Episode 27: Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies, I'm your host Julie Mattson. Today, I thought I'd ring in February by talking a little bit about deaths that occurred on Valentine's day. First, let's start off with the history of Valentine's day, how it originated. And then let's look into the interesting story of Curtis Lovelace, a former hometown football star and assistant state’s attorney who was arrested in August 2014, eight years after his wife Cory died on Valentine’s Day. Ready to get started? Here we go...
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0:06 Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies.
0:08 I'm your host, Julie Mattson Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly true crime podcast with spine tingling, unusual and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner.
0:24 Do I have some stories for you?
0:26 Are you ready?
0:31 Hey, y'all?
0:31 It's February.
0:32 Can't believe it's already the second month of the new year and we've had some crazy weather in Texas.
0:40 I don't know about y'all and a lot of you are, I'm sure used to bad weather and snow and ice, but we are not.
0:47 And everyone here goes a little bit crazy when there's ice or snow and we are having a really bad ice storm.
0:56 Now I've never heard it thunder and then sleet, but that's what we're experiencing.
1:01 But it seems like all the businesses are closed now.
1:06 It's funny because when I was in North Dakota and it was snowing, the car washes were still open and of course here one little drizzle, they shut down because we don't normally wash our cars because we don't have a lot of mud because we don't have snow all the time that melts and makes our cars nasty.
1:23 But I thought I'd ring in February by talking a little bit about deaths that occurred on Valentine's day and I thought it would be interesting in the beginning to talk a little bit about the history of Valentine's day.
1:37 So back in about the year to 70 A.D.
1:42 There was an emperor named Claudia.
1:44 Yes, he was actually Claudius the second, but he was also called Claudius the cruel and he could not get soldiers to join his military.
1:53 He believed that all the men were way too attached to their families and their spouses.
2:01 He could not pull them away from that to join his military.
2:05 So he banned all marriages and engagements in Rome at that time.
2:12 And then valentine was a holy priest in Rome.
2:17 He defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages behind Claudius back in secret.
2:26 When this was discovered, he was arrested and dragged and beaten to death with clubs and beheaded.
2:35 Now this was in, round or about 270 A.D., again on February 14th. While he was in jail, he left a farewell note for the jailer's daughter and he actually signed it from your valentine.
2:51 The two of them had actually become friends and he knew that he was gonna die.
2:58 So he left her a nice little note.
3:00 Now, he was named a saint after his death and gradually February 14th became a date for exchanging love notes, poems and gifts.
3:12 So this is how ST. Valentine's day came about and how it started.
3:18 So this was way back in to 70 A.D.
3:21 If you can only imagine how many love notes have been exchanged since then.
3:26 But we're going to start the month of February talking about Curtis and Cory Lovelace.
3:33 Now, I don't know if this is a story that any of y'all had heard, but this couple lived in Quincy, Illinois. Curtis Lovelace was a hardworking assistance state's prosecutor and a former college football star for the university of Illinois.
3:51 He was also president of the school board.
3:56 He taught classes at the local college and also did some sports broadcasting for the sports at the high school in Quincy.
4:07 Now, Corey, his wife was from a very prominent family, She was a former cheerleader, she was an honor student and she raised their four kids, basically was a stay at home mom raising her kids and trying to take care of her family and I'm sure just juggling a lot, we all know that's a super difficult job by the way. I always hate when people tell me I'm just to stay at home mom and I'm like, don't say I'm just a stay at home mom because that is a huge job.
4:42 It's hard for people to actually commit to that.
4:47 A lot of people want to work and they want to get away from their kids, but they're not able to because of the cost of childcare or whatever.
4:53 But anyway, don't ever say I'm just a stay at home mom because you are much more than that if that's what you do.
4:59 So, February 14th , 2006, Curtis Lovelace found his wife Cory dead in their home.
5:07 He said that he walked her to bed at about 8:15 in the morning and he drove their three oldest children to school.
5:15 And then when he came home he found her dead in bed, that's where he left her.
5:22 And I guess he was gone, they say for about 45 minutes now she had reportedly been sick.
5:29 She had flu like symptoms.
5:31 She was reportedly as they both were an alcoholic.
5:36 She also had bulimia which is an eating disorder and so initially he was not accused and not investigated.
5:46 It was believed that her death was caused by basically her body's weakness and her immune system's weakness, dealing with the alcoholism and the Bulimia at the same time that she got sick.
