Officers entered after police say Jake Bigoni’s statements conflicted with information suggesting his estranged wife could be dead or badly injured inside.
PLANO, Texas — Plano police officers had already knocked twice on Jake Bigoni’s door when information arriving through dispatch transformed a welfare check into an emergency. His wife was missing. Her car was in the garage. His mother said he had told her the woman was dead.
Minutes later, officers went inside and found 34-year-old Eliana Alexandra Bigoni dead in the trunk of a white Hyundai Genesis, according to an arrest probable cause affidavit. Jake O’Brien Bigoni, 37, was initially arrested on an abuse-of-a-corpse allegation. Detectives obtained a murder warrant the next day. The sequence illustrates how investigators say separate pieces of information accumulated until officers believed an immediate search was necessary to determine whether Eliana Bigoni could still be saved.
The investigation began Aug. 12 with no confirmed report of a killing. At 10:23 a.m., Plano police dispatched officers to a welfare concern in the 4700 block of Charles Place involving potential family violence. The caller could not reach Eliana Bigoni, who was separated from her husband and going through a divorce, according to the affidavit. She had planned to visit Jake Bigoni’s apartment that morning for a specific reason: to pick up their two children, ages 2 and 5, and take them to school.
A witness told investigators that the exchange should have taken 10 to 15 minutes. Instead, Bigoni became unreachable. The witness had spoken with her at 7:17 a.m. and expected to meet her for breakfast at 8:30 a.m., according to local reporting on the affidavit. When she missed the meeting, the witness checked a shared cellphone location and saw that her phone appeared to remain at The Parker Apartments.
When officers first approached Jake Bigoni, he said his wife had been there earlier but he did not know where she was, the affidavit says. He explained that she had arrived to pick up a child, but the child was not feeling well. Two officers also noticed what appeared to be a large wet mark on his shirt. That observation alone did not establish what had occurred, and officers initially continued gathering information.
They returned to ask about Eliana Bigoni’s vehicle. Looking into the garage, officers saw the white Hyundai Genesis. The car’s presence added another inconsistency to the situation: Jake Bigoni said his wife had left or was no longer there, but the vehicle associated with her remained at the residence. Asked about the wet area on his shirt, he said he had been cleaning the house, according to the affidavit.
The officers then went back to their patrol vehicle. At approximately 10:44 a.m., the affidavit says, they reviewed updated notes attached to the call. One indicated a belief that someone had been seriously harmed or killed. Another reported that a son had said his mother was dead. Those updates still required verification, but they sharply raised the possibility that the missing woman was inside the home and might require immediate assistance.
Police contacted Jake Bigoni’s mother. Her account provided what investigators treated as a crucial contradiction. She said her son had called at about 10:15 a.m. and told her, “I have something to tell you. She’s dead,” according to the affidavit. She also reported that he said he and his wife had gotten into a fight. Police now had one account in which Bigoni allegedly told his mother he knew his wife was dead and another in which he told officers he did not know where she was.
Officers returned to the door at about 10:46 a.m. and detained him. They asked directly whether his wife was inside. According to the affidavit, he again said he did not know where she was and questioned how police knew about the statements attributed to him by his mother. Officers also noticed that the wet area on his shirt had changed appearance as it dried, becoming what they described as a reddish-brown stain.
Those circumstances formed the immediate backdrop for the officers’ decision to enter. The affidavit says they conducted an exigent, or emergency, sweep because they believed it was reasonable to check for Eliana Bigoni and determine whether she needed lifesaving measures. Such an entry was not described in the affidavit as a broad evidence search conducted after investigators had fully assembled a homicide case. It was presented as an attempt to find a potentially injured person amid rapidly developing information.
In the garage, officers opened the investigation’s most consequential chapter. They found Eliana Bigoni in the trunk of the Hyundai. Police said she was not breathing and was unresponsive. The affidavit also describes blood inside the residence and injuries to her face and head. Those observations became part of the probable cause case against her husband. The publicly available sources reviewed for this report do not include a final autopsy report, and they do not support adding a specific medical cause of death that authorities have not formally released.
The discovery also changed the legal status of the encounter. Jake Bigoni was arrested at the scene on a charge of abuse of a corpse without legal authority and taken to the Plano City Jail. The Police Department’s initial public notice said only that an adult woman had been found dead and that her husband had been arrested on the corpse-related charge. It also warned that additional charges could follow as detectives continued working.
They did. On Aug. 13, Plano police announced that detectives had obtained a murder warrant for Jake Bigoni and publicly identified the deceased woman as his wife, Eliana Alexandra Bigoni. Police said both were Plano residents and that the Crimes Against Persons Unit was continuing its investigation. Local reporting, citing jail records, described the murder count as a first-degree felony and the abuse-of-a-corpse count as a state jail felony.
The escalation from one charge to another does not itself prove the allegations. Probable cause is the threshold that authorities must establish to obtain an arrest warrant; conviction requires prosecutors to meet the much higher burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The affidavit gives investigators’ account of why they believed Bigoni was responsible, but it is not a trial record and does not contain a defense response to all of the state’s allegations.
The document also leaves important issues open. It does not establish a publicly confirmed motive for the killing police allege. The reviewed reports do not disclose a complete forensic reconstruction of the events before officers arrived. Nor do they provide a final court judgment determining Jake Bigoni’s guilt. Those gaps are significant because early arrest records often describe what investigators believe happened before the evidence has been fully tested in court.
What the available material does establish is a tightly documented sequence. Eliana Bigoni went to the apartment for her children. A planned 10- to 15-minute pickup stretched into hours without contact. Her phone location remained there. Her car remained in the garage. Jake Bigoni told officers he did not know where she was, while his mother reported that he had told her she was dead. Officers entered and found her body, and the murder allegation followed the next day.
The two children were inside the residence when police conducted the welfare check, according to reporting on the affidavit. Officers removed them after finding their mother. Authorities have not publicly described in detail what the children witnessed, and the available record does not justify speculation. Their involvement is therefore limited in this account to the facts investigators have made public.
The murder and corpse-abuse allegations remained the central charges against Jake Bigoni, while no published final judgment was found resolving the case. Plano police have treated Eliana Bigoni’s death as a homicide investigation, but the criminal accusations remain subject to the court process, and Bigoni is presumed innocent unless proved guilty.
Author note: Last updated Sept. 22, 2026.