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How a Seemingly Perfect Marriage Ended in a Murder-For-Hire Plot · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Welcome back to the deep dive. Glad to be here today.
• 0:03
  We are focusing on a very specific coordinate, right Oak
• 0:08
  Cliff down in Dallas, Texas.
• 0:10
  Speaker 2: It's a fascinating starting point.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it really is, because you know, it's a place
• 0:15
  that usually represents this very specific slice of the American tree.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: Oh.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: Absolutely, You've got the tree lined streets, historic homes. Exactly.
• 0:23
  It's the kind of neighborhood where people don't just live
• 0:26
  next to each other, they actually know each other.
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: They're invested in the community.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: Right, It's got that community spirit that realtors just love
• 0:34
  to put in their brochures.
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: The idyllic suburb.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: But we aren't here to talk about the architecture.
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: No, we're not.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: We are zooming in on a very specific morning, October ninth,
• 0:44
  twenty twenty.
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: I think it's important to really set the atmospheric stage here.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, walk us through it.
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: So it's right around sunrise. Okay, the light is you know,
• 0:53
  just hitting the pavement. And remember the context here. It's
• 0:56
  October twenty twenty.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: We are deep in the first year of the pandemic exactly.
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so world is quiet.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: Right, nobody is really commuting Commutes.
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: Are basically non existent for a lot of people. There
• 1:08
  is this sense of stillness that in hindsight feels incredibly
• 1:14
  eerie given what is about to happen.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and in this stillness we have.
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: Our subjects, Jamie and Jennifer Faith.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: Right, They've been married for fifteen years at this point,
• 1:23
  a long time, and they step out of their front
• 1:26
  door to take their dog Maggie.
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: For a walk, just a normal morning. It is the.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Absolute definition of a mundane domestic ritual.
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: It's what we call a soft target.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: Environment because they're totally relaxed.
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: Right, you have two people comfortable in their routine, the
• 1:42
  coffee is probably still brewing inside their house.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: Defenses are completely down completely, and then that silence is
• 1:48
  just shattered.
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: It's entirely broken.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: But I want to be very specific for you listening
• 1:52
  about how it breaks. Yeah, because this isn't it's not
• 1:55
  a scuffle. It isn't a shouted demand for a wallet.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: Or a watch at all. A mass man charges them
• 2:01
  and just opens fire on Jamie Faith. The forensic details
• 2:06
  of this attack are well, they're immediate red flags for
• 2:10
  anyone in criminology.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: That down for us.
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: Jimmy Faith is shot seven.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: Times, seven times, he takes.
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: Three rounds to the head, three to the chest, and
• 2:18
  one to the groin.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: I really want to pause on that last detail.
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: The groin shot.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that seems excessive for a robbery.
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: It's not just excessive, it's highly communicative.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: Communicative, like it's sending a message.
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: Exactly. In homicide investigations, we look for overkill as a marker,
• 2:35
  a marker of what usually intimacy or extreme hatred. Oh okay,
• 2:40
  because a robber, right, they want compliance or they want goods.
• 2:44
  They shoot to disable or do escape.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: They don't stick around to shoot someone seven times.
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: Right, and even a professional hit man shoots for efficiency.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: Two to the chest, one to the head.
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: Exactly standard execution. But a shot to the groin, Yeah,
• 2:57
  that is symbolic destruction. Wow, that is the shooter saying
• 3:01
  I am not just killing you, I am emasculating you.
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: It suggests a narrative of punishment, a very specific personal punishment.
• 3:09
  So in the immediate aftermath, Jamie is dead on the pavement,
• 3:13
  just an awful scene, and Jennifer is there, she's screaming.
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: Her wrists are duct taped by the assailant.
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: But she's physically unharmed.
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: Not a scratch on her.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: The shooter then jumps into a black Nissan Titan pickup truck.
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: Which crucially has this distinctive white tea deecalt on the
• 3:30
  rear window. It speeds off, and that decal is going
• 3:33
  to become the visual anchor of this entire investigation.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: It really is. But right now, on that specific morning,
• 3:39
  the community is just left with a dead neighbor and
• 3:42
  a completely traumatized widow. The illusion of safety is gone,
• 3:46
  which brings us to the mission of today's deep dive.
