Jamie Faith: Murder-For-Hire
On October 9th, 2020, in Oak Cliff, Texas, Jennifer and Jamie Faith took their Bernese Mountain dog for their usual 7:30 a.m. walk around the block. They hadn’t made it far when a man wearing a mask walked up behind the couple and shot Jamie Faith seven times, including three times in the head and once in the groin. After killing Jamie, the masked man duct-taped Jennifer’s hands together and tried to take some of her jewellery but soon gave up and sped away in a black pickup truck which had been parked on the street.
Jennifer’s injuries were minimal, but her husband Jamie died at the scene.
It didn’t take long for the Oak Cliff community to rally around Jennifer. The day after the shooting, 46-year-old Jennifer Svelen set up a GoFundMe page with the help of the Oak Cliff Ladies Club. Soon enough, the page had raised over $60,000. The Oak Cliff Ladies Club also provided Jennifer Faith, and her adult daughter Amber, with meals for several weeks.
After a few months, Jennifer appeared on the news to thank those who had shown their support. She also appealed to the authorities to catch the person who murdered her husband, whom she called the “backbone of my family”.
Then, around four months after the murder, on 24 February 2021, Jennifer was arrested.
Jamie and Jennifer had gotten married nine years previously. Jamie even adopted Jennifer’s daughter, Amber. He was a technology director at American Airlines, while she was a trained speech pathologist. People who knew the couple said there was no indication of trouble in the marriage, so Jennifer’s arrest came as a shock.
It turns out that police had found 14,000 text messages on Jennifer’s phone, sent to an old high school boyfriend, Darrin Lopez. In a murder-for-hire plot, Jennifer had pressured Lopez into shooting her husband.
After rekindling their relationship and engaging in an emotional affair, Jennifer convinced Lopez that Jamie had been emotionally, physically, and sexually abusing her. She went as far as setting up fake email accounts pretending to be her husband and another man. Via these emails, she would brag about the abuse, pretending to be her husband, even including photos of old injuries from a car accident to add to her stories. These emails incited rage in Lopez. He lived in Tennessee, so the affair wasn’t physical, potentially making it easier for Jennifer to manipulate him. As well as this, according to CBS News, Lopez had suffered a traumatic brain injury years ago in Iraq, which Jennifer knew about, and this could have made him more vulnerable to believing her lies.
In texts between the two of them, they discussed Jamie’s life insurance and retirement funds. In an email sent between Lopez and Jennifer posing as a mystery man who knew of the supposed abuse, Lopez said that he wanted to “put a bullet” in Jamie’s head, to which Jennifer replied “If it were up to me I would tell you to go for it with your idea — lol. I’ll give you an alibi.”
In the months after Jamie’s murder, Jennifer used the GoFundMe account to buy Lopex a large-screen TV, and plane tickets for him and his daughters and had withdrawn $58,000 from the account. She was sending him money via Venmo transactions. She also gave Lopez access to her credit cards for him to use whenever he needed, saying; “AMEX has no limit and I think the Visa has like $35,000… PLEASE don’t hesitate to use them for whatever you need, especially when it’s stuff for the girls.” Whilst she was using the money to shower her old boyfriend with gifts, she left her husband’s $6,500 funeral bill unpaid.
In January 2022, police tracked the black pickup truck from the murder scene back to Lopez’s home in Tennessee, and he was arrested. If convicted of murder, he faces up to life in prison.
In February 2022, Jennifer Faith pleaded guilty to the murder-for-hire charge against her in return for prosecutors to drop the obstruction of justice charge she was also facing, and seek a life sentence rather than the death penalty. Her sentencing hearing is due to take place on 26 May 2022.
Sources:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndtx/pr/jennifer-faith-pleads-guilty-murder-hire-husband-s-death
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jennifer-faith-jamie-faith-dallas-murder-for-hire-puppet-master/
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/wife-murdered-man-spent-thousands-26681573
https://people.com/crime/jennifer-faith-alleged-murder-for-hire-plot-high-school-boyfriend/
https://www.oxygen.com/crime-news/jennifer-faith-guilty-in-murder-for-hire-of-husband-james