Jorge Avila-Torrez killed three people in two separate attacks four years apart. On Mother's Day 2005, at the age of 16, he stabbed two second-grade best friends, Laura Hobbs and Krystal Tobias, in a park in his hometown of Zion, Illinois. In July 2009, by then a corporal in the U.S. Marine Corps, he killed Amanda Jean Snell, a 20-year-old Navy intelligence specialist who lived a few doors from him in a barracks at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Arlington, Virginia.
Neither crime was solved at the time. In Zion, police charged Laura's father, who had confessed after an interrogation that lasted most of a day and night. He spent five years in the Lake County jail awaiting trial. In Virginia, Amanda Snell's death was first recorded as of undetermined cause. Avila-Torrez was caught only in February 2010, when Arlington police arrested him for abducting three women, one of whom he raped and strangled and left for dead. She survived. His DNA, entered into the national database after that arrest, matched evidence from both earlier killings. Laura's father was released in August 2010.
Avila-Torrez was sentenced to five life terms in Virginia in 2010 and to death by a federal jury in 2014. In 2018 he pleaded guilty to the Zion murders and received 100 years. In December 2024 President Joe Biden commuted his death sentence to life without parole.
Zion is a small city in Lake County, Illinois, on the shore of Lake Michigan between Chicago and Milwaukee, about 45 miles north of Chicago. Avila-Torrez grew up there. His parents had emigrated from Mexico; his father worked at a cardboard factory and his mother kept house, and he was close to his older sister, the Washingtonian reported in a long 2012 account of the case. In May 2005 the family lived two blocks from Beulah Park, according to the same account, and NBC Chicago reported that they lived a block from the homes of the two girls who were killed there.
He was a friend of Krystal Tobias's older brother, who was 15 at the time. That year, the Washingtonian reported, he was expelled from school after police found a small amount of marijuana on him. He would later enlist in the Marine Corps.
Laura Hobbs was 8 and Krystal Tobias was 9. They were in the same second-grade class at Beulah Park Elementary School in Zion Elementary School District 6, the district superintendent told the Associated Press in 2005, and they were best friends. A neighbor told the AP that the two were inseparable: where one went, the other followed. One of their teachers remembered them as very sweet.
At Krystal's funeral, her brother told mourners that she slept with her stuffed animals every night. Friends recalled that she liked picking dandelions and wanted to learn to fish, although she screamed whenever she saw a worm. More than 300 people filled the First Baptist Church in Zion for the service on the Saturday after the killings. Her small white casket was covered with pink roses, and she was buried with teddy bears and a stuffed bulldog, the mascot of her elementary school. Krystal's mother is Marina Tobias.
Laura's mother is Sheila Hollabaugh. The AP reported that a service for Laura was scheduled in Zion for the following day.
On the afternoon of Sunday, May 8, 2005, which was Mother's Day, the two girls went out on their bicycles. When they did not come home, their families raised the alarm. One girl's parents called police at about 8:50 that evening, two hours after she had been due home, and the other family called soon afterward. Police searched through the night with dogs, and family members and volunteers joined in.
The girls were found at dawn on Monday, May 9, in a wooded area of Beulah Park, off a bicycle path, with a bicycle nearby. Both had been stabbed many times. The AP's first report said a resident walking in the park found them; later AP reports said Laura's father found them during the search. The park, which press reports also called the Beulah Park Forest Preserve, has a paved bike path, a ravine and mountain bike trails.
The details of what happened in the park were established years later, in the federal penalty trial in Virginia and through the evidence that led to Avila-Torrez's guilty pleas. A witness had seen the girls talking with someone who looked like him. Medical experts who testified in 2014 concluded that some of Laura's wounds were inflicted while she was still alive. Laura had been sexually assaulted: semen recovered from her body and clothing was later matched to Avila-Torrez. In 2005, however, the Zion police chief said publicly that there was no evidence of sexual assault, and as late as August 2010 the Lake County state's attorney repeated that there was no sign either girl had been sexually assaulted. That error mattered, as the next section explains.
Zion police interviewed Avila-Torrez in 2005, but only as a witness, according to the Washingtonian.