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: We need to peer back the layers of this crime.
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: Because spoiler alert, this isn't a hood unit.
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: No, the police actually lock onto the shooter fairly quickly.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: Right, this is how she did it.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: That's the perfect way to phrase it.
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: We are analyzing the puppet master dynamic.
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: Yes, we're looking at a stack of sources here, federal
• 4:06
  court records, police investigations, coverage from dateline in forty eight hours.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: And they all paint this terrifying picture of psychological warfare.
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: We have three main players to keep.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: Track of, Okay, lay them out for us.
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: The victim, Jamie Faith.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: The unsuspecting husband.
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: The weapon Darren Lopez, a hit man, and the puppet master,
• 4:25
  Jennifer Faith.
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: The wife, the wife, and then hook Here. The thing
• 4:29
  that I think will keep you up at night is
• 4:31
  the mechanism of control.
• 4:33
  Speaker 2: It's a scousing.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: How does a suburban wife who as far as we know,
• 4:36
  has never fired a gun in her life, right, how
• 4:39
  does she rewrite reality so effectively that she convinces another
• 4:43
  person to commit murder.
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: A man who is six hundred miles away.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: From home, believing he's the hero of the story.
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: It brings up this really chilling concept of proxy murder.
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: Proxy murder.
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we often think of hitman as these cold, transactional professionals.
• 5:01
  You know, you find them on the dark web for
• 5:02
  a bag of cash, like in the movies exactly, But
• 5:05
  in this case, the hit man was a weapon forged
• 5:08
  out of love and lies and crucially neurological vulnerability.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: We're going to get deep into that, but let's start
• 5:16
  with the reality before the fiction took over.
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: A good place to start.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about Jamie Faith, because in these true crime stories,
• 5:23
  the victim so often just gets flattened into a name
• 5:26
  on a police report.
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: They lose their humanity in the narrative, right, and.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: To understand the absolute tragedy here. You need to understand
• 5:34
  who he was.
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: Jamie was what I would call the stable constant. Yeah,
• 5:37
  he was forty nine. He was an IT manager for American.
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: Airlines, very steady job by all accounts.
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: He was analytical, steady, kind of a nerd in the
• 5:47
  best possible way.
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: But what's fascinating to me is.
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: His trajectory his personal life.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: Right before he met Jennifer, he was this self proclaimed
• 5:56
  confirmed bachelor.
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: Which is a very strong identity to hold.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: He wasn't looking to settle down. He had decided, hey,
• 6:02
  this isn't for me.
• 6:03
  Speaker 2: He had vowed never to marry, never to have kids.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: He was totally content, and then.
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: In two thousand and five, he goes on a blind
• 6:09
  date in Arizona.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: Enter Jennifer lynn Erlob, and that.
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: Life long resolve of his just meltz.
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: It really speaks to how hard he fell for her.
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: It was an immediate, deep bond. They had this shared
• 6:21
  sense of adventure.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: But it wasn't just her he was taking on. Jennifer
• 6:25
  came with a daughter.
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: Amber from her previous marriage.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: To Rick Erlob, And for a guy who explicitly said.
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: No kids, Jamie didn't just tolerate Amber. He stepped all
• 6:36
  the way up.
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: He did. And I want to highlight a specific event
• 6:40
  that proves this wasn't just you.
• 6:41
  Speaker 2: Know, for show the wedding in twenty twelve.
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they eloped to Vegas with an Elvis impersonator, which.
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: Shows Jamie really had a fun, loving side.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: But the more serious commitment came later.
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: When Amber turned eighteen.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: Right, Jamie formally adopted her.
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: Now think about that.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: Why do that when she eighteen?
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: She's legally an adult.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: There's no custody battle to win, There's no financial tax
• 7:05
  reason to do it.
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: That's exactly why it matters so much. Yeah, legal adoption
• 7:09
  of an adult is purely an emotional contract.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: It has no practical benefit regarding child support or visitation
• 7:14
  or anything like that.
