The knife came out of nowhere. One moment Jane was dancing at her own party, laughing with a friend, and the next, a man she barely knew was chasing another guest around the house with a blade in his hand. He slashed the guy’s chest open. Not deep enough to kill, but deep enough to leave a gash that would scar.
Police swarmed the house. The party was over. And Jaime Osuna was dragged off to jail. Jane had only invited him because her nephew brought him along.
She’d never heard of Jaime before that night. She didn’t know about his record, his violent history, or the fact that he had spent years bouncing in and out of detention centers. All she saw was a handsome guy with an easy way of talking. She had no idea that this single night would lead her down a path of terror she would spend the rest of her life trying to recover from.
Jaime was born on March 7th, 1988, in Bakersfield, California. That city is a tough place, a place where gangs, drugs, and violence are woven into the fabric of everyday life. Jamie’s mother, Michelle, was emotionally absent. She separated from his father a year after he was born and later remarried a man named Jeff, a stepfather who apparently had no love for Jaime.
By all accounts, Jeff was cruel to the boy, and Michelle never once stepped in to stop him. Jane, who would later become Jaime’s wife, listened to him describe fragments of that childhood, and what she heard was almost unbearable. According to Jane, Jaime was thrown out of a moving car when he was just a little kid. He was hung in a tree.
He wasn’t allowed to eat with the family; instead, he was forced to sit on the floor and eat like a dog while his siblings ate at the table. He slept outside in the rain. He was denied food while other children in the house were fed. It was a childhood stripped of safety, warmth, or affection.
The streets raised Jaime. And the streets of Bakersfield are unforgiving. He joined gangs at a very young age. The violence inside him was apparent almost from the start.
Later, he would admit to torturing animals just for fun, saying he put cats in the freezer and even microwaved a family pet alive while his mother was out at the store. He told these stories without remorse, as if they were simple facts about his past, not confessions of cruelty. His first serious run-in with the law came in 2005, when he was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon and sent to the California Youth Authority. From that point on, he spent most of his adolescence and early adulthood in detention centers and prisons.
His record grew longer with each year: battery, drug possession, assault, even attempted murder. He was never out for long. Whenever he was released, it wasn’t long before he found himself back inside. In December 2008, Jane did something she’d been pressured into for a while.
Her son from a previous relationship had been begging her to throw a party for his high school friend, and she finally gave in. It was the holidays, and she wanted to make her son happy. At that point, she knew nothing about Jaime’s past. She didn’t know he was fresh out of prison or that his face was already beginning to show the faint outlines of terrible things.
All she knew was that her nephew brought a friend, and that friend was pleasant to look at. Jaime developed a crush on Jane almost immediately. And Jane, for her part, found him charming. He talked about psychology and philosophy in a way that made him seem educated, even thoughtful.
She looked past the chaos of their introduction and saw someone she thought might be worth getting to know. Jaime apparently thought so too, because when he was arrested that night, he stayed in touch with her through letters. Jealousy had driven him insane that night at the party. Jane was dancing with some other guy, and her nephew, for reasons no one fully understood, went out and told Jaime about it.
It wasn’t a romantic thing; it was just dancing. But Jaime flew into a rage. He grabbed a knife, stormed inside, and went after the man. It was terrifying to witness, even then.
Jane should have known. Everyone around her said she should have known. But Jaime wrote her letters from jail, sweet and intelligent, and she let herself believe that the man she’d seen with the knife was not the man who was writing to her. A year later, he was released.
Jane picked him up from prison. She was surprised to see that he now had facial tattoos, ink that covered parts of his face and made him look more menacing than she remembered. She didn’t like it. It was a drastic change.
Still, she gave him a chance. She was drawn to his mind, his way of speaking. She thought that, with her help, he might turn his life around. By 2009, Jane discovered she was pregnant.
The pregnancy was hard. She was bedridden and vulnerable, and she already had a son to care for. The fear of raising another child alone was overwhelming. Jaime, seeing an opportunity, stepped up in a way she never expected.
He cleaned the house. He cooked for her. He helped with her son. He pampered her constantly, making her feel cared for for the first time in a long time.
Jane believed he was changing. She believed he really loved her. When she brought up marriage, Jaime agreed right away. In February 2010, they exchanged vows at his grandmother’s house.
Jane thought this was her new beginning, that her child would have a father and she would have a partner. But the truth was far darker. And within weeks of the wedding, the mask began to slip. Jaime became violent with her almost immediately.
