Jennifer Faith’s mug shot, via the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department
Jennifer Faith received the expected sentence of life in prison this week after pleading guilty in the 2020 murder-for-hire of her husband, James Faith, in South Winnetka.
James Faith, a technology director for American Airlines, was shot multiple times on the morning of Oct. 9, 2020, while he and his wife were walking their dogs. It was the morning after their wedding anniversary.
After the shooting, Jennifer Faith pleaded to TV cameras for help in finding her husband’s killer, who she said attempted to use tape on her hands. Meanwhile she had orchestrated the whole thing.
She tricked her high school boyfriend, 49-year-old Darrin Ruben Lopez, into carrying out the murder by telling him her husband was abusive. Lopez and Jennifer Faith exchanged over 100,000 text messages, between May 2020 and January 2021, many of them romantic or sexual. She also created a fake email account to pose as her husband in threatening messages to Lopez.
Lopez is an Army Special Forces veteran who received traumatic brain injury in the Iraq War, the Dallas Morning News reports.
He drove from his home in Tennessee to kill James Faith and has been charged with murder.
There was one other witness to the crime, and doorbell cameras on South Waverly captured images of Lopez’s truck as well as audio of the crime.
Jennifer Faith tried to collect on her husband’s $629,000 life-insurance policy after his death and was pursuing her husband’s $400,000 retirement account.
She also took out credit cards and paid for shopping sprees using $58,000 from a crowd-funding campaign that Oak Cliff neighbors raised in the wake of her husband’s death.
Faith pleaded guilty to murder-for-hire in February.
“You are pure evil. Not to mention disgusting,” U.S. District Judge Jane Boyle told Faith during her sentencing hearing Tuesday, the newspaper reports.
Read this comprehensive story about the case by Kevin Krause, who covered the sentencing.
