Did Jealousy Drive a Military Man to Murder?

Aug. 17, 2007 — -- Just after midnight on Oct. 2, 2005, Christina Cleland said goodbye to her co-workers at a local bar in their small Ohio town, and hurried home to her boyfriend, David Heinricht. When she reached their apartment, she found a white rope knotted around a pillar of a living room wall. Heinricht's body was on a black futon, a noose wrapped around his neck.

"I turn the light on," Christina said, "and that's when I see the ropes. And I, for a whole second, I stood there because my eyes were lying to me and I didn't want to believe it."

In Heinricht's right hand was a broken cigarette; in his left, she found a typewritten suicide note, bearing the signature "Dave." "Dear Christina," it read, "I don't love you…you need to go back to your husband."

In a strange coincidence, Heinricht's father, Guy Arginziano, was at home that night with the police scanner crackling in the background in his kitchen.

"I heard David's name and information come over the air waves," Arginziano said. "And so I knew he was involved somewhat in whatever incident occurred. When I got to the apartment, a police officer opened the door. He had a sergeant come out and say that my son had passed away. And I thought about it, and I thought, well, now, 19-year-old kids don't pass away."

For Christina, the clue to Heinricht's death was in the note that she found. It brought up all the unhappy circumstances of the love triangle she had been trying to untangle. She wanted to move on from her unhappy first marriage to a young soldier, Shaun Cleland.

Nearly four years earlier, the two had married in Hawaii, where Shaun was stationed. It was a whirlwind romance and gave the teenage Christina an opportunity to escape her strict Mormon upbringing. Soon, Christina and Shaun moved into an apartment in his Ohio hometown, right next door to Heinricht. Shortly after the move, they began to argue over Shaun's career in the military.

"We had discussed at first when we were together that he would not make it a career, and here he is about to make it a career," Christina recalled. "I told him, if you go, that it's going to be the end of us because we have been apart more than we have been married, and I don't know who you are."