Days after former New England Patriots football star Aaron Hernandez committed suicide in his Massachusetts prison cell last week, multiple law enforcement sources disclosed for the first time that his motive for killing a friend in 2013 may have been to prevent the friend from outing him as bisexual, according to a report by Newsweek.
Hernandez had been serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for the murder of Odin Lloyd. During his 2015 trial, in which he was convicted of the murder, authorities said they were uncertain of the motive.
“But interviews with multiple law enforcement officials directly involved in the case say Lloyd — a semi-pro football player who was dating Hernandez’s fiancée’s sister at the time — had information the football star did not want out: That he was bisexual,” Newsweek reported on April 21.
According to Newsweek, law enforcement sources said one of three notes Hernandez wrote and left in his cell shortly before he hanged himself with a bed sheet on April 19 was to a prison boyfriend, who has been placed on a 24-hour suicide watch.
Another of the notes was to his fiancée, Shayanna Jenkins Hernandez, and the third one was to the couple’s 4-year-old daughter, Newsweek reported law enforcement sources as saying.
The law enforcement sources also told Newsweek that during the investigation of Lloyd’s murder authorities discovered that Hernandez had a longtime secret male lover, a high school friend, that Lloyd reportedly knew about and who Hernandez did not want his fiancée to find out about.
The sources said that shortly before his arrest for Lloyd’s murder Hernandez, who in 2012 signed a record $40 million contract with the Patriots, transferred a large sum of money to an account he set up for the male lover, Newsweek reported. It reported that Hernandez transferred smaller amounts of money to accounts he set up for his fiancée and daughter.
Newsweek reported that sources disclosed that Hernandez placed his suicide notes beside a Bible that was opened to the New Testament verse, John 3:16, and that he scrawled the verse on his forehead with red ink.
The verse states, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whosoever believes in him would not perish but have eternal life.”
Longtime D.C. bisexual advocate A. Billy S. Jones-Hennin has said the lives of many male bisexuals are complicated due to relationships with women and men and consequently they often fear being outed as bisexual.
