Few in the former port city of Quincy, Il., 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, says the Associated Press. That sparkling image was shattered when he was charged with suffocating his first wife and mother of four on Valentine’s Day in 2006.
The accusation unsettled followers of the case that had remained open because a pathologist and coroner’s jury never pinpointed why the 38-year-old woman died suddenly. The scandal, cracked open 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. Lovelace, 45, remains jailed on $5 million bond, and his situation is the “continuing grist of gossip in tight-knit Quincy,” AP says.