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In the wake of Mary Meyer's murder on that October 12 afternoon, who among her close friends and family first knew that she was dead? And how did they come by that knowledge? The truth—elusive though it has been—about when and how Mary's friends and family learned of her death is part of the key to unraveling the mystery of who killed her, and why.

To begin with, the first public revelation that Mary Meyer had been romantically involved with President Kennedy came through a story in the National Enquirer in its March 2, 1976 edition. The details of the story had been given to the Enquirer by James Truitt, a close friend of Mary's. She had confided her affair with President Kennedy to her friend, and he had kept a record of everything Mary had shared with him.

The Enquirer exposé revealed the fact that Mary had been keeping a diary of her affair, as well as the fact that she and the president had smoked marijuana in the First Family's residence in the White House. It was disclosed, for the first time, the fact that following her death, Mary's diary was found by her sister, Tony, in Mary's studio, and that this diary had been given to the CIA's counterintelligence chief James Angleton to be burned, which he never did.

Cord Meyer would maintain that Angleton was a "very close friend of ours, and he successfully dealt with a diary that might have been embarrassing, assured that it didn't come out. That was not done to protect state secrets or anything like that. It was done to protect a friend."

Sixteen years after his wife's murder, Cord would finally reveal in his book Facing Reality who had contacted him in New York on the afternoon of Mary's murder to tell him what had happened—again, before police had any idea of the victim's identity. It was the same "friend" that had called the Washington Post's Ben Bradlee "just after lunch," a man who happened to be a close CIA colleauge—a fact that Cord, too, failed to mention in his account… my father, Wistar Janney.