tod evans
10-13-2014, 08:39 AM
Every now and again the system ingests one of its own........
Lovelace case begins to get national attention
http://quincyjournal.com/above-the-fold/2014/10/13/lovelace-case-begins-to-get-national-attention/
Murder case going viral
From Associated Press/Huffington Post:
Editor's Note: Producers from the CBS News program 48 Hours and the NBC News program Dateline have begun to take a look at the first-degree murder case of former Adams County Assistant State's Attorney and Quincy School Board President Curtis Lovelace.
And the Website "The Huffington Post", which has a large national following, picked up a new Associated Press story over the weekend.
If you google the name of AP reporter Jim Suhr and Lovelace, you get 1,860 results as of Monday morning, meaning at least that many news outlets are following the story. As expected, the case is garnering national attention.
Suhr's story is linked below. It is written in a style that many of the other future stories written by reporters outside of Quincy will almost certainly follow. BG
Few in this former port city along the Mississippi River had more cachet than Curtis Lovelace: an all-Big Ten football player, longtime prosecutor, school board president, sports broadcaster and educator at the local university.
That sparkling image in the 40,000-strong western Illinois community of Quincy was shattered when he recently was charged with suffocating his first wife and mother of four on Valentine's Day in 2006, unsettling many followers of the case that had remained open because a pathologist and coroner's jury never pinpointed why the 38-year-old woman died so suddenly.
The scandal, cracked open last December when an investigator gave the case a fresh look, has all the makings of a made-for-TV flick: A community pillar is whisked away by police as he steps from his law office for lunch — eight years after his first wife's death.
Curtis Lovelace, 45, now faces a first-degree murder charge, to which he has pleaded not guilty. Unsurprisingly, as Lovelace remains jailed on $5 million bond, his situation is the continuing grist of gossip in tight-knit Quincy.
"He just seemed like an average fellow, a very active gentleman," Mike Cadwell, a barber for 40 years, said while giving an older client a trim. "I'm not sure what kind of a person does that kind of a crime, but he didn't seem to fit that mold."
In the 1980s, Lovelace was a star jock at Quincy High School in track, wrestling and football, earning six varsity letters and eventual enshrinement in the school's sports hall of fame. He went on to play football as a center at Illinois, where he was the team captain and a two-time all-Big Ten pick. The business major also was an academic all-American — a coup for Lovelace, who has said he got mostly B's in high school.
"I did not come to the University of Illinois as a star athlete or a star student," Lovelace told the (Bloomington) Pantagraph in 1990. "I think I've reached this point with hard work."
He married former high school classmate Cory Didriksen in 1991, got his law degree at Illinois, started a family and became an assistant prosecutor in Quincy, the once-thriving port that was a key point along the Underground Railroad and the site of one of Abraham Lincoln's storied 1858 debates against Stephen Douglas in a U.S. Senate race.
But what happened in the Lovelace home in 2006 became its own source of local debate.
Lovelace case begins to get national attention
http://quincyjournal.com/above-the-fold/2014/10/13/lovelace-case-begins-to-get-national-attention/
Murder case going viral
From Associated Press/Huffington Post:
Editor's Note: Producers from the CBS News program 48 Hours and the NBC News program Dateline have begun to take a look at the first-degree murder case of former Adams County Assistant State's Attorney and Quincy School Board President Curtis Lovelace.
And the Website "The Huffington Post", which has a large national following, picked up a new Associated Press story over the weekend.
If you google the name of AP reporter Jim Suhr and Lovelace, you get 1,860 results as of Monday morning, meaning at least that many news outlets are following the story. As expected, the case is garnering national attention.
Suhr's story is linked below. It is written in a style that many of the other future stories written by reporters outside of Quincy will almost certainly follow. BG
Few in this former port city along the Mississippi River had more cachet than Curtis Lovelace: an all-Big Ten football player, longtime prosecutor, school board president, sports broadcaster and educator at the local university.
That sparkling image in the 40,000-strong western Illinois community of Quincy was shattered when he recently was charged with suffocating his first wife and mother of four on Valentine's Day in 2006, unsettling many followers of the case that had remained open because a pathologist and coroner's jury never pinpointed why the 38-year-old woman died so suddenly.
The scandal, cracked open last December when an investigator gave the case a fresh look, has all the makings of a made-for-TV flick: A community pillar is whisked away by police as he steps from his law office for lunch — eight years after his first wife's death.
Curtis Lovelace, 45, now faces a first-degree murder charge, to which he has pleaded not guilty. Unsurprisingly, as Lovelace remains jailed on $5 million bond, his situation is the continuing grist of gossip in tight-knit Quincy.
"He just seemed like an average fellow, a very active gentleman," Mike Cadwell, a barber for 40 years, said while giving an older client a trim. "I'm not sure what kind of a person does that kind of a crime, but he didn't seem to fit that mold."
In the 1980s, Lovelace was a star jock at Quincy High School in track, wrestling and football, earning six varsity letters and eventual enshrinement in the school's sports hall of fame. He went on to play football as a center at Illinois, where he was the team captain and a two-time all-Big Ten pick. The business major also was an academic all-American — a coup for Lovelace, who has said he got mostly B's in high school.
"I did not come to the University of Illinois as a star athlete or a star student," Lovelace told the (Bloomington) Pantagraph in 1990. "I think I've reached this point with hard work."
He married former high school classmate Cory Didriksen in 1991, got his law degree at Illinois, started a family and became an assistant prosecutor in Quincy, the once-thriving port that was a key point along the Underground Railroad and the site of one of Abraham Lincoln's storied 1858 debates against Stephen Douglas in a U.S. Senate race.
But what happened in the Lovelace home in 2006 became its own source of local debate.