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: It is Jamie standing up and saying you are my daughter,
• 7:18
  officially forever.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: It totally solidifies the family unit.
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: It shows a man who is incredibly devoted and capable
• 7:27
  of profound love.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: And the neighbor saw this too, they loved him. When
• 7:31
  they relocated to Dallas in twenty seventeen for Jamie's promotion,
• 7:35
  they integrated.
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: Perfectly, seamlessly. Neighbor Melissa Gonzalez noted that Jamie just cared about.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: People regardless of race or religion. He was just the
• 7:46
  sweetest person.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: That was the quote from Shrmona Jackson, another neighbor, the
• 7:50
  sweetest person.
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: And Jennifer played the role of the perfect partner.
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: They hosted barbecues, they let the local kids use their
• 7:57
  pool to.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: The outside world. This was an absolutely idea marriage.
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: In fact, the day before the murder, it's so sad,
• 8:03
  they celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of their.
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: First date fifteen years and twenty four hours later he's
• 8:09
  dead in the street.
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: It makes you realize how effective the facade was.
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: But if we dig into Jennifer's history, there were cracks
• 8:16
  underneath the surface, right, There.
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: Was definitely a pattern tell us about that. If you
• 8:20
  look at her relationship with her ex husband, rick erlob Okay,
• 8:24
  she had a distinct history of portraying herself as a victim.
• 8:28
  How so she had previously accused Rick of abuse.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: Oh wow.
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: But and this is a critical detail from the records.
• 8:35
  Rick claimed and investigations supported that there was never any
• 8:39
  evidence of this.
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: So she has this sort of damsel in distress modus operande. Precisely,
• 8:45
  he thrives on being the one who needs saving.
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: She learns very early on that victimhood is a currency.
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: That's a great way to put it.
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: It buys sympathy, it buys attention, and most importantly, it
• 8:56
  buys protection.
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: Now, let's move to the catalyst for all of this,
• 9:00
  the year twenty twenty.
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: We really cannot tell this story without the context of
• 9:04
  the pandemic.
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: No, you can't. It's the backdrop of the whole thing.
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: The pandemic is almost like the invisible accomplice.
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: Here right March twenty twenty hits Lockdown's isolation anxiety is
• 9:15
  through the roof. People are stuck in their homes. For many,
• 9:17
  the digital world becomes the only.
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: World, and that environment is an absolute petri dish for
• 9:23
  emotional affairs.
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: So Jennifer starts telling friends the marriage is sexless.
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: She's laying the groundwork, and.
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: Then she admits to a full blown emotional affair.
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: But the target of this affair isn't just some random
• 9:34
  guy she met on Facebook.
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: Now it's Darren Lopez.
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: Her high school sweetheart from Tennessee.
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: The high school sweetheart trope is so powerful, it really is.
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: It taps into this deep nostalgia.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: It takes you back to a time before mortgages.
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: Before bills, before adult responsibilities.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: It feels pure.
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: But Darren Lopez in twenty twenty is not the teenage
• 9:56
  boy she dated back in high school.
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: Let's profile him because he is a very complex figure
• 10:01
  in this tragedy.
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: He is. Lopez is forty eight years old. He is
• 10:05
  a US Army Special Forces veteran served in a rock yes,
• 10:08
  but he returned home with significant wounds.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: Both visible and invisible.
• 10:12
  Speaker 2: He suffered a traumatic brain injury a TBI during his service.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: And he deals with severe PTSD. Right, I want to
• 10:19
  get technical on the TBI aspect for a second. We
• 10:22
  hear that term a lot, right, traumatic brain injury, But
• 10:24
  what does it actually do to a person's decision making architecture.
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: It's crucial to understand this if you want to understand
• 10:32
  the crime. A TBI, especially depending on where the physical
• 10:36
  damage is, often impacts the frontal lobe.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: And what does the frontal lobe do?
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: Think of it as the CEO of the brain. It
• 10:43
  handles executive function okay, impulse control yeah, and the ability
• 10:48
  to process nuance.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: So if that's damaged, people.
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: With TBI can really struggle with black and white thinking.