Within days, police had a suspect: Laura's father, identified here by his initials, J.H. He was questioned soon after the girls were found, for about 24 hours in all according to most reports, and at the end of it he signed a written confession and repeated it on video. Prosecutors then announced that he had attacked both girls after Laura refused his order to leave the park and go home. He was charged with first-degree murder and denied bond.
He was innocent. He said the confession had been coerced, the product of nearly nonstop questioning over about two days. Police also cited a small knife they had found, Chronicle Media reported. He stayed in the Lake County jail, never tried, for five years.
The evidence that would clear him was found by his own defense. In about 2007, the Lake County Public Defender's Office identified DNA on Laura's body and established that it was not her father's. Prosecutors did not drop the case. "I don't know why the DNA in and on Laura Hobbs was missed," his public defender, Keith Grant, said in 2010. Rob Warden of Northwestern University's Center on Wrongful Convictions, who worked on the case for years, later put the cost plainly: when the wrong person is charged, he said, the right person remains free to keep doing whatever he was doing.
Avila-Torrez enlisted in the Marine Corps after the Zion killings. Friends later described him to the Washingtonian as solid and dependable, a young man who loved cars and trucks and spent long hours on video games. In April 2009 he was given an administrative job in the Washington area, stationed at the Navy Annex, and moved into Keith Hall, an enlisted barracks at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Arlington, close to the Pentagon. By July 2009 he was an active-duty corporal.
Amanda Snell was 20 and a petty officer second class in the U.S. Navy, an intelligence specialist. Associated Press reports describe her as a native of Las Vegas; the Washingtonian reported that she was born in Twentynine Palms, California, home of a large Marine Corps base, and that her mother, Cynthia Snell, had herself served in the Marines. She was active in the ROTC program in high school and enlisted in the Navy straight after graduating. She did basic training at Great Lakes, Illinois, not far from Zion, and then went to the Navy and Marine Corps Intelligence Training Center in Virginia Beach.
In the fall of 2008 she was assigned to the office of the Chief of Naval Operations at the Pentagon and moved into Keith Hall. Away from work she volunteered as a youth minister at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Alexandria, and she hoped one day to teach special education to children with autism. She was quieter than many of her barracks neighbors. She suffered from migraines, her family said, and sometimes covered her head with a sheet or pillowcase to ease them.
Avila-Torrez lived on the same floor of Keith Hall, about eight doors from her room. He would later tell investigators that he did not know her.
Amanda Snell was killed in her room on July 11, 2009. Avila-Torrez later described the attack to a fellow inmate who was secretly recording him: he said he went into her unlocked room while she slept and attacked her, and the U.S. Attorney's Office summarized his account as binding her wrists with a laptop power cord and strangling her. He then hid her body in her wall locker, and he said he made the bed and tidied the room, leaving the fitted sheet in place.
She was due on duty at the Pentagon at 11 p.m. on Sunday, July 12, and did not arrive. On Monday, July 13, her Navy supervisor found her body in the locker, with a pillowcase over her head. Her room was neat and the bed was made. Her laptop and iPod were missing.
The autopsy found no bruising, no sign of a struggle and no sign of sexual assault, and the medical examiner listed the cause of death as undetermined. Some investigators at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) thought she might have died of natural causes; her family said she had a slight heart defect. John Wagner, then an NCIS deputy assistant director, rejected the undetermined ruling and had the case treated as a homicide. A second medical examiner, retained by the government for the trial, concluded that she died of asphyxia, which the Fourth Circuit noted can occur without any visible injury.
Agents interviewed the residents of the barracks. Avila-Torrez was among them. He let them search his room and gave a DNA sample. Her bedding was collected but, the Washingtonian reported, was not given priority for testing. No one was arrested, and the case stayed open for almost two years.
In early February 2010 an Arlington County police officer noticed a silver Dodge Durango moving slowly through a neighborhood, its driver watching people on the street, and wrote down the license number. The next day, during the heavy snowstorm that Washington called Snowmageddon, the same officer and a colleague followed the vehicle again. On February 5, according to the federal jury's findings, Avila-Torrez bought a Glock pistol, intending to use it in abductions and assaults.
