SHE HIRED ME ON CRAIGSLIST TO KILL HER!
Joseph Lopez confesses to executing Natalie Bollinger — but swears she asked him to do it after they met online
Joseph Lopez told cops that he ran across the chilling ad while browsing Craigslist’s “Women Seeking Men” section in the middle of the night around Christmas in 2017. “I want to put a hit on myself,” read the subject line. Soon after, he claims, he reached out to the young woman who’d posted the horrifying request, 19-year-old Natalie Bollinger, and arranged to meet with her on Dec. 28. He was only planning to talk to her, Lopez allegedly told cops, “until he gained her trust and then he would try to convince her that it was a bad idea and that she shouldn’t do it.”
But within a few hours, she was dead. The Broomfield, Colo., teen’s body was found the next day, in a wooded area in a neighboring county. She had been shot in the head, execution-style, while kneeling. An autopsy revealed that Natalie, who reportedly had a history of drug use, also had a “potentially lethal level of heroin in the blood at the time of death.” After getting access to her phone, police found 111 text messages between her and Lopez, 22, and after they stopped him on his way to work at a Domino’s pizzeria on Feb. 8, he spilled his shocking story. “[He told cops] that it was eating away at him,” according to a police affidavit, “and that several times he felt like just calling the police himself and confessing to shooting Natalie.” But the Craigslist ad does not appear to still be online, and the young woman’s family thinks Lopez, who was arrested and charged with first-degree murder, killed her in cold blood. “People aren’t even thinking of the fact, this man IS EVIL enough to take her life. Why would he not make this all up?” Natalie’s twin sister, Alycia, wrote on Facebook. “This was set up. This was murder.”
Lopez insists Natalie wanted to die. He told cops that “they discussed how she wanted to be shot and killed and that she wanted it to happen ‘quickly,’” according to the affidavit, and that she agreed to give
him her gun in exchange for his “hit man services.” (That same day, her boyfriend, Joseph Marino, reported her missing, along with his pistol.) After Lopez picked up Natalie, he told cops they drove around looking “at a few places where he would help her commit suicide,” when finally she told him to stop the car at the site of the crime. “He said he was still trying to talk Natalie out of killing herself but she was set on doing it,” authorities say. Lopez told them that he and Natalie then knelt down on the ground and “said a prayer together,” according to the affidavit. “He said he was shaking so he decided to turn his head to the right, away from Natalie and he closed his eyes. Joseph said he fired one single round…striking Natalie in the head.”
Some of those who know Lopez are surprised that the mildmannered anime fan who liked to sing Disney songs and doted on his infant son could be so violent. “He was upbeat, very smart and kind,” Misti Janda, who worked with him for seven months at Domino’s, tells In Touch. “I never saw him angry. When anyone would yell or get mad at him, he would cower.”
But a few years earlier, Lopez had received counseling after writing in his journal in high school about torturing and killing people, he told cops. After graduation, he continued to lead an active fantasy life, creating at least 12 alter egos online, including a hit man named Akai, who he said helped him cope with depression and suicidal thoughts, according to the affidavit. Akai was “charismatic and can lure people in but then turn psycho,” he told cops, and it was under that guise that he interacted with Natalie.
Her loved ones are horrified by his excuses. “This man is covering up lies. Only even worse than lying, he’s making my sister look crazy. It’s disgusting,” Alycia wrote of Lopez, whose preliminary hearing is set for April 27. “My sister did not choose this for herself. The truth will come out.” ◼