Diana Lovejoy is an American woman who was jailed over a failed murder-for-hire attempt on her estranged husband Greg Mulvihill’s life.
Lovejoy hired an assassin, her lover and former Marine Weldon McDavid, to carry out the killing in September 2016.
McDavid got off a shot at Mulvihill but he survived and within a week investigators had cracked the case and arrested both suspects.
The story of Diana Lovejoy, her ex-husband and her lover-cum-hired assassin has since gone down into lore as one of the most gripping true crime stories of all time that has been chronicled on Snapped, Dateline and more.
We give out more details about this gripping saga below.
Diana Lovejoy Wikipedia – Who is Diana Jean Lovejoy?
Diana Lovejoy was born sometime in October 1975 in San Diego, California. Prior to becoming an infamous attempted murderess, Lovejoy was a triathlete and software technical writer leaving a life of privilege in Carlsbad, California.
Lovejoy attended Mountain View High School growing up and continued to the University of California, San Diego where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Literature Writing, Psychology, French, and Music in 1995. She was elected to the Provost’s Honors list four years running and starred on a collegiate swim team. Lovejoy was elected to Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society during her time at UC San Diego.
Following graduation, she took a job at Nokia as Lead Documentation Specialist, carrying out duties including authoriting instructional and procedural documentation and teaching documentation management procedures. After four years in the role, she left Nokia in September 1999, joining Previo in January 2000 as a Technical Writer.
For the next seven years, she worked as a Technical writer for Websense and IBS Interprit/Irdeto. She also freelanced on the side, taking gigs that came her way via her personal website writing marketing emails, website copy and press releases for clients.
A long-time athlete, Diana Lovejoy started Lovejoy Fitness in October 2008 as a personal trainer, triathlon coach and more. She worked as Expert Strength coach for GOTRibal, a women’s global triathlon organization and also served as a writer.
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Her final job before arrest and incarceration was as Senior Technical Writer for salesforce.com in San Francisco.
Lovejoy married Greg Mulvihill and the couple had a young child at the time of their bitter divorce and custody battle in the mid-2010s that led to her taking a series of wrong decisions that ended with her in jail and infamous all around the world.
Diana Lovejoy, Weldon McDavid and Greg Mulvihill Love Triangle
Sometime in 2016, Lovejoy and her ex-husband had engaged in a bitter custody battle over the previous year that left her feeling very unsatisfied and bitter.
According to reporting from the time, Lovejoy was miffed at the 50-50 custody arrangement and with having to pay her ex-husband $120,000. To solve her problem, she turned to her then married lover Weldon McDavid, a veteran and firearms instructor, offering him $2,000 to kill her ex-husband.
Around 10:30 p.m. on Sept. 1, 2016, McDavid called Mulvihill and posing as a private investigator, told him that he had incriminating evidence against him that could prove devastating.
He said he had taped the evidence to a utility pole along a dirt path off Avenida Soledad in Carlsbad.
Mulvihill left his home at that late hour, took a flashlight and a mini-baseball bat and after calling a neighbor for back-up, headed up the dirt path to find out what the hell was going on.
McDavid was hiding in the bushes with an AR-15-style rifle waiting for his arrival to eliminate the threat.
However, Greg and his neighbour heard some rustling when they got to the path following which a shot rang out. Mulvihill was injured but survived and McDavid fled the area.
One week after the attack, Lovejoy was arrested as the prime suspect in the crime. McDavid was arrested a short while later after authorities pieced together the entire scheme.
A surveillance video showed Lovejoy purchasing the burner phone McDavid used to call her ex-husband and a search of his home turned up the weapon used in the shooting. Cell phone tower data placed both McDavid and Lovejoy near the dirt path where the shooting took place. Investigators revealed Diana had driven her one-time lover to the area to kill her ex-husband, and DNA of McDavid was found near the scene.
“She was going through a contentious custody dispute and she hired Weldon McDavid to shoot her husband and eliminate the problem,” Carlsbad Police Department Sgt. Darbie Ernst said in an interview. “It is as straightforward as possible.”
Their trial was pretty straightforward and a jury found both defendants guilty, despite their insistence they never planned on killing Mulvihill. McDavid said at trial that if he wanted Mulvihill dead he’d be dead.
“I could hit that person – center mass – 100 yards away without any problem,” he said.
That defence was not as convincing as they’d thought it would be. McDavid received 50 years to life at the California Institution for Men in Chino and Lovejoy, was sentenced to 26 years to life in prison.
Following the guilty verdict, Lovejoy collapsed, and McDavid wept. He later told Dateline what he regretted the most about the whole ordeal was cheating on his wife with Lovejoy.
“It was totally unsatisfying. If there was only one thing I can take away I would take [sleeping with Lovejoy] away because I hurt my wife, and that means more to me than anything.” he said.