The True Crime Story I Think About

content warning: there's going to be talk of murder, assault and dismemberment, unfortunately

I'm going to touch on a case I've thought about for a decade but haven't written about in a substantial way because the research is pretty hard to come by.

It's no controversial take to say true crime is an exploitative and gross genre and I'm amazed there hasn't been a soul-crushing Investigation Discovery talking-head-and-reenactment-type show on this, but it raises legitimate questions you could handle with care if weren't also trying to crap out a lurid, low budgeted time-filler. I'm sure Reddit has at different times been all over this story, but I deeply wish I could read something substantial about it, that takes the humanity of it seriously.

I don't know if you watched VH1's "Celebreality" shows, but I loved them. One bad TV show led to another until half of VH1's late 2000s programming was "I Love The..." nostalgia lists and the other half was dating and lifestyle reality trash starring the once nearly famous.

It began with The Surreal Life, which aired one season on The WB before moving to VH1. That show was The Real World with Corey Feldman and Tammy Faye Bakker-level celebrities and a morning zoo sidekick's sound effects board. The fridge was full of liquor, the daily tasks were heavily contrived and Bronson Pinchot was horny. I could get mealy-mouthed in explaining the show's appeal, qualifying that I didn't really enjoy watching Vanilla Ice be an asshole to Gary Coleman as the two ineptly worked a Johnny Rocket's shift, but I'm not above this slop.

Celebreality as a network-wide concept began after Flavor Flav and Brigitte Nielsen hit it off on the third season of The Surreal Life. Nielsen had a boyfriend the whole time, but the network played up the odd couple angle of their flirtation with 2005's Strange Love, about their post-Surreal Life romance. After one season of Strange Love, Nielsen was out and Flav, the more charismatic and famous of the two anyway, went on to find love with his own Bachelor knock-off, Flavor of Love, in 2006. It ran for three consecutive seasons.

The Bachelor airs at least one run every year and its couples have a miserable success rate, but that show hides its failures behind fairytale language and "Nobody will ever understand how it felt in the house" conversations. Flavor of Love began its initial run of 20 episodes in January 2006 and had another 20 episodes ready to go for the second season's premiere that August. The show was not pretending its season finales signified anything special. Flavor of Love's most famous contestant, nicknamed New York, got a two season dating show and two additional lifestyle reality shows. Contestants from each season of her initial spin-off, I Love New York, got spin-off dating shows: Real Chance of Love, starring brothers Real and Chance, got two seasons, while Frank The Entertainer in A Basement Affair got one. Real and Chance also starred in a Ghost Hunters-type paranormal reality show. Other Flavor of Love contestants showed up on the three-season etiquette competition Charm School.

That paranormal reality show, where Real and Chance tried to capture Bigfoot, ran at the end of 2010. As 2011 began, a clutch of episodes from Brandy & Ray J: A Family Business' second season were quietly aired with 1am premiere times. Those were the two last gasps. The network created a web of spin-offs of spin-offs of spin-offs and flooded its schedule with them for just over five years. All-told, The Surreal Life had 26 off-shoots.

I won't bury you in another list of show names and season counts, but when Flavor of Love became VH1's biggest ever hit, the network hired Poison's Bret Michaels to headline Rock of Love, essentially the white version of its golden goose, and that also had a run of contestant-focused spin-offs. I actually think the first season of Rock of Love is a perfect reality show, a trash tornado that accidentally scratches the limits of the form in a profound way, but I'll talk about that elsewhere. Michaels' biggest hit song, which he talked about like saying its name would keep his dick from falling off, had come out 19 years earlier, making it older than a few of the women who had signed up to date him. At his best, he was charming, at his worst he was the "nice guy" version of a misogynist hair metal dude, explaining, quiet and glassy eyed, why he wasn't sure he could handle dating another stripper, like he expected somebody to rub his back and whisper "Hey, it's all right, we dancers are a wicked sub-race of people but I'll take care of you." The show was even bigger than Flavor of Love.

Rock of Love's third dedicated spin-off, after Rock of Love: Charm School and Daisy of Love, focused on a Paris Hilton-type (down to the toy dog its star carried around) named Megan Hauserman. Hauserman had been a minor character in Rock of Love's second season, placing fifth, but really came alive in Rock of Love: Charm School and the first season of I Love Money, a Big Brother rip-off starring contestants from the Celebreality shows. The nth example of VH1's casting mobius strip, I Love Money let you watch physical challenges between people who had tried to win the affection of somebody who had tried to win the affection of somebody who had tried to win the affection of a somebody who used to be famous.

I promise this will all matter to the story.

Hauserman's vehicle was Megan Wants a Millionaire, a dating competition where all the contestants were rich. The show aired three episodes and vanished from VH1's schedule.

