Pamela Fayed Murder: The Attack, Trial, and e-Bullion Fraud

Pamela Fayed was stabbed to death on July 28, 2008, in a Century City parking garage in Los Angeles. Her estranged husband, James Michael Fayed, paid an employee $25,000 to arrange the killing to stop her from cooperating with a federal investigation into their gold-trading business and to prevent her from claiming half of roughly $12 million in marital assets in their divorce. He was convicted of first-degree murder in 2011 and sentenced to death. The three men who carried out the attack were later convicted and sentenced to life without parole. The murder of Pamela Fayed also exposed a $35-million-a-month illegal money-transmitting operation that federal authorities eventually shut down, recovering about $23.3 million for more than 1,000 victims.

The Attack in the Century City Garage

On the afternoon of July 28, 2008, Pamela Fayed left a meeting at the Watt Tower complex in Century City. She and James had just sat down with their respective attorneys to discuss the federal investigation into their gold-trading businesses. Minutes after she walked into the parking garage toward her SUV, three men attacked her. She was stabbed 13 times in the head, neck, and chest, and her throat was cut. A judge later described the screams that echoed through the structure as “bloodcurdling.”¹

Surveillance cameras caught the attackers fleeing in a red SUV rented through the couple’s company, Goldfinger Coin & Bullion. Other cameras recorded pedestrians reacting to the screams and moving toward the sound. James Fayed sat on a bench outside the building, texting on his phone. Prosecutors later pointed to that stillness as proof he knew what was happening.²

Who Pamela Fayed Was and Why She Was Targeted

Pamela and James Fayed married in 1999 and together built a precious metals and digital currency enterprise based in Camarillo, California. Their company Goldfinger Coin & Bullion ran the website e-Bullion.com, which let customers buy, hold, and transfer gold and silver online. The couple owned a home in Camarillo, a ranch in Moorpark, and bullion vaults in the United States, Switzerland, and Australia. Their combined assets sat around $12 million.³

Pamela had two daughters: Desiree, from a previous relationship, and Jeanett, her daughter with James. In April 2007, she consulted a friend and learned that Goldfinger needed a federal money-transmitting license to operate legally. She wrote a $400,000 check to secure the license over her husband’s objections.⁴

The couple filed for divorce in October 2007. During the proceedings, James accused Pamela of embezzling $800,000 from Goldfinger and tried to block her access to the business records. By mid-2008, Pamela had learned that Goldfinger and James were the subjects of a sealed federal indictment. Her attorney reached out to an assistant U.S. attorney to signal that she wanted to cooperate. She was killed before that meeting happened.

Prosecutors argued James Fayed had two motives, feeding each other. He did not want to hand over half of the couple’s assets in the divorce, and he did not want Pamela describing the inner workings of e-Bullion to federal investigators.

The Murder-for-Hire Chain

James Fayed recruited Jose Luis Moya, the employee who managed the couple’s Moorpark ranch, and offered him $25,000 to arrange the killing. Moya brought in his niece’s boyfriend, Gabriel Jay Marquez, who in turn brought in his nephew, Steven Vicente Simmons, to do the stabbing.⁴ The appellate court later identified Simmons as the person who “probably did the actual killing.”⁵

Prosecutors said James had tried to have Pamela killed on earlier occasions, including at a Fourth of July party in Malibu, but those attempts fell through.¹

How Investigators Broke the Case

LAPD Detective Eric Spear traced the red SUV from garage footage to an Avis location near the couple’s Camarillo business. It had been rented with a credit card tied to Goldfinger. When investigators recovered the vehicle, they found Pamela’s blood inside even though the interior had been steam-cleaned.⁴

A fingerprint belonging to Simmons turned up on a parking garage ticket. Cell tower records placed both Simmons and Marquez near the garage at the time of the killing. Text messages between James Fayed and Moya, which Fayed had deleted, were recovered and filled in more of the plot.

James Fayed was briefly arrested and questioned on July 29, 2008, the day after the murder, but invoked his right to remain silent and was released. Three days later federal agents arrested him on the sealed indictment charging him with running an unlicensed money-transmitting business. A search of the Moorpark ranch found $60,000 in cash, $3 million in gold bullion, and 25 weapons including assault rifles.⁶

The Jailhouse Recording

The case’s biggest break came in September 2008. While Fayed was in federal detention on the money-transmitting charge, his cellmate, a convicted cocaine dealer named Shawn Smith, told authorities Fayed had confessed. LAPD Detective Salaam Abdul fitted Smith with a hidden recorder and sent him back to the cell.⁴

On the recording, Fayed admitted paying Moya $25,000 to have Pamela killed. He complained that the attackers had botched earlier chances to kill her in remote spots without cameras and said she “wouldn’t listen to reason.” He then asked Smith to help arrange a hit on Moya to eliminate him as a witness.² On September 15, 2008, Fayed and Moya were charged with first-degree murder, and the federal money-transmitting indictment was dismissed the same day.

