Jury Deliberates in Brittany Killgore Case

The jury will continue deliberating Monday afternoon in the trial of three defendants, who lived a sadomasochist lifestyle and are charged with the 2012 torture and slaying of a young Marine wife.

Deputy District Attorney Patrick Espinoza told jurors during the September 14 opening statements that the three defendants killed 22-year-old Brittany Killgore “for their own sadistic pleasure.”

The three defendants: former Marine staff-sergeant Louis Perez, 49, Dorothy Grace Maraglino, 40, and Jessica Lynn Lopez, 28; lived together in a Fallbrook home where police discovered a sex dungeon with whips, ropes, sex apparatuses, spiked collars and a Taser, among other items.

Defense attorneys said their clients were not present when Killgore was killed. They said their clients lived a lifestyle of bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism – or BDSM, but stressed that all their interactions were strictly consensual.

In April 2012, Killgore’s body was found naked and strangled in a Riverside County ravine four days after she was reported missing.

She texted a friend “Help” shortly after getting into Perez’s truck on April 13, prosecutors say.

Espinoza said Perez texted friends that he had planned a BDSM night for the weekend before picking Killgore up.

The prosecution also presented evidence that Perez texted Maraglino: “Come home,” after picking up Killgore.

Lopez’s defense attorney painted her client as a scapegoat for the crime – a sex slave who was only doing what she was told.

Attorneys for the other two defendants portrayed Lopez as the sole bad actor who suffers from severe schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder.

Perez’s lawyer, high-profile defense attorney Brad Patton, said during opening remarks that Lopez was jealous of Killgore and saw her as a threat to the conditions in the Fallbrook home where she lived as a slave to the other defendants.

Each of the defendants is facing identical charges: one count of murder with a special circumstance; one count of conspiracy to commit kidnapping; one count of kidnapping; one count of torture; and one count of attempted sexual battery. The special circumstance charge on the murder is for murder during the act of kidnapping.

The maximum sentence each defendant faces is life in prison without the possibility of parole.
 

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