On the night of February 10, in North Arlington, he approached a 26-year-old woman, showed her a gun and a knife and told her to get into his car. She dropped her bag and ran to safety.
On the night of February 27, he confronted two women, both graduate students, at gunpoint and demanded their wallets. When they said they had no money, he forced them into a house and tied their hands. When one of them tried to call 911, he took her to his vehicle, drove her away, raped her, and choked her with her scarf until she lost consciousness. He left her in the woods in Prince William County. She survived: she regained consciousness and was found by passersby, who got her help. A third woman reported being confronted that night by a man with a stun gun before she escaped into her house. None of these women is named here.
The officers who had followed the Durango in the snow made the connection. Within hours, Arlington police had a description, a vehicle, a photograph from the state motor vehicle records and an identification from a photo lineup. Because he lived on a military installation, detectives worked with the base command to obtain authority to search there. On February 27, 2010, less than 12 hours after the abduction, officers arrested Avila-Torrez as he walked up to the Durango on the base.
Inside the vehicle they found the survivor's student identification card, Metro card and an earring, an iron, bloodstains, packing tape and a stun gun. In his room were a loaded Glock pistol and a laptop holding instructions for using chloroform and a collection of violent sexual videos, according to the Fourth Circuit and the Washingtonian. DNA results in May 2010 found his semen on the woman he had raped and her blood in the Durango and on his clothing.
Arlington detective Robert Icolari, a retired Marine gunnery sergeant, told him, "You have dishonored us," the Washingtonian reported. By the time of his trial he had been discharged.
Avila-Torrez was held in the Arlington County Detention Facility. Police came to suspect that he was planning to threaten or harm the women who would testify against him. He drew a map to one survivor's home, was found with a homemade knife and threatened a guard, according to the Washingtonian. The federal jury later found that he had plotted while in jail to have witnesses killed. Prosecutors warned the women, and police kept watch over them.
To learn more, police enlisted another inmate, Osama El-Atari, a federal prisoner held on a bank fraud case, who agreed to wear a recording device in exchange for the hope of a lighter sentence. Over about a week in August 2010 he recorded his conversations with Avila-Torrez.
Avila-Torrez's DNA profile went into the national CODIS database after the Arlington arrest. In June 2010 it matched the semen recovered from Laura Hobbs's body and clothing. The Fourth Circuit later recorded the laboratory's estimate that only one in every 985 quadrillion people would be expected to share that profile. That month two Zion detectives traveled to Arlington with the files on the 2005 killings.
The Zion match moved NCIS to speed up testing of the bedding from Amanda Snell's room. A semen stain on her fitted sheet was found to be consistent with his DNA, and shoe prints in her room were consistent with his shoes. Cell phone location records obtained by a Virginia investigator under a court order placed his phone near the barracks when she died.
In the recordings El-Atari made that August, Avila-Torrez said he had suffocated Snell and called it "the perfect crime." His description of the method changed from one conversation to the next: strangling, a plastic bag, a laptop cord. He said she was a random victim and that he had killed her "for the adrenaline" and because he could. He also told El-Atari that he had killed two girls in Zion when he was 16, and the Fourth Circuit noted that his account of those killings matched the autopsies.
On August 4, 2010, after a short hearing in Waukegan, Lake County prosecutors dismissed every charge against Laura's father. He had been in custody since Mother's Day 2005, about five years. He was driven from the courthouse to a waiting car and left for Texas, where his mother lived.
The state's attorney, Michael Waller, said his office no longer believed the father had any role in the killings, but he defended the original charges, pointing to the written and videotaped confessions, and said: "I don't believe law enforcement did anything wrong in this case." He did not apologize. Avila-Torrez was by then the prime suspect, but he had not yet been charged in Illinois.
Arlington County indicted Avila-Torrez on May 17, 2010, on charges including rape, abduction, robbery and firearms offenses. His trial was held in the Arlington County Circuit Court in October 2010. He did not testify. On a Friday in mid-October 2010 the jury found him guilty on 14 of the 17 counts, among them abduction with intent to defile, rape, forcible sodomy, robbery, armed breaking and entering and use of a firearm in a felony, and acquitted him of three firearms charges. It recommended five life terms, consecutive terms totaling 168 years and a $190,000 fine.
