Darrin Lopez Murdered a Man to Protect the Woman He Loved — She Ended up Being a Liar

If the first cut is the deepest, that means the first love could be the sweetest. That was the case for Darrin Lopez and Jennifer Faith, who dated in high school back in the late 1980s. They were only kids, so the relationship didn't last, which resulted in Lopez and Faith choosing very different life paths.

Lopez would later enroll in the Army, retiring after six deployments to Iraq, reported NBC News. He got married, had two kids, and then divorced. Faith became a speech therapist, also married, and had a daughter. In 2020, while isolating during the COVID-19 pandemic, Lopez decided to reach out to Faith. They entered into an emotional affair that ended in murder. Where is Darrin Lopez now? Here's what we know.

In July 2023, Lopez was sentenced to 62 years in a Texas prison for the murder of Faith's husband, Jamie Faith. He is currently serving his sentence at Coffield Unit in Colony, Texas. A few months after his sentence, Lopez told Dateline that he was hoping Governor Greg Abbott would shorten his sentence. The convicted killer said Faith manipulated him into murdering her husband. "I became her weapon," he said.

The fatal shooting occurred on Oct. 9, 2020, while Faith and her husband were walking their dog near their home in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, per NBC News. Lopez shot Jamie seven times, then roughed up Faith a bit to make it look like she was attacked as well. "I'm not supposed to be widowed at 48," Faith said tearfully during an interview with WFAA. She put on one heck of a performance.

While she was grieving, Faith was texting with Lopez about ways in which they could avoid getting caught. She instructed her former high school boyfriend on how to answer questions from the police. Faith also told Lopez that witnesses described a particular decal on the back of his truck, so she told him to remove it. He lied and said he did. They also came up with a reason why the exes were talking so much, even as Faith was scrubbing her cell phone.

In February 2021, the United States Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Texas announced in a press release that Faith was charged with obstruction of justice. She was arrested at the home she shared with Jamie. "Sometimes things just aren’t what they seem. Special agents and detectives knew Mrs. Faith was hiding something and were able to expose her darkest secrets," said U.S. Attorney Prerak Shah.

It was later revealed that Faith told Lopez she was being physically and sexually abused by her husband. She went so far as to send Lopez a stock photo of a bloody lip, claiming Jamie did that to her. The day before Jamie was killed, Faith messaged Lopez pretending to be her husband, telling the Army veteran that he planned to sexually assault Faith and possibly drown her. That's when Lopez drove the 10 hours to Texas. "If I didn’t do something, she was going to die," he told Dateline.

In June 2022, Faith was sentenced to life in prison after adding a charge of interstate commerce in the commission of murder-for-hire. She is serving out her sentence at FCI Aliceville, a federal prison in Aliceville, Ala. After her arrest, Faith kept up her lies in a letter she wrote to Lopez in October 2021. "Just a quick note to say I never lied to you and I never sent you emails from any account but mine, as me,” she said. “There is a ton more I wish I could say, but I can’t right now."