Florida Man Stole Heirloom Ring, Used It to Propose to Second Woman

A grandmother's diamond ring, stolen from a jewelry box in Orange City, Florida, reappeared weeks later on another woman's finger as a proposal gift. That Facebook post, meant to celebrate an engagement, became the thread that unraveled more than a decade of deception.

Joseph Louis Davis, 53, was arrested and booked into Volusia County Jail on March 13, 2026, where he remains held without bond. He faces felony charges of grand theft and aggravated stalking after investigators established he had stolen multiple rings from one partner and used at least one of them to propose to another.

Davis met both women on OkCupid in 2015 and 2016, running parallel relationships while concealing each from the other. To his Orange City girlfriend, he went by "Joe Brown." To his Orlando fiancée, he was "Marcus Brown." At the time of his arrest in St. Petersburg, he was living with a third woman as "Mark Brown." None of them knew his real name or that the others existed.

The stolen property included an engagement ring, wedding bands, and a diamond ring that had belonged to the Orange City victim's grandmother, the piece with irreplaceable family provenance. Investigators valued the total theft at approximately $6,270, a figure that crosses Florida's felony grand theft threshold. To cover his trips between Orange City and Orlando, Davis told his girlfriend he was traveling for cancer treatments.

The logistics of the scheme were extraordinary. Davis once drove his Orlando fiancée to the Orange City girlfriend's house while the girlfriend was at work, told the fiancée the home was his, and asked her to move in. That deception collapsed when the fiancée posted photos on Facebook showing off the engagement ring. The Orange City girlfriend recognized her stolen jewelry, contacted the fiancée directly, and both women began cooperating with detectives. After Davis disappeared, the Orlando fiancée also reported her own laptop and additional jewelry missing from her apartment.

Investigators had issued an arrest warrant in 2021, but Davis had given only false names to both victims, and database searches came up empty. He had, in fact, been wanted in Oregon since 2014 on a separate warrant for a hit-and-run crash with injuries. Davis is a convicted felon out of Oregon and North Carolina, with prior arrests for possession of a fictitious ID, filing a false police report, domestic assault, and cocaine possession with intent to sell. A 2014 booking record lists a tattoo reading "Only God Can Judge Me."

A tip to the Volusia County Sheriff's Office eventually placed Davis in St. Petersburg in 2026, living with yet another woman who had no knowledge of his identity or legal history. He told investigators he had stayed off the radar by keeping an extremely low profile.

The case sits at the convergence of two documented national trends. Romance scams cost Americans $1.14 billion in 2023, according to the Federal Trade Commission, with a median per-victim loss of $2,000. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded nearly 18,000 confidence and romance fraud reports in 2024, totaling more than $672 million. Jewelry theft accounts for approximately $1.2 billion in annual U.S. losses according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program, and the Jewelers' Security Alliance reported that while crime frequency fell in 2024, total dollar losses rose as individual incidents grew more costly.

A grandmother's ring holds a kind of value no appraiser can quantify. That it resurfaced in a public Facebook post, worn as proof of a new love, may be the most telling detail of all.