Houston Man Sentenced to Life in Prison for 2009 Murder of Mother of Five

Jorge Trevino Cardenas, a 52-year-old Houston man, was sentenced to life in prison on Thursday after being convicted of murder in the 2009 fatal stabbing of Domitila Alvarez, a 38-year-old mother of five. The announcement came from Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg, who praised the persistence of investigators in solving the cold case.

Alvarez was attacked and killed at her family’s auto shop in the Alief area on April 24, 2009. She had gone to the shop that evening to handle some business alone. Hours later, family members discovered her body inside the office, where she had been repeatedly stabbed with a long knife during a violent altercation. Bloodstains were found not only on Alvarez’s clothes but also on the door leading out of the office, on security bars outside the door, and on a nearby truck.

Despite a thorough investigation, police were initially unable to identify a suspect, and the case went cold. However, in 2021, as part of a case review project, the Houston Police Department’s Homicide Division Cold Case Squad re-examined the evidence. Investigators found that DNA collected from the crime scene matched Cardenas’s DNA, which had been entered into a database after his 2014 conviction for sexual assault of a child. The DNA match was confirmed on multiple items, including Alvarez’s clothes and the areas leading away from the scene, suggesting Cardenas cut himself during the attack and left a trail of blood mixed with Alvarez’s.

Cardenas was arrested and charged with murder in January 2023. The trial lasted four days, and the jury convicted him of murder. In addition to the forensic evidence, a witness who knew Cardenas testified that he lived near the auto shop at the time of the murder, worked as a security guard nearby, and carried a long, fixed-blade knife with a serrated edge. Medical experts determined that Alvarez had been killed with a similar type of knife.

Assistant District Attorneys Christopher Condon and Michael Simons led the prosecution. Condon highlighted the importance of DNA in the case, stating, “DNA does not lie, it does not forget — it waits. There was a literal blood trail from the victim’s body to Jorge Cardenas.”

Cardenas, who is already serving a prison sentence for the 2014 sexual assault conviction, must now serve at least 30 years of his life sentence for the murder before he becomes eligible for parole.

“There was no apparent motive for the murder,” DA Kim Ogg said, “but this was a horrific crime, and justice has finally been served for the victim and her family.”