Angel Maturino Resendiz was executed by the State of Texas on June 27, 2006, for one crime: the capital murder of Dr. Claudia Benton, a 39-year-old physician who was attacked and killed in her home in West University Place, an enclave inside Houston, in December 1998. A Harris County jury convicted him on May 18, 2000, after rejecting his plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, and the same jury voted for a death sentence days later.
He was linked to many more deaths. By the time he died, the Associated Press counted at least 15 killings attributed to him: eight in Texas, two each in Illinois and Florida, and one each in Kentucky, California and Georgia, from 1986 to June 1999. Most of the victims lived or were found near railroad tracks, and investigators believed he moved between the crime scenes by riding freight trains, which is why the press called him the Railroad Killer. He was charged with several of those killings in Texas, Illinois, Kentucky and Georgia, but none of those cases ever came to trial. Others he confessed to after his conviction, in some cases with details police could check and in at least one case with details prosecutors did not believe.
His case is also remembered for what happened at the border. In June 1999, while he was wanted for murder and sought by a growing federal manhunt, the Border Patrol caught him crossing illegally into New Mexico, ran his fingerprints through its own computer system and sent him back to Mexico the same night. Four more people were killed after that. A review by the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General, published in March 2000, set out how that happened.
He used so many names that the FBI kept the one the public already knew. When he was placed on the Ten Most Wanted list in June 1999 he was listed as Rafael Resendez-Ramirez. CBS News reported then that the FBI believed he had used more than 30 aliases and that his birth certificate gave his real name as Angel Leoncio Reyes Recendis. An FBI agent told reporters the bureau would keep using Resendez-Ramirez because "the public has given us some very good information with the name that's known," and agents believed he had borrowed it from an uncle. Time magazine reported that the same uncle told the Associated Press his real name was Angel Resendiz Resendiz. The courts used Angel Maturino Resendiz, and that is the name under which he was tried and executed.
His date and place of birth vary in the records too. The Inspector General's report gives August 1, 1959, at Izúcar de Matamoros in the state of Puebla, Mexico. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice lists August 1, 1960, and gives his native state as Durango. CBS News reported in 1999 that he had lived in the town of Rodeo, Mexico. Border Patrol records from 1998 and 1999 show him giving at least seven different birth dates. The prison system recorded that he had completed the seventh grade and had worked as a laborer.
Little about his childhood is established by court records. Amnesty International, which campaigned against his execution, said in 2006 that his childhood in Mexico was marked by mental illness in his family, deprivation and abuse. At his trial, defense experts pointed to glue-sniffing and head injuries in childhood as possible causes of his mental illness, according to an Associated Press account of the verdict.
The Inspector General's appendix on his criminal and immigration history is the fullest public record of his life before 1998. The earliest entry is August 31, 1976, when he was excluded at San Antonio, meaning he was refused entry at the border. In September 1976 he was arrested for trespassing on Chrysler property in Sterling Heights, Michigan, and allowed to leave for Mexico, and in October 1976 he was caught trying to cross near McAllen, Texas, and returned the same day.
In 1977 he was convicted in Corinth, Mississippi, of destroying private property and was returned to Mexico. In 1979 he was arrested in Miami over a house burglary in which the 88-year-old owner was beaten and a car taken; the report notes that the owner died in November 1979 and that the autopsy listed natural causes as the probable cause of death. In 1980 he was convicted in Miami of burglary, auto theft and aggravated battery and sentenced to 20 years, to be served concurrently. He was paroled after about six years and deported from Brownsville, Texas, in September 1985.
Through the late 1980s the record is mostly about false papers. He was convicted of falsely claiming to be a U.S. citizen, first in late 1985 and again after a June 1986 arrest at the Laredo port of entry, where fraudulent documents were found; he served about 15 months and was deported again in October 1987. In St. Louis, a federal investigation into identity and document fraud ended with his conviction on seven counts in March 1989 and a 30-month sentence. Searches tied to that case turned up a pistol, a knife, false documents and marijuana in safe deposit boxes. He was deported a third time in May 1991.
In 1992 he pleaded guilty in Las Cruces, New Mexico, to a residential burglary in which a pistol was taken, and was paroled in April 1993 to an immigration detainer. In June 1993 he was arrested in Carson County, Texas, for evading arrest in a truck that had been stolen in Missouri; he gave the name Carlos Cluthier Rodriguez, and the fingerprints taken then would matter five years later. In December 1994 he was arrested in Albuquerque for receiving a stolen vehicle and resisting arrest, was released on bond and failed to return, and a bench warrant stayed open until 1999. In 1995 he served 30 days in San Bernardino County, California, for trespassing and carrying a loaded firearm. In August 1996 he was ordered off a rail yard in Macon, Georgia, and two days later pleaded guilty to criminal trespass at a rail yard in Science Hill, Kentucky.