On December 10, 2010, Judge Benjamin Kendrick imposed the sentence the jury had recommended. Two of the three women attended. The judge called Avila-Torrez a coward and a predator and said that he had never really been a Marine. Theo Stamos, the deputy commonwealth's attorney, also called him a predator and said the jury had done exactly the right thing. He was sent to Red Onion State Prison in Virginia.
On May 26, 2011, a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia indicted Avila-Torrez, then 22, for the premeditated first-degree murder of Amanda Snell. "Today, we are charging Jorge Torrez with murdering a young Navy Petty Officer in her barracks," said the U.S. Attorney, Neil MacBride. Cynthia Snell told ARLnow she was waiting for the case to end so that she could finally learn why. He pleaded not guilty, and on February 29, 2012, the government gave notice that it would seek the death penalty.
In early 2013 the trial judge, Liam O'Grady, ordered a competency evaluation on his own motion. A psychiatrist, Richard Ratner, found no diagnosable mental illness and concluded that Avila-Torrez was competent to stand trial and to represent himself, while noting his strong aversion to discussing his personal history and his strong opposition to any mitigation defense. Avila-Torrez decided that representing himself was probably not in his best interests, and the court appointed new counsel.
The trial opened in Alexandria on March 31, 2014. Prosecutors Michael Rich, Jonathan Fahey and James Trump, with Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Heberle, presented the DNA from the sheet, the shoe prints, the phone records and the El-Atari recordings. The defense told jurors that the evidence was shoddy and that the recordings were the boastful talk of two inmates. After deliberating from Monday afternoon until late Tuesday morning, on April 8, 2014, the jury found him guilty of first-degree murder.
In the penalty phase, which began on April 21, 2014, Avila-Torrez instructed his lawyers to present no mitigating evidence and not to challenge the government's case. The court held a private hearing, found him competent and allowed his lawyers to stay on as standby counsel. He sat before the jury in a green jail jumpsuit.
Prosecutors now put the whole history before the jury. They showed photographs from Zion and the evidence that his semen had been found on Laura Hobbs. They described the Arlington abductions, the gun purchase and the jail plots, and played recordings in which he laughed about the killings. Trump told jurors that Avila-Torrez had believed he had "literally gotten away with murder" until his arrest in Virginia, and that he had called himself "an army of one" while preying on defenseless children. "There's no room for doubt," Trump said. "Jorge Torrez deserves to die."
The jury found him eligible for death on two statutory aggravating factors, both based on the Arlington convictions. It also found a series of non-statutory aggravating factors: that he had killed Krystal Tobias and Laura Hobbs in Zion on May 8, 2005; that he had stalked women in early February 2010 intending to assault them; the gun purchase; the Arlington attacks; the jail plots and the homemade knife; a lack of remorse; future dangerousness; and the harm done to Amanda Snell's family. Seven of the twelve jurors found one mitigating factor, that he had been under 18 when he killed the girls. After less than four hours of deliberation, on April 24, 2014, the jury unanimously recommended death.
It was the first death sentence returned at the federal courthouse in Alexandria since 2007. One of his lawyers, Robert Jenkins, said his client preferred death to life in prison and said: "It wasn't as much a trial as it was an assisted suicide." Under federal law the judge had no discretion to depart from the jury's verdict. On May 30, 2014, at a brief hearing in a half-empty courtroom, Judge O'Grady sentenced him to death. Jenkins said that Avila-Torrez maintained his innocence of the Snell murder even as he preferred death, and that he would appeal.
The appeal raised a narrow but serious legal question. The only statutory aggravating factors that made Avila-Torrez eligible for death were his Virginia convictions, and those convictions were for crimes committed seven months after Amanda Snell's death. His lawyers argued that crimes committed after the murder could not count as prior convictions, and that the court should have applied the so-called categorical approach to the Virginia statutes. They also challenged his waiver of mitigation without a second competency evaluation.
