A California appeals court has shut down the latest attempt by Jessica Lynn Lopez — one of three killers convicted in the 2012 torture-murder of 22-year-old Marine wife Brittany Killgore in Fallbrook, California — to overturn her conviction.
Killgore’s case, which I covered in True Crime Case Histories — Volume 5, remains one of the most disturbing crimes I’ve ever written about. Lured from her apartment under the pretense of a Hornblower dinner cruise, Brittany was instead taken to the Fallbrook home of Marine Staff Sergeant Louis Ray Perez, where she was restrained, tortured, and strangled by Perez, his live-in “slave” Jessica Lopez, and his polyamorous partner Dorothy Maraglino. All three were convicted of first-degree murder, kidnapping, torture, and attempted sexual battery in 2015, and each received a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.
Lopez’s most recent appeal hinged on California’s 2019 felony murder reform, which narrowed murder liability to defendants who actually killed, intended to kill, or were “major participants” in the underlying felony. In 2023, San Diego Superior Court Judge Robert Kearney rejected Lopez’s petition, ruling she still met the standard for murder under the revised law. She appealed.
In August 2025, a three-justice panel of the Fourth District Court of Appeal sided with Kearney. The justices concluded Lopez was either a major participant in the kidnapping and torture or had aided and abetted the killing itself.
Lopez had argued that her infamous seven-page confession letter — the one she wrote at the Ramada Inn in 2012 alongside multiple knives, an empty bottle of Chambord, and self-inflicted cuts on her neck and wrist — was “patently fabricated” at Maraglino’s direction. The appellate panel wasn’t buying it, writing that the appeal “offers no supporting reasoning or logic” to conclude the letter’s contents were “inherently improbable or physically impossible.”
Lopez also argued that Killgore wasn’t tortured at all, and that she herself hadn’t participated in the kidnapping because Brittany was already restrained by the time Lopez arrived home. The panel dismissed both claims, citing medical examiner testimony and details Lopez had included in her own confession letter.
Perez, Maraglino, and Lopez are all still serving life without parole — exactly where the jury sent them a decade ago. For Brittany Killgore’s family, that means the legal system, for once, held the line.