The Inspector General counted at least three formal deportations and at least four voluntary returns before 1998, and said the records were unclear about others. News reports at the time of his arrest called him a drifter, and the record shows arrests across the South, the Midwest and the West, several of them at rail yards.
People who studied him after his arrest described an intelligent man. Ken Macha, the West University Place detective who worked the Benton case, called him "politically astute" and told Newsweek he had apparently been involved with the Libertarian Party in the 1980s. Alan Brantley, an FBI profiler who later testified at his trial, called him "an injustice collector" who wrote many angry letters from prison.
Among the earliest deaths that investigators have been able to name were two in March 1997 in central Florida. Jesse Howell, 19, was found on March 23, 1997, on the railroad tracks at Belleview, a town between Tampa and Jacksonville. Wendy Von Huben, 16, who had been with him, was missing.
The case stayed open for three years. Early in 2000 a Marion County Sheriff's Office detective, Jeff Owens, wrote to Resendiz in jail in Texas to ask about Howell's death and Von Huben's disappearance. In his reply, Resendiz said he had killed a man and a teenage girl. Marion County detectives then interviewed him in Texas, and he told them he had killed Howell with a railroad air brake coupling and had strangled Von Huben about eight hours later. He told them he believed the two were anti-Christians, Major Patti Lumpkin of the sheriff's office told reporters.
On July 15, 2000, a search team following his directions found skeletal remains wrapped in a blanket and a camouflage jacket about 15 miles south of Belleview, ABC News reported. DNA from Von Huben's family was to be compared with the remains. The Associated Press later listed him as the prime suspect in both Florida deaths and reported that he had been given immunity from prosecution there. He was never charged in Florida.
Christopher Maier, 21, was a junior at the University of Kentucky. On the night of August 29, 1997, he and his girlfriend were taking a shortcut along the railroad tracks to a party in Lexington when they were attacked. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, describing the evidence heard at the punishment phase of the Benton trial, said Resendiz robbed the couple, bound Maier and beat him to death, then sexually assaulted the young woman and struck her in the head. She survived with serious injuries. She is the only person known to have survived one of the attacks linked to him, and she testified against him in Houston in 2000.
For almost two years there was nothing to connect the Lexington case to Texas. The link came in 1999, when an FBI search of its violent-crime database matched the Kentucky attack to the Texas killings, and DNA from the Lexington case matched as well, according to the Inspector General. Kentucky prosecutors charged him with Maier's murder. After his death sentence in Texas, they told reporters they would decide when to bring him back to face that charge. He was never tried in Kentucky.
In July 1997, an unidentified transient was beaten to death in a rail yard in Colton, California. The Associated Press listed Resendiz as the prime suspect in 2003. No charge was reported, and the man was not named in the reports.
Leafie Mason was 87 and lived in Hughes Springs, Texas, near the railroad tracks. She was beaten to death in her bed in October 1998; the Associated Press gave the date as October 2. The appeals court said Resendiz killed her by hitting her with an iron, and the AP said it was her own antique iron. The Hughes Springs police chief, Randy Kennedy, told Newsweek the attack was "a matter of over-kill." Texas charged Resendiz with her murder, but the case was never tried.
Fannie Whitner Byers was 81 and lived in a rural home near a railroad track in Barrow County, Georgia, near the town of Carl. She was beaten to death in December 1998; the Associated Press gave the date as December 11. Georgia charged Resendiz with her death. The AP reported in 2003 that information he provided had led Barrow County to drop charges against another man. Georgia never tried Resendiz. In January 2006, a Georgia news outlet noted that he still had not been tried for her death.
Claudia Benton was 39 and a physician at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where she was training in medical genetics; the college's roster of its medical genetics residents lists her in a program that began in 1998. She lived with her husband, George Benton, and their daughters in West University Place, near a railroad track. After her death the Angelman Syndrome Foundation, which supports research into a rare genetic disorder, created the Dr. Claudia Benton Award for Research, first given in 2001.
The Inspector General's report sets out what police found. On December 16, 1998, while her husband and children were away, someone broke into the house and attacked her as she lay alone in bed. She had multiple stab wounds and blunt-force injuries, and an autopsy showed she had been sexually assaulted. News reports said she had been beaten with a bronze statue about two feet tall. (Some sources give the date as December 17, 1998, the date the Texas prison system lists for the offense, and the date the Associated Press used.) The killer took a banjo, a guitar, a stereo and jewelry, and drove off in her Jeep after dismantling the steering column and starting it without a key.
