Angel Maturino Resendiz was born in Izucar de Matamoros, Puebla, on August 1, 1959, and crossed into the United States illegally for the first time as a teenager. He spent twenty years riding freight trains around the country, working occasionally, and accumulating convictions for burglary, trespass and immigration offences in several states under a long list of aliases. American reporting called him the Railroad Killer, after the freight trains he travelled on.
From at least 1997 he killed people whose houses stood within sight of a railway line. He broke in at night, bludgeoned them with whatever was in the house, and left on the next train. Dr Claudia Benton, a paediatric neurologist, was killed at West University Place near Houston in December 1998. The Reverend Norman Sirnic and his wife Karen were killed at the parsonage in Weimar, Texas, in May 1999. Josephine Konvicka, Noemi Dominguez, Christopher Maier, Leafie Mason and others died the same way, across Texas, Illinois, Kentucky, Florida and California. At least fifteen are attributed to him.
The transience is what protected him. Deaths hundreds of miles apart, in different states, with no connection between the victims and no vehicle to trace, were not linked for a long time. When they were, in 1999, he became the subject of one of the largest manhunts in the country and was put on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list.
During that manhunt he was picked up crossing the border by the United States Border Patrol on June 1, 1999, held, and voluntarily returned to Mexico, because his name was not on the relevant watch list. He crossed back and killed again. The failure caused a congressional inquiry.
He surrendered on June 21, 1999, on a bridge at El Paso, after Texas Ranger Drew Carter negotiated through his sister and a spiritual adviser and promised him decent treatment and access to his family. He was convicted of Claudia Benton's murder in 2000 and executed by lethal injection at Huntsville on June 27, 2006.