cover of episode Lockdown (Jamie Faith)

Lockdown (Jamie Faith)

2024/2/13
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Hi, I'm Ashley Flowers, creator and host of the number one true crime podcast, Crime Junkie. Every Monday, me and my best friend Britt break down a new case, but not in the way you've heard before, and not the cases you've heard before. You'll hear stories on Crime Junkie that haven't been told anywhere else. I'll tell you what you can do to help victims and their families get justice.

Join us for new episodes of Crime Junkie every Monday. Already waiting for you by searching for Crime Junkie wherever you listen to podcasts. We just really need some answers. If anybody knows anything, please contact the detective. I'm not supposed to be widowed at 48. I just hope that at some point, maybe this person can recognize the gravity of what they've done.

I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff. I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction. And this is Anatomy of Murder. The widespread lockdowns due to the COVID pandemic of 2020 had people all over the world rethinking their daily routines, their careers, their hobbies, and in some cases, their entire lives.

So maybe you started making bread or doing yoga or cooking up a little side hustle from home. Maybe all of that time online had you looking up old flames from high school or just reconnecting with the people in your pod. But in some cases, those close quarters also wreaked havoc on relationships, sometimes with tragic results.

Case in point, on an October morning in 2020, a man named Jamie Faith was gunned down in broad daylight in front of his wife and neighbors in the Oak Cliff neighborhood in West Dallas. And the ensuing homicide investigation would unravel a sordid story of how one couple's pandemic passion would lead to infidelity, claims of torture, and eventually murder. It was definitely a twist. I mean, I've never had anything like this.

Helping us tell this story is veteran prosecutor Brandy Mitchell, a Dallas native who knows the Oak Hill neighborhood well. It is a transitional neighborhood. It's just west of Dallas. You've got young couples moving in and then people who are going to stay put in that house that's about to fall over. Kind of has that funky Austin type vibe to it. In other words, residents have come to expect a lot of change.

But one thing no one expected on October 9th, 2020, was to wake up to multiple gunshots and the sound of a woman screaming. I live in Dallas. Every once in a while, you'll hear a shot fired. It was unique because it was 7.30 in the morning and it was multiple shots in rapid fire. So I think that was particularly unusual and that did prompt several, several, several 911 calls. The scene on this typically quiet residential street was chaotic to say the least.

Neighbors emerging from their homes saw a man lying in the road bleeding from multiple wounds and a woman kneeling next to him screaming desperately for help.

Neighbors recognized the couple as 49-year-old Jamie Faith and his wife Jennifer. Jamie was an executive for American Airlines, and the couple and their teenage daughter had moved to the Dallas area from Arizona just a couple years before. It was also clear to everyone at the scene that Jamie's injuries had been immediately fatal. Doctors would later determine that he had sustained seven gunshot wounds, three to the head, three to the chest,

And one to the groin. They can't tell you which shot was first, but any number of those shots would have been fatal immediately. So it was just the culmination of gunshot wounds is what killed him. As law enforcement arrived and established a crime scene, they were immediately confronted with something not exactly the average in most homicide investigations, multiple eyewitnesses.

According to one neighbor, the couple had just left their home when they were ambushed by a lone gunman wearing a hoodie and a mask. He just happened to be like at his kitchen window, which faced the street, and heard the shots and he was a few houses down, so he took off.

He comes out of his house, and that's when he sees a man, average height, with the hoodie and the face mask on. And this man was walking, did not say anything to him, did not raise his gun, did not do anything threatening towards him, just went and got into his truck. Other witnesses got a good look at the truck, a black pickup with a large T decal on the back window. They were looking at him, and they were looking at him, and they were looking at him, and they were looking at him.

There was a neighbor who came out and took video. He came out when he heard the shots fired, I believe, and then he took video of a black truck that was leaving. They couldn't get anything from a license plate on it, but they did know it was a black Nissan Titan. So within minutes of the shooting, law enforcement had a description of the shooter and his getaway vehicle.