San Antonio police found the Jeep on December 18, 1998, in a motel parking lot near railroad tracks. Houston police lifted fingerprints from the steering column and ran them through the Texas fingerprint system. On December 26 the system reported a match to Carlos Cluthier Rodriguez, the name he had given in Carson County in 1993. A search through California's database matched the same man to his 1995 arrest in San Bernardino, and on January 5, 1999, the FBI reported his long criminal record. The same day, a Harris County judge issued a warrant for him on a charge of burglary of the Benton home, which noted that he was a suspect in her murder. Prosecutors had told police they needed more evidence for a murder warrant.
During 1998, months before and after the Benton killing, the Border Patrol caught him seven times. The Inspector General's table lists the dates: January 5, 7 and 8, 1998, at Del Rio and Uvalde in Texas; April 17, 1998, at Santa Teresa, New Mexico; April 21 and 22 at Uvalde and Del Rio; and November 3, 1998, at Santa Teresa. Each time he was returned to Mexico the same day. Each time he denied having a criminal record, and each time the agents checked his fingerprints only against the Immigration and Naturalization Service's own system, called IDENT, which held records of earlier border arrests and a database of lookouts but was not connected to the FBI's criminal records. No agent learned of his convictions or of the open Albuquerque warrant, and none of the stops met the local threshold for prosecuting a repeat illegal entrant.
After the warrant was issued, police tried several times in early 1999 to make sure he would be stopped at the border. The Inspector General found that every attempt went to the wrong system or stalled. A Houston police analyst asked a Customs Service employee in December 1998 or January 1999 to place a border alert in the Customs database used at ports of entry. On January 8, 1999, Detective Macha called an INS special agent in Houston, who referred him to Customs and did not mention IDENT. A second INS agent later gave Macha the immigration file on Resendiz and called a friend at Customs to check that an alert had been entered, but the friend's computer crashed and no one followed up. Customs told the Inspector General that no alert was entered in its system until June 22, 1999. An intelligence officer put Resendiz in a weekly intelligence report, and INS regional staff offered to make an electronic wanted poster, but the photograph mailed for it never arrived.
On March 10, 1999, Texas Ranger Drew Carter asked another INS agent by phone to place an internal hold on Resendiz. Carter believed it had been done. The agent said he did not recall the call, and the Inspector General found he had apparently done nothing. "In fact, no one in the INS had entered a lookout for Resendez in any INS database," the report said. A Harris County detective assigned to a regional fugitive task force concluded that Resendiz was a transient who had probably fled to Mexico and stopped actively looking for him.
Norman Sirnic, known as Skip, was 46 and the pastor of a church in Weimar, a small town about 100 miles west of Houston. His wife, Karen, 47, was the church secretary. They lived across from the railroad tracks. When they did not appear for the Sunday service on May 2, 1999, they were found dead in their home. The Inspector General gives the date of the killings as April 30, 1999; the Associated Press gave May 2, the day they were found. The Court of Criminal Appeals said they were beaten to death with a sledgehammer as they slept and that Karen Sirnic was sexually assaulted. Their pickup truck was taken. Some of their jewelry was later found at his home in Rodeo, Mexico, the Associated Press reported.
Texas Rangers saw similarities to the Benton case, and DNA from the Sirnic home matched DNA from the Benton home. That match, and the database link to Lexington, persuaded an FBI profiler, Mark Young, that "Resendez was a serial murderer who was going to kill again," in the words of the Inspector General's report. Young recommended a federal task force. The FBI's Houston fugitive squad took the case on May 24 or 25, 1999, and on May 27 the FBI obtained a federal warrant charging him with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution, covering four murders. It was entered in the national crime database the next day.
At about 9 p.m. on June 1, 1999, a seismic sensor near Mount Cristo Rey, about seven miles east of the Border Patrol station at Santa Teresa, New Mexico, picked up movement. Two agents responded, and a helicopter with a searchlight found a man crouched in the brush on the side of a ravine near the railroad tracks. One agent climbed down and brought him out. Nine other people were caught in the same area, and all ten were driven to the station.
He gave a name he had never used before, De Uribe Rafael Hernandez-Hernandez, and another new birth date. He said he had never been arrested or deported. An agent noticed a blue tattoo near his wrist and "thought nothing of it," and described him as very quiet and respectful.
