The first phone call came in the middle of the night. It was him, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “Watch the news,” he said. “I just killed a woman at the El Morocco Motel.
You’re next. ”
I had known something was wrong with Jaime the moment I let him back into my life. But I never imagined it would come to this. I never imagined he would actually do it.
I met him in December of 2008, at a party I never should have thrown. My son had been pressuring me to host something for his high school friend, and I finally gave in. My nephew brought along a guy I’d never seen before. He was handsome, pleasant-looking, and I knew absolutely nothing about his past.
He had a way of talking about psychology and philosophy that made him seem educated, interesting. He developed a crush on me that night. It should have been flattering. Instead, it became the worst mistake of my life.
Another man asked me to dance. That was all it took. My nephew told Jaime, and Jaime lost his mind. He ran inside, grabbed a knife, and chased that poor guy around the house.
He slashed his chest open, left a gash that could have killed him. The police came, the party was shut down, and Jaime was arrested on the spot. I should have been done with him then. Any sensible person would have been.
But he wrote me letters from jail, and they were good letters. He made me feel like I mattered. So when he was released a year later and asked me to pick him up, I went. He had a tattooed face by then, which I didn’t like, but I told myself it didn’t matter.
He still had that mind, that way of talking that made me feel like he was the only person who really saw me. By 2009, I found out I was pregnant. I already had a son from a previous relationship, and this pregnancy left me bed-bound and terrified. The idea of raising another child as a single mother was overwhelming.
And Jaime was there for all of it. He cleaned the house. He cooked my meals. He helped with my son.
He made me feel cared for in a way I hadn’t felt in years. When I brought up marriage, he agreed without hesitation. We exchanged vows at his grandmother’s house in February of 2010. For a few weeks, I convinced myself I had made the right choice.
Then the other shoe dropped. It started with jealousy. He thought every man who looked at me was trying to take me. It didn’t matter that I was pregnant, that I felt terrible about my body, that I wasn’t looking at anyone.
He was convinced I was cheating. One argument started over nothing, something so small I can’t even remember it. He pushed me. I was heavy with pregnancy, and I fell.
I broke a rib and ended up in the ER. He was arrested for assault, and I gave birth alone. He was furious about that, blamed me for it, even though it was his own fault. And when he was released, I lifted the restraining order anyway.
I wanted a better life for my baby. He promised to go to anger management classes. I wanted to believe him. I told myself he could change.
I was wrong. Soon after the order was lifted, he started using crystal meth. The paranoia was immediate, and it was terrifying. He choked me until I passed out, more than once.
The mental trauma was worse than the violence. He was controlling, toxic, unpredictable. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t trust him.
Every sound in the house put me on edge. The breaking point came when he pushed my other child off a bed, onto the floor. That was it. I finally kicked him out of the house.
But getting rid of him wasn’t simple. He called me constantly. Twenty to forty texts a day, ten to fifteen calls, all threats. He was going to kill me.
He was going to do worse. I lived in fear, waiting for him to show up. Then, after a few days, the calls just stopped. I assumed he’d been arrested again.
I didn’t care why he was gone; I was just relieved. The relief didn’t last. Then the phone call came. “Watch the news.
” My blood ran cold. I contacted the Kern County Sheriff’s Office and asked if there had been an incident at the El Morocco Motel. The officer didn’t believe me. He assumed I was a vengeful wife trying to set up her husband.
He dismissed me. Five days later, an exterminator entered a room at that motel and found a woman’s body. Her name was Evette Pena. She was thirty-six years old, a mother of six, and she had been stabbed fifty-seven times.
Her body was positioned in a way that was almost beyond comprehension. Three knives had been impaled in her back along with a large pair of scissors. There were ligatures around her neck, including pantyhose and corduroy. She had been assaulted and stabbed in her privates.
A large metal rod had been forced down her throat. The pathologist listed three causes of death. I called the sheriff’s office again when I heard the news. This time, they took me seriously.
They picked me up and interrogated me for nearly ten hours. I told them everything about Jaime, about the threats, about the call. I told them he was capable of this. I knew it in my bones.
He was arrested five days later at a relative’s house in central Bakersfield. He had threatened to blow up anyone who tried to arrest him, but the bombs were a bluff. They took him into custody without a fight. I visited him at the detention center, hoping for some kind of closure about Evette’s murder.
What he told me was worse than anything I could have imagined. He confessed that he had stayed in that motel room with her body until it began to decompose. He admitted to violating her corpse while high on meth, multiple times. He said he only left because the smell had become too unpleasant, even for him.
His face was covered in new tattoos by then. The ones stretching horizontally across his lips gave him a permanent, mocking grin. He looked like the Joker, and he loved it. He had gotten so thin from the drugs that he was barely recognizable.