Trial, Conviction, and Death Sentence

James Fayed’s trial took place in 2011 before Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy. Prosecutors built their case on the garage surveillance video, the rental SUV with Pamela’s blood, the cell phone and text records, Simmons’s fingerprint, and the jailhouse recording, which was played for the jury with a written transcript.⁷

Fayed maintained his innocence. His attorneys challenged the recording on Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment grounds, arguing Smith was acting as a government agent and that the federal detention was a pretext to bypass Fayed’s right to counsel. They also tried to shift blame to one of Fayed’s sisters. Judge Kennedy later said there was “no evidence at all” behind that theory.¹

On May 19, 2011, the jury convicted Fayed of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. It found true two special circumstances: murder for financial gain and murder by lying in wait. On May 31, 2011, after about three days of deliberation in the penalty phase, the jury recommended death.⁷

During the penalty phase, Pamela’s sisters, her brother Scott Goudie and his wife, her daughter Desiree, and several friends gave victim impact testimony. Desiree read a personal letter Pamela had left for her and Jeanett. Goudie, who became Jeanett’s legal guardian, told the court the family could not find “complete peace” while Fayed was alive because of what he was “capable of doing and how far can he reach.”¹

On November 17, 2011, Judge Kennedy sentenced Fayed to death for the murder and to 25 years to life for the conspiracy. She called him “one cold, calculating human being,” pointing to the surveillance video of him texting outside “like he doesn’t have a care in the world” while his wife was being killed.¹

What Happened to the Three Attackers

Moya, Marquez, and Simmons were tried separately. On February 20, 2015, a jury convicted all three of first-degree murder and conspiracy. The jurors found the lying-in-wait special circumstance true as to each man and the financial-gain special circumstance true as to Moya, who had accepted the $25,000.⁸ All three received life without parole. Their appeals, focused on the use of Fayed’s jailhouse recording at their trial, were rejected by California’s Second District Court of Appeal in February 2018, and the California Supreme Court declined to review the case that June.⁵

The e-Bullion Fraud Pamela Was Ready to Expose

The federal investigation Pamela had planned to help ultimately shut down what the FBI called an unlicensed money-transmitting business. At its peak, about $35 million per month moved through e-Bullion.com, which had more than a million users worldwide. The platform’s near-total anonymity made it attractive to operators of high-yield investment scams and Ponzi schemes, who used it to collect and launder stolen funds. When those schemes collapsed, Fayed’s companies absorbed the abandoned money.⁹

After the FBI and IRS shut the operation down in 2008, U.S. authorities worked with counterparts in Australia and accessed encrypted servers in Switzerland to identify account holders. Through civil forfeiture, the government eventually returned about $23.3 million to more than 1,000 victims in the United States, Canada, and Australia, with the final disbursement of $9.8 million recovered from gold and silver at a Perth mint in April 2019.¹⁰

Where James Fayed Is Now

James Fayed’s death sentence triggered an automatic appeal. On April 2, 2020, the California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in full in People v. Fayed, rejecting each of his constitutional challenges to the jailhouse recording, including the Sixth Amendment right-to-counsel argument (the right had not attached to the murder case because he had not yet been charged with murder when he spoke to Smith) and the Miranda argument (protections do not apply when a suspect believes he is talking to a fellow inmate).⁴

Fayed has kept filing. A state habeas petition has been pending before the California Supreme Court. A federal habeas petition was dismissed in 2022 because he had not exhausted his state remedies. In 2025 he filed an original writ of habeas corpus with the U.S. Supreme Court, again arguing his federal detention had been unlawful and the jailhouse confession should have been excluded. The California Attorney General filed a brief opposing that petition in August 2025.¹¹

Fayed is housed at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton. No execution is imminent. California has not carried out an execution since 2006, and Governor Gavin Newsom’s March 2019 executive order imposed a moratorium on capital punishment, granting reprieves to everyone on death row without commuting their sentences. The death sentence still stands as a legal matter.¹²

1
Los Angeles Times. Fayed Sentenced to Death for Wife’s Murder
2
ABC7. James Fayed Sentenced to Death
3
6abc. James Fayed Sentenced to Death for Wifes Murder
4
California Supreme Court. People v. Fayed, S198132
5
KFI AM 640. State Supreme Court Won’t Hear Case of Three Convicted in Woman’s Killing
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Los Angeles Times. Gold Trader Arrested in Wifes Slaying
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NBC Los Angeles. Jury Recommends Death in James Fayed Murder Case
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Daily News. Two More Murderers to Be Sentenced in Century City Garage Slaying
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FBI. Fools Gold
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U.S. Department of Justice. United States Returns $9.8 Million Recovered From e-Bullion Illegal Money Transmitting Business
11
U.S. Supreme Court. Brief in Opposition, In re James Michael Fayed, No. 24-7445
12
Office of the Governor. Governor Gavin Newsom Orders a Halt to the Death Penalty in California