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She was a California girl who loved horses. He was a Canadian boy with construction money. They met at a party for Hawaiian Tropic and what followed was a Vegas wedding and a honeymoon that just didn‘t last. On August fifteenth, The body of model Jasmine Fiore, crammed into a suitcase, was pulled from a dumpster in Las Vegas. She had been brutally strangled, her teeth missing and her fingers cut off. Her husband, Ryan Jenkins, fled the country, and all eyes turned towards the manhunt, and the channel that made him famous - VH1.

We’ve all heard the jokes about VH1’s reality show lineup: Rock of Love would eradicate mankind through a super strain of herpes, and the like. But no one expected that a person tied to VH1’s current lineup would ever do something so vicious, so primal, as to squeeze the life out of another human being. How did VH1 and murder become synonymous?

It began with two shows: I Love Money 3 and Megan Wants a Millionaire. VH1 has been know to recycle their reality stars - some get spinoffs, like Daisy De La Hoya, and some just bounce from show to show. Megan Hauserman, for example, got her start on a show called Beauty and the Geek, then moved to Rock of Love with Brett Michaels, then I Love Money, Rock of Love: Charm School and finally VH1 gave her a show of her own: Megan Wants a Millionaire. One of the contestants on this show was Ryan Jenkins. He and Megan spent a good deal of time together, and when the show was over, he moved on to I Love Money 3. Though neither show will hit the air (VH1 aired a couple of episodes of Megan Wants a Millionaire, but the show was axed immediately after Fiore was), Jenkins boasted that he ‘Won a boatload of money’ on I Love Money.

And then the unthinkable happened: near San Diego, Jenkins and Fiore, a lovely, doll-featured woman, checked into a hotel, L‘Auberge Del Mar. Video surveillance shows Jenkins leaving with luggage. An ex-boyfriend, with whom Fiore was re-connecting (they had plans to meet up in Vegas after she left the hotel in San Diego), received a text message, telling him to ‘suck it‘. But she was already dead; Jenkins strangled her to death, and carried her out of the hotel in the suitcase, only to take her body somewhere to remove her teeth and cut off her fingers in an attempt to obscure her identity. The police had to use the serial number on her breast implants to identify her. As soon as that identification came through, several things happened at once. Jenkins fled. VH1 was put under the microscope. Everyone held their breath.

Though Jenkins had been partying with a friend a few days after her death, as soon as his wife was identified and the police spotlight swung to him, he fled north, stopping a few miles short of the Canadian border. Then he vanished, and the manhunt went wild. More people spotted Jenkins than Elvis, and a few unlucky look-alikes were arrested. But it wasn’t until August twenty-third that the story would come to an end, when Jenkins was found hanging from a coat rack in the Thunderbird Motel in Hope, B.C. by the motel’s manager. Though there reportedly no suicide note, it’s not hard to understand why. Fiore’s ex-boyfriend, who received that posthumous text, and her family are both saying the same thing: good.

So what is VH1 saying? Effectively, their stance is ‘oopsie‘. Though Jenkins, like all potential contestants, should have undergone a background check, he made the final cut on not one but TWO shows with an assault charge on his record. And not just any assault; Jenkins had been charged with beating a girlfriend. His stint on VH1 was part of the repertoire he used to woo Fiore, and if he had, in fact, won I Love Money 3, VH1 gave $250,000 to a murderer. Though VH1 could hardly be held accountable for not foreseeing Jenkins committing murder, they do have a stance against putting violent contestants on a show - understandably; with all those people packed into one house, any number of things could go wrong, and even when contestants don’t have a record, punches do get thrown. So how did he end up on television? How was his background missed? And does VH1 bear any responsibility for giving him a clean bill of health? After all, Fiore married a man who was due to be a celebrity as soon as his shows began airing. Surely his appearances were part of the package that made him so appealing to her - after all, she was a model in search of fame herself.

Whatever the argument, one thing is certain: it is a sick and violent man who discovers his wife texting an ex-bf and strangles her, stuffs her body into a suitcase, drags her away to maim her corpse, dump her, then text that ex-bf, with her phone, telling him to ‘suck it’, and go party with friends. It is cold, calculating, and in the end, Jenkins got off light.