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Salt Lake City

June 12, 2019

Lauren McCluskey had a new boyfriend, and her friends were worried. The University of Utah track-and-field star wasn’t going out as much as before. When she did, he would demand to know where she was. She sounded sad. He was talking about buying her a gun.

It didn’t take long for McCluskey to share her friends’ anxiety. He’d lied to her about who he was, and she found out. She broke it off. But he didn’t go away.

Instead, he stalked her, sending texts from fake phone numbers. He extorted her. After nearly two weeks of abuse, Melvin Shawn Rowland shot and killed McCluskey in a campus parking lot. Hours later he killed himself.

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Salt Lake City

June 12, 2019

Lauren McCluskey had a new boyfriend, and her friends were worried. The University of Utah track-and-field star wasn’t going out as much as before. When she did, he would demand to know where she was. She sounded sad. He was talking about buying her a gun.

It didn’t take long for McCluskey to share her friends’ anxiety. He’d lied to her about who he was, and she found out. She broke it off. But he didn’t go away.

Instead, he stalked her, sending texts from fake phone numbers. He extorted her. After nearly two weeks of abuse, Melvin Shawn Rowland shot and killed McCluskey in a campus parking lot. Hours later he killed himself.

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When people think about gender-based violence on college campuses, they don’t often think about Lauren McCluskey. They’re more likely to think about the legions of women who have pressed colleges to take campus sexual assault more seriously. In the past decade, a long-overdue reckoning has ensued.

But as sexual assault has made headlines, another type of gender-based violence gets “short shrift,” says Dana Bolger, who co-founded Know Your IX, an advocacy group. “When you open up The New York Times,” she says, “you just aren’t reading about intimate-partner violence.”

Intimate-partner violence, sometimes referred to as dating violence or relationship violence, is a broad term that encompasses not just physical and sexual abuse but also psychological abuse, like stalking or belittling. It’s common, poorly understood, and easily overlooked on college campuses.

McCluskey’s death, in October, and the abuse she had suffered made a textbook case. The warning signs hadn’t shown up on her body. Not bruises, but harassing messages. Not broken bones, but blackmail.

Before she was killed, McCluskey had described Rowland’s abuse to the university police, but officers didn’t recognize the danger she was in. The campus safety net wasn’t designed to detect the full spectrum of intimate-partner violence. McCluskey’s death served as painful proof.

Utah wasn’t alone in struggling to recognize dating violence, and it is not alone among universities now in considering its responsibility to protect students. Across the country, campus officials have gotten a fast education in what constitutes sexual assault. But they are still figuring out what dating violence looks like, and when they’re obligated to address it, says Adele Kimmel, a senior lawyer at the law firm Public Justice.

At Utah, the case of Lauren McCluskey is a nightmarish reminder that the stakes are high and the consequences dire. Women across campus found themselves thinking: What would it take to save other people like McCluskey? The answer was daunting in its complexity. But still, some of them set about teaching the University of Utah how to recognize a danger that looks different from what we’ve been told to fear on college campuses.

In early September, McCluskey met Rowland at the London Belle, a bar in Salt Lake City. He worked as a bouncer. She was a senior at Utah who studied communications and competed in the high jump. He took her to dinner, bought her roses, fixed her car window, said Jill McCluskey, Lauren’s mother, who is a professor at Washington State University. He seemed like a good guy, at first.

That impression quickly soured. Rowland began to isolate McCluskey, her friends noticed. She looked exhausted, and she told two friends that he wouldn’t let her hang out with them. It seemed to McCluskey’s friends that she was being taken advantage of.

In October, McCluskey discovered that Rowland had lied about everything: his name, his age, his criminal past. He was 37, not 28, as he’d told McCluskey, who was 21. In fact, Rowland, who was on parole when he met McCluskey, had spent a total of more than 10 years in Utah prisons after being convicted of enticing a minor over the internet and attempted forcible sexual abuse.

McCluskey resolved to break it off. When she did, on October 9, Rowland “was really upset with her,” she later told the police. Soon after, she began getting texts from strange phone numbers saying she “had broken Rowland’s heart.”

One message was especially jarring. “Go kill yourself,” it read.

Women between ages 18 and 24 are at heightened risk of being in an abusive relationship. But intimate-partner violence “crosses racial boundaries. It crosses gender boundaries. It crosses both hetero and same-sex relationships,” says Rachel K. Myers, a research scientist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

If you’re in college, chances are you’ll either be harmed by a partner or know someone who has been. But more than half of all college students say it’s difficult to identify what dating abuse looks like. An equal number say they don’t know how to help when they spot it.

