On June 19, 2014, Diana Duve, a nurse from Moldova who worked in Vero Beach, went to see her ex-boyfriend Mike Jones after a very bad breakup. She told her mother that she wouldn’t be coming back home, and then she mysteriously vanished. Jones had told Duve’s parents that she was safe with him, but when she went missing, both she and Jones were looked for very hard.
Investigators soon found out scary things about Jones’s past and used cellphone tower pings, surveillance, and other clues to find him at a Hampton Inn. Duve’s body was eventually found in the trunk of her car, which was parked in a Publix parking lot.
Later, the ex-boyfriend was found guilty of first-degree mur*der with premeditation and given a sentence of life in prison without the chance of parole.
Diana Duve’s on-again off-again boyfriend was abu-sive and even attempted to strangle her once
Diana Duve and Mike Jones met at a bar in Vero Beach in the summer of 2013, and they moved in together five months later. In April of the next year, they were said to have gotten into a heated argument that quickly turned physical. According to what Duve’s friends said, Jones yelled at her and tried to put his hands around her neck.
Eric Corrigan, who used to live next door to them, said that he called 911 to report a possible domestic dispute.
Duve failed to return home after a rendezvous with her ex-boyfriend
After Duve and Mike Jones got into a fight, they broke up, and she moved out of the house. Jones, who was 32 at the time, kept chasing after the nurse, who was 26, even after they broke up. He sent her texts.
Soon, on June 19, 2014, the two people who used to be together made plans to meet at a local bar called What-A-Tavern. At 1:15 a.m., Duve and Jones were seen leaving the place.
She even told her mother, Lena Andrews, about a half hour later that she wouldn’t be coming home that night. She didn’t come home the next day, so a report was made that she was missing.
Mikes Jones was a convicted felon on probation at the time
Authorities learned that Diana Duve’s ex-boyfriend Mike Jones, who she was last seen alive with, was a convicted felon when they looked into her disappearance.
He was charged with aggravated stalking in 2012 in Fort Lauderdale, where he lived before moving to Vero Beach, for threatening to k*ill an ex-girlfriend. Jones said that he wasn’t guilty and was put on probation.
Cellphone tower pings
Detectives thought that finding Mike Jones would help them find Diana Duve, a 26-year-old nurse who was last seen leaving a bar with him. Jones was likely to blame for Duve’s disappearance, so they thought that finding Jones would lead them to Duve.
They didn’t have any leads, so they used pings from cellphone towers to find Jones at a Hampton Hotel about 25 minutes south of Vero Beach. Local police were able to find his car in the parking lot of the business.
The hotel’s surveillance video showed that Jones checked in about 24 hours after Duve disappeared. There, he was arrested for breaking his parole, but he refused over and over to tell the police where the missing woman was.
Diana Duve’s body was found stuffed in the trunk of her abandoned car
After Mike Jones was caught, detectives used cellphone tower pings again and also looked at hours of surveillance footage. After this, local police were looking for Duve’s car and found it around 4:30 a.m. in the parking lot of a Publix. Her dead body was put in the car’s trunk.
It was proven that Duve was strangled to de*ath. Two days later, Jones was charged with first-degree planned mu*rder.
Small drops of blood on the threshold of the garage door led detectives to believe that he ki*lled her in his apartment and put her body in the car while it was still in the garage. The victim’s blood was in the bottle. In 2019, Jones was found guilty of the crime.