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: They lose the gray area exactly.
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: They can be more impulsive, they can have a lot
• 10:59
  of t trouble regulating their emotional responses to stress.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: Add to that, his current life situation in twenty twenty,
• 11:06
  it was grim. He's living in Cumberland Furnas.
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: Tennessee, is medically disabled.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: He's recently separated from his wife, and he's.
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: A single dad raising three daughters and two step daughters Loane.
• 11:16
  He is isolated, he's overwhelmed, and he is profoundly lonely.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: He has this ingrained protector identity from his Special Forces.
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: Service, but he feels like he's failing in his domestic life.
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: So he is incredibly vulnerable, right for manipulation. And then
• 11:32
  Jennifer Faith enters the.
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: Chat and she doesn't just knock on the door.
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: No, she kicks it down. The volume of communication between
• 11:39
  them is staggering.
• 11:41
  Speaker 2: We are talking about over one hundred and sixteen thousand
• 11:46
  text messages and emails. Wow, in just six months.
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: Let's do the math on that for the listener, it's unbelievable.
• 11:53
  That's roughly five hundred to six hundred messages a day.
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: If you assume you are awake for sixteen.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: Hours is a message every ninety seconds or so.
• 12:02
  Speaker 2: It is a constant bombardment.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: It creates a completely closed loop reality exactly.
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: Lopez isn't really living in Tennessee anymore, not mentally. Mentally,
• 12:11
  he is living entirely in this digital space with Jennifer.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: She tells him they are soulmates. She love bombs him
• 12:17
  until he is practically addicted to the dopamine hit of
• 12:20
  her attention on his phone.
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: And he believed the love was completely real. He later said,
• 12:25
  why would she put me through all this torture if
• 12:27
  she didn't love me.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: Which brings us to the actual fabrication, the mechanics of
• 12:31
  the manipulation.
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: This is where she truly becomes the puppet master.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: She needs to turn Jamie, the guy who adopts kids
• 12:37
  and likes Elvis, into a monster.
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: Right, she starts telling Lopez that Jamie is physically and
• 12:44
  sexually abusive, but she knows.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: That just saying the words might not be enough, not
• 12:50
  for a man trained in evidence gathering. Right, He's a soldier.
• 12:53
  He's gonna want.
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: Intel, So she manufactures the evidence.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: He sends some photos, bruises.
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: On her arms, burns a bloody lip.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: And this is the insight into the pure psychology of
• 13:03
  her deception.
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: The photos were entirely fick.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: None of it was Jamie.
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: Some of the photos were from a car accident she
• 13:10
  had way back in twenty twelve, and the others they
• 13:13
  were literal stock images that she.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: Just purchased and downloaded online. Yes, okay, I have to
• 13:18
  play Devil's advocate. Here, go ahead, Lokaz with special forces.
• 13:22
  He was How does he not just do a reverse
• 13:24
  image search on a stock photo? How does he not
• 13:26
  see right through this?
• 13:28
  Speaker 2: That is exactly where the TVI and the emotional isolation intersect. Okay,
• 13:32
  confirmation bias is a very powerful drug.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: He wanted to believe her.
• 13:37
  Speaker 2: Yes, because believing her gave his life a purpose again.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: He could be the hero.
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: Right when your brain's executive function is compromised and your
• 13:46
  heart is desperate for connection, you don't fact check the
• 13:50
  woman you think is your soulmate.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: You just react.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: You fall back on your training protect the vulnerable.
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: But she didn't even stop at photos. She took it
• 13:58
  a step further.
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: She actually impersonated the victim.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: She created fake email accounts posing as Jamie.
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: This is arguably the most diabolical part of the whole plot.
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: She would email Lopez pretending to be her own husband.
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: And Jamie, or rather Jennifer pretending to be Jamie, would
• 14:14
  write these horrific things like what things like I enjoy
• 14:18
  hurting her or you can't stop me, stay away from
• 14:22
  my wife.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: She was puppeteering her husband to taunt the killer.
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: She was deliberately poking the bear, triggering Lopez's protective rage.
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: And she even invented a fake friend to help out
• 14:34
  Rob Schmidt.
