Crocodile Tears: The Wife Who Wrote Her Husband’s Killer

True crime. Based on the public record: a U.S. Attorney’s Office press release, court filings and trial coverage.

A dog walk that ended in gunfire

On the evening of October 9, 2020, Jamie Faith, a 49-year-old technology director at American Airlines, stepped out of his home in Oak Cliff, Dallas, with his wife Jennifer and their dog.

They had been walking for about a minute when a man opened fire. Jamie was shot seven times and died at the scene.

Jennifer told Dallas homicide detective Chris Walton what she had seen. A stranger, she said, had shot and kept shooting. He had dark eyes, he came toward her, and he tackled her to the ground. Audio from the scene captured her screaming. Video afterwards showed her crying hysterically. She looked, to everyone who saw her, like a woman whose life had just been destroyed.

She was not a witness. She was the author of the plan.

The love story behind the murder

To understand how Jamie Faith died, you have to go back seven months before the shooting, to the reappearance of an old flame.

Darrin Ruben Lopez was Jennifer’s high school sweetheart. He had gone on to serve in the U.S. Army, including in Iraq, where he suffered a traumatic brain injury that left him disabled. By 2020 he was living in Cumberland Furnace, Tennessee, hundreds of miles from Dallas. He and Jennifer began a long-distance relationship, and she would later call him her “one and only love.”

Then the emails started.

Jennifer created two fake email accounts. Through the first, she pretended to be her own husband. Through the second, she pretended to be one of her friends, a man named Rob. Using those identities, she told Darrin a terrible story: that Jamie was physically and sexually abusing her.

None of it was true. Jennifer would later stipulate in her plea papers that no abuse ever happened. To make the lie convincing, she downloaded stock photographs of injuries from the internet and attached them to the messages as evidence.

According to trial coverage, the fake accounts were created in April 2020. She closed them in early September, about a month before the murder. By then, they had done their job.

The drive to Dallas

On October 8, Darrin Lopez decided to act. By his own later testimony, he believed he was protecting the woman he loved. He drove from Tennessee to Dallas, waited near the Faiths’ home, and ambushed Jamie as the couple walked their dog. Afterwards, he fled in a black Nissan Titan pickup with a distinctive “T” decal on its rear window.

Police did not know who he was. But Jennifer was already thinking about the truck.

The performance

When investigators began looking for the pickup, Jennifer went on television. She appeared on Dallas-Fort Worth’s ABC affiliate, WFAA, and pleaded with the public to help find the truck with the decal.

Then she picked up her phone and texted Darrin. She told him she had woken up in a panic, and that he needed to get the sticker off the back window of his truck as soon as possible. He removed it the next day.

Putting herself in front of the cameras while quietly warning the killer was only part of the performance. Money was part of it too.

• She had been sending Darrin money and gifts before and after the murder. She even gave him two credit cards and paid them off with money raised by a “Support Jennifer Faith” GoFundMe campaign, set up by people who sincerely believed she was a grieving widow.
• About a month after Jamie’s death, she filed a claim with MetLife for roughly $629,000 in death benefits from his employer. She kept Darrin updated on the claim, and the two discussed using the money to get a home in her name in Tennessee.

The cover-up cracks

By January 2021, investigators wanted to talk to Jennifer again. Rather than panic, she coordinated. She contacted Darrin to line up their stories. On January 10, she sent him a message telling him not to text her the following Monday, because she planned to delete her texts and factory reset her phone.

It was too late. Federal agents from the ATF arrested Darrin the very next day, January 11, in Cumberland Furnace. The gun used to kill Jamie Faith was found inside his home. Ballistics later matched bullet fragments and casings to it.

Jennifer was not yet in custody, but she was still trying to hold the story together. On February 2, 2021, she asked a third party to pass a message to Darrin in jail. In it, she said she would always be with him, and that she had to be careful because every communication was being monitored.

She was right about the monitoring. She was charged shortly afterwards, first with obstruction of justice and later with using interstate commerce in a murder-for-hire, a crime that can carry the death penalty. Even after her arrest, she kept up the fiction. In a handwritten note to Darrin in October 2021, she insisted she had never sent him emails from any account except her own.

Two verdicts

In February 2022, Jennifer Faith pleaded guilty. In exchange, prosecutors dropped the obstruction charge and agreed to recommend life in prison.

On June 21, 2022, U.S. District Judge Jane Boyle sentenced her to exactly that. She also ordered a $250,000 fine and $6,500 in restitution to Jamie’s family for funeral costs. During the hearing, prosecutors played the video of Jennifer describing the shooting to detectives. The judge called her “pure evil.” The U.S. Attorney, Chad Meacham, said she had put on a performance with crocodile tears, and that those tears had not stopped the federal investigators.

Darrin Lopez, who had pleaded not guilty, went on trial in a Dallas County court in July 2023. On the stand, he told jurors he had been outraged to learn that the emails and texts supposedly from Jamie and from Rob had actually been written by Jennifer, and that he had truly believed he was protecting her. He expressed remorse for killing an innocent man.

The jury was not persuaded that this excused anything. They found him guilty of murder after about an hour and fifteen minutes of deliberation. After a longer penalty phase, they sentenced him to 62 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. His attorney said he planned to appeal.

What the case leaves behind

Most murder stories begin with a killer and end with a victim. This one began with a lie, and the lie was the weapon. A woman manufactured a villain who did not exist, and handed her old love a mission and a gun’s worth of motive. A man with a brain injury became the instrument. And a good man, out walking his dog, paid with his life.

Both people responsible are now in prison.

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Sources: U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of Texas press release (June 21, 2022); Court TV, CBS Texas, Fox 4, WFAA and NBC DFW trial coverage. Details are as reported publicly; Lopez’s appeal status may have changed since publication.