Murder in Missouri: a year ago a say college student with big dreams fell victim to his secret policeman lover. How one man's closet destroyed two lives and left a community in shock.

Once free, Jesse Valencia intended never to return to his fire-and-brimstone hometown in the hills of Boyle County, Ky., for more than brief family visits. Being gay, vocally liberal, and nonreligious constituted three kinds of blasphemy in central Kentucky. But he just couldn't stay quiet about it.

The first chance he got, he bolted to college--first to Ohio, then Missouri--where he easily made friends and attracted admirers of both sexes. Away from a family troubled by too little money and too many addictions, Valencia reinvented himself through embellished stories and a persona built upon grand possibilities. "He always felt pretty lost, not sure of where he wanted to study or where he wanted to go," says Erin Shepherd, a high school friend.

Valencia never did move back to Boyle County, but on June 5, 2004, he was buried in those Kentucky hills, having been brutally murdered by his secret lover--a married police officer who worked for the town of Columbia, Mo., the tiny mid-state home to the University of Missouri. Valencia now lies within walking distance of his mother's house outside Perryville, Ky.

"I miss Jesse, like it happened only yesterday," says his mother, Linda Valencia. "I never fully realized how gay people were affected by the way people in society act towards them. It never made me think about how painful it must be to have to hide your sexuality--until now."

On May 21 a Columbia jury convicted Steven Rios of first-degree murder, condemning him to a mandatory life sentence. The jurors also found him guilty of armed criminal action. (Sentencing for that charge was scheduled for July 5.) Special prosecutor Morley Swingle emphasized to jurors that Rios's DNA was found under Valencia's finger-nails and that his arm hairs were left on Valencia's shaved chest.

The knife used to slit his throat was never recovered.

"I have no sympathy for Steven Rios," adds Linda Valencia. "I am glad that he got life without parole and 10 years. I hope every day that he is in prison he sits and thinks about what he did to my baby. I hope he dreams about it. I hope he suffers. And then when he dies and he has to meet God, I hope God will judge him even more harshly than the jury did."

How did a student with an angelic face and a sexy, devilish grin die at the end of a tawdry affair with a married man? "Jesse was excited at first, but he reached the point where he wanted to end the relationship," prosecutor Swingle told jurors. "This defendant used his badge for sex and his knife to forever close the mouth of his victim."

When he left home, Valencia took on the role of a person of means. He was unhindered by something as insignificant as the truth, seeking credibility among privileged friends with his stories about trips to Greece and a family-owned stable of horses. He led them to believe that he came from money but also that money didn't really matter to him. His Peter Pan charm allowed him to get away with it. When a friend caught him in a grandiose fabrication, Valencia would just repeat the story the next day to the same friend who knew it wasn't true. He even lied about his age--23--trimming off a couple of years because he hated the idea of growing older.

"He talked about places like Greece and Israel as if he'd been there," says former boyfriend Jack Barry. Valencia needed those fables because his real story didn't make sense to him. He could name every constellation, discuss physics, and recite ancient Greek tragedies. He debated politics, wore too-tight T-shirts, and styled his big brown hair like a glam rock star. These were not supposed to be the interests and trappings of a gravel-road Kentucky boy.

For that matter, he wrote letters to newspaper editors about political issues, attended anti-Bush rallies during the presidential campaign, and taped jokes about Ann Coulter on the front door of his apartment. He wanted to attend law school, joking to friends that he might become the nation's first openly gay president.

Six weeks before Valencia's death, Rios, 28, was the cop who responded to a complaint about a loud party in Columbia's East Campus neighborhood. Rios arrested Valencia that night and was evidently smitten. A sexual relationship began almost immediately--even though the older man lied about his real name. It continued even though Rios repeatedly came by the student's basement apartment late at night, always unannounced and always expecting quick satisfaction, and even though Valencia continued to pursue other potential boyfriends.

Their late-night trysts had to remain a secret, Rios told his lover. But Valencia immediately told several friends about the bizarre new relationship and soon talked to them about confronting his new sexual partner over whether he was married.

Hours before his death on June 5, 2004, Valencia ended a Friday night shift as a desk clerk at the cut-rate Campus Inn motel and walked home to change clothes for a friend's party. Valencia's latest potential romantic interest, Ed McDevitt, was also at the party. They'd met the night before at the city's gay dance bar, the SoCo Club, and left together for Valencia's bed.

McDevitt seemed a bright spot in a period of personal darkness for Valencia, who told friends earlier that day he hoped the simple hookup might turn into a relationship.

Months earlier Valencia and longtime boyfriend Barry had parted, very much against Valencia's wishes. To fill the void he took on a series of sex partners, sometimes dating more than one man at a time-something his friends say was out of character but which seemed to be his way of coping with loneliness.

More than once Valencia met men online in Columbia's chat room on Gay.com and invited them back to the motel where he worked. Loneliness wasn't the only problem he was attempting to gloss over: He couldn't pay his credit card bills, was late on the rent, and never seemed to have enough money even to buy dinner. He told a few friends that he was considering bustling his way out of debt.

But it was the affair with Rios and the secrecy it required that weighed the most on Valencia's mind, friends say. The two didn't seem to belong together. Whereas Valencia looked and acted the part of an urban hipster, Rios was more of a square. He kept his receding hairline of black fuzz closely cropped, and his off-duty attire of Eddie Bauer sportswear coordinated with his Eddie Bauer edition Ford Explorer.

