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Faith Hedgepeth was a UNC sophomore when she was killed on Sept. 7, 2012. Her murder was unsolved until Sept. 16, 2021, when Chapel Hill police made an arrest in her case. The murder trial begins Sept. 28, 2026. Here’s ongoing coverage about Hedgepeth and the case.
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Wearing orange scrubs, Miguel Salguero Olivares held a handwritten note up to the camera during a jailhouse video call with his longtime friend, Katie Ellen.
“Im so happy to see you,” it said.
Katie began to cry.
“Don’t cry, baby,” he told her.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to cry in front of you,” she replied.
Salguero Olivares answered by forming a heart with his fingers and holding it up to the camera.
For two weeks, jurors in the Faith Hedgepeth murder trial had heard about Salguero Olivares as a murder suspect. Now they were seeing him as a friend.
But there was more heartbreak in the Durham County courtroom Monday than most knew. The recording captured a moment with a woman whose life, along with her infant daughter’s, ended in tragedy.
In June 2024, deputies found the bodies of Katie and her 7-month-old daughter inside their Lexington home. Katie, 31, had died of a fentanyl overdose, and her baby had died of dehydration after her mother’s death.
Among those watching the recording in the courtroom was Katie’s mother, who has spent the past two years mourning her daughter and granddaughter. Now, she has taken her daughter’s place in supporting the man Katie believed was innocent.
“I am supporting Miguel. She was 100% convinced of his innocence,” Laura Ellen told The News & Observer in interviews.
The recording was shown during testimony by State Bureau of Investigation agent Justin Heinrich. Prosecutors had introduced a photograph of the handwritten note Salguero Olivares held up during the call, seeking to link his handwriting to a note found at the scene of Hedgepeth’s killing.
But it was the defense that played the video for jurors during cross-examination, while questioning Heinrich about whether Katie had told Salguero Olivares she loved him.
Salguero Olivares is charged with first-degree murder, rape and burglary in the September 2012 killing of Hedgepeth, a 19-year-old UNC-Chapel Hill student. Prosecutors say DNA evidence links him to Hedgepeth, a rum bottle they allege he used to beat her, and other items found in her apartment.
He has pleaded not guilty, told police he didn’t know Hedgepeth or have sex with her, and has no significant criminal history.
Katie attended and graduated from UNC around 2015, but she didn’t know Hedgepeth, her mother said.
Katie’s only connection to the case was through Salguero Olivares, whom she met the year Hedgepeth was killed.
Katie and Salguero Olivares met around 2012, working at a local pizzeria on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, Laura Ellen said.
They were born just days apart, both the youngest children in their families, and quickly became friends.
“They were both the baby of the family,” Laura Ellen said.
Katie played bass drum in the university’s marching band. She spoke Spanish and was one class away from completing a minor in the language, her mother said.
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Salguero Olivares was a recent immigrant from Guatemala, and the two often spoke Spanish together.
When Salguero Olivares was arrested in 2021, Katie thought back to the time they had spent together nearly a decade earlier, her mother said. She struggled to reconcile the accusations with the man she knew.
She had spent time with him around the time Hedgepeth was killed.
If he had committed such a terrible crime, she couldn’t imagine him returning to work and behaving normally, Katie told her mother
But Katie wanted to look into his eyes and ask him herself, Laura Ellen said. Eventually she did, in one of the many calls she had with him.
Afterward, she called her mother.
“I knew. I just knew he didn’t do it,” Laura Ellen recalled her daughter saying.
Katie was musical from an early age, her mother said. She took piano lessons, played flute in middle school and became drum major her senior year of high school. At UNC, she played in the marching, basketball and symphonic bands.
After she graduated from UNC around 2014 with a degree in biology, she worked multiple jobs before taking a customer service role at Duke TIP, the Talent Identification Program.
Katie inherited a house in Lexington from her aunt and moved away from Durham around 2019.
Her mother believed the move separated Katie from people who cared for her.
“She lost touch with joyful, caring people like Miguel and her life changed,” Laura Ellen said.
About three months ago, in a Davidson County courtroom, about 85 miles west of Durham, Laura Ellen sat through a weeklong trial involving her daughter’s and her granddaughter’s deaths.
Katie had been clean since her daughter’s birth, her mother said she learned, but a man named Donta Williams coerced and exploited her vulnerabilities and sold her drugs.
The jury convicted Williams, 37, of High Point, of death by distribution and involuntary manslaughter. He was sentenced to up to 22 years in prison.
“It’s cold comfort,” Laura Ellen said.
In the February 2023 video played for the jury this week, Salguero Olivares teased Katie about how long it had been since she had spoken Spanish. He smiled broadly, scrambling to find a piece of paper and something to write with as they struggled with audio problems. Katie wiped away tears while he tried to make sure she could hear him.
Katie wanted to get his public defender’s name, she said, in case he wanted her to testify.
In the Durham courtroom, Laura Ellen remembered Katie telling her about the conversation. Like her daughter, she struggles to reconcile prosecutors’ account of the killing with the man Katie knew and trusted, who had no known history of violence. She worries that others have already made up their minds about his guilt.
Katie was no longer there to stand by her friend. But her mother is now carrying on what her daughter started.
“This is my purpose right now. Whatever I can do for Miguel, I want to do” she said.
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Testimony in the trial is set to resume Wednesday, Oct. 21, around 9:30 a.m.
This story was originally published October 20, 2026 at 12:16 PM.