That’s partly because the term “intimate-partner violence” “is not something that people often relate to,” Oxborrow says. Students may think of a husband throwing plates against a wall. They don’t think of the boyfriend who deletes every other male contact from your phone.

Technology further blurs the lines of what’s acceptable. When people hear the word “stalking,” they think of “the creepy guy that’s two feet behind you, wearing the dark trench coat,” says Laura L. Dunn, a victim’s-rights lawyer in Washington. But it’s also the bad Tinder date who keeps sending you aggressive texts.

It’s hard to tell people about abuse that’s being perpetrated by a person you love, or once loved. Under the federal campus-crime-reporting law known as the Clery Act, changes that took full effect in 2015 required colleges to start tracking reports they receive of domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking. But in 2016, nearly 90 percent of colleges said they had received zero reports of dating violence, says Anne Hedgepeth, director of federal policy at the American Association of University Women. “That doesn’t really square with the experiences students are having,” she says.

Incidents of intimate-partner violence typically aren’t reported, especially within a small community, because “you’re going to sit in class with this person,” Oxborrow says. “You have friends in common.”

And many students believe that short-term relationships — the type that many of them enter — can’t escalate. “People are like, ‘Oh, they just dated for a minute. It’s not that big of a deal,’” Oxborrow says. “Well, if he’s obsessed, if he’s deadly, it’s a very big deal.”

In other words, the most dangerous time in an abusive relationship is when you leave it, she says. Research indicates that those who are most at risk of being killed by a partner recognize that they’re in danger only about half of the time.

McCluskey was in trouble and she knew it. On October 12, 2018, she called the campus police to report the messages she’d been getting. Now the texts from unknown numbers were telling her that Rowland had been hospitalized, then that he had died, and that it was her fault. Finally a text asked her if she wanted to go to Rowland’s funeral.

McCluskey calls university dispatch

October 12 at 4:24 p.m.

"I think they're trying to lure me somewhere."

Show transcript

McCluskey: I’ve been getting these texts from these numbers of different people. They were saying that he was in the hospital and then saying that he passed away. But then, but then I got texts from him, and he seems to be alive. And then I got a text about asking if I wanted to go to a funeral, his funeral. And I think they’re trying to lure me somewhere.

But a campus police officer told McCluskey that without “any threats or anything of a criminal nature,” there “isn’t much we can do,” according to a police report. Tell the messagers to stop, the officer said, and contact the police again if the situation escalates.

The next day, it did. McCluskey told the police that someone was threatening to release compromising photos of her if she didn’t pay $1,000. By now she suspected it was Rowland. She was scared and did not know what to do, she told the campus police.

An officer met with McCluskey that day, and she filled out a witness statement. The case was then assigned to a detective, identified in police reports as Kayla Dallof, to follow up on possible extortion charges.

Dallof, who worked Tuesdays through Fridays, returned to work three days after the statement was filed, but she focused on other cases. Meanwhile, McCluskey was anxious for an arrest. On October 19, she called the Salt Lake City Police Department to tell them that she hadn’t gotten any updates from the university.

Later that day, Dallof contacted McCluskey for the first time to get more information. The detective told her that investigative subpoenas would be needed. Those would take time. She told McCluskey to tell the dispatcher if she received any other messages.

Three days later, on October 22, McCluskey got a text from someone claiming to be the university’s deputy police chief, asking her to come to the police station. McCluskey emailed Dallof and spoke with another officer about the text. The officer recognized it as sent from an impostor and told McCluskey not to answer. But he didn’t report it up the chain.

That evening, McCluskey was on the phone with her mother when Rowland grabbed her outside of her dorm complex. Jill McCluskey heard her daughter say, “No, no, no, no, no.” Then the cellphone hit the ground.

At 9:55 p.m., McCluskey’s body was found in the back seat of a car in the parking lot. She’d been shot multiple times.

Dallof, who was off work that day, was called to the homicide scene. While there she opened her work email and saw McCluskey’s message about the fake text.

The text messages. The blackmail threats. The controlling behavior. The access to a gun. The attempt to lure McCluskey from her apartment. Each was a clue that McCluskey had been in danger. The clues weren’t as obvious as a broken arm or a broken window. But they were there — typed out, emailed, and recorded.

Those missed clues would be laid out in an external review commissioned by the university in the aftermath of McCluskey’s death. They bolstered a distressing conclusion: In McCluskey’s case, the warning lights should have been flashing red. But they didn’t seem to blink at all.

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A Series of Missed Signals

Early September

McCluskey and Rowland meet.