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: Right. She created a totally fictional email account for this
• 14:38
  guy Rob, who was Rob.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: Supposed to be Rob.
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: Is supposed to be a buddy who would help cover
• 14:43
  up the murder if Lopez went through with it.
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: So Rob emails Lopez and says, hey, if you take
• 14:49
  care of this Jamie problem, I can provide an alibi exactly.
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: Look at what she's doing systematically.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: She's removing all the barriers to murder.
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: The moral barrier gone, Jamie is evil, the legal barrier gone,
• 15:03
  she tells him the police won't.
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: Help them, and the logistical barrier gone.
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: Because Rob has your back.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: Defense attorney Christy Jack noted that Lopez was just being
• 15:12
  provoked and goaded constantly.
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: She backed him into a psychological corner where murder felt
• 15:18
  like the only solution.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: She even told him that going to the police would
• 15:21
  harm her daughter, Amber.
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: Using her own child as a human shield in this narrative, and.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: Then comes the final trigger October eighth, twenty twenty, the deadline.
• 15:30
  She sends a fake email from Jamie.
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: Threatening a severe assault the very.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: Next day, so Lopez gets in his truck.
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: He makes the decision.
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: He drives six hundred and fifty miles from Tennessee to Dallas.
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: That's a long drive, ten hours, a lot of time
• 15:43
  to think, a lot it's in to turnaround. But you
• 15:45
  have to remember his state of mind. He's on a mission.
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: He's deploying.
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: In his reality, he is deploying to save a hostage.
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: He arrives in Dallas under the cover of night.
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: Home security footage actually captures this shadowy figure lurking for hours.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: It's in the yard of an abandoned house right next
• 16:02
  door to the Faiths, just lying in wait, which brings
• 16:05
  us back to the execution that we talked about at
• 16:06
  the top of the show.
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: Seven am. The ambush.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: He approaches wearing a blue mask.
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: Armed with a point four to five caliber semi automatic.
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: Pistol, the seven shots, the overkill.
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: And specifically that groin shot, which we now know was
• 16:23
  directly linked to Jennifer's fabricated claims of sexual abuse.
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: It was retaliation for something that never.
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: Even happened, a phantom crime.
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: And immediately after Jamie goes down, Jennifer begins her performance.
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: She starts screaming. She acts the part of the shock
• 16:37
  traumatized widow.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: Flawlessly, seemingly genuine to all the witnesses and remember the staging.
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: Lopez ductapes her.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: Wrists, but loosely as they had planned, and.
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: He attempts to pull her ring off to simulate a robbery.
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: But it's clumsy, it's pure theater. So the police arrive
• 16:55
  and Jennifer is super.
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: Cooperative, very cooperative with a mass twist.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: She hands her phone straight to the police.
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: She even gives them the security footage from her own house.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: Which seems like the actions of an innocent person wanting
• 17:08
  to catch a killer, except.
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: She had already gone in and deleted one hundred and
• 17:12
  sixteen thousand texts with Lopez.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: She thought she was so smart.
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: She thought she was handing them a brick. She had
• 17:18
  no idea she was handing them the smoking gun.
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: But we'll get to the digital forensics in a second.
• 17:23
  First look at how the community responds.
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: Oh Cliff rallies around her.
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: Immediately, they start to GoFundMe.
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: They raise over sixty thousand dollars.
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: It's the ultimate betrayal of community trust.
• 17:34
  Speaker 2: You have people cooking meals for her, donating their hard
• 17:37
  earned money, crying with her on the sidewalk.
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: And meanwhile, what is she doing with that money?
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: She's funding the hip man.
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: She literally drains the GoFundMe.
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: She sends the cash to Lopez via Venmo.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: She issues him two credit cards in her name.
• 17:50
  Speaker 2: She buys them a big TV. She sends gifts to
• 17:54
  his kids.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: Think about the pure morality of that. The neighbor's money
• 17:58
  given an absolute is being funneled directly to the man
• 18:02
  who brought the trigger.
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: It's grotesque, it really is.
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: And she's managing the public narrative at the same time.
