LOS ANGELES (CN) — A former civilian employee of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency was sentenced to 40 years in prison on Friday for plotting to kidnap and kill his estranged wife, whom he had strangled to death.
U.S. District Judge Josephine Staton called the crimes of 38-year-old Eddy Reyes “heinous” and the “product of pure evil,” at a hearing in Downtown Los Angeles.
“This defendant carried out a despicable, cold-blooded murder of his own wife and now appropriately faces the consequences,” said United States Attorney Martin Estrada, in a written statement.
Both prosecutors and Reyes had asked the judge for a sentence of 30 years.
Reyes’ attorney wrote, in a memo, that Reyes is “extremely remorseful and admittedly will always regret his actions.”
He added: “Reyes did try to locate Claudia’s remains near the Salton Sea. However, it is important to note that Reyes did not bury her, and he was not present when she was buried by his half-brother, P.O.”
Reyes met his future wife and victim, Claudia Sanchez, in El Salvador in 2014, when she was 16. They got married, had a son and immigrated to the U.S. According to court documents, Reyes had a history of domestic violence, and his wife obtained restraining orders against him twice, in 2014 and 2016.
Prosecutors say that by 2016, Reyes suspected that his wife was cheating on him. He contacted his half-brother — “a one-time gang member and gravedigger in El Salvador,” according to the Department of Justice — and asked him to kill his wife.
In May 2016, Reyes called his wife at work and told her he would pick her up and take her out to dinner. Instead, he drove to his mother’s house in Orange, and pulled into the garage. Once the garage door had closed, Reyes’ half-brother, identified in court documents as P.O., jumped out from the SUV’s cargo area into the back seat and grabbed Sanchez. He punched her in the face, then strangled her to death with the seat belt. She was 21 years old.
The next day, Reyes used his wife’s phone to send a text message to her co-workers, saying she would not be coming into work that day.
P.O., who is now dead, used the phone to text a paralegal working for Sanchez’s divorce lawyer, saying she was no longer in need of the attorney’s services. He also texted Sanchez’s mother, reading in part: “The truth Mom is that I met a white American man with blue eyes that’s going to take me to New York and because I don’t love eddy or the boy although eddy loves me very much I’m going to leave with this American man… And because we’re going to take the bus and there won’t be internet signal I’m going to disconnect this telephone so eddy won’t follow me I will contact you when I get there.”
According to the criminal complaint, Reyes filed a missing person’s report for his wife a little more than two weeks after her murder. But when contacted by the police, Reyes refused to answer any questions. Detectives later found a drop of Reyes’ blood in the SUV, and dog indicated that a dead body had been in the vehicle.
Reyes has been in custody ever since his arrest in 2021. In April, he pleaded guilty to one count of kidnapping resulting in death.