I had fallen off Celebreality at this point, but in the summers between college, when I was home, had access to cable TV and was surrounded by a family who loved trash like I did, I would still watch whatever stray shows aired between June and August. When Megan Wants a Millionaire was supposed to air its fourth episode on August 23, 2009 and nothing happened, it felt weird, but I don't think I was curious enough to seek out why the show had gone away. I did not care. I might have assumed there were ratings issues and probably didn't think about Megan Wants a Millionaire again until a few weeks had passed, I was visiting family and my uncle told me about the grisly story of a murdered woman he'd read in the newspaper that day.

The third episode of Megan aired August 16, 2009. Four days later, Los Angeles police put out an arrest warrant for Ryan Jenkins, one of the competition's frontrunners. Jenkins was an antsy 32-year-old Canadian bro– probably not a millionaire– who had been charged with assaulting an ex-girlfriend in 2007. If VH1 conducted a background check– and they say they did– they did not flag his then-recent record of abuse. At a time when Texas Hold 'Em was all over TV, Jenkins looked like he watched World Series of Poker tournaments the way some people watch megachurch broadcasts. He also looked like he'd buy a burner phone and text a flood of taunts to anybody who beat him at a game.

Jenkins had flown to Las Vegas right after filming on Megan ended (it would later come out he finished third in the competition, though he would have won had producers not swayed Megan toward somebody more likable). I've never been able to get an exact date, but Megan was wrapped by early March 2009 and Jenkins was in Vegas within the week. He met a model named Jasmine Fiore and they married two days later, on March 18. A couple months after the marriage, while still in Vegas, Jenkins was charged with domestic violence. He was on-and-off with Fiore from there.

On August 14, two days before the third episode of Megan aired, Jenkins and Fiore were in San Diego for a charity poker tournament. They left their hotel early the next morning, Jenkins returned alone two hours later, checked out and started driving to Canada, at some point calling police to report his wife missing.

The next day, and this is a detail that truly haunts me, so close the email if you'd like, Fiore's body was found in a suitcase, in a dumpster, in Orange County, her body so mutilated she was only able to be identified by the serial number in her breast implants.

Nobody really knows what happened in the early hours of the 14th, after Jenkins and Fiore left their San Diego hotel, but one of Fiore's exes has said he was texting her and they were trying to schedule a trip when she could visit him. She texted him "I'm coming." After Fiore's estimated time of death, the ex received another text from her phone: "Suck it."

By the time Fiore's remains were discovered, Jenkins had ditched his car for his boat (named "Night Rideher"), got in a chase with authorities around Washington state and ultimately made it to British Columbia. He checked into a motel room outside Vancouver, with a maybe-unknown stranger's help on August 20, paying for the next three days. He holed up in the room, the stranger left and didn't return and Jenkins killed himself somewhere between the 21st and the 23rd. The motel manager and his nephew checked on Jenkins' room when he failed to check out and found him hanging by a belt. Police discovered Jenkins' suicide note, never made public, on a laptop in October, which I wouldn't find notable if I hadn't learned about it from VH1's blog.

When that same website had announced Jenkins' suicide on August 23, following two previous posts lightly covering the manhunt, the blog linked to and summarized TMZ's reporting and continued, simply, "There's not really much to add to that by way of commentary. Tragedy begets tragedy. Of course, our sympathy goes out to the friends and families of Jasmine Fiore and Ryan Jenkins, as it has for the past several days." One day later, in a move so obvious you wonder why they had to make it public, the blog announced VH1 had canceled Megan.

The network also canceled the third season of I Love Money, which Ryan Jenkins had competed in and won. Jenkins had flown to Mexico to film I Love Money after the domestic violence charge in Las Vegas. The fourth season of that show, also already filmed in full, was postponed a year. In less than six months, Jenkins left one reality show, met and married a woman, fell out with her, reconnected, filmed a second reality show, returned to his wife and murdered her. This schedule does not look condensed, it looks flattened.

Jenkins had caused damage before and would have caused damage again. The Celebreality machine did not kill Fiore. But that timeline does not feel good. A quick look at the Celebreality banner's life, with the number of shows released under it each year:

2004: 1
2005: 3
2006: 4
2007: 8
2008: 9
2009: 10
2010: 7
2011: 1

There were a few celebrity-centered reality competitions on VH1 that didn't spin-off from The Surreal Life or get marketed as Celebreality, like My Antonio (The Bachelor but with Antonio Sabato Jr.) and I Want To Work For Diddy (The Apprentice but the rapist host is serving jailtime). And as the revelation of a completed and banked fourth season of I Love Money let on, there was probably already enough material ready by Fiore's murder to make 2010 Celebreality's busiest year. I'm sure there are people in Los Angeles right now who signed a tight NDA in 2009 after competing for the affection of a woman you never heard of because she got second place in a Rock of Love season VH1 never announced.

