"He denied his relationship with Maura until we forced him to admit it," says Maura's father, Marcus. While Rachel is strong and definite in her belief that their daughter is the victim of foul play, Marcus can't speak about Maura without weeping, and he says he prays every day for her safe return. "Everything Frank Manwaring says has been a lie-until someone forces him to tell the truth."
Having an affair, of course, is a far cry from committing murder. And while it's not been proven that everything Secretary Manwaring has said about his relationship with Maura Greer has been false, many of his statements have been reticent and incomplete. Police feel he has been less than forthcoming. Maura's parents believe he has not only hindered the investigation, they are convinced that he should be at the center of it.
On Friday, February 24, Maura was supposed to visit her parents in East End Harbor, a small town on the outskirts of Long Island's chic Hamptons. It was Marcus's birthday on Saturday, and Maura was going to spend the weekend celebrating. Marcus had reserved an hour of tennis at a local indoor court on both Saturday and Sunday because Maura loved to play tennis and they had a friendly competition going back to Maura's teens. Rachel made a salon appointment for both mother and daughter on that Saturday afternoon. They were going to get facials, manicures, and pedicures. "She loved being pampered," Rachel says. "And I loved being able to pamper my daughter."
Marcus went to the train station to pick up Rachel. She was supposed to arrive on the 4 p.m. train. But when the train pulled away and the platform was cleared of people, there was no Maura. "At first I wasn't too concerned," Marcus says. "Maura was not always the most responsible person in the world, at least when it came to her parents. But when I called Rachel to see if Maura had called, she started talking about how she'd had a premonition. Rachel said that something bad had happened, that she'd felt it the day before but didn't say anything." So when he got home, Marcus called the Washington, D.C., police and said that Maura was missing. The D.C. police asked a few questions and, according to the Greers, basically dismissed their concern. "She hadn't been missing long enough to be 'missing,'" Rachel says, her voice tinged with anger. "We couldn't get them to do anything for forty-eight hours."
When the police finally did decide to act, they went to Maura's apartment. What they found was a spotless home with alphabetized CDs, a closet full of designer clothes, and nothing but two cans of Diet Coke and two cartons of unflavored yogurt in the fridge. Oh yes. They also found Maura's purse. In it were her driver's license and all of her credit cards.
"Why would she leave her purse?" Rachel asks. "We think it's because she was told to leave it behind. We believe that Secretary Man-waring didn't want her to meet him if she was carrying any identification. From the things that Maura said about the relationship, the man she was seeing was obsessed with secrecy. He had all sorts of rules for her to follow when she met him. We believe that this was one of those rules. It's why we believe she was on her way to meet him when she disappeared."
Manwaring did indeed try to keep the affair secret. Not only is he married with two college-age children, he is in a highly visible and sensitive cabinet position, appointed by a president whose popularity is partly based on his constant reaffirmation of his belief in and the country's need for faith and traditional family values. He is the tough, honest, anti-scandal leader. That is the image he ran on, it is the image that has kept his poll numbers higher than those of any president in recent memory, and it is the image he insists on maintaining for himself and his advisers. Manwaring's affair does not conform to that image. It is not just damaging to the president on a political level. According to several advisers, it offends the president's personal sensibility.
Although Manwaring at first denied that he was meeting Maura the day she disappeared, the Greers also forced him to admit the truth about that. Maura had a reservation at a local Marriott Hotel and was due to check in the afternoon of February 23. Manwaring admitted, nearly a month after Maura went missing, that he was supposed to meet her there and spend the afternoon and evening with her in the suite they regularly frequented.
Two weeks after Maura's disappearance, the D.C. police had uncovered no clues and had no leads in the case. They had not made a connection to Manwaring at this point. That came after the Greers got their phone bill. While scrutinizing it, Marcus Greer noticed that there were several long-distance calls made that month to a Washington number he was unfamiliar with. He realized that the dates of the calls coincided with the last weekend Maura had visited East End Harbor. He mentioned this to Rachel, who immediately went to the phone and dialed the number. It was a pager. Fifteen minutes later, the Greers' phone rang. The call to the pager was being returned. The person who returned it was Secretary Frank Manwaring.
The Greers asked Manwaring if he knew their daughter. He was nonplussed, they say, and evasive. He refused to speak to them. They immediately took their information to the Washington police. It took the police another four days before they contacted Manwaring. They went to his D.C. apartment, interviewed him for half an hour, then released a statement that the secretary knew Maura Greer, they were friends and nothing more, and that he had absolutely nothing to do with her disappearance. The police announced that he was not a suspect.
The media immediately jumped on the story. Two days after it was made public, a woman named Eva Grey called a press conference. Ms. Grey is a lap dancer at a Washington club called Privates. At the conference, she revealed that several years earlier she had had a four-month-long affair with Secretary Manwaring. The affair ended, she said, when she confronted him about his promise to leave his wife. According to Ms. Grey, the secretary got violent during the conversation. She alleges that he choked her until she almost passed out and told her that if she ever brought up the subject of his divorce again, he would make sure she disappeared. Secretary Manwaring immediately called a press conference to say that not only was Ms. Grey's story untrue, he had never met her or heard of her.
In the weeks that followed, two other women came forward with similar stories. One woman, Esther Forrester, is a secretary at a Washington insurance company; the other, Felicity Black, is an out-of-work advertising executive. Both said that when their affairs with Secretary Manwaring became serious they talked to him about his promise to leave his wife and he became enraged and violent and ended the relationship.
At this moment, the various mysteries remain as such. What will happen to Frank Manwaring? He denies ever having met Ms. Grey or either of the two other women. He did-nearly a month after Maura's disappearance-admit to the affair with her but denies knowing anything about what has happened to her. There has been a tremendous public outcry for Secretary Manwaring to step down from his cabinet position, something he has thus far refused to do. There is also great political pressure being put on him to resign. The head of the Food and Drug Administration, where Maura Greer was interning and where she met Mr. Manwaring, is Chase Welles. Mr. Welles is the man most often rumored to be Mr. Manwaring's replacement. Welles has a close relationship with the president, and his positions are often much more in line with the president's. Manwaring and the president have differed publicly on the question of stem-cell research. The president has signed a bill restricting such research and is on record as opposing it on religious and moral grounds. Mr. Manwaring is a vocal proponent of the need for such research. Mr. Welles has stated that he believes the president is on the side of the angels when it comes to this issue.