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Pediatric dentist Kendra Hatcher thought she’d finally met the man of her dreams. The only problem was that someone else wasn’t willing to let him go.
Hatcher — who devoted her life to helping others across the globe — was gunned down in the parking garage of her Dallas apartment complex on September 2, 2015, according to the Dateline: Secrets Uncovered episode titled “10 Minutes to Sunset.”
An eyewitness spotted a Jeep Cherokee racing out of the parking lot, but it would take investigative skills to connect the dots of the bizarre crime and find the cunning mastermind behind the plot to take the 35-year-old’s life.
Who was Kendra Hatcher?
Before her shocking murder, she was thriving. Hatcher — who spent time in Ecuador during dental school breaks providing dental care for the poor — had a job she loved, working as a pediatric dentist in the Dallas area.
“She was on a different level when it came to just being awesome,” her brother Neil Hatcher remembered.
Hatcher had even seemingly met the love of her life, Dr. Ricardo “Ricky” Paniagua, a handsome dermatologist.
“He complimented her very well,” Hatcher’s close friend Tami Patano shared. “He has this kindness about him and she immediately fell for Ricky and fell hard.”
Although the pair had only been together for a few months, they were already talking about marriage and were about to embark on a romantic trip to Mexico.
All those plans came to an end, however, on the evening of September 2, 2015 when Kendra was gunned down in the parking lot of her Gables Park 17 apartment complex in Dallas, just as she was returning home from work.
What Happened to Kendra Hatcher?
Teen Hashem Saad stumbled on the crime just as he and a friend entered the parking garage, usually reserved just for residents or visitors of those living in the property.
“You could hear just screaming. Straight up screaming,” Saad told Correspondent Keith Morrison.
Saad heard gunshots, tires screeching and then saw a black Jeep Cherokee racing away from the scene with two masked assailants inside the vehicle, all of which he recounted to a 911 dispatcher just moments later.
Hatcher had been shot at close-range in the head and lay crumpled next to her car.
When Dallas Police arrived, Detective Eric Barnes said authorities discovered a magazine from a firearm laying next to her body and noticed her car door had been left slightly ajar.
“I assumed that possibly it was a robbery and during the exit the robber got a little anxious and released the magazine,” Barnes commented.
Hatcher’s purse had been stolen, adding to the robbery gone wrong theory. However, when prosecutor Justin Lord arrived at the scene he questioned why someone would try to commit a robbery behind a secured gate of the parking garage.
“It looked like an execution,” he said.
Surveillance Footage Clues
Paniagua told police that he’d been waiting in the apartment for Hatcher to come home, then briefly left to get some tacos before returning to the complex, only to discover the large police presence.
Barnes noted that he seemed genuinely distraught to learn of his girlfriend’s death.
Investigators decided to focus on that black Jeep Cherokee seen racing out of the parking lot around 7:45 p.m. that night. Grainy surveillance camera footage from the garage showed the driver had been a woman.
The footage also showed that earlier that night the driver had waited for a resident to access the garage and then followed the car inside. Another camera captured the hazy image of an unknown person getting out of the Jeep and walking toward the area Hatcher’s vehicle had been parked. After presumably firing the fatal shot, the figure can be seen jumping back into the passenger side of the Jeep as it raced away.
Dallas Police released still shots of the vehicle and the female driver to the media and quickly got their first break in the case. A man named Luis Ortiz came forward to report that he was the owner of the Jeep. He said he’d loaned the car to his friend Brenda Delgado and had no idea how it became involved in a murder.
“He knew that he needed to come in and talk to help clear his name,” Barnes said.
Delgado told police that she’d been at dinner at Chili’s with Ortiz at the time of the murder and quickly produced a receipt to confirm her alibi. However, she told police that her friend Crystal Cortes, a young single mom, had borrowed the car.
Cortes admitted to being in the parking lot, but first told Barnes that she had her six-year-old son in the car and said they planned to go to a nearby park. She said when she heard a gunshot and saw an armed man running through the parking lot with a mask on she quickly sped out of the lot to get away.
But after police confronted her with the surveillance footage, Cortes eventually changed her story and admitted her son had never been in the car at all. Instead, she said she’d gone to the parking lot with a guy she knew as “Lamar,” who drove a Blue Chrysler Sebring. She claimed he had just planned to rob Hatcher but shot her after she was “stubborn” and didn’t want to hand over her purse.
Cortes was arrested and charged with first-degree murder and police set off to track down “Lamar,” a man they ultimately identified through the help of cell phone data as Kristopher Love.
He denied having any involvement in the murder, but with the help of a specially trained dog named Titan, police were able to recover the .40 caliber handgun used in the shooting hidden deep within the center console of his car.
Love was also taken into custody and charged with capital murder.
A Motive For Murder
Detectives were still trying to piece together the crime, when they learned that Delgado was
Paniagua’s ex-girlfriend. The two had dated for several years and even lived together before Paniagua broke up with her. He started dating Hatcher a few months later.
“She had a very tough time after her breakup with Ricardo,” Barnes said.
The two remained friends after the break up, but Paniagua had no idea that Delgado had begun to stalk him, tracking his location through a Find my Phone app, secretly letting herself into his apartment while he was away and logging into his email account.
Just days before Hatcher was killed, Paniagua had asked Delgado to remove her belongings from his apartment and told her how serious his relationship with Hatcher had become.
Cortes and Love eventually flipped on Delgado and told police that she had recruited them to carry out the crime. While Love insisted he was only hired to steal her purse, Cortes said that Delgado had “pretty much set everything up.”
Before police could make an arrest however, Delgado fled to Mexico. Although she was on the run, authorities still formally indicted her for capital murder.
Seven months after the murder, Delgado was placed on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitive’s list and authorities offered a reward up to $100,000 for information on her whereabouts. She was apprehended a short time later and prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty to get Mexico to agree to extradition.
Cortes pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against Love and Delgado as part of a plea deal. Love was convicted of capital murder in his own separate trial in 2018 and was sentenced to death.
Delgado went on trial in June of 2019. Prosecutors called a series of others who claimed Delgado had also asked them to carry out the murder and Cortes testified about how Delgado had helped plot the killing. It took a jury just 18 minutes to convict her. She was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