Before his collision with Valencia, Rios seemed to have a lot going for him. He had a pretty wife, a new baby boy, and a treasured job. He mentored schoolchildren, served on the city's drug abuse advisory committee, and worked off duty as an administrator for the Columbia Police Foundation. He was Supercop.

But secretly, witnesses say, he was a sexual predator, a stalker. At least three times before Rios met Valencia, he used his badge to attempt to negotiate sexual favors. Two women he'd arrested, and another who was a victim of domestic violence, were ready to testify at his trial that Rios solicited them for sex while working on their cases. One said he came to her house 30 to 35 times, sharing intimate sexual details and telling her he wasn't married.

The happy husband was in reality a tightly wound coil, ready to snap. And when Rios snapped, Valencia was his target.

An autopsy revealed that Valencia's killer choked him unconscious before using a serrated knife to cut a jagged four-inch gash across his throat. His body was abandoned in the grass between two apartment houses frequented by students.

Lying faceup, Valencia's nearly nude body went undiscovered for nine hours that hot summer Saturday until a neighbor, thinking the boy in the blue shorts might be a partyer who had passed out the night before, walked over to see if he could wake him--and saw the blood.

When police responded, Rios came along--hours before he was supposed to go on duty. Knowing the department would figure out that he'd arrested Valencia weeks earlier, he volunteered to identify the body and to maintain security at the scene by standing outside the victim's apartment door. Another officer at the scene, James Means, testified later that he sensed something was wrong with Rios, his close friend, because he seemed overly quiet and surly.

Within 24 hours, tipsters told detectives about Valencia's affair with a police officer--although they did not know the man's real name. Police, working to learn more, reached out to Columbia's gays and lesbians by distributing informational flyers at the SoCo Club and at the June 2004 PrideFest event in Cosmo Park.

But their best lead came not from tipsters but from Rios himself.

Two days after the murder, the officer placed himself under the microscope by approaching detectives working the case. He wasn't the officer being talked about in the CrimeStoppers tips referring to a policeman lover, he said. But his lies about the affair fell apart when detectives presented him with eye-witnesses. The victim's friends had not only seen Rios at Valencia's apartment but one had been in the same room with Rios on one occasion as he was having sex with Valencia.

But proof of the affair, no matter how sordid or suspicious, didn't prove murder. With no eyewitnesses to the crime and no murder weapon, detectives couldn't detain Rios.

The next afternoon, the Thursday after the killing, Rios answered his door and turned away two newspaper reporters who came with questions about the affair and the dead student. Panicked, he drove to Kansas City, Mo., in an attempt to catch a flight to Alexandria, Va., where his father lives. After he missed the plane Rios bought a shotgun. Then he phoned Columbia police and told a detective, "I've done something bad." He threatened to end his life. Making calls to police and to his family while driving back toward Columbia, he attempted to say his goodbyes. Officers kept him talking until he reached his in-laws' home in Columbia, where he was taken into protective custody.

The drama only escalated the next day. After seeing his police chief on the evening news confirming that Rios was indeed the officer who'd had a relationship with Valencia, Rios escaped the mental hospital where he was supposed to be under close watch by climbing over a patio wall. He made his way to the uppermost level of a five-story parking garage and for the next two hours stood on the ledge. A crowd gathered and intervention experts listened as he blamed the police chief, blamed the media, and said they could all burn in hell.

He took off his gold police insignia ring, placed it on the ledge, and told the officers trying to talk him down that they could melt it down. It had become worthless to him. Then he gave up.

Months later, at Rios's trial, Swingle meticulously outlined for jurors the early-morning hours surrounding the homicide, describing a scenario that allowed Rios plenty of time to leave a gathering of officers on the garage roof of the police department, kill Valencia, dump his body, and then return home to his wife and baby, all within 45 minutes.

When Rios testified in his defense, he admitted to lying about the affair to his wife, to his department, and to his friends. He elaborated about his shame at having unprotected sex and about participating in a three-some with Valencia and another gay college student. But when asked by public defender Valerie Leftwich whether he killed Valencia, Rios responded with just one word: "No."

In his cross-examination, Swingle asked Rios to clarify the fact that he confessed to the affair only after being presented with witnesses to it.

"So you admit then that you are willing to lie when it serves your purpose?" Swingle asked. The defendant indicated under oath that the description was accurate.

On May 21, when the judge read the jury's guilty verdict aloud, most of the sobbing in the courtroom came not from Rios's supporters but from three rows of Valencia's friends, who surrounded his mother. To reporters on the courthouse steps after the verdict was announced, Linda Valencia described Rios as an "evil, sadistic-looking person that looks like he crawled up from hell."

"I hope that people will learn from my son's tragic death," says Linda Valencia now. "That they will be very careful who they trust. I also hope they will try and be more understanding about gay people and let them have the same rights that everybody else does. They are God's children. I think that none of us has a right to judge each other.

"I urge everyone to stay close to your loved ones. Jesse and I were always close. We talked on the phone every day when he lived in another state. Talk to your loved ones. Tell them you love them. Don't let rifts develop between you and stay that way."

COLUMBIA, MISSOURI 

Pop: 86,981 ('02)

Nickname: College Town, USA

Native son:

Country songwriter Brett James ("Drugs or Jesus")

Wells is a reporter at The Tampa Tribune in Florida.