“We’re actively looking for anybody who may have participated in the murder, anybody who may have helped [Ryan Jenkins] flee from our jurisdiction, and for the victim’s car,” Susan Kang Schroeder, a spokeswoman for the Orange County District Attorney’s office, said Monday.
In Buena Park, Calif., police have issued a search warrant for Ryan Jenkins’s cellphone records and are looking for the white Mercedes that belonged to Fiore, whose body was found stuffed in a suitcase in a Buena Park dumpster on Saturday, Aug. 15.
The international manhunt that followed the discovery of Fiore’s body ended Sunday when Jenkins’s body was found hanging from a coat rack in a room at the Thunderbird Motel in Hope.
Jenkins’s father says he’s struggling to come to terms with the accusation that his son murdered Fiore and that he believes the former reality TV contestant was corrupted by the Hollywood lifestyle.
Jenkins, a Calgary real estate executive who appeared on two VH1 reality TV shows, was found dead eight days after he allegedly killed Fiore.
“If my son was guilty, he was crazy. He was not the boy we knew. The boy we knew was not capable of anything remotely close to this act,” said Dan Jenkins, a prominent Calgary architect. “You talk to everyone here who knew him before he went down there and they’ll talk about a wonderful young man, a thoughtful man.”
Jenkins said his son appears to have fallen into the wrong crowd in Hollywood and that he was incapable of the violence he is accused of committing. He “would faint at the sight of blood,” Dan Jenkins said, adding he could not speak about details of the case.
Buena Park police Sgt. Bill Kohanek said investigators hope finding Fiore’s car will lead them to the crime scene.
It’s also possible Fiore’s car was itself the crime scene.
“The evidence in the hotel room [at San Diego’s L’Auberge del Mar, where Jenkins was last seen with Fiore] doesn’t match the nature of the crime.”
In B.C., the RCMP and the B.C. Coroners Service are investigating Jenkins’s suicide, examining the laptop computer and belongings that were in the room when his body was found.
So far, U.S. police have few leads as they investigate the possibility of an accomplice, said Kohanek. “We’ve had contact with both sides of [Jenkins’s] family and no one is trying to hide anything from us as far as we know. But as far as we’re concerned he’s still the only suspect [in Fiore’s death].”
