A 47-year-old Louisiana woman made famous on a reality TV show was killed in a murder-suicide by a man she had been dating, police said. 
 
 Valerie Dowden Wells, whose parents’ rags-to-riches tale turned into CMT’s “Bayou Billionaires,” died after suffering multiple gunshot wounds Monday in the parking lot of a Shreveport McDonald’s, police told KTBS-TV. 
 
 “This is really hard on us and her children. It is out of order. No parents should have to go through this,” Wells’ parents, Kitten and Gerald Dowden, wrote on Facebook Tuesday morning, according to the TV station. 
 
 Investigators believe Robert Gaddy, 46, shot her in her car around 4 p.m. outside the Mansfield Rd. McDonald’s before shooting himself. Gaddy later died at a hospital. Shreveport police Cpl. Marcus Hines told KSLA-TV that Gaddy and Wells had been involved in a relationship. 
 
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 Her parents struck it rich after learning that their home was sitting on the fourth biggest natural gas deposit in the country, according to a CMT guide to the show. The program first aired in 2012. 
 
 Wells and Gaddy knew each other from high school and had recently started going out, the show’s executive producer, Brian Flanagan, told People magazine. The family of the mother of three is “not doing well” after her untimely death, he said. 
 
 “She was a sweetheart. Valerie suffered from MS, but she was incredibly strong,” Flanagan said. “She was ill for a very long time but worked through it. She always had a smile on her face. She was sunshine walking through a room, and it’s incredibly sad news.” 
 
 Shreveport police said Robert Gaddy shot Wells before turning the gun on himself. (KSLA-TV) 
 
 Wells worked in the public defender’s office in nearby Mansfield. A friend of hers recalled in a Facebook post how the “kind and giving” woman helped local families around the holidays. 
 
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 “If you or someone you know is being abused, please take the matter to the police and get out of the situation. Domestic violence is dangerous and can be deadly,” the Facebook user wrote. “Fly with the angels, sweet Val, you will be missed.” 
 
 Her family organized a visitation for her on Thursday night at 6 p.m. and a funeral service on Friday at noon at Shreveport’s Rose-Neath Southside Chapel. 
 
 Sign up for BREAKING NEWS Emails privacy policy Thanks for subscribing! ||||| Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE Cpl. Marcus Hines with the Shreveport Police Department said a woman was shot and killed, and a man is in grave condition after shooting himself outside a McDonald's on Mansfield Road. (Sarah Crawford/The Times) 
 
 Buy Photo A deadly shooting took place outside of this McDonald's at Mansfield Road and West 70th Street on Monday afternoon. (Photo: Sarah Crawford/The Times)Buy Photo 
 
 A woman is dead and a man is in grave condition after a shooting took place in west Shreveport Monday afternoon, according to the Shreveport Police Department. 
 
 Cpl. Marcus Hines, public information officer with SPD, said a man shot a woman in the parking lot of McDonald's at Mansfield Road and West 70th Street. 
 
 "We have more questions than answers at this point," Hines said. 
 
 Hines said the female victim was in a vehicle attempting to leave the parking lot when the man approached her car. The man is alleged to have shot the woman and then himself, Hines said. 
 
 "Her car rolled out of the parking lot after she was shot multiple times by this man," Hines said. "Following that shooting, the man did turn the gun on himself." 
 
 The female died; the alleged shooter was taken to University Health in "grave condition," Hines said. 
 
 "We do not know currently if there is any type of relationship of any kind, past or present, between the victims involved in this situation," Hines said. "We are working to confirm their identities, and hopefully that information will be available very soon." 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/news/2016/11/07/breaking-murder-attempted-suicide-fast-food-restaurant/93451232/ ||||| Jealousy may have been the motive behind Monday’s murder-suicide of a Louisiana woman who was featured along with her family in the 2012 reality TV show Bayou Billionaires, the victim’s daughter confirms to PEOPLE. 
 
 Around 4 p.m. that day, Valerie Dowden Wells, 47, was shot multiple times by Robert Gaddy, 46, as she sat in her car near a McDonald’s parking lot in Shreveport, Louisiana, police Sgt. Rod Johnson tells PEOPLE. 
 
 Gaddy then turned the gun on himself, Johnson says. Gaddy and Wells were both taken to a local hospital, where Wells was pronounced dead immediately and Gaddy later died, Johnson says. 
 
 Gaddy knew Wells from middle school, and the pair had recently started dating, according to Wells’ 15-year-old daughter, Nikki. 
 
