Noor Malhotra
‘American Monster,’ a true-crime docuseries from Investigation Discovery, looks at those crimes that are perpetrated in daily life. One such crime was the botched assassination of a man at the hands of his ex-wife. What does a Marine veteran have to do with this case? The episode titled ‘Stay With Me’ explores this matter in depth.
Who is Weldon McDavid Jr?
The 52-year old was a School of Infantry instructor who had also been a Marine for 12 years. Consequently, he is an expert gunman. He had even served two tours overseas. On his return to the motherland, he worked at Iron Sights, a shooting range in Oceanside, California. He, along with his mistress Diana Lovejoy, had conspired to assassinate her estranged husband Greg Mulvihill. Greg and his wife were amidst a rather bitter divorce and custody battle in 2014. She claimed that he had sexually assaulted their young son and her. She wanted full custody of her son, which she did initially get. However, with subsequent investigations clearing Greg’s name, they now had shared custody of the child.
In 2016, she was also ordered to pay him $120,000 as his share of the family house in Carlsbad, California, that she got to keep in the divorce. Since she was earning more than him, she also had to pay an additional $100 every month as child support to her husband who was unemployed then. One juror claimed that she did not want to make this payment. She hired her shooting instructor McDavid for $2000 to kill her husband. He called up Greg from a burner phone, pretending to be a private detective with information pertinent to the divorce hearings. He lured him to an isolated area near a pole in the dirt path near Avenida Soledad.
When Greg showed up with a friend, a baseball bat, and a bicycle light, he saw McDavid lying on the ground on his stomach, with a long-range gun pointing at him. A bullet soon lodged itself in his torso, and since it fortunately missed his heart, he survived. That night, McDavid had brought his own rifle and was dropped off at the location by Lovejoy. Investigators tested human feces present at the scene against his DNA, and it was a perfect match. After obtaining a search warrant for his residence, they also found the gun.
Moreover, the authorities felt it could not have been a coincidence that 2 years before all this, he was helping an alimony reform advocate, Crystal Harris, after she claimed that her husband had raped her. She was seen with the shooting instructor and had also taken self-defense classes from him. In an interview, he said that he really wanted to go kill Harris’s husband.
Where is Weldon McDavid Jr Today?
At his trial, he pleaded not guilty and said that with his expertise, if he really wanted to kill Greg, he could have easily done so. He received a 50-year sentence for his involvement. He also had to pay half a million dollars to Greg for punitive damages. He has been at the North Kern State Prison since March 2018. He will be eligible for parole in 2041. In a jailhouse interview, he stated that he regretted cheating on his wife with Diana Lovejoy more than he did the murder for hire plot. He described their affair as “unsatisfying.” As of July 2020, a comment on San Diego Reader stated that “an appeals court has ordered that Weldon McDavid will get another chance at sentencing, with the original trial court judge in San Diego County.”
Read More: Where is Diane Lovejoy Now?