For starters, the campus officers whom McCluskey had called for help weren’t trained to recognize the full array of domestic-violence signifiers. There had been some training in the department, “but it obviously wasn’t enough,” says Sue Riseling, one of the three investigators and executive director of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators.

Each officer with whom the investigators spoke repeatedly emphasized that McCluskey had “never expressed any fear of physical threat or violence from Rowland,” the report says. In the officers’ view, McCluskey’s reports did not meet the statutory elements of domestic violence under Utah law, investigators say. The campus police saw the extortion attempt as Rowland just wanting money, Riseling says. If the officers had looked at McCluskey’s case through a “domestic-violence lens,” Riseling says, “extortion would have just been one element of the domestic abuse.”

In McCluskey’s case, that lack of recognition meant delays. Police officers didn’t investigate the extortion as quickly as they should have, investigators found, in part because Dallof, the detective, was “placed in a position for which she lacked the expertise to recognize the subtle indicators of domestic violence cases.” (Dallof, who did not respond to requests for comment, is no longer with the department. The university has declined to say if she had been fired or resigned.)

It would have been easier to recognize those indicators if officers had met face-to-face with McCluskey, but she had only one in-person meeting with the campus police.

In face-to-face meetings, “you can see anxiety,” says John T. Nielsen, a former commissioner of the Utah Department of Public Safety, who led the review. “You can see fear.”

That can lead to deeper questions, he says, like, “What kinds of things does he demand of you? Will he allow you to associate with your friends?”

“Things like that that, I’m quite certain,” he says, “were never asked.”

But officers weren’t the only people deciding how to handle McCluskey’s case. The office of campus housing had learned that McCluskey was in a manipulative relationship before the police did. Weeks before McCluskey was killed, her friends told a graduate assistant that they were worried about Rowland’s behavior, according to an email obtained by The Chronicle.

 Housing officials eventually decided not to “overstep,” according to the report, because McCluskey herself had not come forward. On the day of her death, officials did discuss her case, but no one in attendance had “any more information or updates on Lauren,” according to the report.

All along, both housing officials and police officers could have referred McCluskey’s case to the university’s victim-survivor advocates, who are trained to support victims of interpersonal violence, including stalking. But no one ever did. In fact, the police and victim-survivor advocates did not have a coordinated, working relationship, investigators found.

“The sad thing about this case is that it is a perfect example of why the advocates are so important,” Nielsen says, “because this young woman was just left to navigate the system all by herself.”

Nielsen and his team issued 30 recommendations to the university. The president, Ruth V. Watkins, accepted every single one. The process of putting them into full effect has begun. The housing department has simplified its reporting process for cases like McCluskey’s. The police department has hired an in-house victim’s advocate and a detective who specializes in domestic violence. Officers are now trained in lethality assessment, a research-driven protocol that can identify people at risk of being killed by an intimate-partner.

When asked about the 16 recommendations that applied to the police department, Dale Brophy, the chief, likened law enforcement to golf: “There’s never a perfect day in law enforcement. Never a perfect day in golf either. You can always do better.”

This month the department held a private awards ceremony at which it recognized three campus employees for their work on McCluskey’s case, The Salt Lake Tribune reported. After McCluskey’s father said the ceremony “borders on obscene,” the department apologized for including McCluskey’s name on the program.

For Devon Cantwell, fixes and recommendations could go only so far. She wanted the university to do more than check a series of boxes. She wanted intervention.

When Cantwell, a Ph.D. student in political science, heard the university call McCluskey’s death a “tragic loss,” it made her angry. Yes, that’s true, she thought. But McCluskey “didn’t die in a bike accident,” she says. “There’s a real name for what happened here.”

Yet when Cantwell referred to McCluskey’s death as intimate-partner violence, some undergraduates pushed back. What happened to McCluskey didn’t qualify, one student told her, because McCluskey and her killer weren’t married and didn’t live together. Cantwell explained that the definition of intimate-partner violence was much broader than that.

The student was visibly upset, Cantwell recalls. “She said, ‘I didn’t know that that’s what that was. I didn’t know that that could happen with somebody you just dated.’”

Students don’t have the right information, Cantwell thought, and the university was morally obligated to give it to them. The university puts major resources behind solving other intractable-seeming problems, like cancer and climate change. Why couldn’t it do the same for intimate-partner violence?

In November she asked Watkins, the president, what was being done to address intimate-partner violence right here, right now.

“This is a nationwide problem,” Cantwell says, “and we just happen to be a petri dish.”

Watkins chose Cantwell, along with students, faculty members, and others for a working group called Resilient U. They convened in January with one goal: a seismic culture shift around relationship violence on the campus.

