Ryan Jenkins and Jasmine Fiore‘s marriage was never a fairy-tale romance. But no one could have predicted the toxic relationship between a 28-year-old swimsuit model and the 32-year-old reality show contestant would end the way it did Sunday night, when his lifeless body was discovered in a small-town Canadian motel.
Jenkins was the prime suspect in his ex-wife’s murder after her mutilated body was found stuffed in a suitcase on Aug. 15. But his death, apparently a suicide, isn’t helping Fiore’s family or friends deal with her murder.
As Fiore’s former fiancé, Travis Heinrich, told Us Weekly yesterday, he feels “bittersweet” about Jenkins’ death.
“On one hand, I’m happy he’s dead,” says Heinrich of Jenkins, who married Fiore on March 18. “But on the other hand, I’m pissed he won’t have to answer for what he did. … I’m frustrated that there are still so many unanswered questions.”
Heinrich isn’t alone. Yesterday Jenkins’ bewildered father, Dan, admitted he still can’t accept that his son could have been responsible for the grisly killing of Fiore.
“If my son was guilty, he was crazy. He was not the boy we knew. The boy we knew was not capable of anything remotely close to this act,” Jenkins, a prominent Calgary architect, told the Calgary Times.
“You talk to everyone here who knew him before he went down there and they’ll talk about a wonderful young man, a thoughtful man.”
“There” was, of course, Vegas, the city of cheesy glamour where Fiore and Ryan hooked up, and quickly married, in March.
Initially it seemed like a good match. She was an aspiring actress and model who had traveled to Sin City with dreams of making it into the big time. Instead, Fiore found herself landing low-level gigs like dealing cards at the Palms’ Playboy Club or working as a cocktail waitress in the MGM Grand – which could be why she was so dazzled by a guy like Jenkins.
Described by his friends as confident, polished and ambitious, Jenkins was believed to be a real estate developer by some and an investment banker by others.
His goal in life, however, appears to have been making it as a celebrity. He loved being a player on the reality TV scene, a passion that struck his mother-in-law, Lisa Lepore, as unrealistic.
“He had stars in his eyes,” Lepore said yesterday. “He was totally jazzed, like, being a star.”
The couple’s on-again, off-again marriage, his father said, was far from heavenly.
“It was hell on Earth – I advised him 50 times to get out of that relationship,” Dan Jenkins said Monday.
“She would take off for days at a time and lie, and Ryan was lonely and distraught and alone down there. She was his only friend, and she’d just disappear.”
Dan Jenkins also played down reports that his son exhibited violent behavior toward his wife in April, when Ryan was arrested on a charge of domestic violence -after allegedly slugging Fiore in the arm.
“He turns around and his wife’s kissing another guy, and he grabs her hand and starts walking away, and they’re arguing and he just pushes her in the pool,” he said, dismissing the notion that his son had a violent past. “People push each other in the pool every Saturday afternoon, and he goes to jail for two days – that’s ridiculous.”
His account signals the start of a desperate media fight to defend the public images of the two tragic figures – a battle that is bound to intensify as the two families square off against each other.
For its part, VH1 has canceled both reality shows Jenkins appeared in – the trashy dating competition “Megan Wants a Millionaire” and “I Love Money 3″ – ensuring that he will never achieve the Hollywood attention he so desperately sought.
But in the most bitter irony, Fiore’s murder and Ryan’s apparent suicide have made each of them a household name. That’s probably more fame than they could ever have imagined.
