Placerville dad pleads guilty to killing 11-year-old Roman Lopez

A California father and mother killed their 11-year-old son almost four years ago in El Dorado County and then reported the boy missing.

Investigators found Roman Anthony Lopez hidden in a storage bin in the family’s basement later that same day. The couple were charged with torture and child abuse over his death in February 2021. Then, some six months later, in October 2021, Jordan Thomas Piper, 38, and his wife, Lindsay Piper, 40, were also charged with Roman’s murder.

On Thursday, Jordan Piper formally admitted to what he had done.

An autopsy showed that Roman had been severely malnourished and dehydrated. He weighed 42 pounds at the time of his death. Medical records from two years before the child died showed that he weighed 61 pounds. That was the last time he ever saw a doctor. In addition to his intentional starvation regime, Roman was beaten and restrained to his bed with zip ties at night.

At first, the boy’s biological father and adoptive mother insisted they were innocent. But the facade didn’t last.

In May 2022, Lindsay Piper changed her “not guilty” plea to “no contest” on one charge of murder in the second degree. She was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison in July 2022.

Jordan Piper’s plea was changed from not guilty to guilty. Appearing in the El Dorado County Superior Court, he was convicted the same day, according to the El Dorado County District Attorney’s Office. He is set to be sentenced for second-degree murder on Nov. 21.

In the Golden State, the maximum sentence for a conviction on a second-degree murder charge is 15 years to life in prison.

His stepmother made the call early on the day he went missing. Volunteers searched through Placerville, a small town in the Sacramento metropolitan area, for the boy. Just before midnight, authorities found Roman’s body at home.

“It is absolutely horrific and incomprehensible the way Roman was tortured, abused and murdered by his own father,” El Dorado County District Attorney Vern Pierson said in a statement. “Although I recognize that it will never seem like enough prison time for any parent who killed their child, today I believe we secured some measure of justice for Roman Lopez.”

The change of plea came one day after Jordan Piper was sentenced to spend 15 years behind bars in a federal child sexual exploitation case for making “surreptitious recordings” of a girl under 18. He was charged by federal prosecutors for that offense in June 2022.

The two cases are unrelated, but the child sexual exploitation investigation was a product of the murder investigation.

While investigating the child’s murder, officers with the Placerville Police Department seized various digital devices from the Piper household. They discovered child sexual abuse materials produced between October 2019 and January 2020 in Tuolumne and El Dorado counties.

“Approximately 433 nude images of Minor Victim 1 were found on Jordan Piper’s cell phone in the cache and screenshots section of the phone, as well as cache folders and screenshot folders in a secure folder on the phone,” federal agents wrote in a criminal complaint. “Many of those images created by Jordan Piper were focused shots of Minor Victim 1’s genitals or pubic area. In addition, the video camera was placed in a manner to maximize the chances of recording the genitals of Minor Victim 1 and other users of the bathroom.”