That was helpful, but that's all they had. And there's lots of black Nissan Titan trucks. So at that point, the detectives are just going around trying to get as much information from any of the neighbors and collect the ring video to see where the car might have gone. And I don't believe they really get a break on that vehicle because it took off back on the freeway. Which meant that the shooter was on the run. And unfortunately, the surviving victim of the attack, Jennifer Faith, was in no condition to give a coherent statement.

She was pretty hysterical. It took a while to get her to calm down. She does not give any kind of description or anything that's helpful at the scene. Jennifer still had remnants of duct tape on her wrists, and it appears that the shooting was perhaps some kind of robbery or failed abduction. But there were obviously plenty of questions that remained to be answered, not the least of which was who killed Jamie Faith and why.

A small blessing in the midst of this tragedy, Jamie's stepdaughter Amber was still in the house when the attack occurred, sparing her from potential violence as well as the traumatic sight of her stepfather being shot over and over, then falling dead onto the ground. But as detectives begin their investigation, they know that even she could be a potential source for crucial information.

Amber Faith, at some point, had come out. So Detective Walton has them sent to DPD headquarters to talk to them there while he is working with the responding officers and obviously trying to figure out as much information as they can about the shooter. Jennifer eventually was able to recount for police the horrifying details, how the masked men seemed to come out of nowhere as she and Jamie left the house to take their dog for his morning walk.

In a taped interview, she tells police that the gunman didn't utter a word before he pulled the trigger, firing multiple times at Jamie at close range, even after he had already fallen to the ground. Here is Jennifer Faith during part of that interview. The bird turned and like just dark eyes coming toward me. And so I just turned and I don't know.

She described that he pushed her down, duct taped her, really didn't say anything to her, shot, pushed her, took her ring, but could give no indication as to why anyone would do this, except they just happened to be the people walking on the street that morning.

Anastasia, as we know, the shooting happened in just a few seconds. And there's a few things to look at in determining a potential motive. You know, ripping off the ring from her finger, okay. You know, an armed robbery that may have led to murder. And then there's the question of who shoots first and then robs somebody, right? To disable them. And then there's no struggle, at least with Jamie. And nothing else was taken.

And then let me just go to the obvious here, you know, seven gunshots, three to the head, three to the chest. And there's that last one, Anasika, the one to the groin. I mean, that so far is my big BRF. Shots to the groin is as personal as it gets.

Or is it trying to look that way and it's something else? Because I agree with you, like there's something more going on here. But I just kept looking at like, wait a second. So are they taking the ring as an aside? So you kill someone, you see they have something of value. Hey, I may as well take that too. Are they taking it to try to make it look like a robbery? There's going to be something more at play here than just someone walking off the street and either robbing someone or just shooting them just because.

And in the interview, Jennifer couldn't think of anyone who would have a reason to target her or her husband. They had no enemies that she knew of, nor could she recognize the man through the mask. They were at headquarters for a while. Walt was really trying to get as much information as he could

on who the potential shooter was. In the meantime, in the Dallas PD, it's all hands on deck. There's an APB out for the shooter's black Nissan truck, CSI is scouring the scene for forensic evidence, and detectives are scrutinizing the details of a brazen murder that now has this community terrified and surprised even the most veteran of investigators.

I mean, it's Dallas, but this is still shocking to everybody that, you know, this couple's walking on 730 on a Friday morning and he gets gunned down. And 730 in the morning is going to be a busy time on almost any day of the week, certainly weekdays. But this was COVID, the pandemic. So that meant most, if not all, people were home. Perhaps the most telling aspect of this murder is the brutal nature of the shooting itself. It appears to be planned, deliberate and merciless.

Three in the head, four in the chest, one in the groin. I mean, that seems very specific. I mean, even the witnesses described it as like an assassination. Just walked up and just annihilated this person. Just assassinated this person. That's just what it seemed like.

