21-year-old Lauren McCluskey was born in Berkley, California. After she graduated from high school, she moved east to attend the University of Utah to study communications, and she lived on campus.
She was on track to graduate in the spring of 2019. When she graduated from college, she dreamed of moving somewhere sunny and warm while pursuing a career in public relations.
Even as a child, Lauren was always on the go, so it was no surprise to her parents when she grew up to be quite athletic. Lauren was a track-and-field star, and she continued to be competitive in that through college.
Lauren was intelligent. She was sweet. She was sensitive. She loved animals, especially cats, and she volunteered at a local animal shelter. She liked to do karaoke in her free time with her friends. She never had one bad thing to say about anyone she ever met.
Lauren was more on the quiet side, but her parents say she just chose her words very carefully before speaking.
The light this bright and beautiful woman brought to people in her life was snuffed out when she was murdered…right on her college campus.
On the night of September 2nd, 2018, Lauren met a 37-year-old man named Melvin Shawn Rowland while out for the evening.
She was at a bar called the London Belle in Salt Lake City, which was just a 9-minute drive from campus and a popular hangout spot.
Melvin was tall, and he had a great smile. He was working at the front door as a bouncer. The two really hit it off that night.
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But the thing is, Melvin wasn’t Melvin at all. He gave Lauren a fake name. He gave Lauren a fake age, too, to make it seem like he wasn’t so much older than her.
He was also a registered offender, and he was on parole. He didn’t share those crucial details with Lauren, though.
Melvin lied about his life that night, and Lauren gave him her phone number, thinking he was a nice man.
Lauren started seeing a lot of Melvin in the following days, and he seemed like a dream guy to her. He took her out to lovely restaurants and fun dates. He bought her flowers. He was kind and gentlemanly towards her in the beginning.
Eventually, he ended up staying over at her dorm room very frequently. As in, nearly every single night, he was sleeping in Lauren’s dorm room twin-sized bed along with her.
At first, he made an attempt to be friends with her friends, and they really liked him. Then, he started telling Lauren she was not allowed to see her friends or hang out with them.
Melvin became controlling, and Lauren’s friends became concerned.
She had to tell him where she was at all times, who she was with. She wasn’t allowed to go anywhere with other guys. She was sad. She started to look different. She dressed differently. She lost a lot of weight. She was stressed out.
She was being taken advantage of and controlled by this much older man. As September came to an end, some of Lauren’s friends alerted the staff at their dorms to express concern over how often Melvin was staying over. They were also worried that he spoke about guns a lot.
They went on to mention that they thought Lauren was at risk of being seriously hurt by Melvin. Nothing ever came of that meeting. The staff looked into whether or not Lauren had in some way broken the rules in the dorms, but they didn’t go further than that.
At the beginning of October, Lauren learned that Melvin had lied to her about everything after she looked him up online. She knew he was an offender, too.
On October 9th, Lauren did something about it. She asked Melvin to come to her dorm room so they could have a talk. She felt she owed it to Melvin to let him know in person.
When he got there, she explained to him that she knew. She told him she was no longer going to be in a relationship with him. While Melvin did end up owning up to being a registered offender, he told Lauren he was the same age as her.
Perhaps Lauren felt bad for him or badly about the breakup because she let Melvin sleep over that evening, and she let him use her car the following day.
Melvin didn’t bring her car exactly back as promised, and the following day, Lauren’s mom, Jill, phoned up the campus’s security to ask that they send an escort to help Lauren get her car from a parking lot on campus.
Lauren and Jill were worried for her safety, but that was never noted in the security system, and Lauren never got the escort.
Then the sinister text messages started.
Lauren started receiving a bunch of weird text messages, and some implored her to take her own life. 3 days after she broke up with Melvin, she reached out to campus security again to explain the messages she was getting.
She did say she didn’t think they were dangerous, but they were concerning to her, and they certainly seemed very suspicious. She thought the messages were coming from some of Melvin’s friends, but then she was worried that Melvin himself was sending them.
Some even said he had died because of her. After she realized he was alive and well, posting online, she suspected these messages were some kind of game to get her out of her dorm room, which she told the officer she spoke with.
