A young man, Loren Bunner who took photos of his ex-girlfriend as
they hiked together in the Alabaman countryside before shooting and
pushing her off a 49ft cliff, has been jailed for 52 years.
Before the devastating incident occurred, the pair had been walking
the Pinhoti Trail in the US state, with Bunner even posting four
pictures on Instagram of his former girlfriend hours after he killed
her.
Loren
and Jolee began dating a year earlier and Jolee broke up with Loren so
many times but was always emotionally blackmailed into going back to
Loren after he threatened to commit suicide.
Loren was said to be possessive and extremely controlling and only
wanted Jolee to hang with him and his own friends and sit by him as he
played video games. Jolee got tired of his behaviour and finally ended
things with him. Loren tried to win her back, begging for weeks, but
Jolee remained adamant.
Loren then asked that they stay friends and on August 29th 2015, he
convinced the teen to follow him on a hiking trip and the night before
they went Jolee messaged a friend joking: “If something happens to me,
you’ll know who I was with.”
Before they headed off, Loren posted a picture of Jolee on his
Instagram account, the first of four photos showed Jolee, 18, sitting in
the front of Loren’s car with his dog. The caption read, ‘On our way to
go hiking.’
During the hike, on 30th August, Loren updated his Instagram three
more times. The last two photos were of Jolee standing on the edge of a
cliff at the state park. Loren had written, ‘Oh, ya know. Just enjoying
the view.’
In
the last one, Jolee looks like she’s taking a photo as she faces a
cloudy mountain top with her camera, a photo which seems to be her very
last picture before her death.
After
killing his ex, Loren called the cops and said: “I want to turn myself
in for the murder of my ex-girlfriend that happened just a little while
ago on Cheaha Mountain.”
Police recovered a Bear Claw .22 gun from Loren and found on him and a
large amount of blood was discovered where Jolee was killed, as well as
on Bunner’s steering wheel.
When questioned, Loren shocked the investigators with his
explanation. He told police that he’d shot Jolee in the head as part of a
suicide pact, before throwing her off a cliff. When it was his turn to
kill himself, he couldn’t go through with it.
“She didn’t want to see it coming,” Loren said, which is why he’d
shot her from behind. But it didn’t explain why he’d then turned her
over and shot the young girl between the eyes.
The 22-year-old was charged with murder and after initially pleading not guilty, he admitted the murder in July this year.
The court heard he had bragged to cell mates about killing the 18-year-old – saying if he couldn’t have her no one else could.
Loren was sentenced to 52 years in prison and told to pay over £7,000 in restitution to the Alabama Crime Victims Commission.