In other words, it looked like it could have been the work of a professional or at least someone who was highly trained, perhaps even with a military background or some type of firearms expertise. You know, with my experience, Anastasia, with firearms as a member of law enforcement, you hear someone who fires three shots to the head and three shots to the chest. I mean, that's someone who has experience using a firearm. The barrage of multiple close range shots, including a shot to the groin,

has also the classic hallmarks of an overkill, which, as we've discussed before, is often indicative of a killer with a grudge. And this, as I said before, looked personal. But that would mean what his friends and family considered unthinkable: that there was someone in Jamie's life that had reason to kill him. Want to connect with more family and friends and their native language isn't English?

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Detective Walton of the Dallas Police Department looked to the victim's wife, Jennifer Faith, to offer some insights into her husband's private life. I think he just kind of went through, you know, tell me what happened, tell me what you remember.

Why would anyone do this? Who did not like him? And she really couldn't give any answers. I believe Amber may have said, you know, maybe look into my biological father, but they had had no contact with him. I think Amber at the time was 20 something years old and had no contact with him for 20 years, but they really could give no indication of who would do this.

Interviews with Jamie's friends and family painted a picture of a well-liked, successful businessman who was known for his generosity and generally sunny disposition. In fact, at his funeral, his friends even wore his signature Hawaiian shirts in his honor. Jamie didn't strike anyone as the kind of person to attract this kind of trouble at all.

a good, decent guy from the Midwest. Moves here around 2017, I think, with Jennifer Faith and adopted Amber when she was 18 because she wanted to be adopted by him. Did really, really well at his job. They talked, Walton talked to his boss and a bunch of coworkers. They were devastated by this. Nothing about this guy that says,

He was doing anything dangerous. And his marriage to Jennifer appeared to be the picture of marital contentment. The night before his murder, they had celebrated their 15th wedding anniversary. In fact, every indication, you know, that they really enjoyed their life together. If not a passionate romance, at least they had a steady, stable marriage.

With a stable home life and what appears to be a relatively solid marriage, investigators would begin to look towards Jamie's work. And Anastasia, that is clearly the right step to take here, because if you don't have any intel, really of any potential enemies, then where else would you look? And he did have a very high position at American Airlines. He had a large group of people working for him. And American Airlines was a very high position.

American Airlines had just had a very large layup of 30,000 employees. What if anything Jamie had to do with that? Who knows? But those obvious motives of love, money, or in this place, work, were exactly where investigators needed to look. He was fairly high up.

in American Airlines. So of course they went that route. Walton immediately started looking at any disgruntled employees. And so as detectives went hunting for suspects, the couple's community of friends and neighbors rallied around Jennifer and Amber. You know, the neighbors would walk with her in the morning. Her friends were coming in from Arizona. She was doing group texts with all of the friends, keeping them updated on not only the investigation, but on the memorial.

A GoFundMe campaign to support Jennifer raised over $60,000, and for months their tight-knit friend group took turns providing meals and support for Jennifer and Amber. They also worked to raise awareness about Jamie's uncaught killer. Two months after her husband's murder, Jennifer appeared on local news, stepping out in front of the cameras to urge viewers to be vigilant and on the lookout for the killer's black pickup truck.

We just really need some answers. If anybody knows anything, please contact the detective. I'm not supposed to be widowed at 48.

But for detectives, the leads were drying up. There had been no credible threats at work. Amber's biological father had an alibi, and there were no other suspects that had surfaced. Detective Walton knew it was time to change his tact. I think he was at this point kind of like, okay, I've just got to look at everything. She's giving me no indication. We have a very, very bland description of an average height man with a mask on and a hoodie, and then driving a black Nissan Titan truck that are a dime a dozen.

Investigators began to believe that the next lead could lie buried in mountains of digital data that's surrounding each of our daily lives. And so Detective Walton asked Jennifer if he could take possession of Jamie and her cell phones to go hunting for anything that seems out of the ordinary. Jennifer agreed. So that really, I think, was just such an important part of this case because that just led them to the next step.

