Kriti Mehrotra
It was in broad daylight on October 9, 2020, that James “Jamie” William Faith Jr. was horrifically killed outside his own home, leaving the entire nation baffled to the very core. It didn’t take long for officials to zero in on the perpetrators thanks to surveillance footage and phone as well as e-mail records, but it still took a long time for real justice to be served. As explored in CBS’s ’48 Hours: The Plot to Kill Jamie Faith’ and NBC’s ‘Dateline: Losing Faith’, while one of his assailants pled guilty in 2022, the other was convicted following a trial in the summer of 2023.
Jamie Faith Was Gunned Down Right Outside His Home
Born on May 11, 1971, 49-year-old Jamie Faith was leading a comfortable, happy, stable life in Dallas, Texas, when everything was snatched away from him in the blink of an eye. The Madison, Wisconsin, native had actually graduated from high school in 1990 before going on to pursue a Bachelor’s in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin—Whitewater. He then kickstarted his career and gradually managed to do wonders in the area of software engineering, all the while dedicating himself to his passions as well as his family.
Jamie first came across the woman he later believed to be the love of his life, Jennifer Lynn, on a blind date around 2005, just to then also take on the role of a father figure. Since Jennifer had a daughter named Amber from a previous marriage, then 8 years old, when the couple became serious, he dropped all his bachelor habits to take care of both the girls in his life. In fact, the once self-proclaimed lifelong singleton even tied the knot with Jennifer in Las Vegas in 2012 before legally adopting Amber as his daughter once she turned 18 and could consent to it herself.
According to records, the Faiths built a good life for their little family in Arizona before ultimately relocating to the Oak Cliff neighborhood in Dallas County, Texas, in 2017 for Jamie’s career. He was the Director of Technology at American Airlines by the time 2020 rolled around, unaware that everything he’d worked for would soon be taken from right underneath his feet. The family man had left home alongside his wife on the morning of October 9 to take their dog Maggie on a walk like normal, just to be ambushed and heinously shot to death. He took 7 bullets – three to the head, three to the chest, one to the groin – whereas his wife was left duct-taped yet otherwise unharmed.
Jamie Faith’s Death Was Immediately Classified as a Murder
With the brutality of the entire incident, it was evident to officials from the get-go that Jamie’s death was a targeted murder rather than an accidental shooting or a drive-by gone wrong. According to Jennifer’s statements, their assailant was wearing a blue mask and didn’t really say anything while he attacked them, opened fire, and tied her up before fleeing the scene. This made investigators wonder whether he had any enemies, like possibly a disgruntled employee he may have recently had to let go of because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but they found no real leads.
That’s when they began wondering if Jamie’s murder was a murder for hire, driving them to begin looking into everyone close to him, including his friends, his family, as well as his wife. By this point, thanks to the surveillance cameras, detectives had already managed to identify that the suspect’s vehicle was a black Nissan truck with a “T” decal on the driver’s side back window. This, combined with the texts they had found on Jennifer’s phone, led them directly to Darrin Ruben Lopez, who resided on a 20-acre property in Cumberland Furnace, Tennessee.
Darrin not only owned a Nissan that had the exact decal, but he was also Jennifer’s high school and college sweetheart who had recently retired from the Army and emotionally reconnected with her. The initial texts recovered from the former’s phone showed her admitting to her emotional affair with her ex, only for her husband to have found out about it, resulting in them lying low. Therefore, officials zeroed in on the widow and her lover by conducting surveillance, tracking their financial records, as well as looking deeper into their steps over the past few months.
A Mountain of Evidence Helped Bring Jamie Faith’s Killers to Justice
Apart from looking into all possible motives Jennifer and Darrin might have had to kill James, investigators even back-tracked the veteran’s footsteps and were able to build a clear case/timeline. They found surveillance videos of him driving away from his property in Tennessee and stopping at a gas station in Arkansas while wearing a blue mask; the same kind Jennifer had said the killer wore. Then, the GPS data from his phone showed him arriving at the Faith home at 2:19 am on the fateful day, where he waited for five hours to kill Jamie before driving back home.
As if that’s not enough, detectives also uncovered that Jennifer had been sending e-mails to Darrin posing as her husband and a former co-worker to paint Jamie as physically and emotionally abusive. They hypothesized that she did all this to provoke him to remove her husband from the picture for good, following which they even worked together to cover up their illicit affair and actions. After all, they also found indications of deleted messages as well as her texting him to remove the “T” decal from the back window of his truck as soon as possible.
Thus, on January 11, 2021, Darrin was arrested not far from his home, and a search of his vehicle yielded the alleged .45 caliber murder weapon, the blue mask, and credit cards in Jennifer’s name. He was subsequently charged with murder on a state level and a gun crime on a federal level, to which he pleaded guilty, so he was transferred to the Dallas County jail to be held on $1 million bail awaiting trial. Then, when officials discovered that Jennifer still maintained contact with him and had also engaged in financial fraud, she was arrested too.
Jennifer had used the funds she had received from a GoFundMe page set up to help her cope as a grieving widow to shower Darrin with gifts, including a large screen television and plane tickets. So, on February 24, 2021, she was arrested on one count of obstruction of justice on a state level, only to be charged with murder-for-hire on a federal level in September as more details came to light. In the end, on February 7, 2022, she pleaded guilty in exchange for a life sentence rather than the death penalty, and later on, in July 2023, Darrin was convicted following a trial and sentenced to 62 years in prison.
Read More: Amber Faith: Where is Jennifer Faith’s Daughter Now?
