Jorge Avila-Torrez

On Mother's Day in May 2005, eight-year-old Laura Hobbs and nine-year-old Krystal Tobias went out to play together on their bicycles, but failed to return by nightfall. Their families, police and volunteers searched for the girls all night, but to no avail.[2] The following day, Hobbs's father, Jerry, found their bodies in Beulah Park Forest Preserve.[3] Both girls had suffered 31 stab wounds to the necks and faces,[4][5] with their eyeballs removed from the eye sockets. In addition, they were sexually assaulted, which investigators failed to notice in the preliminary investigation.[2]

Upon discovery, authorities immediately focused on Jerry Hobbs, as he was an ex-convict who had moved to the city in the summer of 2005 from Texas, in an effort to reconcile with his girlfriend and three children, following an incident where he chased off a man attempting to court her with a chainsaw.[2] They arrested him for possession of a knife, and after a lengthy interrogation, he confessed to the murders.[4] He spent the following five years in a Lake County jail awaiting trial, despite his defense team and a private laboratory finding that semen samples from Laura's body did not match Jerry in 2008.[2] At the time, the 16-year-old Avila-Torrez lived in the neighborhood, and was acquainted with the girls, as he was friends with Krystal's older half-brother.

After his arrest, Avila-Torrez was housed with 37-year-old Osama El-Atari, a former restaurateur jailed for defrauding several banks of $53 million.[6][7] In exchange for a lesser sentence, El-Atari had agreed to carry a wiretap on him, and during one of their recorded conversations, he asked Jorge if he feels any remorse. In response, Avila-Torrez replied in the negative and directly implicated himself in all three murders.[6] In his 2014 federal jury trial, backed by the jailhouse confession, El-Atari's testimony and the DNA evidence, Avila-Torrez was sentenced to death for the Snell murder, in addition to receiving 168 years of imprisonment on the state level for his other crimes.[2][7] At the time, he was the first person to receive a federal death penalty since 2007.[4]

Following these trials, he was extradited to Lake County and held in the county jail, after his initial housing in the Red Onion State Prison. By that time, Jerry Hobbs had been officially exonerated and successfully sued various law agencies in Lake County, but was again jailed in Archer City, Texas following a police pursuit for various small crimes, receiving several years' imprisonment in 2016.[2] As for Avila-Torrez, he was again put on trial for the murder of the two girls that same year. His defense attorney, Jed Stone, attempted to dismiss the DNA evidence as "substandard and weak", additionally pointing out that El-Atari's testimony should be discarded, as he was found murdered during an unrelated robbery in Maryland that February.[7] Stone also noted that Jorge's abusive childhood was a contributing factor for his murderous inclinations. After negotiations between the prosecutors and Stone, he secured a guilty plea from his client, in exchange for 100 years' imprisonment and a transfer from Red Onion State Prison, which he called "an evil, racist facility".[5] At his sentencing, presiding Justice Daniel Shanes told Avila-Torrez that he was a serial killer, and if he has even a spark of goodness, it is so far out of his reach that it's unattainable. Currently, Jorge Avila-Torrez is detained in USP Terre Haute, awaiting execution.[3]

• List of death row inmates in the United States
• List of serial killers in the United States