A cursory look at Jennifer's phone calls and texts on the night of the murder had not revealed anything suspicious. But when police conducted what's called a phone extraction, which is a more in-depth look at the actual contents of someone's calls and texts, then they uncovered what appeared to be evidence of clear cracks in the couple's marriage.

And that's when they find the communication between Jennifer Faith and her friend back in Arizona named Tina Spring, where she describes that she's having an emotional affair.

An emotional affair, which in this case is in the form of a series of text exchanges with an old high school boyfriend. And then it starts describing him. His name is, she only puts the first name. His name is Darren. Former Special Forces. I knew him back in high school. He now lives in Tennessee. And, you know, she just doesn't know what to do. She loves Jamie, but wants more passion and romance in her life. And this other guy is, you know,

somewhat providing that. For any homicide investigator, any mention of an extramarital relationship, emotional or otherwise, is going to immediately raise red flags. Not just because any love triangle creates a slew of motives for murder, but because it exposes the fact that at least one person, in this case Jennifer, had not been fully honest.

And if she was withholding this information from police, you have to ask, what other secrets was she keeping? And so detectives do what detectives do, and they look in her contacts. And lo and behold, she has not deleted Darren Lopez. And the address is Cumberland Furnace, Tennessee. And then lo and behold, they keep looking into it. And what is registered to Darren Lopez, but a black Nissan Titan truck.

And I think this is the ding, ding, ding. Darren Lopez was immediately elevated to the top of investigators' person of interest list, and they initiated surveillance of his property in Tennessee. Come to find out this property is 20 acres. And what they do is do a flyover of this property. They found there was a black Nissan Titan truck. What's notable about the Nissan Titan, they're taking pictures of that, is that the T-sticker

was gone, but you could still see the outline of it. With the possible getaway car located and linked to a name that appears in Jennifer Faith's contacts, investigators were faced with two possibilities. Either Darren Lopez acted alone or he and Jennifer were co-conspirators in a plot to kill her husband. They get the Verizon records back and it's showing in a massive amounts of contact between her number and his number. It's showing

Calls and texts, that's it. But it's a massive amount of communication. However, on October 8th, you see that their communication lessens dramatically. And October 9th, it completely stops. Which leads investigators to believe that they were exchanging more than just sweet nothings. It looked an awful lot like they were hatching a plan.

Soon enough, investigators had Jennifer at the station for a second interview. This time, she wasn't being treated as a victim, but as a potential suspect.

And that interview, the second interview at headquarters, Walton does go hard on what is this relationship? Why didn't you tell us about it? At this point, you know, they're questioning her about him. And she's just saying that she's helping him get through a divorce. But no indication that they have any kind of a relationship and continues to deny that they have a relationship. Jennifer claims that Darren had reached out to her during COVID and their communications were nothing more than a stroll down memory lane.

If there was a flirtation, it was only just as respite from the tedium of the pandemic lockdown.

But if it was such an innocent flirtation, then why was Darren's truck scene fleeing the crime scene? It was a question that Dallas detectives were ready to put to him directly. But getting Lopez into custody was not a risk-free endeavor. They came to learn that Lopez was a highly trained military veteran with multiple deployments under his belt. Trying to arrest him at home could be a very volatile situation. And moreover, they came to find out that he had

three teenage daughters in there that concerned them. So Dallas PD collaborated with the local Tennessee Sheriff's Department and also the ATF to wait until Lopez was outside of his home, apprehending him during a traffic stop, which makes total sense because tactically they can control the situation. He was both unarmed and seemingly unsurprised by his arrest. He didn't resist. You know, they had the arrest warrant. He didn't resist at all.

