Five Fatal Minutes

Natalie Bollinger was nineteen and lived in Broomfield, Colorado. In the months before her death she had written on social media about being stalked by a man. On December 28, 2017, she was reported missing, and so was her boyfriend’s Glock pistol.

Her body was found the next day in a wooded spot off Riverdale Road in unincorporated Adams County. She had been shot once in the head, and the autopsy also found a potentially lethal amount of heroin in her system. Her phone held 111 text messages from December 28 with an unknown number, which detectives traced to Joseph Michael Lopez, 22, who worked for Domino’s Pizza. Lopez said he had answered Natalie’s Craigslist ad seeking someone to kill her only to talk her out of it. When cell phone location data put him at the scene, he said she had shot herself, then claimed she had asked him to pull the trigger.

Lopez was arrested in February 2018 and charged with first-degree murder. Prosecutors argued that he had hours to get Natalie help and chose not to. On December 3, 2018, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to forty-eight years in prison. Natalie’s family said publicly that the plea deal was not justice.