A circle of support after losing his only daughter

When Lauren Charles, a young attorney scaling the corporate ladder as a project manager for a Washington, D.C., defense contractor, first introduced her father John to her boyfriend, she coyly waited until she was alone with her dad, a math teacher at De La Salle High School in New Orleans, to pop a very important question.

“So, Daddy,” Lauren asked, “what do you think of my boyfriend?”

For a man used to putting two and two together, John Charles spoke from a deep well of distilled wisdom – his intuition as a father.

“Baby, I need another first impression, because this one didn’t work,” Charles told his daughter, his only child and an honor student at Ben Franklin High School.

Lauren was crestfallen, because, after all, she was madly in love.

What was it about her boyfriend that didn’t sit well with Charles? Charles admitted he didn’t really like Lauren’s previous boyfriend either – the guy from Oregon she had met in law school – but this was somehow different.

Charles had caught a train into D.C. to meet Lauren and her boyfriend at a Japanese Garden Festival. Everyone knew this was going to be their first “meet-and-greet.”

“He had his baseball cap on his head sideways,” Charles recalled. “So, I’m thinking to myself, ‘Oh, dude, I’m a grown man, and you introduce yourself to me like that?’ I’m from that era, you know, where I don’t appreciate that. It didn’t sit right. And, so, I thought to myself, ‘Oh, Lauren, this is your boyfriend?’”

Charles continued to puzzle over what intrigued Lauren about Reginald Dunlap Jr.

“I have no clue,” Charles said. “That was me and every single one of her friends. I mean, not a single person was on the fence.”

Was he good looking?

“No.”

It was sheer mystery, complicated by other troubling signs. Dunlap, a Maryland resident, had no close friends. He had attended Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans but did not graduate (he and Lauren did not meet in New Orleans).

But, their relationship, and eventually, their engagement and wedding, proceeded.

“About six months before the wedding, Lauren’s aunt and godmother died, and we were at the repast,” Charles recalled. “I walked past Lauren as she was talking to some people – and she didn’t see me there – and she said, ‘Oh, my daddy doesn’t like my boyfriend.’ It was the thing where she understood I didn’t like him. I just didn’t badger her about it. When they got married, I didn’t express it anymore.”

Another red flag: At their wedding, Dunlap did not have a single friend attend.

A tragic turn
In time, Charles’ first impression was borne out tragically.

On March 7, 2021, Lauren, then 40, was found brutally murdered in the Maryland home she owned and where she lived with her husband.

In an attempt to cover up the murder and make it look as though an intruder was responsible, Dunlap trashed the house and then attended 9 a.m. Mass by himself at St. Martin of Tours Catholic Church in Washington, D.C.

“As a matter of fact, the first thing he said when he called 911 when they answered was, ‘I just got back from church.’”

Dunlap’s alibi began falling apart almost immediately. Montgomery County, Maryland, detectives began hearing from Lauren’s friends and family, who knew intimate details about their volatile relationship, and also about Lauren’s determination, after much soul-searching, to give her husband a deadline to leave the house.

From 1,100 miles away, Charles knew his daughter was trying to gain her freedom, but he did not fear for her physical safety.

“I wasn’t that worried,” he said. “If I were, I would have been out there.”

On Feb. 28, 2021, Lauren handed her husband a written notice to vacate the premises by the end of March. She was murdered a week later.

At Dunlap’s one-week murder trial – which was held nearly two years after Lauren’s death – Charles was the first prosecution witness, but he was only on the stand for about four minutes, with the highlight being his ability to identify Dunlap to the 12-member jury as his daughter’s former husband.

'The Army'

The Montgomery County courtroom had room for about 40 people, and Charles said Lauren was so well loved by her friends and coworkers that at least two dozen showed up every day for the gruesome testimony.

“They were an army,” Charles said.

Charles made several decisions before testifying and then sitting through the testimony.

He positioned himself so that he was isolated from the jury but in Dunlap’s direct line of sight whenever he had to confer with his lawyer.

“My entire thing about this whole trial is that the Holy Spirit was with me the whole way,” Charles said. “The whole question in my mind was how I was going to react when I saw this guy. When I first saw him – and for the entire time I saw him – I felt nothing for him. I attribute that to the Holy Spirit backing me the whole way. I’m still being protected because I’m not having nightmares from the horrific, graphic images from the crime scene. The main prosecutor, Debbie Feinstein, was a professional jewel. She would constantly look over at me to see how I was doing, and whenever she did, I just gave her a thumbs up.”

Charles said all of Lauren’s friends had told her to leave the home for safety as things began to escalate. Charles said text messages between Lauren and her friends were introduced into evidence – texts he was not aware of – that showed how scared Lauren was for her safety.

“She was texting to her friends, ‘This has to end, this has to end,’” Charles said.

Sound advice: Seek help
It sounds counter-intuitive, Charles said, but sometimes the best advice to give someone who is involved in domestic abuse is to seek professional help – such as therapy or other support services – and not to “demand” that the person flee from the situation.

What often happens is that the person who is being abused will dig in her heels and reject the wisdom of her friends.

“This is really important,” Feinstein said after Dunlap was convicted of first-degree murder on March 10 after the jury needed only five hours to return a conviction. “When someone is experiencing domestic violence, domestic abuse, if you are a friend or family member, the best kind of help you can provide is just to wrap support around them and encourage them to get professional help.

“With a victim of domestic violence, telling them to leave is actually the exact opposite of what we should be saying because they’re already in a power control dynamic. To have a friend or family member come in and demand that they do something will have the person dig down even more. The idea is to have the person come to the place on their own – that they have to leave. Victims of domestic violence are not going to leave until they’re ready to leave.”

Feinstein said it is helpful for a friend or relative to “express concerns” or “offer a listening ear” or”tell them that we’re afraid for them.”

“Everything in this case was done right, and that’s part of what makes it such a tragedy,” Feinstein said. “She was doing everything she could to get out of that relationship, and she was almost there. She was supposed to go away the following weekend and stay elsewhere. She never got to because he killed her first.”

Dunlap put up no defense.

“I say the defense’s case was about a second long because that was the amount of time it took for them to say, ‘The defense rests,’” Charles said.

The De La Salle teacher said he will never forget the amount of love and support he received from school president Paul Kelly, other administrators, teachers and students. During the one-week trial, he got regular texts and prayers on his phone.

Dunlap will be sentenced on July 7. He is likely to receive life in prison without parole.

Charles hopes people who find themselves in an abusive situation will allow their friends to speak frankly to them without the fear of canceling their friendship.

“Friendship should surpass anything,” he said. “It took Lauren a while to hear it from everybody. It wasn’t a consensus – it was unanimous. She went to a therapist. She went to a divorce attorney, and she visited a deacon at her church.”

The two-year nightmare will never end, but Charles hopes Lauren’s death can be used as a protective signpost for others.

“She might be saying to me, ‘I’m sorry that it took me so long to get this done and that we couldn’t spend more time with each other,’” Charles said.

Lauren is buried at St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, right across the street from Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, where Charles goes to Mass.

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