Once in the interview room, Lopez was clearly nervous. He was pacing around and then talking to himself whenever investigators were not in the room. Obviously, he should be nervous. You know, his truck was seen leaving a murder scene. And there's a record of thousands of calls and texts between him and the murder victim's wife. And then Barnes just starts to kind of lay out.

what they have, particularly some of the phone stuff, not giving it all up, but kind of letting him know. Like, I know, you know, Jennifer Faith. I know you guys had a lot of contact with each other. I mean, you could see that Darren was clearly understanding what was about to happen. Once it became clear to him that he knew where this was headed, he said, you know, I don't want to talk anymore.

So what do investigators do when they come out of that interview room with nothing concrete? In fact, almost nothing at all? They pivot and look for additional evidence elsewhere. So as soon as they make the arrest, that's when they do a search of the house. They're finding...

Notes.

gifts, credit cards, all for the proof that their relationship was more than just an online fling. But still, we are talking about circumstantial evidence, essentially background information that could help build a plausible narrative. What they needed was some evidence that directly tied Lopez to the murder. And it turns out they didn't have long to wait.

And then they find the gun, unbelievably, in one of like near one of his little rucksacks. And they also see that it looks like there's apparent blood smear on the gun. And so they get the gun to Dallas, which goes through the forensic testing, which comes back with Jamie Faye's blood. But the real smoking gun in this case was not a gun at all.

It was his phone. And the treasure trove of digital data contained within would hold the key to unraveling the twisted story of how Darren and Jennifer's virtual affair led to a very real murder.

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Darren Lopez had retired from the Army after six deployments to Iraq, a distinguished career during which he earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. But in 2020, he found himself back in Tennessee, divorced and coping with the effects of a traumatic brain injury. He passed the time looking up old friends from high school and old flames, including his ex-girlfriend, Jennifer Faith. It was in February of 2020 when he sent an email to her mother.

saying, "Hey, I'm Darren Lopez. I used to know your daughter back in the day. We grew up together. Remember me? Went to high school. Went to prom. Went to Paris. I'd like to get in touch with her." Jennifer responded to his messages and their correspondence went from casual to romantic almost immediately. Within three days, he's saying, "I love you. I don't want to break up your marriage, but I love you and I can see you coming to Tennessee one day." I mean, it's that fast. It is unbelievably fast. Two 14-year-olds don't get involved that fast.

And one detail that emerged from their email exchanges, they shared a favorite movie from high school, The Princess Bride. And just like the main character in the movie, Darren always signed off with the phrase, as you wish, which as you will hear, Jennifer took quite literally. And he's talking about, I want to make passionate love to you when you come to Tennessee. And they go in and they go hard, both of them.

Within days of reconnecting, they are already making plans to meet up in person and take their affair to the next level. But according to Jennifer's texts and emails, there was one problem. Her husband, Jamie, who she claims is both wildly jealous and physically abusive.

Jennifer says that she's been a victim of systematic domestic abuse, including some very dark scenarios that included hitting, strangling, and sexual torture.

As a Green Beret who had dedicated his life to protecting people, you can only imagine how triggering this must have been for Darren Lopez. The last straw seemed to be an email purportedly sent from Jennifer's husband, Jamie, to Lopez, threatening to torture and kill Jennifer if they didn't cut off their relationship. Listen to how Lopez describes what happened next. Here's a part of his later court testimony. She got to the point where she said that it's enough is enough,

I can't do this anymore. Around this time, or soon, or close to October 9th, did Jennifer ask you to kill him? Yes.

And then he admits to everything, but says that he did it because he believed on October 9th, that was their 15-year anniversary, that she was going to be murdered by her husband, that Jamie Faith had told her, I'm going to kill her. And so according to Lopez's testimony in court, he drove his black pickup through the night to Dallas and staked out the Faith's house. And did you have to act immediately to prevent her threat from being hurt? Yes, sir. That was...