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: The widow's public face versus her private actions.
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: She goes on local TV WFAA news.
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: She is tearfully pleading for help finding the black truck.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: Saying things like I'm not supposed to be widowed at
• 18:21
  forty eight.
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: But look at the duality. Here on television, she is
• 18:25
  explicitly emphasizing the truck's white tea decal.
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: Please find this truck with the tea on the window.
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: But privately she is frantic. She is texting Lopez telling
• 18:36
  him he needs to remove that sticker immediately.
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: It's what psychologists call duper's delight.
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: She really thought she was smarter than everyone else in
• 18:43
  the room.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: She thought she could control the police investigation by feeding
• 18:46
  them the truck description while simultaneously telling Lopez how to
• 18:50
  hide it.
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: But she missed one huge factor. What's that Lopez isn't
• 18:55
  a criminal mastermind. No, he's a broken guy who just
• 18:59
  follows orders.
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: And her friends start noticing weird behavior too.
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: Chev van Ness, a friend, noted she was acting very oddly.
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: Later on, she even tried to deposit two hundred thousand
• 19:11
  dollars from Jamie's estate into her prison account.
• 19:14
  Speaker 2: The greed is just bottomless.
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: Let's pivot to the investigation unfolding, because the police were
• 19:20
  not fooled for long, not at all.
• 19:23
  Speaker 2: Initially, yes, they treated it as a robbery gone wrong.
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: But the overkill nature of the shooting was a glaring
• 19:29
  red flag.
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: It suggested deep personal animosity.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: And then we get the digital forensics breakthrough.
• 19:35
  Speaker 2: The consented search of her phone.
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: Right because she deleted the text, she thought she was safe.
• 19:40
  How does that actually work from a text standpoint.
• 19:43
  Speaker 2: Well, when you delete a file on a smartphone, you
• 19:45
  aren't incinerating the data. We're usually just removing the file pointer.
• 19:50
  The system just marks that digital space as available to
• 19:52
  be overwritten.
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: But until new data actually overwrites.
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: It, the old binary code is still sitting right there. Wow.
• 19:58
  So police forensics tool scrape this unallocated space and they
• 20:03
  easily reconstructed the entire conversation.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: All the thousands of texts, every single one. And once
• 20:09
  they saw that volume of messages to Lopez, they knew
• 20:12
  they had their link. Then they went to glocation.
• 20:14
  Speaker 2: They pulled Lopez's cell phone records, GPS, bank records.
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: They basically watched his digital ghosts travel the six hundred
• 20:23
  and fifty miles.
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: From Tennessee down to Dallas, waited the empty house and
• 20:28
  drive back.
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: And they used aerial surveillance.
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: Right, yes, they flew over Lopez's property.
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: In Cumberland Furnace and what did they see.
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: They spotted the black Nissan Titan, the truck right there
• 20:38
  on the driveway, and remember the tdcal.
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: Did he take it off like she asked?
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: He did peel it off, but he didn't do a
• 20:45
  very good job. What do you mean the adhesive residue?
• 20:49
  The ghost image of the sticker was still perfectly visible
• 20:52
  on the rear.
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: Glass, so they could match the shape perfectly to the
• 20:56
  security footage.
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: It was a one to one match.
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: That is just incredible detective work, physical evidence matching the
• 21:01
  digital footprint.
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: It was absolute checkmate.
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: Which brings us to the arrests. January eleventh, twenty twenty one.
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: The takedown.
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: Lopez is driving. Police pull him over in a traffic stop.
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: It's a high risk stop, obviously given his background, but
• 21:17
  his demeanor is surprisingly quiet.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: He doesn't fight them.
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: He's nervous but compliant, and.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: They search the vehicle. What they find really confirms his mindset.
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: They find the murder weapon, the point four.
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: To five caliber pistol.
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: Yes, and it still has Jamie's blood.
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: On it, still months later.
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: Yes. They also find the blue mask and the credit
• 21:40
  cards in Jennifer's name.
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: Why keep the gun, why keep the mask? Any normal
• 21:44
  criminal would throw that in a river.