He’d accuse her of looking at other men, even during her pregnancy. She would tell him she didn’t notice anyone, that she felt terrible about her body, that she looked overweight, but he just wouldn’t believe her. He was consumed by the idea that she was cheating on him. Even the way she looked at a waiter was enough to set him off.
Late in her pregnancy, they got into an argument. She doesn’t even remember what it was about, nothing serious, something silly. But Jaime pushed her. She was heavy, and she fell hard, and she broke a rib.
She went to the emergency room, terrified for her baby. Fortunately, the pregnancy wasn’t affected. But Jaime was charged with assault and sent back to prison. A restraining order was put in place, and Jane gave birth without him there.
He was furious about that. Furious that he hadn’t been present at the birth of his own child, even though it was entirely his fault. He blamed Jane, of course. He twisted everything so that she was the villain in his story.
Still, Jane wanted to give her newborn a better life. She wanted a family. And against every instinct, she got back together with him. She lifted the restraining order.
He promised to go to anger management classes, and he did, for a time. He made it seem like he was trying. But it was all just another performance. Soon after the restraining order was lifted, Jane began to notice strange behavior in Jaime.
He was erratic, paranoid, and violent. She discovered he had started using crystal meth. There was no fixing him. The drugs made everything worse, fed the rage that was already there, and turned him into something unrecognizable.
He choked Jane on multiple occasions, strangling her until she lost consciousness. She never knew what would set him off. The mental trauma of staying with him was even worse than the physical violence. The control, the jealousy, the constant threats, they wore down her soul.
The breaking point came when Jaime allegedly pushed her other child off a bed onto the floor. Something snapped in Jane that day. She told him he had to leave. She kicked him out of the house and thought, finally, she was free.
But getting rid of Jaime wasn’t that simple. He wouldn’t stop calling. He wouldn’t stop texting. Jane received thirty to forty text messages a day and almost fifteen calls daily, all of them filled with threats.
He told her he would kill her. That he’d do something worse. She was terrified of him, terrified that he would show up at any moment and follow through on his promises. Then, suddenly, the harassment stopped.
Jane was relieved, and she assumed he’d been arrested again. She didn’t care why, as long as he stayed away from her and her children. But what came to light in the following days caught everyone off guard. While Jane was fortunate enough to escape Jaime alive, another woman wasn’t so lucky.
In November 2011, Jaime visited the El Morocco Motel on Golden State Avenue. It was a rundown motel in one of the worst areas of Bakersfield, the kind of place where long-term tenants stayed because they had nowhere else to go. One of those tenants was a thirty-six-year-old woman named Evette Pena, a mother of six. She had been living there for about three months.
She’d had a rough life, and she’d turned to drugs to cope, but unlike Jaime, she had never shown any violent tendencies. She was a loving mother, a woman with faith, a soul who wanted more out of life. On the night of November 8th, 2011, Jaime spent the night with Evette at the motel. It would be the last night of her life.
Afterward, Jaime called Jane. He told her to watch the news. He told her he had just killed a woman at the El Morocco Motel. And then he told her that she would be next.
Jane felt her blood run cold. She knew Jaime well enough to know he wasn’t bluffing. She immediately contacted the Kern County Sheriff’s Office and asked if there had been any incident at the motel. But the officer she spoke to didn’t take her seriously.
He assumed she was just an estranged wife trying to set her husband up. He brushed her off, and the call went nowhere. Five days later, on November 13th, 2011, an exterminator entered the motel room and found Evette’s body. The horror of that discovery shocked even the most hardened officers on the scene.
When Jane heard the news, she called the sheriff’s office again. This time, they listened. She was picked up immediately and interrogated for nearly ten hours as the main lead in what had become an active murder investigation. What authorities found inside that motel room was almost beyond comprehension.
Evette had been stabbed fifty-seven times. Her body had been intentionally positioned, her shins pressed to the floor, her backside elevated, her arms extended forward. Three knives were impaled in her back, along with a large pair of scissors. There was evidence she had been assaulted and stabbed in her privates multiple times.
Multiple ligatures were found around her neck, including panty hose and a green corduroy material that was likely used to strangle her. Jaime had also taken a large metal rod and forced it down Evette’s throat. The crime scene was so brutal that the pathologist listed three separate causes of death: blunt force trauma to the head, asphyxiation, and injuries from sharp-force objects. Anyone capable of such violence, said investigator Paul Lopez, a private investigator and former correctional officer, was a depraved, violent narcissist with no regard for human life whatsoever.
