Rowland wasn’t like other boys in Salt Lake. For starters, he wasn’t from here. He had grown up in New York. He wasn’t as bookish as the guys she’d met at the U., or as immature. He seemed grounded. He was only a bouncer part time, he told her, so he could pay to finish his associate degree in computer science at Salt Lake Community College.
When Jill heard that he was 28, she worried, but she decided not to say anything. Jill had been Lauren’s informal track coach her whole life, and that’s when the accusations of being a helicopter parent began, mostly because other parents thought Jill shouldn’t be coaching her own daughter. Lauren wasn’t a little girl anymore, Jill reminded herself. Allow her to grow up. Soon she would be graduating and out on her own, and she had to let Lauren make her own decisions. And her own mistakes.
Having a boyfriend would be good for her. And the fact that he was older, well, she wasn’t entirely surprised. Lauren was always mature for her age, and she was tired of the boys on campus, so it made sense that she would be drawn to an older guy, Jill told herself.
But as their relationship progressed, Alex noticed things that concerned her. From their first date, Rowland spent nearly every night in Lauren’s room. There was something about the logistics that didn’t add up. Why was this very large man spending every single night in Lauren’s twin bed in her student apartment on campus? It couldn’t be comfortable, it didn’t seem practical. Didn’t he have his own place?
Then, less than a week after they started dating, Lauren started saying things that indicated that Rowland was controlling her: “(He) told me to wear jeans and a T-shirt” or “(He) told me I could invite some friends to a bar.” Lauren readied herself for dates in a panic, fearful that she would anger him by being late. If he texted her, she would rush to respond immediately in case he got mad at her for her delayed response, even having Alex reply to him for her if she was driving.
He would often start their phone conversations with a hostile quiz: What are you doing? Who are you with? Where are you?
He was possessive, jealous. He told Lauren he didn’t want her going out downtown, or to friends' houses or parties, because other men could be there. When her phone died during a night class, he called her later enraged, accusing her of cheating. To protect her from the advances of other men, he bought her pepper spray and pressured her to buy a gun.
He told Lauren this was because he had been cheated on by a previous girlfriend and had trust issues. Lauren told Alex that she figured he’d get over all that once they became more established in their relationship. Alex was worried, but didn’t want to overstep.
“I kind of hinted at it, that this wasn't normal, like the controlling stuff,” Alex says. “But I didn’t want to push it only because I knew he had a lot of control over her at that point. I knew that sometimes, the guy could try to manipulate the girl and cut off communication (with her friends). So that’s why I didn’t push it.”
She had lost weight, and her eyes were glassy and hollow. She looked defeated, a fragment of the confident, bubbly woman she had been less than a month before.
But she was still so “in it,” Alex remembers, still loyal to him and refusing to criticize him.
“It was in her nature never to say anything bad about anyone, but there were times when she was emotionally abused when he would say things to her, but she couldn’t seem to recognize it,” Alex recalls. “She was under his spell.”
Other friends were also worried. The next day, Alex told two of her friends about Lauren’s situation, and they approached University of Utah housing staff to tell them that they were concerned about Lauren’s boyfriend’s control over her and how often he stayed in her room. They were also worried about how much he talked about guns.
Then, during a short visit to Pullman for fall break in the first days of October, Lauren researched her boyfriend online and discovered that he wasn’t who he said he was at all. He had lied about his name, which he had said was Shawn. He was actually Melvin Rowland. He had lied about his age, which was actually 37. And most shockingly, he had lied about his criminal record — that he was a registered sex offender who had spent 10 years in prison, released only shortly before she met him. She stared at his familiar face in a mug shot and tried to calm the panic rising in her throat.
Almost nothing Rowland had told Lauren was true. Born in New York, he was adopted by an older couple, but after they died, he was sent to a state-run group home. He had spent time in a Buddhist institute in California, joined the Job Corps and got a job as a certified nurse assistant after taking classes at Salt Lake Community College.
