It is the intimate and undeniable connection between her murder and that of her lover, President John F. Yet there is an another horror in the death of Mary Meyer, a horror that reaches far beyond the personal.

There was nothing pretty or easy about waking up early one morning in 2006 and finally realizing that my own father – Wistar Janney, a career high-level CIA officer – had been involved in the “termination” of Mary Pinchot Meyer, someone I had grown to love and care about. It ended exactly 30 years later in shocking fashion. My journey – a rigorous, thorough research endeavor informed by my education as a Princeton undergraduate and later by my training as a clinical psychologist – began in 1976. “The amount of work is the same.” As I meticulously attempted to unveil the facts surrounding Mary Meyer’s murder, I repeatedly took refuge in Castaneda’s words as the aftershocks of this event reverberated throughout my life in unimaginable ways. “We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong,” wrote the author Carlos Castaneda. Sometimes tormented, even haunted, I came to realize the necessity of a deeper reckoning – and not just emotionally or psychologically, as my chosen profession dictated, but some final resolution of knowing a more complete, unvarnished piece of the truth, and the direction from which it lay.

In the intervening time span of nearly half a century, nothing has dimmed the memory of what took place that night, nor the seminal childhood event of losing my best friend Michael eight years earlier in 1956. Nearly five decades have passed since I sat at my family’s dinner table on the night before Thanksgiving in 1964 where I first learned that my best friend’s mother had been murdered. Mary Pinchot Meyer had been brutally put to death. She was eventually officially identified by her brother-in-law, Benjamin C. For more than five hours, her identity remained unknown to police – but not, I would discover many years later, to an elite high-level group of operatives within the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). on a crisp, sunny mid-October day in Washington, D.C., that a beautiful, affluent middle-aged white woman was murdered on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal towpath during her accustomed walk after a morning of painting at her nearby Georgetown art studio. So it was in 1964, just before 12:30 P.M. Professor Cornell West, Princeton University ( Rolling Stone. That's the statement allowing you to live. Every person who bears witness has to have the depth of conviction of a martyr. History would be an excellent thing, if only it were true.

In His Garden by Leo Damore