 Gaddy was jealous that Wells continued to communicate with Nikki’s father, the teen confirms. 
 
 Brian Flanagan, Bayou Billionaires‘ executive producer, tells PEOPLE that family members “believe that’s the reason it all went down” — an assertion Nikki confirms. 
 
 Of the investigation into the motive, Johnson says police “haven’t been able to lock it down as a hard core fact.” 
 
 And with both victim and shooter dead, Johnson says, “that could be one of those facts we’ll never know.” 
 
 ‘She Was my Beautiful Mother’ 
 
 Wells’s death has left her close-knit family “all in total shock,” Wells’s sister-in-law Peggy Dowden tells PEOPLE. “We can’t believe it happened.” 
 
 “She was the most loving person, she was so friendly, she was always smiling,” Dowden says. “She was down-to-earth. She loved everybody so much.” 
 
 Bayou Billionaires, which aired on CMT, focused on the Shreveport-based Dowden family’s rags-to-riches story after they discovered their home sat on a large deposit of natural gas. 
 
 Wells was a single mother of a son and two daughters, and she she worked at a public defender’s office, another producer who did not want to be identified tells PEOPLE. She also suffered from Multiple Sclerosis but never let the condition slow her down. 
 
 “I was so impressed,” the producer tells PEOPLE. “She had a job that meant a lot to her, a TV show, was a great mother. And on top of that she was dealing with MS.” 
 
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 Wells loved caring for her home, part of a family compound on the same sprawling property as her parents, Kitten and Gerald Dowden, who also starred in the show. She took refuge in a small garden area in front of her house, which is surrounded by acres of pastoral land. 
 
 “She liked that quiet time and connection with nature,” the producer tells PEOPLE. 
 
 Nikki, Wells’s youngest child, says Wells “was the strongest person I knew.” 
 
 “She taught me everything I needed to know to be a successful, thriving, beautiful woman,” says Nikki, who will be cared for by other family members. 
 
 “We knew we loved each other very much. She was my beautiful mother and I was her sparkle child,” Nikki says. “We will always miss my wonderful mama.” 
 
 Wells’s funeral service will be at noon on Friday, Peggy says. ||||| In a modern day rags to riches story, Bayou Billionaires tells the story of the Dowdens of Shreveport, La. -- a hardworking family of modest means who recently discovered their home sits on the fourth largest deposit of natural gas in the United States. After years of pinching pennies and balancing budgets, the over-the-top Dowdens are ready to enjoy the finer things in life, sparing no expense. Bayou Billionaires follows Gerald and Kitten and the rest of their family as they experience the perks of belonging to a brand new tax bracket. ||||| Valerie Wells’s great and unexpected fortunes were rivaled only by the sudden tragedies she suffered. 
 
 When the Louisiana-born woman was just entering her 40s, her parents, Gerald and Kitty Downden, made a life-changing discovery. 
 
 They were deeply poor — at the time, the divorced Wells worked in the public defender’s office but was living in a double-wide mobile home with her three children on her parents’ land. But that was soon to change: The family found that their house in Shreveport was sitting on the fourth-largest natural gas deposit in Louisiana. 
 
 Almost immediately, the Dowden family was swimming in wealth. 
 
 As the New York Times wrote, they had a “name for the blessing that’s changed their lives and that of their family: ‘mailbox money.'” The six-figure checks they earned “for the hard work of staying put” simply arrived via the Postal Service, as they enjoyed the royalties. 
 
 They had more money than they knew what to do with. 
 
 They had so much, in fact, that in 2012 Country Music Television began filming the family for a reality show titled “Bayou Billionaires,” in which Gerald, Kitty and the kids repeatedly proved this observation. 
 
 In one episode, they tried out a country club, only to realize they hated it. In another, they headed to a local auction and bought, well, almost everything. Now in possession of too much useless junk, the two decided to host a yard sale to sell the things they had just purchased. Gerald filmed a television commercial that ran in two local parishes advertising the sale. On the show, he said the family “spent more money on the commercial than we made on the yard sale.” 
 
 If those moments sound a bit like leftover plotlines from “Beverly Hillbillies,” well, let’s just say you’re not far off. (In one episode, Wells confuses the phrase “Japanese tapas bar” with “Japanese topless bar.”) 
 
 They became known around Dixie, particularly for Gerald Dowden’s goofy, original Southernisms. While visiting Rome with his newfound wealth, for example, he was awed by the Coliseum. He said in an interview with CMT, “They used it for 1,000 years. We tore down Cowboys stadium after 40 years!” 
 
