Unlucky 13

Brittany Killgore was 22 and living in Fallbrook, California, in the spring of 2012. Her husband, a Marine, was deployed, and their marriage was ending. Louis Perez, a Marine staff sergeant at Camp Pendleton, shared a Fallbrook house with his girlfriend Dorothy Maraglino and a roommate, Jessica Lopez. The three lived a BDSM lifestyle.

On April 13, 2012, Perez picked Brittany up at her apartment for what she believed was a dinner cruise in San Diego. About ten minutes later she texted a friend the word “Help.” Perez was arrested within days on an unrelated weapons charge while detectives searched for her. On April 17, her body was found near Lake Skinner in Riverside County. That same day, Lopez was found injured at a hotel on Rosecrans Street in San Diego with a written confession claiming she had acted alone. Prosecutors argued the letter was false and that all three had planned the abduction.

In 2015, Perez, Maraglino, and Lopez were each convicted of first-degree murder with special circumstances, along with kidnapping and related charges, and sentenced to life without parole. A state appeals court reviewed the convictions in 2017, and courts later refused Lopez’s request to have her murder conviction thrown out under a revised California law.