
I added the name Meg to the page and held my breath.
“Nate says she came out of nowhere seven months ago, infiltrated Cory’s life, and conned him into giving her access to everything.”
“Let me guess, she was young and hot.”
“Probably, but here’s the thing—Nate claims everything Meg told Cory about herself was a lie. That she targeted him from the beginning and used what he was doing to his students as cover to empty his bank account and disappear.”
“That doesn’t make her a con artist; that makes her a hero.”
***
Back in the car with Frank, I brought it up. “One of the cousins brought up the possibility that Cory’s girlfriend, Meg, was conning him. That she set all of this up.”
I looked at Frank across the center console, his white hair erupting out of his head in a way that had earned him the nickname Einstein among the other reporters. He was a legend, and I was lucky to be able to learn from him. But it wasn’t easy, having to constantly fight for the real assignments, not the public records searches and lunch orders my male colleagues kept trying to stick me with.
He grunted and said, “While that may be, the story we’re going to write is the one about a predatory high school principal.”
“But they think Meg might have been the one who put it all in motion. A female con artist could be an interesting angle.”
Frank shook his head. “It’s important that you learn early on that not every great story will be told,” he said. “Newspapers are a dying business, and our job is to write stories that will sell papers. Sex and scandal sell. That’s what we’re writing.”
I didn’t agree with him, but I wasn’t going to argue. I also wasn’t going to let it go. My mother had warned me: As a woman in the news industry, you’re going to have to work harder, be smarter, take bigger risks to prove you’re just as good as the men.
When we got back to the Times offices, I waited until Frank went out to get a cup of coffee, then dug around in his notes until I found the number for Cory’s parents.
“Good evening, Mrs. Dempsey, this is Kat Roberts from the LA Times. I met you earlier today with Frank? As we were going through his notes, we realized we didn’t have the full name of the woman who’d been living with Cory at the time of his arrest.”
“We never met her, but her name was Meg Williams,” Cory’s mother said. “I’m not sure if Meg is short for something, or if that’s her real name at all. She took off shortly before everything broke open. In fact, if you find her, could you let us know?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “We’ll be in touch.”
Frank returned, coffee in hand, and said, “What are you going to tackle first?”
I closed my notebook. “I’m going to get started fact-checking some of the statements from your interview today.”
He nodded and settled in to write what would become a four-part series on public schools and the structure that allowed a man like Cory Dempsey to do what he did.
And that was the night I started my search for Meg Williams, the woman who had exploded Cory Dempsey’s life and then disappeared. The woman who would soon destroy mine as well.