 The show, though, was derided by critics. The Washington Post pointed out that the show — and others like it, such as “My Big Redneck Vacation” and “Duck Dynasty” — plays purely on “Southern tee-vee stereotypes,” even though, as Ted Ownby, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, said, “People of the South get frustrated at the narrow range of representations.” 
 
 Some of those shows lasted; others faded. “Bayou Billionaires” lasted a scant two seasons, but that mailbox money kept arriving on schedule. 
 
 Those funds proved more than useful, too. They were necessary, as Wells was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a generally sudden-onset disease that attacks the central nervous system and “disrupts the flow of information within the brain, and between the brain and the body,” according to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. 
 
 “I was so impressed,” Brian Flanagan, the executive producer for “Bayou Billionaires,” told People. “She had a job that meant a lot to her, a TV show, was a great mother. And on top of that she was dealing with MS.” 
 
 Her bad luck grew exponentially worse on Monday, though. 
 
 She had driven to McDonald’s — a vestige of a normal life, one before money was no longer a concern — and was preparing to leave after munching on the comforting fast food. 
 
 As she began to drive out of the lot, a man later identified as 46-year-old Roddy Gaddy allegedly drove up and shot her several times. 
 
 “Her car rolled out of the parking lot after she was shot multiple times by this man,” Cpl. Marcus Hinessaid told the Shreveport Times. “Following that shooting, the man did turn the gun on himself.” 
 
 Wells was rushed to University Health, the hospital for the LSU Health Shreveport School of Medicine, where she was pronounced dead. Gaddy’s body, bleeding from gunshot wounds, was found in a nearby parking lot. He was transported to the same hospital, where he died. 
 
 Though her biography on CMT stated, when the show ran, that Wells was “not interested in getting back into the dating game,” police told the Times they believe the two were previously involved in a relationship. 
 
 “We know they had a relationship of some type, but I can’t tell you if they were friends having a dispute or formerly intimate. We simply don’t know at this moment,” Shreveport Police Sgt. Rod Johnson said. “We have some guesses, but we’d like to back that up with hard facts.” 
 
 Wells’s 15-year-old daughter, Nikki, told People that the two indeed had recently struck up a romantic relationship. 
 
 Though police have not yet offered a motive for the shooting (and told the magazine that, since both parties are dead, “that could be one of those facts we’ll never know”), Nikki told People that Gaddy was jealous that Wells still spoke to her ex, Nikki’s father. 
 
 Flanagan corroborated this, telling the publication the Downdens “believe that’s the reason it all went down.” 
 
 At the moment, though, the family that once held a spotlight is in mourning. 
 
 On their private Facebook page, Kitten and Gerald wrote, “This is really hard on us and her children. It is out of order. No parents should have to go through this,” according to KTBS. 
 
 Nikki, who called her mother “the strongest person I know,” said she missed her mother. 
 
 “She taught me everything I needed to know to be a successful, thriving, beautiful woman,” Nikki told People. “We knew we loved each other very much. She was my beautiful mother and I was her sparkle child. We will always miss my wonderful mama.” 
 
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– A star of CMT's short-lived reality-TV show Bayou Billionaires has died in an apparent murder-suicide. Police say Valerie Dowden Wells, 47, was attempting to exit a McDonald's parking lot in Shreveport, La., when she was shot multiple times in her car around 4pm Monday. Her car then "rolled out of the parking lot," police tell the Shreveport Times. Authorities identified the shooter as Robert Gaddy, 46, who was found suffering from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a nearby parking lot, reports the Washington Post. Both Wells and Gaddy were pronounced dead at a hospital. Police, who haven't yet nailed down a motive, say the pair knew each other since childhood and may have been "formerly intimate." However, Wells' 15-year-old daughter, Nikki, tells People that her mother had recently started dating Gaddy, who was jealous that Wells continued a cordial relationship with Nikki's father. "This is really hard on us and her children. … No parents should have to go through this," say Wells' parents, Kitten and Gerald Dowden, who secured a reality-TV deal after they discovered their home sat on a lucrative natural-gas deposit, the fourth largest in the country, per the New York Daily News; Bayou Billionaires last aired in 2012. Wells, a single mother of three with multiple sclerosis, "was the strongest person I knew," says her daughter. "She was my beautiful mother and I was her sparkle child. … We knew we loved each other very much."