On August 28, 2017, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed the conviction and sentence in United States v. Torrez, 869 F.3d 291. Judge Thacker wrote the opinion, and Judge Diaz concurred separately. The majority held that it was bound by the circuit's earlier decision in United States v. Higgs on the timing question, though two judges indicated that without that precedent they might have decided differently. Judge Floyd dissented in part, arguing that the categorical approach applied and that the Virginia convictions would not qualify under it. The court also found that the death sentence was not the product of passion, prejudice or any other arbitrary factor. Rehearing was denied on September 25, 2017, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied review on June 17, 2019.
Illinois prosecutors filed murder charges over the deaths of the two girls in 2012, after saying the DNA linked him to the crime, according to the AP. Michael Nerheim, who was not Lake County state's attorney when Laura's father was charged, said he would bring Avila-Torrez back to Illinois for trial whatever happened in Virginia, a decision the girls' families supported. Illinois no longer had the death penalty.
He was returned to Lake County in November 2014 and pleaded not guilty on November 20, 2014. He faced 18 counts of murder. His lawyer, Jed Stone, told the court in October 2015 that the DNA evidence was "junk" and that the defense would argue the girls had been killed by Laura's father, relying on the confession that prosecutors themselves had long ago abandoned. In 2015 Avila-Torrez went on a hunger strike in jail. On November 29, 2017, Lake County Circuit Judge Daniel Shanes ruled the DNA evidence admissible, rejecting the defense argument that it was only a partial and inconclusive match. He did not allow prosecutors to play the full El-Atari recordings and required a transcript instead; El-Atari had since died.
The trial never took place. On September 18, 2018, Avila-Torrez, then 30, pleaded guilty to the murders of Laura Hobbs and Krystal Tobias under an agreement with prosecutors that dropped other charges. Judge Shanes sentenced him to 100 years in prison, 50 for each girl. "You are a serial killer," the judge told him, and said he had earned every day of the sentence. Outside court, Krystal's mother, Marina Tobias, said the result meant that he would never be able to hurt anyone again. Steve Schiller, an assistant state's attorney in the case, said later that the office could not call itself satisfied with a case so brutal, and credited the result to good police work. He was expected to be moved into federal custody, the AP reported; he had wanted to leave Red Onion.
On December 23, 2024, President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The White House fact sheet listed "JORGE AVILA TORREZ" by name and register number. The administration said the action was consistent with the moratorium on federal executions it had imposed and would prevent the next administration from carrying out sentences that would not be sought under current policy. The three men left under federal death sentences had been convicted of terrorism or hate-motivated mass murder; Avila-Torrez was not among them.
As of October 18, 2026, Avila-Torrez is in federal custody at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate locator, which lists him under register number 16054-084, aged 38, with a projected release of "LIFE." He is serving life without parole on the federal murder conviction, alongside the Virginia and Illinois sentences. No later court ruling or news report about his case was found when this was checked.
Laura's father filed a federal civil rights suit in December 2010 against the officers he said had coerced his confession, alleging that he had been physically and psychologically tortured into it. The case was settled in 2014 for $7.75 million, which his lawyer, Kathleen Zellner, described as the largest civil rights settlement in Lake County history; some reports give the figure as about $8 million. In November 2010, three months after his release, he went to Springfield to meet lawmakers who were considering a bill to abolish the death penalty in Illinois. "I thought about my daughter a lot more than I thought about myself," he said of his years in jail. "The death penalty is wrong."
His case was one of several that drew national attention to the Lake County State's Attorney's Office under Michael Waller. ABC7 Chicago reported in 2018 that four other cases had shown DNA evidence of innocence being disregarded by the office in that period, and that in all five men had spent a combined 80 years in custody. The case led to reforms in the Lake County justice system, ABC7 reported. His lawyers argued that if Lake County investigators had not fixed on the wrong man, Amanda Snell and the women of Arlington might never have been harmed.
The arrest in Arlington, made possible by two officers who had noted a license plate in the snow and by a survivor who identified her attacker, produced the DNA that resolved both earlier cases: a murder that NCIS had not solved and a double murder in which the wrong man had been charged.
Proven by final convictions: the murder of Amanda Snell (federal jury verdict, 2014); the murders of Laura Hobbs and Krystal Tobias (guilty pleas, 2018); and the Arlington abduction, rape, sodomy and robbery counts (jury verdict, 2010).