The quick build up of Celebreality content after Flavor Flav's second act and the even quicker burn off of that content after Jasmine Fiore's murder goes silly to dark on a dime. Again, I am not saying VH1 killed a person. It did not kill this person, at least. But VH1 did not properly look into its contestants and one of them met and murdered his wife within months of a star turn in his second Celebreality franchise. They gave him a platform and if he hadn't killed Jasmine Fiore so soon after he got that platform, VH1 would have aired a follow-up show and given him an even bigger platform. If you weren't reading VH1's blog or your uncle didn't off-handedly tell you about Fiore's death, you would not know this had happened.

And I'm not talking about a platform in the sense that they gave him a chance to express his ideas in a popular franchise's spin-off. I'm saying they gave him a pedestal. That poker tournament Jenkins and Fiore attended before her death was a charity event and he was one of the guests. He wouldn't have been invited to it if he was just some real estate developer who kept getting bailed out of business failures by his rich dad. And if it wasn't Jasmine Fiore, it would have been somebody else. Every woman in Calgary seemed to think he was a creep. Fiore was 28-years-old when she was killed and I have trouble seeing pictures of her, knowing what a person's body would have to look like for her to have been that unrecognizable to the people who found her. That means no fingerprints. That means no teeth. This is not speculation.

The questions I mentioned at the top: Was this a one-time failure at Collective Intelligence and Straightline International, the third-party firms that performed background checks for VH1's reality shows, or was all of their research half-assed? I'm not asking how many other people were killed, because I know the answer is probably none. I'm asking if the background checks on the other people were actually thorough, or the researchers just lucked out that only one of the contestants they cleared turned out to be vile. How did the background checkers feel? In a 2020 Entertainment Weekly story, one of the few things written about the situation after 2009, we get this:

"It's the worst thing to ever happen to me in my career," says [Megan Wants A Millionaire production company 51 Minds Entertainment co-founder Mark] Cronin. "When something comes that close to home, that's a really scary thing." Adds Erika Worth, whose background check company Collective Intelligence was caught up in the aftermath of the scandal, "The effects of it were devastating. However, I am grateful, because I feel like it changed reality TV forever."

So there's a follow-up question I would have liked somebody to ask Worth on her claim that she was grateful: Can you imagine any other way reality TV could have been improved? A way without a woman being murdered?

Worth eventually says "I have never taken an easy breath since this happened 10 years ago" and Cronin says it "lenses every conversation [I have] during the approval process for a contestant or a cast member," but they each also bemoan the damage Jenkins' casting did to their companies; Worth contends "we literally lost everything overnight," Cronin says "our names were mud." Is the issue a person was slaughtered or is the issue a firm lost business for a while?

Later in the EW article:

"Ryan Jenkins had one of the best personalities on this planet," says Christopher Catalano, who worked as a senior casting producer for 51 Minds from 2007 to 2011 and is now a senior casting producer for CBS' Big Brother. "He was intriguing, he knew it. He wasn't the best-looking guy in the world—he just had this charisma."

There are word choices here that still creep me out, i.e. Catalano doesn't say Jenkins seemed to have the best personality, he says he had the best personality. Fiore's murder is framed, either by the article, the interviewees or both, as a freak accident that burned a lot of people who were just doing their jobs. To underline this again, I don't think Worth is responsible for Fiore's death, but I think she could talk about the death like Fiore's murder wasn't merely a regrettable mistake. Now that their careers have rebounded, you won't hear these people talk about this again.

My other questions are about Fiore and Jenkins' families, and that isn't a thing I'd want to pry into more than anybody else has. Jenkins' mother thought he was innocent, Fiore's mother thought her daughter had the marriage annulled. Given Jenkins supposedly admitted to the murder in his suicide note and given Nevada courts did not have a record of an annulment, these reactions are what they are. These families went through hell and I wouldn't even be in a position to talk to them if I was craven enough to bug them about their dead children.

That's kind of the whole case: it's fucking horrible and there are no answers. The story begins with cheeky TV and ends in a motel so seedy contemporaneous articles quote its other tenants as being worried about all of the press descending on their temporary home. I don't have any reason to write this much about it, or really at all. It terrifies me. It's depressing and senseless. Here's word 3,057 of this edition of the newsletter: Sorry.

P.S. I did not mention that the town Ryan Jenkins killed himself in is called Hope, because God is abysmal at irony and symbolism and I will not sanction his corny Linkin Park lyric world.