On Sunday, Jeanette Weiss remembered her daughter Jessica Zipkin’s bright smile, her big brown eyes and velvety red hair, and the excitement that lit up the 34-year-old every time she came up with a new recipe.

That light went out early Saturday morning, when Zipkin’s ex-boyfriend beat her to death with a hammer in her Perkiomen Township apartment, law enforcement officials said.

William Carey, 46, has been charged with first- and third-degree murder and possession of a criminal instrument, according to a statement issued Sunday by Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin R. Steele and state police. of Pennsylvania.

Shortly before 1:30 a.m. Saturday, state police responded to a 911 call about a possible dead woman in an apartment on Gravel Pike in Perkiomen, according to the joint release. Inside they found Zipkin with a fatal wound to the back of his head and a hammer next to his body.

An autopsy determined that Zipkin had died from blunt force trauma to the head and that the manner of death was a homicide, authorities said.

According to Zipkin’s relatives, she had been dating Carey from early March to late April, but the couple split in mid-October.

Jena, a waitress by profession, as her friends affectionately called her, was kind, a good listener, and had the naivety of someone who always looked for the best in people.

“(She’ll) drop everything she’s doing to come save you, that’s the kind of person she is,” her best friend, Alania Perry, said in an interview Sunday.

But over the weekend, no one was there to save Zipkin.

According to the probable cause affidavit for Carey’s arrest, Zipkin’s body was found in an apartment rented by Carey.

Surveillance video recovered by police shows Carey arriving at a local tavern, the Duck Inn, at 12:57 p.m. on Friday, wearing a T-shirt. Almost an hour later, he returned to the apartment and ten minutes later Zipkin arrived.

Around 2:30 p.m. a neighbor heard a woman screaming and then a man screaming, but according to the affidavit he turned up the volume on his television.

Eight minutes later, cameras see Carey entering the basement of the Duck Inn with articles of clothing and unpacking them in a trash can, the affidavit states. Soon, he is seen leaving in a long-sleeved shirt and placing the trash bag from the tavern’s basement into a dumpster in the parking lot.

At some point, he asked a person to take him shopping for shoes because the ones he had were “stinking,” according to the affidavit. But when they got to the store, Carey didn’t get out of the car. Instead, he appeared to be “distracted and crying while inside the vehicle,” the police report states.

Shortly before 1:30 a.m. Saturday, Carey returned home and told the property owner that “his girlfriend had passed away in the apartment,” according to the police complaint. The property owner called 911.

As a result of a search warrant, police found a pair of blood-stained sneakers in Carey’s kitchen Saturday morning, and a pair of jeans and a T-shirt that appeared to be blood-stained in the trash bin. from Duck Inn, according to the affidavit. of probable cause.

Shortly afterward, Carey was arrested. He is being held without bond at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Nov. 13.

For Zipkin’s loved ones, the loss is immeasurable and painfully sudden. They are left heartbroken and confused, said Perry, their friend. “We don’t know what went wrong,” he added.

As the family deals with the loss, they said they hope “Jena” is remembered as a good soul who was always there for people and loved her cat, Flurken.