Lopez said that Jaime truly believed he was entitled to take a life at his own free will. When Danielle Pena Gonzalez, Evette’s sister, learned the details of her sister’s death, she was heartbroken beyond words. Danielle had practically raised Evette. She had always looked up to her, admired her, loved her in a way that went beyond the bond of blood.
The grief rippled through the entire family, but tragically, they never found the closure they desperately needed. Officials told them that recovering Evette’s body wasn’t possible. Jaime had violated her so severely that the only thing they could give the family was her ashes. There was no apparent motive for the murder.
Investigators speculated that Jaime went to Evette as a client, but later, in conversations with Jane, he revealed something even more cruel. He killed innocent Evette because she resembled Jane. The woman he said he wanted to kill but hadn’t yet. Evette was simply a substitute for his rage.
On November 18th, 2011, five days after Evette’s body was discovered, Jaime was arrested at a relative’s house in central Bakersfield. Investigators had developed intelligence that a family member was helping him hide. Law enforcement got a search warrant and deployed a SWAT team to apprehend him. Before the raid, Jaime had threatened Jane, saying he had bombs and explosives and would blow up anyone who tried to arrest him.
After a brief standoff, he was taken into custody. His claims about explosives turned out to be a wild bluff. Jaime was transported to the Lerdo pre-trial detention facility, a place that houses some of the worst criminals in the system. But even among those men, Jaime operated on a completely different level of depravity.
Jane visited him at the detention center multiple times, hoping to find some closure about Evette’s murder. What he told her was beyond comprehension. Jaime confessed that he had stayed in the motel room with Evette’s body until it began to decompose. He admitted to violating her corpse while high on crystal meth, multiple times.
The only reason he finally left, in his own words, was because the smell had become too unpleasant, even for someone as depraved as him. Jane noticed that Jaime had gotten significantly more facial tattoos since she last saw him. The change was so dramatic that he was barely recognizable. He was reportedly fascinated by the Joker from the Batman comics, and the tattoos stretching horizontally across his lips mimicked that look.
He had also lost a considerable amount of weight, likely from his heavy drug use. Jaime confessed to Jane that he had really wanted to kill her, but the only reason he stopped was because he thought of their son. Even while confined in one of California’s most secure correctional facilities, Jaime’s violent impulses didn’t stop. In January 2012, he got into an altercation with another inmate over a minor dispute about noise.
Jaime had crafted a crude but deadly weapon called a tomahawk, a prison shank made by melting razor blades into a toothbrush. The improvised blade could slice through human tissue with terrifying ease. He went after the man with the weapon hidden in his hand and threw a punch. The other inmate, a guy considerably larger than Jaime, managed to block the strike and pin him down.
As he wrestled Jaime to the ground, he felt something wet and realized he was bleeding profusely from his neck, face, and chest. The attack left five deep gashes that would later require sixty-seven stitches to repair. Investigator Lopez later described the incident: that wasn’t just a jailhouse brawl. Jaime wanted to make a point.
You don’t do that to somebody unless you’re trying to take their life. That told Lopez everything he needed to know about Jaime: he was a sick, psychotic person who suffered from multiple mental conditions and should never be around anybody. When Jane asked Jaime why he had attacked the other inmate, he said he did it to delay his trial. He didn’t feel safe going to the actual prison system because of the murder he had committed.
He would rather risk another murder charge than face what was waiting for him. Jaime also began performing rituals in his cell. He drew a large pentagram on the floor and arranged photographs of Evette Pena around it. When a gang coordinator asked why he had created this display, Jaime responded, “Now they can worship her god,” referring to himself.
The markings were initially allowed to stay until officials discovered they were drawn in blood. That raised serious health and safety concerns, and the markings were removed. Jaime was formally classified as an extremely dangerous individual who couldn’t be safely contained even in isolation. Everyone around him, whether a guard or another inmate, was at risk of violence.
Another inmate held in the same prison described Jaime in chilling terms: “If he was able to, he’d kill you without a second thought. You could feel hate radiating off this person. Anger and hate. If there was a demon incarnate, I would say Jaime Osuna is it.
