Joey Sanchez in a 2017 mug shot (Texas Department of Public Safety), Jennifer Sanchez in a missing person photo (Texas EquuSearch)
More than five years after a Texas mother of six boys vanished without a trace, her estranged husband admitted to murdering her with an "unknown object" and pointed investigators to where they might find her body.
Joey Leos Sanchez, now 49, was initially charged with capital murder after 39-year-old Jennifer Sanchez was last seen alive on Sept. 7, 2018. Authorities in Harris County suspected from the start that he intentionally killed Jennifer Sanchez "while in the course of committing and attempting to commit retaliation" against her.
The victim's aunt Yvonne has said that Joey Sanchez — a "very violent person" — and Jennifer Sanchez were still married at the time she was murdered and that she had sought a restraining order against him.
Charging documents noted that the defendant, indeed, had a violent past, having been convicted in 1996 of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
Texas Department of Public Safety records show that Joey Sanchez is a convicted sex offender who served substantial time behind bars starting in the mid-nineties for the aggravated sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl.
His mug shots from 2012 to 2018 tell the story of his past.
Joey Sanchez (from top left to bottom right) in Texas Department of Public Safety mug shots from 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2017, 2018, and 2018.
The images are also a window into Sanchez's future: 50 years of incarceration for Jennifer Sanchez's murder.
On Monday, Joey Sanchez "pleaded true" to first-degree murder and was sentenced to serve five decades behind bars in the custody of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
Court documents included the finding that the defendant did use a deadly weapon to murder Jennifer but that weapon was not a firearm. Rather, it was an "unknown object" used to perpetrate a heinous act of family violence.
Local CBS affiliate KHOU reported that the admitted killer said he hit Jennifer Sanchez with a beer bottle and strangled her.
Joey Sanchez also, for the first time, claimed he discarded the victim's remains in Galveston.
"We don't know if it's the truth. If he did throw her in the ocean, it's just a pinpoint," Jennifer's mother Ofelia Gomez told KHOU.