Mod The Sims - Making Headlines - A mini-story contest

After a 16 day manhunt, Chloe Lovejoy, 30, and her ex-husband Dill Lovejoy, 32, were found hiding in a tattered tent in Lirchwood Park in Sim City yesterday morning. Mr Lovejoy sustained a broken nose during the apprehension. Ms Lovejoy sobbed as if she were the real victim. Hours later, the two led police to Fiora Danielle Reed’s body in a burlap sack held down with stones in a pond.

Reed, 47, co-founder of OrangeFruit, an organic juice company headquartered in Sim City, was kidnapped at gunpoint on January 23 at 9:03 pm while walking home on 12th street after dinner with husband Dill Lovejoy. Though the crime was caught on surveillance cameras, the hunt for Reed and her kidnappers turned up nothing.

“It was as if she had vanished into thin air,” said Reed’s brother, Kenny Vu. “The worst part was that no one knew if her kidnapping was random or targeted.”

Indeed, the lack of a ransom demand made police suspicious that more was going on than met the eye. When confronted with this missing fact, Lovejoy claimed he had gotten a text from Reed two days after her disappearance, that read “30 million or else”. Lovejoy says he accidentally deleted the text while trying to forward it to detectives and then was too embarrassed to admit to what he called his “stupidity”.

“I don’t care how stupid you are,” Vu said, “no one mistakenly deletes what may be the last contact from your missing wife.”

Police agreed. Phone records proved there wasn’t any contact from Reed to Lovejoy since she disappeared. On February 3, Lovejoy had another text with video from Reed’s kidnappers.

“Convenient timing is an understatement. There was a ransom demand, yes, but it reads like something out of a movie.” Detective Theodore Granger of the Sim City Police Department said. “The video shows Ms Reed tied up to a chair in an old barn. She appears to have been buried and dug up for the sake of proof of life.”

The contents have yet to be released to the public, but other sources describe Reed as having her head covered with a yellow burlap bag. Her body was streaked with dirt and crawling with maggots.

“All hope of bringing her home alive vanished in an instant,” Granger said.

Police believed that Dill Lovejoy had staged the video in order to get police suspicions off himself. The fact that Fiora Reed was worth an estimated 300 million simoleons and had only been married to Lovejoy for five months made the husband a prime suspect. The only problem was how. Lovejoy had been under police surveillance since the deleted text confession. Detectives took a closer look at the tapes that recorded the initial kidnapping.

“Ms Reed looks confused, not terrified, as if she recognizes her assailant’s voice or demeanor.” Sim county assistant district attorney, Amy Reyes said.

On February 12, the blue van used in the kidnapping was found abandoned in Appaloosa Plains nearly 100 miles away from Sim City. A search of the vehicle revealed a shovel, bleach, and crumpled sheets with dirt and blood on them. There was no sign of Fiora Reed.

The next day, William Fransten, 43, cousin of Chloe Lovejoy, confessed to being the van’s driver during the kidnapping. According to Fransten, Ms Lovejoy promised to pay off his various debts if he helped her in what she called a “small prank to teach someone a lesson”. Fransten claims to have only driven the two as far as Appaloosa Plains as his cousin had requested and took a cab back to Sim City. Fransten denies any involvement with Reed’s death maintaining that she was still alive when he left the van in a Hogan’s restaurant parking lot.

Separating amicably in 2010, citing irreconcilable differences after six years of marriage, Chloe was Mr Lovejoy’s first wife. Friends of the divorced couple say the two remained very close. Chloe Lovejoy not only retained her married name, but, friends say, always wore her wedding rings. Reed was Mr Lovejoy’s third wife.

“From what we can gather, Chloe killed Ms Reed in the van and buried her somewhere in Appaloosa Plains, but when Dill needed something to take the heat off him, she dug up the body and staged the ransom video.” Said Granger. “For reasons we have yet to ascertain, instead of reburying the corpse and fleeing, Chloe stole a car and returned to Sim City with Ms Reed’s corpse. Then she and Dill took off together.”

In an odd twist, they didn’t go far.

“They were in our own backyard for over two weeks. I suppose they hoped the search would concentrate in Appaloosa giving them a chance to either escape or remain in the city unnoticed.” Reyes said.

That plan didn’t work. Police discovered Chloe and Dill occasionally camped for the weekend in Lirchwood Park a 16-block nature preserve in Sim City used for family recreational purposes. With the help of drones, the fugitives were successfully located in Lirchwood.

Both Granger and Reyes believe that the Lovejoys had intended to kill Reed from the start... just not yet.

“Authorities uncovered a total of 2 million simoleons in four separate accounts all under Chloe Lovejoy’s name,” Reyes said. “Ms Reed was giving money to her husband for a fake business venture. Instead of being invested, the money was put into Chloe’s accounts.”

Granger added,
“We believe the Lovejoy’s original plan was to wait to accumulate wealth in Chloe’s accounts before staging Ms Reed’s death. Whether jealous of Reed and Lovejoy’s marriage and high life, or if Reed was starting to catch on to the scheme, we don’t know, but Chloe may have jumped the gun and went after Reed prematurely. That left room for many mistakes.”

Mistakes in a scheme that might have been pulled off by the couple before. Investigators have reopened Mr Lovejoy’s second wife’s death. Originally ruled an accident, on July 7, 2011, Melissa Brandt Lovejoy was found floating in a shallow pond near a park trail in Riverview. It was well known that Brandt Lovejoy, who suffered from a back injury after a car accident, would self medicate. At the time, authorities assumed she taken a walk without realizing she had overdosed and passed out by the pond eventually drowning in it. Though there was no bruising beyond that incurred in a fall, investigators are now looking into whether Brandt Lovejoy may have been Dill and Chloe Lovejoy’s first victim.

“Weeks after Melissa’s death, Dill collected 1.2 million in insurance and he and Chloe immediately got back together.” Reyes said. “It may have been for money, at first, but I believe they’re predators. They were developing a pattern. They had to put Fiora into a pond just like Melissa. If they hadn’t been stopped, I’m certain another poor soul would have lost their life.”

How involved Dill Lovejoy was in Reed’s kidnapping and murder has yet to be determined. Authorities are hopeful that with all the players in custody, the full stories of the deaths of two Mrs Lovejoys will surface.

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