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: Because in his mind he isn't a criminal, right, he's
• 21:48
  a soldier who successfully completed a mission. You don't throw
• 21:51
  away the weapon you used to save the princess.
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: Wow, he had zero consciousness of guilt.
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: Not in the traditional sense.
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: No, So Jennifer is arrested the exact same day down
• 22:00
  in Dallas.
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: Initially they just charged her with obstruction of.
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: Justice for trying to wipe a phone, right, It was.
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: A holding charge while they built the massive murder for
• 22:08
  hire case.
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: Her friends were absolutely floored.
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: Friend Teresa Jensen said, just my mouth on the ground.
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: The grieving widow mass fell off instantly for everyone.
• 22:18
  Speaker 2: It was a shock to the whole system in Okliff.
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: And then comes the interrogation of Darren Lopez.
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: This is where the tragedy just deepens immensely.
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: He confesses right away, doesn't.
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: He He does, but he tells them I did it
• 22:31
  to protect her.
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: She was being abused, and the detectives have to systematically
• 22:37
  break his reality.
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: They have to sit this guy down and show him
• 22:40
  the evidence.
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: There was no abuse, Darren.
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: The photos are fake, Darren by Jennifer, imagine that psychological collapse.
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: You realize you didn't save anyone.
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: You murdered a completely innocent man, a man who loved
• 22:55
  his wife and adopted her kid. You killed him for
• 22:58
  a lie, but master is finally unmasked.
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: Detective Eric Barnes made a really profound statement about this.
• 23:05
  Speaker 2: He said, the only true victim in this case was Jamie.
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: Jamie was innocent.
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: Lopez was a victim of horrific manipulation, Yes, but he
• 23:14
  still chose to become a murderer.
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: Well, Jennifer was the architect of the whole thing.
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: So we look at the legal proceedings the fate of
• 23:22
  the conspirators.
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: Let's start with Jennifer Faith September twenty twenty one.
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: She faces sedal charges for a murder.
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: For hire, and in the federal system in Texas, that
• 23:31
  carries the potential for the death penalty, and that.
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: Is the ultimate leverage the prosecution needed.
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: Because Jennifer did not want to die.
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: Her narcissism demands self preservation above all else.
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: So on February seven, twenty twenty two, she takes a
• 23:45
  plea deal.
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: She pleads guilty to avoid execution, and in.
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: June twenty twenty two, she is sentenced to life imprisonment.
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: The judicial condemnation was severe.
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: The judge actually called her pure evil.
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: In court US attorney Chad Meacham call the plot heinous.
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: She will die in a federal.
• 24:02
  Speaker 2: Prison, which Lee's Lopez's fate.
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: He pleads not guilty.
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: Yes. His trial happens in July twenty twenty three, and
• 24:09
  his defense strategy was fascinating from a legal standpoint.
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: He essentially argued that he was a weapon.
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: He argued he didn't have the men's the guilty mind
• 24:17
  required for murder because his entire reality was manufactured by
• 24:21
  someone else.
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: I became her weapon. That was his actual testimony.
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: It's a compelling moral argument, but legally, legally it doesn't
• 24:28
  hold up. Yeah, explanation is not justification.
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: Right, you still pulled the trigger.
• 24:32
  Speaker 2: The jury convicted him of murder, and his sentence sixty
• 24:35
  two years in prison plus a ten thousand dollars fine.
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: He tried to appeal, right he did.
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: He argued there was insufficient evidence to prove he wasn't
• 24:43
  acting in defense of a third person.
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: But the Texas Fifth Court of Appeals denied that appeal
• 24:49
  in December twenty twenty four.
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: He is currently petitioning Governor Greg Abbott for clemency.
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: Any chance of success there.
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: It's a total hail Mary. The state of Texas is
• 24:59
  not known for showing leniency and execution style murders, regardless
• 25:03
  of the tragic backstory.
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: So what's his current status here in twenty twenty six.
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: He remains incarcerated. Yeah, he won't be eligible for parole
• 25:10
  until twenty fifty one. He will be an old man,
• 25:12
  if he's even alive at all.
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: We have to step back and ask the big question.
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: Here, the motive? Why right?