Proven but contested by him: Avila-Torrez never admitted the Snell murder in court. His lawyer said in 2014 that he maintained his innocence of it, and at trial the defense called his jail statements boasting.
Unsupported claims: in the recordings made by Osama El-Atari, Avila-Torrez claimed to have killed 23 people. No source links him to any killing beyond the three for which he was convicted, and the same recordings contained boasts about crimes he did not commit, according to his lawyers' filings to the Supreme Court. His statements about how he killed Amanda Snell changed between conversations.
Wrongly charged: Laura's father, who was held for five years on a confession he said was coerced and was cleared by DNA in 2010. The defense theory in Illinois that he committed the murders was never tested at trial and was abandoned when Avila-Torrez pleaded guilty.
Details that vary between sources: who found the girls' bodies (a passing resident in the first AP report; Laura's father in later reports); whether the girls were sexually assaulted (denied by police in 2005 and by the state's attorney in 2010; the DNA evidence and the federal jury's findings show that Laura was); how long the father was questioned (about 24 hours in most reports, "more than 20 hours" or two days of near-continuous questioning in others); the year the excluding DNA was found (about 2007 or about two years before 2010); the year the Illinois charges were filed (2012 according to the AP; one magazine account says 2011); Amanda Snell's hometown (Las Vegas, or born in Twentynine Palms, California); the date of the second Arlington attack (February 27, 2010, in the court record; the night of February 26 in one magazine account); and the settlement figure ($7.75 million or about $8 million).
1988: Jorge Avila-Torrez is born; he grows up in Zion, Illinois.
May 8, 2005: Laura Hobbs, 8, and Krystal Tobias, 9, are stabbed to death in Beulah Park, Zion; they are found at dawn the next day.
May 2005: Laura's father is questioned for about 24 hours, confesses and is charged with murder; Avila-Torrez, 16, is interviewed as a witness.
After 2005: Avila-Torrez enlists in the Marine Corps.
About 2007: the Lake County Public Defender's Office finds DNA on Laura's body that does not belong to her father.
Fall 2008: Amanda Snell is assigned to the Pentagon and moves into Keith Hall.
April 2009: Avila-Torrez moves into Keith Hall.
July 11, 2009: Amanda Snell, 20, is killed in her barracks room.
July 13, 2009: her body is found in her wall locker; the cause of death is first listed as undetermined.
February 10, 2010: attempted abduction of a woman at gunpoint in North Arlington.
February 27, 2010: two women robbed and bound; one abducted, raped and left for dead; she survives. Avila-Torrez is arrested on the base the same day.
May 17, 2010: Arlington County indictment.
June 2010: his DNA matches the evidence from Laura Hobbs.
August 2010: El-Atari records his admissions in the Arlington jail.
August 4, 2010: charges against Laura's father are dropped; he is released after about five years.
October 2010: Arlington jury convicts Avila-Torrez on 14 of 17 counts.
December 10, 2010: five life terms plus 168 years.
December 2010: Laura's father sues the officers who questioned him.
May 26, 2011: federal indictment for the murder of Amanda Snell.
February 29, 2012: notice of intent to seek death.
2012: Illinois murder charges filed (AP).
February 2013: found competent after a court-ordered evaluation.
2014: Laura's father settles his civil suit for $7.75 million.
March 31, 2014: federal trial opens in Alexandria.
April 8, 2014: convicted of first-degree murder.
April 24, 2014: the jury recommends death and finds that he killed the two Zion girls.
May 30, 2014: Judge Liam O'Grady imposes the death sentence.
November 20, 2014: pleads not guilty in Lake County.
August 28, 2017: Fourth Circuit affirms (869 F.3d 291); rehearing denied September 25, 2017.
November 29, 2017: Judge Daniel Shanes rules the DNA evidence admissible.
September 18, 2018: pleads guilty to the Zion murders; sentenced to 100 years.
June 17, 2019: U.S. Supreme Court denies review.
December 23, 2024: President Biden commutes his death sentence to life without parole.
October 18, 2026: held at USP Terre Haute, release listed as "LIFE."