That moment, as soon as Jamie left the house, was the first time I would be able to safely take care of the threat to Jennifer. And so I acted. So the first time that Lopez and Jennifer Faith are actually together in person after beginning this online affair was the day that Lopez was there to now kill her husband. Lopez claimed that he was acting in defense of Jennifer, a woman he believed was in mortal and immediate danger.

He claimed that when in his words he acted, he was only being a good soldier. When you acted, what was that? That's when I fired my gun into Jamie. How many times? Well, I fired a total of eight shots. And his explanation for the excessive nature of the shooting, including three close-range shots to the head? Being a medic, treating people on the battlefield...

the human body can take a lot of damage and still live. I did not want Jamie to suffer, even though

In my eyes, he was a monster. I did not want him to suffer. So I approached and I fired the rounds into his head. According to Lopez, after the shooting, he then attempted to create a believable scenario to try and protect Jennifer from being found out by pretending she was an innocent victim of a random attack. Then I was transitioning from taking out Jamie to now I'm going to attack Jennifer again.

to give her plausible deniability to anything, to give her her alibi. I had to approach her, knock her down to the ground, and start to duct tape her. In his own words, he also punched and slapped her before removing her ring and fleeing the scene. Clearly, some misdirection to make it look like a robbery. At the time, I was thinking I was the noble soldier that did my job. I did what I was trained to do. I protected people.

I kept them from a monster. So that's what I believe.

Okay, so there's a lot to unpack here. You have a career soldier, clearly in love or at least seemingly so, who believes someone that he cares about is in mortal danger. So he decides to take action in her defense. And according to Lopez, he even received physical proof of the abuse in the form of photographs of her bruises at her black eye. But there's one problem. None of it is true. None.

Not the abuse, not the torture, not the threatening email supposedly sent by Jamie. None of it. Jennifer Faith had made it all up. That email from Jamie sent from a fake account. And those photographs of her injuries, they actually weren't Jennifer at all. Those were photographs that she potentially took off the internet.

and using it and saying that those injuries were her own. After being charged with murder, Darren Lopez entered a plea of not guilty, his defense team arguing that his brain injury made him susceptible to Jennifer's manipulation. That was the narrative that was out there from the get-go, is that she manipulated him into killing her husband. But prosecutors were ready to poke holes in that story too.

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The problem with that is they were really into this together. Or what I wanted to present to the jury is what I had in front of me. These two were way into each other and these two wanted to be together.

And these two are both responsible for this murder. Prosecutors showed that in the days following Jamie's murder, Jennifer not only began withdrawing substantial amounts of money from the GoFundMe campaign set up in her husband's memory, she was then sending that money to Darren Lopez, along with credit cards, plane tickets, and other gifts. Evidence that Lopez's vigilante actions were not just motivated by love,

Another cornerstone of Brandy Mitchell's prosecution? Common sense. That Darren Lopez could not have really believed everything that Jennifer Faith was telling him.

Darren Lopez just ain't that stupid. I mean, Jamie Faith is managerial high up in, I mean, high up in American Airlines. He had like 500 employees underneath him. But this man's going to email you using his jamie.faith at gmail.com and his date of birth at the end of it. And he's going to email you that he's having his wife gang raped by 10 men.

And it was just absurd. As for Jennifer Faith, who was arrested and initially charged with obstruction of justice for her efforts to help Lopez get away with murder, she continued to claim she had never explicitly asked Lopez to kill her husband. And Brandi knew it would be a challenge to prove that she was in on the plot. There was no smoking gun email or text where they were actually laying out, OK, this is going to happen on October 9th.

I want you to kill my husband. The only thing we did find near the end is that she is talking about, hey, in Texas, you have to have a front license plate and a back license plate. And then also, well, you'll be mostly on the freeway. So she is...

It looks like talking to him about the fact that he will be in Texas fairly soon, but that's about as close as we get. Then there were the communications that occurred between Lopez and Faith after the murder, which prosecutors were ready to argue were as damning as a confession.