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: Why not just get a divorce? If she wanted to
• 25:20
  be with her high school sweetheart, just leave Jamie.
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: Greed and narcissism the classic toxic cocktail and true.
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: Crime break down. The financial game.
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: Jamie had a life insurance policy, he had a solid
• 25:32
  pension from the airline. He had assets.
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: If she divorces him, she gets half of that maybe.
• 25:37
  Speaker 2: And she loses her social standing in the neighborhood.
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: She just becomes the divorcee who ran off with her
• 25:42
  ex exactly.
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: But if she's a widow.
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: She gets one hundred percent of the money, She gets
• 25:46
  one hundred percent of the sympathy, she gets the GoFundMe cash.
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: She gets to play the tragic heroine on the evening news.
• 25:52
  She wanted the money and the man without any of
• 25:56
  the messiness of a breakup.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: You mentioned proxy murder earlier. Are we seeing more of this?
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: It's a specific psychological profile we do see from time
• 26:06
  to time.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: Like who.
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: It really reminds me of cases like Pamela hump Oh
• 26:10
  right manipulators who don't want to get their own hands
• 26:13
  physically bloody, but are totally willing to destroy lives psychologically
• 26:18
  to get what they want.
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: They view other people as just pawns.
• 26:21
  Speaker 2: Like NPCs in a video game, non player characters that
• 26:25
  exist just to serve their narrative.
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: Which brings us to the collateral damage. Because it's not
• 26:31
  just Jamie who lost his life.
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: Think about Amber, Jennifer's daughter. She lost her stepfather, who
• 26:36
  was the only real dad she ever.
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: Knew, and her mother is the reason why.
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: She is the living victim here. She has to reconcile
• 26:43
  the fact that her own mother used her safety telling
• 26:47
  Lopez that Jamie was going to hurt Amber as a
• 26:50
  pawn to get her dad killed.
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: That is a trauma that requires a lifetime of therapy.
• 26:55
  Speaker 2: And then there's Lopez's.
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: Family, his kids in Tennessee.
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: Their dad went from being a war hero who served
• 27:00
  his country to a convicted murderer.
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: It just rivels out even the community of Oak Cliff.
• 27:06
  Speaker 2: That fundamental trust is broken.
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: When you find out the grieving widow next door who
• 27:11
  you baked a castrole for is actually the mastermind of
• 27:14
  a hit.
• 27:14
  Speaker 2: It makes you look at all your neighbors differently. It
• 27:16
  hardens a community.
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: I want to end this deep dive by reflecting on
• 27:20
  the victim.
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: I think that's really important.
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: We've spent a lot of time analyzing the psychology of
• 27:25
  the killers, but Jamie Faith deserves the final word.
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: He absolutely does.
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: We need to remember him not just as a body
• 27:32
  on the pavement, but as the man who walked his
• 27:34
  dog at sunrise.
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: The man who loved his goofy Elvis.
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: Wedding, the man who adopted a child that wasn't biologically
• 27:42
  his own, just out of love.
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: He was completely erased because he was inconveniently decent.
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: Jennifer couldn't villainize the real Jamie to get what she wanted,
• 27:50
  so she had to invent a fake one.
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: That is the ultimate tragedy. Fact really is better than fiction,
• 27:56
  but fiction is what got him killed.
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: Texas Ranger Jim Holland always says that about these cases,
• 28:01
  fact is better than fiction.
• 28:03
  Speaker 2: It serves as this grim reminder that we often assume
• 28:06
  we share a reality with the people closest to us.
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: Jamie thought he and Jennifer were living the exact same life.
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: They weren't.
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: It forces you, listening right now, to ask that really uncomfortable.
• 28:17
  Speaker 2: Question, how well do you really know the person sleeping
• 28:21
  next to you.
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: It's the ultimate nightmare.
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: Trust but verify, Jamie.
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: Faith is gone, but the ripples of this deception continue
• 28:27
  to affect everyone involved well into today.
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: The danger of hidden manipulation is always present. Thanks for
• 28:33
  exploring this with us, always a pleasure.
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: We'll see him on the next deep dive.