Kaitlin McLean, a senior and student-government leader, knew it wouldn’t be easy. The university is sprawling, with 33,000 students, plus tens of thousands of staff and faculty members, and Salt Lake City residents who come to the 1,500-acre campus every day.

Many students had placed themselves in McCluskey’s shoes, McLean says. “You think, would I have done anything differently? And the answer is, probably not.”

“So then we think, ‘Well, if that’s the best information we had, we clearly don’t have the right information.’”

And without the right information about intimate-partner violence, McLean says, “I could be in danger, or my peers could be in danger — and I am so uneducated, I wouldn’t even know. I wouldn’t know to go seek help.”

McLean, who was in the working group and also on a campus safety task force, read through hundreds of pages of safety concerns that were submitted to the university by people on the campus after McCluskey’s death. She studied safety policies at other Pac-12 institutions and led an effort to get a safety statement — a paragraph that includes the phone number for the university police and a link to the campus safety website — on every professor’s syllabus. After debate in the Academic Senate, the measure was passed. McLean was proud.

“People are so invested right now in progress,” McLean says. “It’s not, ’Maybe next semester, maybe next year, maybe that’s a change we can do later.’ It’s people coming forward and saying, ‘Why not do it right now?’”

For Brittany Badger, progress meant a new approach to educating students. Her office, the Center for Student Wellness, which oversees the university’s victim-survivor advocates, has long held bystander-intervention training sessions. Last fall the center revamped that training to expand what being a bystander means.

Being an effective bystander doesn’t need to be a “heroic intervene last minute” kind of thing, Badger says. Officials at the center want to normalize the idea of people’s checking in with one another when they see something that feels even “slightly off,” she says.

And this spring, the center developed a healthy-relationships workshop. The goal is to help students identify not just red flags but less obvious warning signs — what Badger calls “pink flags.” When an ex won’t stop texting, or when a partner shows up at someone’s work unexpectedly, it might mean nothing. But she has seen those situations “completely escalate,” she says.

“That gray zone is the hardest space to create behavior change,” Badger says. But it’s “the space where you start to shift cultural norms and social norms to be like, ‘This still isn’t OK.’”

Chris Linder wants her fellow faculty members to know about the gray zone, and how to talk with their students about living within it.

Linder, an assistant professor of higher education at Utah, spent a decade as a victims’ advocate. Over the years, she’s watched the morphing of stereotypes about violence on college campuses away from the “stranger jumping out of the bushes” trope, she says. Now the stereotype is that two students meet at a party, get drunk, then something goes wrong.

What we don’t really think about, or collect much data on, is if and how those two students knew each other before that night, says Linder. How long had they been dating? Were there warning signs?

McCluskey’s murder brought such questions to the fore.

Sensing an opening, Linder scheduled a meeting for faculty members who wanted to broach the topic of intimate-partner violence with students. Some, like a law professor, came to lend their expertise. Others were there to listen.

Linder recalls, “We had a math professor come who said, ‘This is really important to me, and I don’t know how to talk about it in my classrooms. But I want to, because I feel like the more exposure people get, the better.’”

When that math instructor, Kelly MacArthur, heard about McCluskey, it felt familiar.

Here was a woman who asked for help and wasn’t taken seriously, MacArthur says. “The thought that she was waving the flag, saying, ‘Hey, something is terribly amiss here,’ and people weren’t acting quickly enough, is kind of horrifying to me.”

The instructor had wriggled out from the grip of her own abuser about five years ago. She thought about the people who hadn’t believed her when she told them about what she had gone through. His abuse was mental and emotional, never physical, MacArthur says. “If he would have hit me, I would have been like, ‘Oh, yeah, that I understand. That I have learned about.’”

This semester, for the first time, MacArthur told her students that she has post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from that relationship. She told her students what to do if they witness her having a panic attack in class. She carries laminated cards with instructions: Don’t touch her. Do take long, deep breaths for her to mimic. It hasn’t happened in front of students, but she’s come close. “I think those things are OK to share,” MacArthur says. “I think it’s good for students to see us as human beings.”

MacArthur wants her classroom to be a space in which students can bring their whole selves. That guiding principle is what brought her to Linder’s meeting.

“My overriding question,” MacArthur says, “was, What can I learn, and how can I maybe change the structure of my class, or add something to my class, so that I serve all students, including my students who need help with surviving abuse?”