The following day, Lauren contacted campus security again, this time because the text messages had turned into blackmail and extortion.
Melvin sent Lauren text messages saying that private photos of Lauren that he had were going to be publicly released unless she paid up.
I can only imagine how scared and embarrassed Lauren felt over all of this. She was a good student and was about to graduate. Something like this could potentially ruin her whole career before it even started.
Lauren immediately sent the requested $1,000 to Melvin via Venmo. She so desperately wanted those intimate photos to remain private, and she thought if she complied, they would stay that way.
Not only did Lauren talk to campus police, but she also went to the Salt Lake City police department over this. They told her she had to take it up with campus police because that’s the policy.
For some reason, even though Melvin’s parole officers were in touch with him throughout this time, the campus police didn’t alert them to everything Lauren was telling them.
Lauren repeatedly called the campus police and the Salt Lake City police again, after Melvin somehow found out that she had been in contact with the police.
Lauren even sent screenshots to the campus police of Melvin’s previous mugshot and all the information she had on him detailing his criminal history.
As this is all happening, security footage on campus would later reveal Melvin walking around the campus, seemingly looking for Lauren everywhere.
On October 22nd at 10:39 in the morning, Lauren contacted the campus police after she got a scary text from someone pretending to deputy chief of campus police, stating she needed to get to the station right away.
She knew it was Melvin.
The police officer who spoke to her told her not to text back. They never alerted anyone else in the department about what happened.
At 3 pm, Melvin was somehow able to sneak into the lobby of Lauren’s dorm building. He waited. And waited. And waited.
At 8:20 in the evening, Melvin went outside to the parking lot right by the dorm. Lauren was walking back to her dorm, across the parking lot, and she had just gotten out of one of her classes.
Lauren’s mom, Jill, was on the phone, and Lauren was chatting with her like she did nearly every single day. Lauren seemed happy, she did well on a quiz, and Jill thought she was putting all of the Melvin drama behind her.
Suddenly, Lauren started screaming in a panic, “No, no, no, no!”
The call dropped.
Melvin had put his hands on Lauren. She dropped her phone. She dropped her backpack. She dropped her laptop. He then forced Lauren through the parking lot and into the back seat of the car he had driven to campus and parked by the dorms.
He pulled out a gun and shot Lauren multiple times, right there in the back seat. Just minutes after Lauren had last been heard on the phone by her mom, Jill, a young woman picked up Lauren’s phone.
She said she saw her personal belongings on the parking lot floor, but she didn’t see her anywhere. Lauren’s dad, Matt, called the police, asking them to check out why she had suddenly dropped off the call.
Not long after, police officers found Lauren’s phone and backpack in the parking lot. They searched her dorm and began looking across campus for her.
At 8:38 that night, Melvin called up a woman he had met online and asked if she wanted to go on a date. Right after he had murdered Lauren.
This woman picked Melvin up on campus, and after their date was over, she saw Melvin on the news. She called the police to tell them where she had dropped him off.
At 9:55, Lauren was sadly found dead in the car Melvin had left in the parking lot. At 12:46 in the morning, police knew where Melvin was, and they chased him into a local church. Melvin shot himself inside.
Lauren’s parents filed a wrongful death suit against Lauren’s college, insisting that dorm staff and campus police failed to protect Lauren.
It also came to light in the lawsuit that a campus police officer shared those private photos of Lauren; the very same ones she was afraid to see get out.
In the end, the University of Utah settled for $13.5 million, $10.5 million of which was paid out to her family, while the remaining $3 million went to the Lauren McCluskey Foundation, which Jill and Matt created in Lauren’s honor.
“Instead of intervening and protecting Lauren from her killer, the university officials and police ignored, dismissed, and avoided her requests for help,” the lawsuit stated.
“They did so based on gender stereotypes and indifference to the risks that women experience when they are suffering from domestic violence.”
The Lauren McCluskey Foundation is a non-profit created by Jill and Matt that is devoted to making a difference in campus safety.
“A worldwide outpouring of grief testified to the light she brought during her life – a light that somehow still shines during these dark days,” her family shared in her obituary.
By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