After a decade in prison on sex-abuse related charges, he had been sent back to prison twice for parole violations that included possessing pornography and failure to complete therapy. At one parole hearing he said he had once dreamed of being a doctor, but his addiction to “internet sexual activity” had ruined his life.
When Lauren returned to campus on Oct. 9, she had been planning on attending a teammate’s wedding with Rowland that evening. From her apartment, Lauren called Alex for advice. She wanted to break up with him, but she couldn’t just shoot him a text to end things, because he had borrowed her car while she was out of town and he still had it. Alex advised her not to go to the wedding, and to meet up with him in a public place — like a coffee shop — to end their relationship.
Unbeknownst to Lauren, while she talked on the phone, Rowland was crouching outside her ground-floor window, watching her and possibly listening to her, Lauren told Alex the next day. When she hung up the phone he burst into her apartment without knocking, berating her for talking about their relationship with other people.
“You shouldn’t be talking to your friends about our relationship,” he said, according to Alex.
Lauren confronted Rowland about his lies and criminal history, and broke up with him. He said he was framed by a girl he met at a fraternity party, that she was 17 and that he hadn’t done anything wrong, even though according to his plea he had admitted to soliciting sex from a 13-year-old girl.
“I only plead guilty because I had to,” he insisted.
Lauren wasn’t convinced, and tried to make him leave. That night, he stayed in her room. According to Alex, Lauren told her that every time Lauren tried to make Rowland leave, he forced himself on her sexually. This happened multiple times, according to Alex.
The next morning, Lauren told Rowland she had to go to track practice, and Rowland left, taking her car to run errands. After he left, she realized she didn’t have practice after all, and called Alex from her apartment to tell her about the night before.
Later that day, Lauren got a mysterious text from a number she didn’t recognize, appearing to be a friend of Rowland’s.
“Why’d you break up with the big guy, he really loves you,” the text read. A short time later, another text, supposedly from a different friend, asked her about her car, telling her he’d drop it by instead of Rowland because he couldn’t stand to look at her.
Then the texts escalated. One urged her to “go kill yourself.”
The texts seemed to have similar grammatical errors to those that Rowland used when texting her, giving her a hunch that it was Rowland himself sending her these texts, not his friends.
Lauren called her mom telling her Rowland had her car and was worried about getting it back. Jill McCluskey called campus dispatch and told them she was "very upset and worried" and requested an escort to help Lauren retrieve her car from Rowland. "I'm worried he's dangerous," Jill told dispatchers. Campus security provided an escort for Lauren and she was able to retrieve her car.
Two days later, Lauren received more texts from Rowland, these claiming that Rowland was dead and that it was Lauren’s fault. Some said he’d killed himself, others claimed he’d been in a car accident and she needed to come to the funeral.
She called University of Utah police, telling them about the suspicious messages.
The officer told her that without threats or anything criminal in nature, “there was not much that could be done.”
Escalating threats
But what happened the next day, on Oct. 13, stopped Lauren in her tracks.
Rowland texted her telling her he had a compromising photograph of the two of them together, and that unless she paid him $1,000, he would publish it online.
Lauren panicked. The photo clearly showed her face and the posters in her room. It would tarnish everything she had worked so hard, all her life, to build. She was Lauren McCluskey, the nice small-town girl, the wholesome track star. Her hundreds of track medals, her high GPA, her very identity — all of that seemed to hang in the balance. She was so ashamed, but she was also angry at him, and at herself for falling for him in the first place.
In a panic, she picked up her phone and Venmo’d him $1,000.
She called campus police and went down to the station. Lauren brought Alex with her, and Alex says they were both surprised when the two officers greeted them in the lobby of the station and did not at any point take them back to an interview room to be questioned privately about the matter.
Alex says it seemed that the officers were not particularly concerned about Lauren’s case, suggesting that perhaps it was a scam and someone had hacked into Rowland’s phone.