6:02 So Curtis was arrested in 2014. His case went to trial and this happened because a detective who was not even involved in the initial exam and probably didn't even work at the Quincy Police department at the time.
6:23 This all went down, revived the case and he shared evidence and seen photos and decided that homicide had occurred and this was in 2013. He was arrested in 2014.
6:41 This is when the first trial took place which ended in a hung jury and a mistrial.
6:48 Now the police continued to investigate this further and there was a second trial in 2017 and in this trial, the prosecution alleged that he suffocated her.
7:03 So they determined by pulling all the scene photos out and looking at them again eight years after she had passed away that he suffocated her because of her defensive positioning where her arms were and they also believed because of rigor or the stiffening of the muscles that she had actually been dead longer than he said.
7:32 So he reported it at 9:00 a.m. On Valentine's Day of 2006.
7:36 And so they're saying, hey we've had some other people look at this, look at the photos and based on rigor and lividity.
7:44 It looks like she actually died approximately nine hours before you called us.
7:49 So they actually got a pretty well known forensic pathologist involved in this.
7:56 He said that because both of her arms were up in bed when she was found they were raised kind of up over her head that at that indicated homicidal suffocation by a pillow and that the pillow was left there when rigor mortis set in, which caused her arms to stay in that position.
8:20 And we all know that pillows don't weigh that much.
8:24That was kind of what the belief was.
8:26 He also did say that the death appeared to have occurred nine hours before it was reported.
8:34 Now when you get a well known forensic pathologist who's willing to get up on the stand and say, hey, her arms were up and it appears that she was suffocated with a pillow.
8:49 And it also appears that she was dead longer.
8:52 There is going to be a lot of other evidence and a lot of other experts presented by the defense as well as the prosecuting attorney.
9:04 So basically it's believed that the police, you know, continued to approach all these experts until they were able to find someone to back their murder allegation.
9:19 Now he had also married again after her death.
9:25 They brought in his second wife to portray him as an abusive and threatening alcoholic.
9:32 So there are a lot of different things and I know we've talked about this before that the body undergoes after death.
9:40 That makes it kind of hard to predict the time frame that someone died.
9:46 To help with the estimation, they usually use body temperature, rigor liver mortis, which is the lividity stomach contents.
9:56 If the corneas look cloudy, the potassium level in the vitreous, which is the fluid in the eye, whether or not there's insect activity, but the most commonly used are the body temperature, which I don't have knowledge of what that was as well as rigor mortis and lividity.
10:17 Now the body temperature is you know, supposed to be 98.6 and the body loses or gains heat progressively until it actually equal liberates with the air that's present at the time.
10:30 And they estimate that the body is gonna lose about 1.5 degrees of heat per hour. Now that's approximate, and it's not really that straightforward.
10:42 The 1.5 degree per hour factor is gonna vary a lot of things depending on the size of the body, how much clothes they have on like the body's gonna actually lose heat more slowly in a cold room than it would in a hot environment.
11:01 So if somebody's in an enclosed garage and it's 125 degrees in August, they're gonna gain heat so they're gonna lose or gain heat until they reach equilibrium.
11:13 We always take body surface temperatures at scenes.
11:19 Now back in the day, they used to do liver temps, but we don't do that anymore.
11:24 But there are a lot of things that are gonna affect the body temperature.
11:29 Of course, the sooner after the death the body is found, the more accurately the time of death can be assessed.
11:37 Some people have higher than normal temperatures.
11:40 Women tend to run higher temperatures than men.
11:43 If someone's been ill and have had a fever, that's going to elevate the temperature of the person at the time of death.
11:50 Also chronic illness, dehydration, prolonged shock, all those things are going to increase the body temperature.
11:58 So there's gonna be a lot of variations in most people.
12:02 If someone is obese has on heavy clothing exposure to direct sunlight, those types of things fat and clothing are gonna insulate the body really well.
12:15 So an obese person in a sweater is not gonna lose heat as quickly as a thin person who does not have clothes on. Hopefully that makes sense.
12:26 And now this was not the case in this death in particular, but when flies and maggots begin to feed on The corpse, the body temperature is really no longer of use.
12:40 Now after people die, their muscles start to stiffen and contract.
12:44 And this can begin as soon as 15 minutes after someone dies, usually a body is in full rigor after about 15 hours again, I'm not sure.