Evil does not do justice to Jaime Osuna. ”
Jaime was transferred to a maximum-security housing unit that offered the highest level of prisoner isolation. Inmates are locked in their cells for twenty-three hours a day. But even in that restrictive environment, Jaime continued his sadistic behavior.
He flooded his cell once or twice a week just for entertainment. He constantly tormented correctional staff in the most twisted ways he could think of. On one occasion, he killed a mouse and methodically peeled off its skin until only the skeleton remained intact. He continued sending letters to Jane.
Three of the most disturbing included drawings of Evette’s body at the crime scene covered in blood, a pentagram, and a note claiming her mother was “rotting in hell. ” Another featured a rat. For the most part, Jane tried to ignore these letters, but when investigator Lopez personally reviewed them, he was shocked by their content, still filled with detailed descriptions of torture and violence. Jaime spent over five years at Lerdo awaiting trial.
Finally, in March 2017, he was given a trial date. To everyone’s surprise, he initially pled not guilty to Evette Pena’s murder. But then he attempted to negotiate with prosecutors, offering to change his plea to guilty only if they took the death penalty off the table. According to investigators, this was just another twisted power play.
Jaime was toying with the judicial system, tormenting the victim’s family, because it didn’t matter one bit whether he pled guilty or not. He just wanted control. Members of Evette’s family were present at the court hearing and gave victim impact statements. Most prominently, Evette’s sister Danielle spoke emotionally about her loss.
But throughout her testimony, Jaime remained arrogant and emotionless. He openly mocked Danielle by rolling his eyes, yawning, and making gestures with his hands. He seemed to revel in the pain he was causing. In 2017, KGET reporter Olivia LaVoy sat down with Jaime for an interview.
He told her, “I love what I’ve experienced. To this day, if I can go back in time to change anything, would I? No. I would go back and do it again and over again.
If I’m released, I will probably end up here again with the same case. ”
On May 15th, 2017, Jaime was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The victim’s family had specifically requested that date because it would have been Evette’s forty-second birthday. Evette’s close friend, Jolene Clement, addressed the court, saying, “Evette is always going to be in our hearts.
We love her and we’re happy she can finally rest in peace. ”
Jaime was transferred to Corcoran State Prison, one of the most dangerous prisons in California. He was placed in the SHU, the Security Housing Unit, where he was kept in complete isolation with no contact with other inmates. For everyone Jaime had victimized, this felt like justice.
Jane was relieved knowing he would be locked away for life and could never hurt anyone the way he had hurt her or Evette. With therapy, she even began healing from her PTSD. But what no one knew was that Jaime wasn’t done. He would commit one more murder, this time behind bars.
It would become one of the most gruesome murders ever committed inside a prison. For whatever reason, Jaime was no longer kept in isolation. In March 2019, nearly two years into his sentence at Corcoran, he was assigned a cellmate: forty-four-year-old Luis Romero, a convicted murderer serving a twenty-seven-year sentence. Luis was getting close to his parole date.
He had served his time and was looking forward to starting fresh. The last thing he expected was that his cellmate would take his life. Within just twenty-four hours of Luis’s transfer, Jaime brutally murdered him in a manner that defied all comprehension. The murder was hidden from the guards because a bed sheet obstructed their view into the cell.
While Luis was still alive, Jaime gouged out his eyes, removed his lungs, and severed his fingers. He then cut his head from his body, pulled out his intestines, and hung them in the light fixtures like decorations. Investigators even discovered a half-eaten sandwich in the cell that contained human remains. Jaime used Luis’s blood as paint, writing messages across the cell walls.
One read, “I am the man with a thousand faces. ” He mocked his victim’s death by scrawling “Haha! ” repeatedly across the walls, like the Joker. He even fashioned a grotesque necklace from Luis’s intestines and wore it.
And he accomplished all of this with nothing more than a razor blade. The following morning, Saturday, March 9th, 2019, the prison guards made the gruesome discovery. Even hardened correctional officers, who were familiar with the worst kinds of criminals, were absolutely shocked and sickened by what they found. Once again, Jaime had managed to shock the world.
Luis’s family was devastated. They had been eagerly awaiting his release, hoping he could start fresh. His sister, Dora Garcia, spoke to KGET News: “We’re here because for us, Luis, his family, he’s more than just another prisoner, another victim of Osuna. He is my mother’s son, my brother, and we love him.
