True Crime with Rachel Shannon
Jealous Ex Hires a Hitman to Murder her Ex's New GF: The Case of Kendra Hatcher
09 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What tragic event is the episode centered around?
Hello everyone, my name is Rachel and welcome back to another true crime video. So, the case that I have for you all today is yet another crazy case that involves a jealous ex who feels that the only way they're gonna get their ex back is to take out the competition. It literally never makes any sense. It seems to be like a bit of a theme going on right now with people trying to hire hitmen.
to take out other people. It's a very scary thing, but this case in particular is definitely an interesting one. Today, we will be discussing the horrific murder of Kendra Hatcher. Kendra Hatcher was born on February 3rd, 1980, in Springfield, Illinois, to parents Reagan Hatcher and Bonnie Gibson Jamison Cauley.
She also had a stepfather named Bruce and she grew up with three sisters, Jamie, Ashley, and Melissa, and one brother, Neil. Kendra grew up in the small Illinois town of Pleasant Plains and she attended Pleasant Plains High School. She was the captain of her cheerleading team and she played volleyball before graduating high school in 1998.
During that time, she would also go on missions trips to help build churches and lead Bible studies for children growing up in poverty. Then she went on to DePauw University in Indiana, graduating with her bachelor's degree. Then she went on to study at the University of Kentucky College of Dentistry. From there, she worked as a pediatric dentist.
While attending school, Kendra spent her spring breaks volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. Family and friends said that Kendra absolutely loved working with children. She loved spending time with her nieces and nephews especially. She was someone who loved to give back, going to Spain and Ecuador to provide dental work for children who needed it.
She also lived a very active lifestyle, which included yoga and running. She was known to be compassionate and full of love for others. She was resilient, strong, and determined to achieve any goals that she set her mind to. But outside of her tough exterior, on the inside, she was soft and delicate with a tender heart. That is what drew people to her.
While attending DePauw University, she met a man named Scott. Scott worked as an anesthesiologist and him and Kendra went on to get married. Scott would go on to say that him and Kendra spent many of their formative years together, being that they met in college, they got married, and started their lives and their careers together.
The two spent their time hiking mountains, going river rafting, traveling internationally, and they went on tons of adventures together. However, the two ended up getting a divorce and going their separate ways. It seemed like a pretty amicable split with the two deciding that they just wanted different things out of life.
So they took space away from one another and started their new chapters in their lives. By 2010, hoping for a fresh start, Kendra ended up moving to Dallas, Texas, where she continued her work as a dentist. While there, she moved to the high-rise apartment complex called Gables Park 17 in Dallas' Uptown.
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Chapter 2: What background information is provided about Kendra Hatcher?
He too had been divorced before moving to Texas, and him and Kendra seemed to get along very well. They were both doctors, both dedicated to their careers, both very intelligent, and both very attractive people. When Kendra first met Ricky, she was immediately intrigued with him. The two went on their first date, and from there, their relationship blossomed quickly from there.
They got along very well, they had the same values, and many of their interests aligned. They spent that summer dining at high-scale, fashionable uptown restaurants, they took nice trips together, and by all accounts, the two fell in love very quickly.
Just a few months later, by that September, they had even started talking about marriage, and Kendra had even flown all the way out to San Francisco to meet Ricky's parents for a long weekend. things seemed to be going amazingly for the couple. The weekend of Labor Day in 2015, the couple were set out to fly for another long weekend vacation to Cancun, Mexico.
However, on that day, September 2nd, everything changed. Kendra had been in her parking garage at her apartment complex, Gables Park 17, when a man just all of a sudden walked up to her and shot her in the back of her head. Completely without reason, without warning, and completely out of the blue, Kendra was dead.
When police arrived to the scene, they found that Kendra's purse had been taken, so initially they thought that maybe she was killed as a part of a robbery gone wrong. That is where the initial investigation took them. Because otherwise, those around Kendra knew her as a sweet, gentle, compassionate woman who worked with kids every day. No one knew anyone who would want to hurt her.
She didn't have enemies. In fact, everyone who knew her loved her. Of course, one of the first people that investigators had to look into was the man she was dating, Ricky. Police took him in and questioned him and he basically said what everybody else said. That he had no reason to want to hurt her and he certainly didn't know anybody else who would want to hurt her.
But police didn't look into Ricky for too long because he was at work when this happened so there was no way that he could have been responsible. So once again, police were at square one. However, only about a week into the investigation, police were taken in a completely different direction than anything they could have imagined.
So when police first started their investigation, they looked at the surveillance video from the apartment complex and they found that the shooter was most likely driving a black Jeep Cherokee. Police didn't really have much more to go off of, so they released the images of the black Jeep to the media in hopes that somebody would recognize the car.
That is when a man named Jose Ortiz reached out to the police saying that this was actually his car. He said that on the morning of September 2nd, he loaned his car to a couple of friends, a 31-year-old woman named Brenda Delgado and another 24-year-old woman named Crystal Cortez. He told the police that initially, after seeing the Jeep on the news, he met up with Brenda and asked her about it.
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Chapter 3: How did Kendra meet her new boyfriend, Ricky?
Then, they decided that they wouldn't be able to get it done with just the two of them. So, Brenda asked Crystal if she knew anybody that would help. From there, they started driving around Crystal's rundown neighborhood and started asking some neighbors for help.
