Jessica Lopez was one of three people convicted in the 2012 murder of Brittany Killgore in Fallbrook, but she says in new testimony that she had nothing to do with the crime
Jessica Lynn Lopez said she did everything she was told. She wore a collar. She ate from a dog bowl. She helped cover up a murder. She wrote a seven-page confession letter, and then she tried to kill herself.
The change was retroactive, clearing the way for hundreds of people in California to ask to have their murder conviction vacated. On the night she disappeared, Killgore was packing for her move when Perez suddenly showed up and asked her to join him on a dinner cruise. She declined, but asked if he could help her move. Perez, a Camp Pendleton Marine, said he could have fellow Marines at her Ammunition Road apartment in the morning to help — if she went on the cruise.
Around the time the “help” text was sent, Maraglino and Lopez were at a Fallbrook grocery store. At checkout, neither had their wallet, so Lopez quickly drove home to retrieve hers. Lopez said Maraglino and Perez were also there, talking. They sent her to the kitchen upstairs, where she waited for further instructions. “Slaves,” she testified, “don’t ask questions.” According to her, Maraglino soon came up, grabbed handcuffs and headed back downstairs.
They also found Lopez’s confession letter. The narrative she laid out in the letter was quite different from what she told the judge this week. She said Maraglino — who was pregnant with Perez’s child — asked Lopez to kill herself and told Lopez she could become the soul of Maraglino’s unborn baby “because she loved me as a baby and we’d never be separated.”
An example would be the case of a liquor store robbery that turns deadly. Under the felony murder rule, the robber who pulled the trigger, the lookout and the getaway driver are all liable for the clerk’s murder, no matter which of them fired the shot. He noted that the jury convicted her of kidnapping and torture, and said the panel also “found she was a major participant” in the murder by finding true a special circumstance allegation . He also pointed to her own writing about a violent abduction fantasy, a piece she wrote well before Killgore’s murder, as state-of-mind evidence.