He told me he had really wanted to kill me. The only reason he didn’t was because of our son. Even locked away, he was still trying to control me, to make me feel like I owed him something. While he was awaiting trial, he attacked another inmate with a crude weapon he’d made from razor blades and a toothbrush.
He slashed the man’s neck, face, and chest, leaving five deep gashes that required sixty-seven stitches. When I asked him why, he told me he did it to delay his trial. He didn’t feel safe going to the actual prison system. He was afraid of what would happen to him there.
He didn’t care about the consequences. He was a psychopath in every sense of the word. He drew a pentagram on the floor of his cell and arranged photos of Evette Pena around it. When the gang coordinator asked why, he said, “Now she can worship her god.
” He meant himself. The markings were allowed until officials discovered they were drawn in blood. For over five years, he sat in detention. The trial kept getting delayed, mostly because of his behavior.
In March of 2017, he was finally given a trial date. He initially pleaded not guilty to Evette’s murder, then tried to negotiate, offering to change his plea if they took the death penalty off the table. It was a power play, a way to torment the victim’s family. Evette’s family was in the courtroom.
Her sister, Danielle, gave a victim impact statement. She spoke through her grief about her big sister, the woman who practically raised her. And throughout the entire testimony, Jaime sat there, rolling his eyes, yawning, mocking the family with gestures. He showed no remorse whatsoever.
In an interview, he actually said he loved what he’d experienced and that if he could go back in time, he would do it all over again. On May 15th, 2017, the family’s requested date because it would have been Evette’s forty-second birthday, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. I thought that was the end. I thought I could finally breathe and heal.
I started therapy. I worked on my PTSD. I felt safe knowing he was locked away for life. I was wrong.
In March of 2019, nearly two years into his sentence at Corcoran State Prison, he was given a cellmate. A forty-four-year-old man named Luis Romero, a convicted murderer who was serving twenty-seven years and was close to his parole date. Jaime didn’t want a cellmate. Within twenty-four hours of Luis’s transfer, Jaime murdered him in a way that defied comprehension.
He gouged out his eyes while he was still alive. He removed his lungs. He severed his fingers. He cut his head from his body, pulled out his intestines, and hung them in the light fixtures like decorations.
He used Luis’s blood to write messages on the walls. “I am the man with a thousand faces. ” He wrote “Haha! ” over and over, just like the Joker.
He even made a grotesque necklace from Luis’s intestines and wore it. All of it was accomplished with nothing more than a razor blade. The guards found the scene the next morning. Even hardened correctional officers were sickened by what they saw.
Later, it came out that two guards had falsified reports, claiming they’d seen Luis alive during their rounds after he’d already been slain. One officer even took unauthorized photos of the crime scene, which were leaked to the public. Luis’s family found out about his death through the news, not from the prison officials. Luis’s mother filed a lawsuit against the prison sergeant who had placed her son in Jaime’s cell.
As of this recording, that lawsuit is still ongoing. And Jaime, ever the narcissist, tried to file a motion to obtain copies of the crime scene photos from his own cell, a request a judge ultimately rejected. In 2021, Jaime was found incompetent to stand trial for Luis’s murder. He was diagnosed with unspecified schizophrenia, antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and PTSD.
The proceedings were paused briefly. A few months later, psychiatrists ruled he was fit to stand trial, and he pleaded not guilty once again. Even now, over six years later, his case for Luis’s murder remains unresolved. Evette’s family still hasn’t found closure.
Her body was so violated that the officials told them a viewing was impossible. They had no choice but to cremate her. There was no body to see one last time. Just a notification of death and a box of ashes.
They struggled financially just to afford that cremation service. For years, they couldn’t even give her a proper burial. In 2024, Danielle launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise funds for a proper burial, but she couldn’t meet the goal and had to postpone it. Instead, on May 16th, 2024, they hosted a celebration of Evette’s life and fiftieth birthday in her honor, inviting anyone who wanted to remember her to join.
Evette’s sister still speaks of her with nothing but love. “I’m not a sister anymore,” she says. The pain is still there, even after all these years. The holidays are hard.
Halloween was Evette’s favorite, and she loved passing out candy and seeing the costumes. They still miss her in the kitchen at Thanksgiving. But Danielle refuses to let the tragedy define her sister’s memory. She remembers Evette for who she was, a woman who would give the last dollar to her name, who would give the clothes off her back, who loved her church and loved God and never stopped preaching about it.
I know I was one of the lucky ones. I escaped him alive. But there are nights when I still hear his voice on that phone call, telling me to watch the news. I know he’s locked away in isolation, that he can never hurt anyone again.
But for Evette’s family, for Luis’s family, the horror will never truly end. He took so much from so many people. And the most terrifying part is that he enjoyed every second of it.
