On the afternoon of December 16, 1998, George Benton and the couple's twin daughters left their house at West University Place in southwest Houston to visit relatives in Arizona. Claudia Benton stayed behind to finish a presentation she was giving the next day. She was thirty-nine, a clinical geneticist at the Baylor College of Medicine, and the brick house stood about a quarter of a mile from a set of Southern Pacific tracks.
Some time after midnight a man came in through an unlocked door and went upstairs. He sexually assaulted her, stabbed her nineteen times, and beat her with a two-foot bronze statuette he picked up in the house. Her Jeep Cherokee turned up in San Antonio with his fingerprints on the steering column.
Angel Maturino Resendiz was born at Izucar de Matamoros in Puebla on August 1, 1959. His birth name is recorded as Angel Leoncio Reyes Recendis, and he took the surnames of his mother and stepfather. He first crossed into the United States illegally as a teenager. He spent twenty years riding freight trains, working occasionally, and collecting convictions for burglary, trespass and immigration offenses in several states under a long list of aliases, including Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, which is the name much of the early reporting used. Federal records show he had been deported to Mexico at least four times since first entering the United States in 1973.
Most of the killings attributed to him came between 1997 and 1999, among people who lived within sight of a railroad line. He broke in at night, used whatever was in the house, and left on the next train. He tended to stay in the houses for a while, mostly to eat. He took sentimental items and laid out his victims' driver's licenses to learn about their lives, and he gave stolen jewelry to his wife and his mother in Rodeo, Durango. He chose people too small or too old to overpower him, and most of the dead were found covered with a blanket or hidden from immediate view.
The earliest deaths he admitted went back much further. In September 2001, hoping to hasten his execution, he confessed to shooting a woman he said he had met at a homeless shelter, whose remains had been found in an abandoned farmhouse in Bexar County, Texas, on March 23, 1986 and never identified, and to killing a man he described as her boyfriend and leaving him in a creek between San Antonio and Uvalde. That man has never been found. He confessed at the same time to beating Michael White, twenty-two, to death with a brick in San Antonio on July 19, 1991.
On March 23, 1997, near Ocala, Florida, he killed Jesse Howell, nineteen, with a railcar air-brake hose coupling and left him beside the tracks at Belleview. Howell's fiancee, Wendy Von Huben, was sixteen. She was raped, strangled and buried in a shallow grave in Sumter County. The couple had come from Illinois hoping to pick oranges and had shared a grain car with him from near Jacksonville. Her remains were recovered in July 2000 after he helped investigators find them. On July 5, 1997 Roberto Castro, fifty-four, was killed at Colton, California.
On August 29, 1997, near the tracks in Lexington, Kentucky, he ambushed a University of Kentucky student called Holly Dunn and her boyfriend Christopher Maier, twenty-one, having crouched behind an electrical box to wait for them. Maier was killed. Dunn survived, and she is the only person who did.
Leafie Mason, eighty-seven, was killed at Hughes Springs, Texas, on October 4, 1998, and Fannie Whitney Byers, eighty-one, at Carl, Georgia, on December 10.
Norman Sirnic, forty-six, was the pastor at Weimar United Church of Christ in Texas and his wife Karen, forty-seven, was the church secretary. They were beaten to death with a sledgehammer in the parsonage on May 2, 1999. Church members found them when they did not appear for the Sunday service. Their car was found in San Antonio, and the fingerprints on it tied the case to Claudia Benton's.
That was the link that told investigators they were looking for one man. It came six months after the Benton murder.
On June 2, 1999 the United States Border Patrol picked him up near El Paso as he crossed illegally. The agents did not know who he was. Immigration ran his fingerprints and his photograph against the list of known fugitives, found nothing, and deported him to Mexico. A later inquiry established that the West University Place police department had alerted immigration about him in December, immediately after Claudia Benton was killed.
He crossed back. Four of the fifteen killings attributed to him happened after that deportation. On June 4 Noemi Dominguez, twenty-six, was killed in Houston, and the same day Josephine Konvicka, seventy-three, was killed at Dubina.
On June 15, 1999, six weeks after the Sirnics, at a house about a hundred yards from the track at Gorham in southern Illinois, eighty-year-old George Morber was shot in the head with his own shotgun. His daughter Carolyn Frederick, whose age is given as fifty-one and as fifty-two, arrived to clean her father's house and was beaten to death with the butt of it.
On June 21, 1999 the FBI made him the 457th fugitive on its Ten Most Wanted list, with a fifty-thousand-dollar reward, which reached a hundred and twenty-five thousand within days, and the manhunt became one of the largest in the country. Agents approached his half-sister Manuela Karkiewicz in Albuquerque and she would not help them. Sergeant Drew Carter of the Texas Rangers went back to her, built a relationship over several weeks, and persuaded her to talk her brother into giving himself up.
On July 13, 1999, a date some accounts give as July 12, Resendiz walked across the international bridge at El Paso, where Carter waited with FBI agent Kimberley Barkhausen, Manuela Karkiewicz and a spiritual guide, put out his hand to Carter, and was handcuffed without resisting. He had been promised decent treatment and access to his family. He then talked, and killings in six states were attributed to him: eight in Texas, two each in Illinois and Florida, and one each in Kentucky, California and Georgia. He also claimed seven murders in Mexico. Jim Mattox, a former Texas attorney general who remembered the Henry Lee Lucas confessions, said he hoped they would not start pinning on him every crime that happened near a railroad track. Resendiz later accused Carter in court of lying under oath; his family had understood that he would be spared the death penalty.
Texas tried him for Claudia Benton alone. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and in May 2000 the jury rejected it, convicted him and sentenced him to death, and the sentence was formally imposed on May 22, 2000. His defense lawyers, with the help of the Mexican consul-general in Houston, Rodulfo Figueroa Aramoni, tried to negotiate his extradition to Mexico to spare his life, and in 2006 the Mexican foreign secretary, Luis Ernesto Derbez, asked Governor Rick Perry for clemency.
The question of his mind came back at the end. Six years later his lawyers argued he was too delusional to be executed, and at a hearing in Houston in the week before the date, psychiatrists called by the defense testified that he was schizophrenic, that he feared government conspiracies, and that he believed he would survive the lethal injection. One of them, Dr. Pablo Stewart, who had examined him twice that year, concluded that delusions had completely taken over his thinking. The judge found him competent on June 21, 2006. Hearing the ruling, Resendiz said he did not believe in death and that he was eternal. His lawyer, Jack Zimmerman, said the court had given them a fair hearing and had reached the wrong conclusion.
He had been held at the Polunsky Unit in West Livingston. With an appeal still pending in the Fifth Circuit, he was executed at the Huntsville Unit on June 27, 2006 and pronounced dead at five past eight in the evening. He asked the victims' relatives watching whether it was in their hearts to forgive him, said they did not have to, and said he had allowed the devil to rule his life. George Benton watched him die, and said afterward that he had come to make the statement that people have to understand what evil really is. He called Resendiz evil contained in human form, a creature without a soul.
At Weimar, where three of the dead came from, the trains still go through forty times a day. What changed, the police chief said, was that people put in alarm systems and security lights, and started locking houses they had never locked before.
In 2003 the British journalist Alex Hannaford interviewed him on tape, and Resendiz told him he had killed many more people than the cases raised at his trial. The recordings became the podcast series Dead Man Talking, released between October 2018 and February 2019.