'48 Hours' Returns to the Gloria Choi Case With New Episode Airing May 2 on CBS

CBS News is spotlighting the killing of Gloria Choi — and the law-enforcement failures her family alleges preceded it — in a new '48 Hours' episode titled 'The Love Bombing of Gloria Choi,' scheduled to air Saturday, May 2 at 10/9c on CBS and stream on Paramount+. Correspondent Natalie Morales reports.

The Details

Choi, 33, was killed on Jan. 2, 2022, in Lakewood, Washington. According to The News Tribune, she was rammed off the road and shot multiple times while on the phone with 911. Prosecutors charged her ex-boyfriend, William Lee Rickman, with the killing.

The case was not without warning signs, according to court records and reporting by The News Tribune. Choi had sought help from police in multiple counties before her death, with at least 11 reported incidents over roughly a month and several contacts with law enforcement in the final days before she was killed.

A lawsuit filed on behalf of Choi's estate alleged that Lakewood police knew Rickman posed an imminent threat and that he had repeatedly violated a no-contact order — but that police failed to arrest him before he carried out the killing, according to The News Tribune. The civil case against Lakewood police remained pending as of The News Tribune's December 2023 reporting.

"Gloria's death was completely preventable. She didn't have to die if people had done their job," Meaghan Driscoll, the attorney representing Choi's estate, said in a statement reported by The News Tribune.

Rickman was convicted by a jury in December 2023 of aggravated first-degree murder, The News Tribune reported. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole. At sentencing, Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Greg Greer addressed the verdict directly: "It's nothing more than selfishness that this defendant took her life."

The episode's title — 'The Love Bombing of Gloria Choi' — references a pattern of behavior associated with abusive relationships in which a partner uses excessive flattery, attention, and affection as a means of control. The CBS News teaser does not provide additional detail on how the term applies to the specifics of Choi's case beyond the episode title itself.

The upcoming broadcast marks a return by '48 Hours' to a case that drew sustained regional coverage from The News Tribune and raised broader questions about how domestic-violence complaints are handled when a victim reports to multiple agencies across county lines.

Context

The Gloria Choi case attracted significant reporting in the Pacific Northwest in the months and years following her death, with The News Tribune documenting the sequence of police contacts Choi made before she was killed and the subsequent civil litigation brought by her estate.

According to The News Tribune, Choi's family — through their attorneys — maintained that Rickman's repeated violations of the no-contact order were documented and reported to police, and that law enforcement had sufficient grounds to detain him before the fatal attack. The Lakewood civil suit, which remained unresolved as of the December 2023 reporting, was one of the substantive legal threads the episode is expected to address.

An advocacy-focused interview piece published by Insider Exclusive, citing attorneys for Choi's family, similarly described the circumstances of her death — Rickman driving her off the road and shooting her while she was on a 911 call — as occurring after multiple documented violations of a domestic-violence no-contact order.

'48 Hours' has a long track record of revisiting high-profile criminal cases, often bringing national attention to proceedings that received primarily local or regional coverage. The choice to air this episode in the spring 2026 broadcast cycle suggests the show's producers view the unresolved civil litigation and domestic-violence accountability questions as still-active elements of the story.

What's Next

'The Love Bombing of Gloria Choi' is scheduled to broadcast on Saturday, May 2 at 10/9c on CBS, according to the CBS News teaser. The episode will be available to stream on Paramount+ following the broadcast.

The civil lawsuit filed by Choi's estate against Lakewood police remained pending as of The News Tribune's most recent coverage in December 2023. No update to that case's status was included in the CBS News teaser materials.