Not surprisingly, Ryan Jenkins' father is struggling with the idea that his son may have been a cold-blooded killer.
"If my son was guilty, he was crazy," Dan Jenkins, an architect based in Calgary, told the Los Angeles Times Monday, hours after Ryan apparently hanged himself in a British Columbia motel room.
"He was not the boy we knew. The boy we knew was not capable of anything remotely close to this act."
Police believe that the younger Jenkins fled the U.S. for Canada after strangling his ex-wife, Jasmine Fiore, and leaving her mutilated body in a Buena Park, Calif., trash bin. A murder charge was filed Aug. 20 while Ryan was on the run.
"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," Dan Jenkins said, adding that his son, who would "faint at the sight of blood," must have fallen in with the wrong crowd when he left Calgary for Hollywood.
And the exposure Ryan sought as a reality-TV star will now be nothing more than a footnote in his case file.
Having previously announced it was indefinitely postponing the show after airing three episodes, VH1 said Monday it is pulling the plug for good on Megan Wants a Millionaire, which featured Ryan as one of the well-off bachelors vying for Megan's heart.
He also shot I Love Money 3, which has been canceled, as well.
Meanwhile, that case file remains open as police investigate whether the real estate exec had help disposing of Fiore's body and/or getting out of the country.
Canadian authorities said that an unidentified woman checked Ryan Jenkins into the Thunderbird Motel in Hope, B.C., while he waited in the car.
"At this present time the investigation into the circumstances of his death is continuing, but preliminary evidence suggests that he took his own life," officials said last night. "Any further details will not be released at this time as this investigation remains in its infancy."
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Shake off the nastiness in the Big Picture Gallery.