And then it's also interesting their communications after the murder, because that was part of my closing, too. There was no remorse on either one of them. And they never talked about it again. It wasn't like he said, oh, aren't you glad you're not being gang raped anymore? I mean, they just literally moved on October 10th.

planning funerals, getting benefits, getting life insurance, possibly moving out to Tennessee. Why don't you come out? Let's go to, what are we doing for New Year's? You know, oh, I went to the grocery store. Let's watch a movie together tonight. As if it was just a bump in the road, assassinating Jamie Faith.

Despite Lopez's claims of mental impairment of being manipulated into being Jennifer Faith's knight in shining armor and her continued denials of being involved at all, Brandi Mitchell was convinced that both Lopez and Jennifer Faith shared the blame for Jamie Faith's murder. I just believe they were both equally culpable of this crime.

And they both went in and knew what they were doing when they did this. At the conclusion of Darren Lopez's trial, he was found guilty and sentenced to 62 years in prison. Instead of facing a trial and a jury of her peers, Jennifer Faith eventually chose to plead guilty to one count of using interstate commerce in the commission of murder for hire. She decides with her attorneys to plead guilty.

and let the judge sentence her federally. The federal sentencing laws spared her the death penalty, and Jennifer Faith was instead sentenced to life in prison. I just hope that at some point, maybe this person can recognize the gravity of what they've done. For months, she played the distraught widow for the cameras and everyone else, but it soon became abundantly clear that it had all been an act.

While justice for Jamie Faith was served, the resolution of the case and the truth about Jennifer Faith was almost as shocking as the murder itself. I think the family loved her. I mean, you know, she had been part of this family for 15 years and it was just such a shock. It was such a twist and a shock and they just didn't know what to make of it.

And I think even the mother afterwards had a hard time believing that her daughter-in-law was part of orchestrating the murder of her son. It's just almost too much to take in. Cell phone records also show that in the weeks following Jamie Faith's murder, Jennifer Faith's cell phone sent 13,644 text messages to Lopez's phone.

Jennifer Faye's cell phone and Lopez's cell phone were in contact almost 24,000 times, which is an average of over 500 times per day. Within those text messages, Jennifer told Lopez that she went to the Dallas Police Department requesting the complete investigative file. Now, normally for family members, they want to know everything about the investigation and that police are doing everything to help solve the murder.

But these requests from Jennifer were anything but normal, in fact, downright suspicious.

Jennifer Faith was interested in one thing: money. She needed those documents to present to the insurance company to get paid on a life insurance policy and to also empty out Jamie Faith's 401 . After his arrest, investigators were able to pull his jail phone telephone calls to Jennifer, in which she cried to him about the fact that she now believed investigators were looking at her, to which Lopez responded,

"Don't worry, Angel. It's all me." Jennifer Faith was the puppet master, and Lopez fell for it hook, line, and sinker. A cold, cruel puppet master, and her puppet, very ready, willing, and able to help her carry out her murderous plan. COVID and lockdown changed a lot of things for many. Indeed, the world sometimes felt upside down.

But a murder plot and the resulting execution being one result is terribly and wildly unexpected. Jamie Faith was a successful career man, a loving husband and father. Having just celebrated his 15th wedding anniversary, he undoubtedly expected that there would likely be at least 15 more. Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder.

Anatomy of Murder is an AudioChuck original. Produced and created by Weinberger Media and Frasetti Media. Ashley Flowers is executive producer. This episode was written and produced by Walker Lamond. Researched by Kate Cooper. Edited by Ali Sirwa, Megan Hayward, and Philjean Grande. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

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Hi, I'm Ashley Flowers, creator and host of the number one true crime podcast, Crime Junkie. Every Monday, me and my best friend Britt break down a new case, but not in the way you've heard before, and not the cases you've heard before. You'll hear stories on Crime Junkie that haven't been told anywhere else. I'll tell you what you can do to help victims and their families get justice.

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