AI Summary
5 min readLauren McCluskey, a 21-year-old track and field athlete at the University of Utah, was murdered on campus in October 2018. In the months before her death, she had repeatedly sought help from campus police after discovering that the man she had been dating, Melvin Rowland, had lied about his identity and was extorting her. The authorities took little action. Investigative reporter TJ Quinn and his team at ESPN spent four years digging into the case, and their work is featured in the documentary Listen and the 20/20 episode Running Out of Time. In this after-show conversation, Quinn explains how the institutional failures that allowed Lauren to slip through the cracks are not unique to Utah—and how a young woman who just wanted someone to listen became a symbol of what can go wrong when systems meant to protect students fail.
The Story That Almost Wasn't Told
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:35) **Deborah Roberts introduces the episode and TJ Quinn** - Roberts sets up the story of Lauren McCluskey, a 21-year-old University of Utah track athlete murdered by a man she dated after campus police failed to act.
- 2 (02:54) **Quinn’s background and how he got on the story** - Quinn describes his career from print journalism at the *Chicago Tribune* and *New York Daily News* to his transition to ESPN, and how his time at the *Salt Lake Tribune* gave him local knowledge for this Utah case.
- 3 (06:20) **Who Lauren McCluskey was** - Quinn paints a portrait of Lauren as a quiet but fierce track star, a devoted friend, and a young woman with a love for singing and animals, raised by two university professors in Pullman, Washington.
- 4 (09:12) **Lauren’s last phone call with her parents** - A clip from the 20/20 episode features Matt McCluskey recounting the moment he and Jill heard Lauren being abducted over the phone.
- 5 (14:07) **Friends saw the warning signs** - Quinn discusses interviews with Lauren’s college friends, who noticed her behavior change soon after she met Melvin Rowland (using the alias "Shawn Fields").
- 6 (16:44) **The public’s victim-blaming narrative** - Quinn addresses the common reaction that Lauren was "stupid" for being taken in by Rowland, and explains how the reporting reframes that view.
- 7 (19:03) **Rowland’s pattern of manipulation and the extortion** - Quinn reveals that Rowland was running a near-full-time operation of manipulating women he met online, and that Lauren was one of many.
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Show Notes
ESPN’S T.J. Quinn discusses a four-year investigation of student-athlete Lauren McCluskey's murder. Quinn unpacks the many questions raised in the case and the changes made after McCluskey's death.
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