Some ideas were brought up: List resources on course syllabi. When you need to cancel class, invite a guest speaker to talk about relationship violence instead. There is no one-size-fits-all response, Linder says. A good strategy is what she calls the “spinach in the smoothie” approach. Ideally, faculty members will think deeply about how relationship violence relates to their areas of expertise, and how they can teach about it, so that students are digesting this information from all different angles.

After months of work, Cantwell, the Ph.D. student, says she’s seeing the early inklings of a culture shift. She’s heard students start to use terms like “intimate-partner violence.” Members of the Utah working group, along with other university departments and community organizations, applied for a $300,000 federal grant to bolster lethality-assessment-protocol training on campus, increase awareness of the dangers of stalking, and advertise the statewide domestic-violence hotline.

Some university resources are stretched thin. The victim-survivor advocates are each balancing about 30 cases at a time, says Badger. The recommended number is 15. Experts predict that the demand for victim services will only increase as awareness spreads.

And in McCluskey’s case, Cantwell says, people were educated. There were bystanders, and they did intervene. And yet, for a lot of reasons — some institutional, some cultural, some “just not trusting or believing women” — McCluskey fell through the cracks. It’s proof, Cantwell says, that awareness alone is not sufficient.

McCluskey’s parents agree. They want more accountability from the university they say fatally failed their daughter. Lauren recognized a bad relationship and left it fairly quickly, Jill McCluskey says. She was killed because “no one responded to her, no one protected her.”

The issue of violence against women can’t be neatly packaged and addressed with one educational program, Cantwell says. It requires us to take “a deep, hard look” at systemic inequalities that exist in Utah, she says, and to have tough conversations about what we see.

“If the university really wants to be serious about it,” she says, “there are going to have to be a lot of people who are going to be uncomfortable.”

McCluskey’s death has made Cantwell less willing to stay quiet. For years, she says, she’s helped friends in abusive relationships create safety plans and call help lines. A month after McCluskey was killed, Cantwell walked a friend through filing a request for an injunction against a stalker. In January a medical resident at Utah was killed by her boyfriend, who then killed himself.

“I’m hoping that somebody, anybody, will start taking this stuff seriously,” Cantwell says. “Because I think a lot of us are just exhausted.”

Before Lauren McCluskey, there was Katy Straalsund. There was Tynesha Stewart. Hyseung Linda Hong. Maggie Wardle. Heather Campbell. And dozens of other college students who have been killed by current or former partners. Many of these college students were killed before “intimate-partner violence” was a term used outside of a dissertation room or a hospital bed. Many of them died before their deaths could be understood, and mourned, in a broader context.

Before Lauren McCluskey, there was Yeardley Love, a University of Virginia lacrosse player who was beaten to death by her ex-boyfriend in 2010. Love’s family later founded an organization called One Love that teaches young people about healthy and unhealthy relationships.

After Lauren’s death, the University of Utah invited One Love to campus. On a Friday morning in April, a few students, a husband and wife, a health educator, and some accounting and facilities employees sat in a circle. Over pizza, they watched a video that showed two college students, Zoe and Will, fall in love. They watched the young couple post artsy photos on Instagram while Will grew aggressive in real life. They watched how an abusive relationship can start off sweetly. They watched how it can toxify.

One Love tries to stay away from terms like “domestic violence,” Liz Cowley, the workshop’s leader, told the group. Instead they talk about behavior. One in three women will be in an abusive relationship during their lifetime, Cowley says. But everyone, she says, will be in an unhealthy relationship at one point or another.

That Friday morning, the conference room was mostly empty. Extra pizza boxes were piled high. Even when the outreach is there, it’s hard to get students to show up. The athletics department held a healthy-relationship workshop, but not many students came, so it started bringing the training directly to teams, which worked better, says Jonathan Ravarino, the department’s director of psychology and wellness. For many students, anything related to McCluskey’s death is still difficult to talk about, he says: “We’re healing.”

Halfway through Friday morning’s workshop, a young couple wandered in.

They’d been dating for more than a year. She wanted them to spend more quality time together instead of just time. He said she was his only social outlet.

After the workshop, before heading out the door, they said they were glad they came. They were going through a rough patch. They’d been fighting this morning.

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About This Story

This article’s account of McCluskey’s case is based on two independent investigations — one commissioned by the University of Utah’s president, the other done by Utah’s Department of Public Safety — as well as more than 170 pages of police reports, phone calls to the university’s police department, phone calls to the Salt Lake City police department, records from the university’s housing and residential-services department obtained through open-records law, original interviews, and media reports about Lauren’s death. The article’s timeline was derived from these same sources, which in some cases conflicted with one another on the dates or details of some events. In cases where key information was disputed — but important to include — we have chosen the version that was most supported by the totality of the evidence.