12:57 She was probably in full rigor because her arms were stiff over her head.
13:02 And if he reported her death 45 minutes after he had left the house, then I think they're just assuming because of rigor that she had been there longer.
13:14Now, they can also determine this by examining the stomach by knowing when a person ate their last meal.
13:24 They can tell how far the contents have actually traveled through the digestive system.
13:28 Also, the eyes start to change immediately after death.
13:32 The people's are gonna dilate, they don't respond to light.
13:35 Obviously the eyes actually contract.
13:38 The fluid in the eye begins to become dry and the iris also change shape.
13:43 Now there's a lot of changes that go on with skin condition and skin drying because of lack of blood flow and whether or not like a fan is blowing on it.
13:56 We always look at the phone. The phone can tell you a lot of things and in this case she probably had not texted anybody.
14:05 I'm sure that was investigated by the police.
14:08 But you can actually look to see when was somebody's last text message.
14:13 When was the last phone call and you can tell if they actually talked on the phone or not and just their established routines, but they actually did get a forensic pathologist to testify.
14:24 That because her arms were raised, that she had been suffocated by a pillow, which I don't know.
14:30 Again, I've not seen the pictures.
14:32 I don't know how you can use that to determine that unless you were there at the time, the time of death.
14:40 I mean, that makes a little more sense, but if the story he's telling is true, who knows?
14:46 But the fact of the matter is, there really wasn't a lot of evidence.
14:50 They were basically, it sounds to me trying to find an expert who was willing to back up their theory that he had suffocated her.
14:59 And then when they found that expert, it definitely went straight back to court.
15:05 Now, he faced 20 to 60 years in prison if he had been convicted of first degree murder.
15:11 Corey, the wife, her mother never really believed that he did it.
15:16 She never really thought of him as a suspect.
15:21 And we all know in many cases, the husband is the first person that comes up, especially from the decedent's family, but in this case, even though they had a little bit of a troubled marriage and they both suffered from alcoholism.
15:35 Her mother never really thought that he did it.
15:39 She did mention also that Corey was on over the counter medications for pain.
15:45 She'd had three knee surgeries and she was also a little bit tired and overworked.
15:50 She'd been caring not only for her own kids, but for her father, he was battling lung cancer and he actually died three weeks after Corey passed away.
16:00 Now, Cory's death, the cause of her death was listed as undetermined.
16:07 And in the second trial, a little more than two hours after the jury went back to delegate, he was actually found not guilty.
16:19 Prior to that trial, he was actually bailed out of jail.
16:23 I think his bond was set at 3.5 million.
16:28 Three couples who were friends of his actually posted $350,000 bond, which is 10% so that he could get out of jail while awaiting trial the second time.
16:41 So he did spend three years in jail.
16:45 And then the ironic part of it all is that he filed a civil lawsuit for 4.5 million and he was granted that he actually sued Adams County and the Quincy police stating of course that he had been wrongly accused and the lawsuit was decided in his favor.
17:08 The city of Quincy has to pay 3.7 million and then the other 800,000 is to be paid by Adams County.
17:17 This trial actually took place in July of 2022.
17:23 So just last year, this has all been going on since 2006.
17:27 He actually gets a settlement, which equals about 1.5 million a year for each of the three years that he spent in jail awaiting trial.
17:39 So I thought that was a little bit of an interesting ending.
17:43 We find that a lot of people who did kill their spouse may end up committing suicide.
17:50 Like I said in the beginning, he was never accused of any wrongdoing at all.
17:55 It wasn't until the police reinvestigated and looked into the photos and actually got all these experts to come forward who had never actually seen the body.
18:07 But we're only viewing the photos to say that it looked like he had killed her.
18:13 It's really hard without proof in this case, it looks like he came out ahead now he is currently married to a girl that he went to high school with.
18:24 Everything says happily married, which is great.
18:26 And actually if he wasn't already rich, he's still practicing law.
18:31 He actually won this $4.5 million lawsuit.
18:36 So sometimes the outcome is a little bit different than the norm and in this case it's much different I think than a lot of people expected.
18:47 Thank you so much for joining me today on Pushing Up Lilies, if you like this podcast and would like to share with others.
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19:02 Thanks again for spending your time with me and be sure to visit me at pushinguplilies.com for merchandise and past episodes.