According to Alex, one of the officers looked up Rowland on the campus directory, and told Lauren he seemed like a “pretty good guy,” who had only been stopped for a traffic ticket on campus (it would later be revealed to Alex that they had looked up the wrong person in their database, who happened to be a student with the same name). In response, Lauren told the officers he was a sex offender and showed them his mug shot.
Still, Alex remembers that they didn’t seem particularly worried. They told Lauren and Alex that a detective would be in touch on Tuesday.
Unsatisfied with their contact with campus police, Lauren reached out to the Salt Lake City police department, but dispatch routed her back to the university police, saying that the extortion was under the university police’s jurisdiction.
Days later, on Oct. 19, Lauren still hadn't heard anything back from the campus police detective assigned to her case. So she called Salt Lake City police again, and was again rerouted back to campus police. A detective returned her call and told her she wouldn’t be back at work until Oct. 23, four days later, but suggested Lauren should call back if she got another message in which Rowland was attempting to lure her somewhere.
That weekend, Lauren sent three screenshots to campus police showing Rowland’s criminal history and continued harassment.
On Friday night, Oct. 19, Lauren and Alex went to Lake Effect, a different bar in downtown Salt Lake City. When they got back to campus, Lauren confided in Alex that she was still stressed about Rowland.
“I remember when the two of us got back on campus, we were talking about her future and the whole Rowland thing. She said one day when she is happily married to a nice guy, hopefully we can look back on this and laugh,” said Alex.
On Monday, Oct. 22, Lauren received another alarming text: this time, from someone claiming to be the deputy chief of campus police, asking her to go to the police station. Lauren called campus police, and the detective who took the call told her not to respond.
Lauren knew it was Rowland, and called Alex to tell her. Alex asked if she had sent the information to the police, and Lauren texted her that afternoon to confirm that she had. (Impersonating a police officer is a crime. According to a later independent review the officer who took the call didn't do anything further with the report beyond telling Lauren to ignore the text).
Alex never heard from Lauren again.
The day of the murder
Around 3 p.m. that day, Rowland snuck into Lauren’s apartment building and began waiting for her in the lobby.
Around 8:20 p.m., Lauren was returning from class when Rowland confronted her in the parking lot outside her dorm. She was on the phone with her mother, who had just put her on speaker so her dad could hear from the other room, where he was doing yoga.
After Lauren screamed and the line went dead, Rowland grabbed her roughly, causing her to drop her backpack and phone, police believe. He then shoved her into the back seat of the car he had driven to campus and shot her multiple times.
Rowland then called a woman he had met on a dating site and asked her to pick him up. They went to dinner and went to her home downtown, where Rowland showered. Afterward, she dropped him off at a coffee shop.
In the meantime, back in Pullman, Matt and Jill were frantically trying to figure out what had happened. When the line dropped, Matt first thought that Lauren had been in a car accident. But as Jill and Matt repeated her name over and over again with no answer, it was clear to both of them what had happened: Rowland or his friends had grabbed her.
Matt picked up his phone to dial 911, and left the other phone line open, in case Lauren came back. Five minutes later, they heard a young woman’s voice, but not their daughter’s. It was a medical student, who said that Lauren's computer and backpack were on the ground, but Lauren was nowhere to be seen.
'Lauren could die tonight'
Matt, his stomach in knots, clung to hope.
At 9:55 p.m., Lauren’s coach called Jill to tell her the news: while searching the parking lot, police found McCluskey’s body in the back seat of a car.
One look at Jill’s face, and Matt already knew they had lost her.
Later that night, the woman Rowland met on a dating site recognized him from the news, and called the police. Salt Lake City police found him shortly after midnight, and followed Rowland into Trinity AME Church.
As the police entered, Rowland shot himself to death.
/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-sltrib.s3.amazonaws.com/public/PQMIUX5WSNGOZPZ4BPVE5XPQEM.jpg)
