Jennifer and Jamie Faith seemed like an ordinary couple.

The pair, who met on a blind date set up by mutual friends in 2005, were well-know in their friendly suburb of Oakcliff in Dallas, Texas.

Jamie was known to ‘do the right thing’ and ‘genuinely cared about people’ – while Jennifer was touted as a loving and devoted wife, described by friends as ‘super sweet’.

After several years of dating, they tied the knot in Las Vegas in 2012 before moving from Phoenix, Arizona to Dallas for Jamie’s job.

But just three years late their dream life came crashing down when Jamie was shot down the morning after their 15th anniversary.

The couple were returning from a dog walk when a stranger pointed a gun at his head before duct-taping Jennifer’s hand and striking her while she lay on the floor.

Police swiftly came to the scene after calls from distressed neighbours.

Autopsy reports revealed that he had been shot three times in the head, chest and once in the groin, the latter immediately inviting suspicion from police. ‘It’s not something typically seen in a robbery – it’s overkill,’ one detective who worked on the case said.

Homicide detective, Eric Barnes, said murders in Dallas were common – but being slaughtered outside his own home was enough to raise suspicion this was more than just a ‘robbery gone wrong’.

Grieving her beloved’s death, Jennifer soon went on TV to beg the for the public’s help.

‘I’m not supposed to be widowed at 48, you know?’ she said, through tears. ‘I just hope that at some point, maybe this person can recognise the gravity of what they’ve done and feel some sort of guilt, enough to come forward.’

But in a shock twist, the killer was no stranger at all. In fact, he was Jennifer’s high-school boyfriend – Darrin Lopez.

Jennifer had lied to Lopez and told him Jamie was abusing her. In a sick plot, she convinced her beau to kill her husband so she could keep his life insurance money – but it was months before police discovered this.

Speaking in Channel 5‘s documentary My Wife, My Killer and the Secret Footage, which aired last night, a friend of the couple, Regina Owens, explained: ‘Jennifer is a super sweet lady, one of my best friends.

‘She would just always be there for me if I needed it.’

Desperate to be supportive, loved ones helped Jennifer set up a GoFundMe page where she raised more than $60,000.

She also created a group chat between her and all her friends where she would share article links to cases of other people who had been killed in the Dallas area.

During police interviews, Jennifer had insisted the couple was not having ‘marital problems’, but police weren’t convinced.

Clips from the time of her murder showed a devastated Jennifer wailing to reporters as she begged members of the public to to support the case

‘I teeter between being completely heartbroken and completely devastated every day,’ she said.

Despite this, police were unconvinced by Jennifer’s woes and requested she hand over her mobile phone data.

There, they discovered a text from a few months before the murder of Jennifer telling a friend she was having ‘a full-blown emotional affair and Jamie knows it’.

As it turned out, Jennifer had reconnected with Darrin, a man she had dated in high school and had begun texting and calling him ‘all day every day’.

Jennifer, meanwhile, continued to appear on television where she would gush over her late husband, branding him the ‘backbone’ of their family and begging those with information to contact the authorities.

From her mobile phone, police picked up an address for Darrin in Tennessee which led them to a ranch where they discovered a black pickup truck parked outside the house.

The truck had a white ‘T’ sticker the police had been able to connect to the murderer fleeing the scene of the crime.

Later cell tower data revealed that Lopez had travelled across county in the direction of Jennifer’s home, arriving there at around 2:30am on the morning of the murder.

From there, detectives were able to look back at Ring doorbell CCTV footage, where they began to suspect that the man lingering outside the Faiths’ house might not have just been their ‘drunk neighbour’.

They arrested Darrin and soon found a firearm that was consistent with that used to kill Jamie.

After thoroughly researching researching phone records, police were able to pick up hours of phone call communication and 13,644 texts shared between the two.

Initially unable to find out exactly the nature of that communication, they offered Jennifer the opportunity to come clean about the relationship with her teenage flame.

Footage from police interviews saw the widow claiming ‘I’ve always been faithful’, as she added that Darrin was just ‘a friend’ who she was helping with ‘his kids’.

Around the same time, friends of Jennifer picked up on the fact that Darrin was involved in their group chat where he had been sharing links to other murders in the areas – posing as someone who wanted to help solve the murder.

But in reality, his intentions weren’t so well meaning. As it turned out, Darrin and Jennifer had a five year plan of how they would make their relationship work.

After it became clear that Darrin had been the blame for the killing, police began to look for motivations for the crime and were shocked to discover the full extent to his affair with Jennifer.

The pair had seven month long ’emotional affair’ after a lonely and divorced Lopez found his former high school flame on LinkedIn and sent her an email.

So in love were they that they began referring to each other as ‘soul mates’, sharing thousands of messages of a sexual nature.

But Jennifer had not been totally honest about her marriage, telling Darrin that she her husband Jamie had been physically and sexually abusing her.

Posing as her husband, Jennifer had also begun contacting Darrin where she said he was going to assault and drown her.

Believing she was under ‘imminent threat’, he made the decision to act to protect the woman he loved.

Jennifer had called Darrin to ask whether she thought she should poison Jamie, to which he said: ‘It was at that time that I told her I didn’t want her to do anything like that.

‘I had told her, once you take a life that changes you forever. Forever. I’d already done that. Being in the military, my actions that I had to take in Iraq and so if it was coming to that point that she felt that bad, I would be the one to take on the burden and do what needed to be done.’

Wanting desperately protect his partner and convinced she was in danger, he drove 10 hours to the Faiths’ house where he shot and killed him.

Suspicions were further amplified when police discovered mention of Jamie’s life insurance in text messages between her and Darrin. The authorities were, after this, convinced that she had been involved in the murder.

Jennifer was the arrested to ‘obstruction of justice’ relating to her husband’s murder.

In October 2021, the month after she was charged with murder-for-hire, Darrin told officials how Jennifer had lured him into agreeing to murder her husband – and how they’d agreed to make the killing look like a robbery and how he’d come up with a code word.

As it turned out, Jamie had never harmed his wife.

Using fake email accounts and fabricated images of injuries, she was able to convince Darrin that she was the victim of domestic abuse, the court heard.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Rick Calvert of Texas‘ Northern District called Jennifer’s lies about her abuse ‘some of the most sadistic things you can possibly dream up.’

In February 2022, Jennifer pleaded guilty to using interstate commerce in the commission of murder-for-hire, admitting to prosecutors that she had falsely told Darrin that her husband was physically and sexually abusing her.

In 2023, Darrin was convicted and sentenced to 62 years in prison, for James’s murder.