For years, a California immigrant and local church pastor harbored dreams of bringing his long-distance spouse from Mexico into the United States. But just as those dreams appeared to finally be within reach, he turned up missing in California’s Central Valley, leading to a search that uncovered a possessive female acquaintance and, at the end of the investigative trail, a couple’s pact to commit cold-blooded murder.

Church, family, and work at a local poultry plant were all part of life’s daily rhythms for 40 year-old Abraham Gaspar-Reyes, who for 11 years had remained separated from his wife in Oaxaca, Mexico while he saved to eventually bring her to the Hanford, California area where he spent his off-work weekends with Tomasa Reyes, his mother, as described in Snapped: Killer Couples, airing Sundays at 6/5c on Oxygen. But when Abraham didn’t return home on an April weekend in 2016, Tomasa immediately sensed that something wasn’t right.

The disappearance of Abraham Gaspar-Reyes

“I got up in the morning on Monday, his truck was not there,” recalled Tomasa on Snapped: Killer Couples. “He never sleeps outside of the home on Sundays. So, I told my husband to wake up. So, my husband gets up from bed: ‘What do you mean he didn’t come home?’ So, he went to look for him to see if he had crashed or where he was.”

Abraham wasn’t known for living the kind of life that would lead him astray from his family and friends. A reliable presence at the church where he often delivered sermons, he spent his weekdays working and rooming with friends in Fresno County, while returning on the weekends to spend time with Tomasa. Alarmed by Abraham’s sudden absence, Tomasa notified local law enforcement, who responded at her home on the same day that Abraham first was reported missing.

As investigators put out a nationwide missing-persons bulletin, a pair of field workers in the Tulare County community of Earlimart discovered a grisly sight: Abraham’s body, dressed in churchgoing attire. He was dead from a gunshot wound to the head. His truck and cell phone were found near a neighboring vineyard two miles away.

“He had taken a gunshot to his right temple that went through his head and exited out the left,” Samantha Arnerich, then a Tulare County Senior Deputy District Attorney, told Snapped: Killer Couples of the evident execution-style killing. “…There were footprints where it looked like the ground was wetter when they had been made, and the ground had sort of dried since. He also had dried dirt on the bottom of his shoes.”

Who killed Abraham Gaspar-Reyes?

The news of his murder shattered his mother, Tomasa: “I was sad. And it hurt me, because he is my son,” she said. “I felt like the whole world, the whole world was crashing down on me. I felt like everything was over for me.”

His friends and family spoke with investigators, confirming he wasn’t the type of man to have enemies.

“The picture that was drawn for us was that Abraham was a pretty decent guy,” recalled Tulare County Sheriff’s Lt. Bryan Clower, who helped work the case, to Snapped: Killer Couples. “He was an assistant pastor at his church, and he was somebody that was respected within his community and very loyal to his family.”

Further inquiries revealed that Abraham had struck up a friendship and, eventually a short-lived romance, with a 40-year-old woman named Angelita Reyes, herself recently separated from her husband and reported by Abraham’s acquaintances to be possessive in her relationships.

After Angelita began attending church with Abraham, “[h]is demeanor totally changed, even with me,” said Pastor Lupe Moreno. ”…He totally changed. She would not allow him to look at another woman, to talk to another woman — young or old.”

Tomasa also recalled an especially memorable encounter after Abraham brought Angelita around to meet her: “She said, ‘Look, I can tell you that if I can’t have your son, nobody can.”

Abraham and Angelita remained romantically linked for slightly more than a year, their relationship ending after Abraham resolved in January 2016 to refocus his efforts on bringing his now-estranged wife from Mexico into the United States.

Equipped with information on a possible motive, investigators tracked down Angelita in the city of Bakersfield and brought her in for an interview.

“She was very comfortable in sitting there and talking, and, like, almost to the point where she was flirting with the investigators,” said Clower, noting that Angelita’s story of her relationship with Abraham seemed to suggest that he, rather than Angelita, was possessive and jealous. But after failing a voice stress analyzer test and agreeing to a second round of questioning, Angelita expanded on her original information, telling investigators that Abraham had tried to blackmail her into continuing their relationship by threatening to make compromising sexual pictures of her public.

Law enforcement wasn’t convinced by Angelita’s version of events, which didn’t “fit the narrative of who Abraham is as a person that’s being presented by every other person who knew him,” said Americh. 

Pressed further, Angelita admitted that she had presented a similar account of Abraham’s alleged jealous nature to another man — her roommate Jesus Jeronimo, who, at age 22, was far younger than Angelita herself. And once investigators brought Jeronimo in for questioning, the floodgates of information finally opened on the truth surrounding Abraham Reyes’ murder.

Jesus Jeronimo and Angelita Reyes face murder trial

The age difference between 22 year-old Jesus Jeronimo and Angelita, who was in her 40s, suggested to investigators that Angelita held considerable power of persuasion over her then-roommate and boyfriend.

“She wove this tale of being the damsel in distress,” said Arnerich. “And he wanted to be her knight in shining armor.”

After obtaining the pair’s cell phone records, investigators learned that Jesus had asked Arturo Pompa, a friend, to lend him a firearm so that Jesus — fully convinced by Angelita’s blackmail story — could intimidate Abraham into leaving Angelita alone. Pompa agreed to loan Jesus a Desert Eagle .44 magnum handgun, teaching him how to use the gun on the condition that Jesus would use it only to threaten Abraham.

Law enforcement would later discover the weapon at Pompa’s home, uncleaned and still bearing the blood and organic matter that resulted from its use in Abraham Gaspar-Reyes’ killing. Though Pompa was originally charged alongside Jeronimo and Reyes with murder, he was eventually acquitted in the three-part trial that resulted in the pair’s criminal conviction.

Arturo Pompa “supposedly provided the handgun for this homicide,” explained Detective Mario Martin, now retired from the Tulare County District Attorney’s Office. “But he did not pull the trigger. And I think a jury probably felt they didn’t know how much Arturo might have taken part in the actual killing, moving of the body, or even luring him to that location. It comes down to the killer couple of Angelita and Jesus, because they’re the ones that actually did the killing.”

Jesus Jeronimo’s demeanor under questioning ultimately led law enforcement to all the additional information they needed to build a solid case against both Jeronimo and Angelita Reyes.

“Some dam inside him, emotional dam, just broke,” remembered Arnerich. “And it’s kind of like that old saying — confession is good for the soul. He spilled everything.”

Jeronimo confessed to pulling the trigger and murdering Abraham Reyes, with investigators further learning that Angelita was indeed with him as the couple lured Reyes to the orchard site of the murder under a false pretense of returning some missing jewelry. Abraham appeared to have approached the orchard in good faith: Pieces of Angelita’s jewelry were found inside his abandoned truck two miles from the place where he was killed.

“Jesus pulled the trigger, but [Angelita] set the wheels in motion and essentially laid the trap,” said Clower.

At trial in July 2018, a Tulare County jury found both Angelita Reyes and Jesus Geronimo guilty of first-degree murder for the killing of Abraham Gaspar-Reyes. Each was subsequently sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

“I do not wish anyone to go through the pain that I went through — because it is a sad, hard pain,” said Abraham’s mother, Tomasa. “But my happiness is that he is with God, and that that is a better place than here. Because there is a lot of evil in the world.”

Watch all-new episodes of Snapped: Killer Couples on Sundays at 6/5c on Oxygen and streaming on Peacock.