Should anything bad happen to Michael J. Mooney, his wife is in possession of a list of potential suspects. Those suspects include Mexican cartel members, the family of an American sniper who almost certainly lied about his kills, the world’s largest sex trafficker, and other unsavory characters Mooney has written about in his 20 years as a journalist, five of which were spent as a staff writer at D Magazine.
Naturally, that suspect list is ever-evolving. “Every so often, in the past, when somebody from that list died,” Mooney says, “we did kind of have a solemn moment of low-level celebration and cross it off.” Recently, an obituary notice floated Mooney’s way, allowing the removal of another name: Grover Hope. “I don’t think he would have been high on the list, but not zero,” Mooney says.
Back in 1975, before Mooney was even born, D published a story titled “Who Killed Beverly Jean Hope?” Back then, Grover was the co-owner of a successful heavy construction company and a man hounding police detectives to find his wife’s killer…