Three charged in love triangle turned murderous

They lived off the books: four illegal Mexican immigrants with restaurant jobs scattered across three counties.

Then their lives twined together with a love triangle, kindled in a Norristown restaurant, that resulted in a scorned husband's beating death with a landscaping brick. The remaining three now face potential death sentences for a murder-for-hire plot that allegedly followed years of spousal abuse.

"Hiring a hit man to take your husband's life is not the preferred method to end that problem," Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman said Tuesday.

The slain man's widow, her boyfriend, and the boyfriend's brother all spent their lives eluding official notice to stay at U.S. jobs. But one of their few appearances on the grid of official life - cell-phone records - eventually led Montgomery County investigators along a high-tech trail that pierced cover stories and solved the April 9 murder of Jose Armando Cazares-Olarte, officials said.

According to court records, Cazares-Olarte, 32, worked at a pizza place at 35th Street and Lancaster Avenue. In Collingdale, Delaware County, he had a stormy marriage with Delia Hernandez-Cortes, 27.

At 5-foot-8, he was nearly a foot taller than her, and in 2003 faced charges - eventually dropped - in Philadelphia over allegedly beating her after she questioned his fidelity. Their daughter and two sons, all under 12, lived in Mexico with Hernandez-Cortes' mother. Frequently after work, he would get drunk and sleep in his GMC Denali in front of their home.

In early 2010, Hernandez-Cortes got a job at La Pablonita in Norristown. The job lasted a few days, long enough for Hernandez-Cortes to spark a romance with coworker Gabriel Martinez-Lopez, 21. She told him of her husband's violence, and between them - accounts differ on the originator - a plan emerged to murder Cazares-Olarte. She would give her lover $500 to buy a gun and throw in her husband's truck later.

To get help, Martinez-Lopez promised money to his older brother, Jose Miguel Martinez-Lopez, 26, who worked at an Outback Steakhouse in Devon. The brothers jumped Cazares-Olarte in Collingdale early April 9, as he arrived home from the pizza shop, but did not shoot him because of potential neighborhood witnesses. They put him in the covered bed of their pickup and drove to King of Prussia, where they lived.

There, he was beaten to death on a street. After many phone calls to discuss their progress during the evening, Gabriel Martinez-Lopez reported to Hernandez-Cortes that her husband's body, "far from you and close to me," would be discovered soon, according to a detectives' affidavit.

Detectives identified Cazares-Olarte by going to the pizza shop named on his shirt. After his wife said she had been mystified by his disappearance, investigators consulted T-Mobile records for Cazares-Olarte's cell phone, which led them to Gabriel Martinez-Lopez - the last man the victim called.

Both Martinez-Lopez brothers confessed. Afterward, so did Hernandez-Cortez. Authorities charged all three with first-degree murder and other crimes.

"They shouldn't be here in the first place," Ferman said.

At an arraignment Tuesday, Hernandez-Cortez's face flushed and frowned when the potential death sentence was announced, though prosecutors have not said they will pursue it. All three are held without bail until their next hearing May 13.

"As an abused wife who is illegally here, she was kind of caught between a rock and a hard place," Hernandez-Cortes' public defender, Edward Rideout, said afterward. "Go to the authorities, and you're afraid they're going to deport you. Obviously, this was the wrong thing to do."