They sort of asked questions to see if they were credible and if this person would actually be able to help and if they determined that somebody didn't seem right for the job, they would just leave. But then, Crystal stopped at her mother's house and at the mother's house, there happened to be two men over.
One was a neighbor and the other was a friend of the neighbor named Christopher Love who had brought his children to the home so that they could jump on the trampoline. 31-year-old Christopher Love was known around the area for selling weed. He also had numerous tattoos and a bit of a record.
Starting in his teen years, he had been convicted of all sorts of things from aggravated assault, aggravated robbery and burglary of a residence. So Brenda and Crystal asked Christopher to chat and he met back up with them at his apartment. When talking to Christopher, Brenda told him that she had connections to a drug cartel. which obviously wasn't true, but he didn't know that.
But she promised Christopher that if he helped her take out Kendra, that she would be able to pay him the equivalent of $3,000 in drugs and cash. Brenda asked Christopher if he had a gun, to which he said yes, and he showed her his .40 caliber Smith & Wesson pistol. Then, Brenda contacted a firearms dealer and asked them if they had a silencer for a .40 caliber Smith & Wesson.
Based on the court documents, I'm not sure if she did get that silencer, but I think they included it to say that, like, she was contacting people, she was trying to get accessories for a gun, so it showed that she was involved in this entire thing. She also purchased a pair of gloves for the shooter to wear so that their prints wouldn't be left behind.
Initially, the plan was actually for Crystal to shoot Kendra with Christopher's gun, and he agreed to be the getaway driver. But they actually ended up swapping roles because Crystal said that she knew the Dallas area better, so she would have been able to drive them around and get them out of there quicker.
Then Brenda decided that the killing needed to take place on September 2nd, the day before Kendra and Ricky were planning to leave for Cancun. They planned to make it appear like a robbery gone wrong. And the days before, Crystal and Brenda had followed Kendra around to get an idea of her daily routine, where she would be at certain times, where she parked her car, and things like that.
On September 1st, they all did a dry run where Brenda, Crystal, and Christopher drove from his apartment to Kendra's work and then to her apartment to figure out exactly how the timing should work with everything. The same day, they stole a temporary license plate off of a blue Durango at a random apartment complex in North Dallas to put on the car on the morning of the murder.
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Chapter 4: What led to Kendra's murder on September 2, 2015?
Then Brenda did give Crystal that $500, so at least she kept true to her word, although I'm sure Crystal and Christopher would have turned on Brenda pretty quickly if she hadn't. Now, once again, after the murder was committed, police didn't know where to look first. Like I said, they did question Ricky, but he didn't know anybody who could have wanted to hurt Kendra.
He had no idea that Brenda, his most recent ex, would be capable of something so horrific. In fact, he texted Brenda after Kendra was shot to let her know the news that he lost his girlfriend so tragically. And Brenda acted very concerned. She was willing to do almost anything to help Ricky with whatever he needed. She was a shoulder to cry on.
But after learning about this new surveillance video that had been released to the public, which showed the Jeep and a woman driving it, Ricky went back to the police. He told them that it almost looked like Brenda was the one who was driving the Jeep.
And again, we know that it wasn't her, but clearly something in the back of his head was telling him that Brenda was not so innocent in all of this. He told police that he was starting to get scared because Brenda was going to be coming over later that day to buy him groceries.
So, of course, after seeing that video and learning this whole crazy story from Crystal and Jose, police found Brenda and went to pick her up to have a chat. When they brought her in, police told her right away that they were investigating the murder of Kendra and she seemed confused. Her body language seemed inviting at first, leaning in and looking curiously at investigators.
She asked them how her name came up. As the interview went on, they asked her about her whereabouts that day. She confidently told them, just what we learned, that she was at the library with a friend, and then Crystal came to pick her up and took her to the shop to exchange cars.
She said that she stopped at Chili's for dinner that night with Jose after the car exchange, and she was very forthcoming with offering up the receipts and the names of everybody who could confirm her story and confirm her alibi. But she was having a hard time remembering where or when she got from place to place, She also mentioned that her phone had died while she was at Chili's.
She also told investigators that she didn't even know Kendra. She said that the relationship between her and Ricky hadn't been all that serious and that she wasn't upset that they had broken up. She wasn't concerned with who Ricky was dating, and she had no idea what the girl even looked like.
She said that she didn't know anything about the black Jeep, saying that Crystal was the one who borrowed it. She said that she did hear about the Jeep being involved with a potential shooting, but she didn't bother to ask Crystal about it. It didn't concern her. So, for the first few hours of the investigation, Brenda didn't budge.
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Chapter 5: How did the police initially investigate Kendra's murder?
She was just a hygienist. And Ricky, he wanted more than that. They acknowledged that she felt stomped on, degraded, and humiliated. But still, Brenda did not crack.
The way that your name came up in the investigation was linked to the vehicle. Okay, the... the jeep.
Black jeep.
Um, and I wanted to talk to you a little bit specifically about Wednesday, what you were doing Wednesday, and, you know, the incident involving the chief. Of course. Okay. Can you tell me a little bit about it?
Wednesday, I was in Carrollton. Okay. And I studied from day B-12 all the way to, like, about 6. And then from 6, we went to Fuzzy's. We had, um, some tacos at Fuzzy's in Carrollton. Mm-hmm. And then from Carrollton, we went to the Chili's off of George Bush.
Okay.
And, um, that was my day on Wednesday.
Okay.
It was my day on Wednesday. Okay. Can we close that? Actually, later. 8.57. Okay, close that.
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