We want to represent the family so that everyone knows that Luis is not alone and that we are here for him. ” She explained that they received two phone calls: one to tell them he had passed and how to recover his body, and a second asking for a money order to recover his belongings. After that, there was no more communication. Everything they knew, they learned from the news.
What made it even more cynical was that two guards allegedly falsified reports saying they saw Luis alive during their rounds after he had already been slain. One of the guards, Joseph Burns, even took unauthorized pictures of the crime scene, which were later leaked to the public. US District Court Judge Jennifer Thurston said of the officer, “Due to defendant’s actions, many of the photographs were ultimately leaked to online media platforms, and plaintiff endured the horrific experience of witnessing the photographs and knowing that these photographs of her mutilated son have been seen by the general public. It was a severe disrespect to his mortal remains.
” As a result, Luis’s mother, Doris Solis, filed a lawsuit against the prison sergeant who placed her son in the same cell as Jaime. As of late 2025, the lawsuit was still ongoing. To add insult to injury, Jaime attempted to file a motion to obtain copies of the crime scene photos from his cell. Even though he already had access to them through his attorney, he wanted to keep them personally.
The judge rejected the request, pointing out he could already view them. It seemed he only wanted to hurt the victim’s families further and waste everyone’s time. In December 2021, psychiatrists who examined Jaime’s medical history found him incompetent to stand trial for Luis’s murder due to his mental state. He was diagnosed with unspecified schizophrenia, antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Criminal proceedings paused briefly, then were resumed after just a few months when psychiatrists ruled he was fit to stand trial. He once again pled not guilty. But even years later, his case for Luis’s brutal killing remains ongoing. At Jaime’s 2023 resentencing hearing, more than a dozen of Evette’s friends and relatives attended, many wearing shirts printed with her photo and the words “In Memory, Injustice.
” Evette’s friend Tanya Perez spoke with heavy emotions, saying, “It makes your stomach turn just to even see his face, just to think that that’s the last image that Evette had in her mind. ”
Danielle Pena Gonzalez continues to remember her sister for the light she brought into people’s lives rather than the tragedy that took her life away. “She was always willing to help others and give out to people, even when she had as little as just a dollar to her name,” Danielle said. Shortly after Evette’s death, Danielle shared heartfelt words: “I knew she knew better, and I knew she was better, and I didn’t understand how this great mom and this woman who was so involved in the church, because she loved church and she loved God and she always preached, no matter what, I love her.
I always did. I never stopped. No matter where she lived, no matter what she did, no matter how mad I was at her decisions, I still loved her. ”
The crimes Jaime committed are truly unparalleled.
Yet the families of the victims continue to show remarkable resilience in the face of absolute terror. Evette’s family could barely afford a cremation service and a small reception. At the time, they weren’t financially stable, and the sudden loss left them struggling not just emotionally but financially as well. Thirteen years after Evette’s death, the pain is still fresh.
Danielle said, “I’m not a sister anymore. Life has not been the same for me after losing my older and only sister, Evette Pena, who I say practically raised me, senselessly killed by Jamie Osuna in 2011. Yes, next month will be thirteen years, but it doesn’t feel like thirteen years. The pain’s still there.
The anniversary of her death brings all the feelings. The holidays are really hard. It kind of starts with Halloween. She loved dressing up.
She loved Halloween, and she loved passing out candies to the kids and seeing everybody’s costumes. And then Thanksgiving, we love to cook, we love to eat, and our kitchen was always smelling good. To not have her here—that was the first holiday that we missed with her. You know, she was murdered in November.
”
The murder left Evette’s body unsuitable for viewing. “We weren’t given an option to bury her. We were told we had no choice but to cremate her. It felt like there wasn’t a final closure.
There wasn’t a body to see one last time, a viewing. It was a notification of her death and then here’s a box of ashes. It just felt so unreal. We want to bury them and have a place to visit.
A place where family can finally visit. ”
Nearly thirteen years after Evette’s passing, in 2024, Danielle launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise funds for a proper burial for her sister. Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to meet the fundraising goal and had to postpone the burial of Evette’s ashes until a later date. Still, the family chose to celebrate Evette’s life in a meaningful way.
On May 16th, 2024, they hosted a celebration of life, a fiftieth birthday gathering in her honor, inviting anyone who wished to remember her to join. The event was filled with warmth, love, and shared memories, a testament to the woman Evette was and the love her family still carries for her.