The officer who entered him in IDENT had been on the job for about six months and had no IDENT training. The system returned three possible matches, with photographs, covering five of his 1998 arrests. The officer rejected each one. He told investigators he was surprised by that and did not remember the man, and that he normally did not compare photographs unless he was sure. There was no lookout in IDENT, the officer knew nothing of the murder warrants, and even with all five earlier stops counted he was below the station's threshold for prosecution. He was returned to Mexico a short time later. Because IDENT recorded times in Eastern time, the enrollment appears in its records as June 2, the date news reports gave for the arrest.
The Inspector General concluded that the decision to return him followed normal Border Patrol practice and that the officer's errors did not change the outcome, but that if a lookout had been in IDENT, "it is likely that he would have been detained by the Border Patrol on that date."
He came back across the border within days. Josephine Konvicka, 73, was found dead in her bed in her home near the railroad about four miles west of Weimar, in Fayette County, on June 4, 1999. Noemi Dominguez, 26, a Houston schoolteacher, was found beaten to death in her home, also near the tracks; the AP gave the date as June 5. The appeals court said Resendiz killed Dominguez with a pickax, took her car, and then killed Konvicka with the same tool. The AP reported that Dominguez's blood was found on the tool used to kill Konvicka.
About ten days later, roughly 800 miles to the north, George Morber, 80, and his daughter, Carolyn Frederick, were killed at Morber's home in Gorham, a small town in southern Illinois, close to the tracks. They were found on June 15, 1999. The appeals court said he tied Morber to a chair and shot him with a shotgun, then sexually assaulted Frederick and struck her with the gun. Sources give her age as 51 or 52, and Newsweek gave Morber's as 79. Fingerprints from the Illinois scene matched Resendiz, CBS News reported, and Illinois charged him with both killings.
The FBI formed a multi-agency task force in Houston on June 8, 1999. On June 9 an INS investigator and an FBI agent faxed a lookout notice to Border Patrol sectors, and an IDENT lookout was finally entered on June 23. While doing that work, an intelligence officer in Del Rio found the eight Border Patrol arrests in IDENT and reported them to the task force and to INS headquarters. The news that the Border Patrol had held and released the man the FBI was hunting became public in late June. The Tampa Bay Times summarized it on June 26: immigration officials said they had not known at the time that he was wanted for questioning in four killings.
He was added to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list as fugitive number 457. By June 21, 1999, the FBI had set up a telephone hotline and offered a reward of 50,000 dollars, and agents said they were not focusing on any single area. The total reward later reached 125,000 dollars. Sightings came from around the country, and hundreds of FBI agents, state police and local officers took part in the search, CNN reported. In Mexico, his wife and other relatives told reporters they could not believe he was wanted for murder; CBS News reported that his wife told the Houston Chronicle he had been a model husband and had never shown violence.
The search ended without a capture. Ranger Carter, a Houston-based Texas Ranger and the lead investigator, had started weeks earlier by interviewing Resendiz's sister, CNN reported. Working through a brother as an intermediary and supported by her pastor, she arranged the surrender. The FBI also helped persuade the family that surrender would be safer for him than being hunted.
On July 13, 1999, he crossed from Ciudad Juárez and walked onto the Ysleta bridge, accompanied by his brother, and met Carter on the American side. "He stuck out his hand, I stuck out my hand and we shook hands," Carter said. Bruce Casteel, commander of the Texas Rangers, said he was "very pleasant, not aggressive." The pastor who had supported his sister said he had a chance to leave and did not.
Casteel said the agreement promised him family visits, a psychological evaluation and assurances that he would be safe in jail, but did not protect him from the death penalty. Mexico, which has no death penalty, would not return suspects to face it, and Texas prosecutors had held back from charging him in other cases for fear that Mexico would refuse to extradite him, Newsweek reported. Before the surrender he had been formally charged with three murders.
He was booked in El Paso, where he told a magistrate only that he had no questions, and flown to Houston. The FBI's own history of its most wanted list credits the national news coverage for his capture.
In Harris County he was charged with capital murder in the death of Claudia Benton; CBS News reported that the charge covered her robbery and sexual assault as well as her killing. He pleaded not guilty. Harris County District Attorney John B. Holmes Jr. had not yet decided whether to seek the death penalty, and a judge set a tentative trial date in February 2000. Investigators said a fingerprint in her stolen Jeep and jewelry traced to her and found at his home in Mexico were part of the evidence. After the surrender, his relatives said they had been misled into believing he would not face a death sentence. Carter denied that.
His court-appointed lawyer, Allen Tanner, told Newsweek in July 1999 that he was not sure his client had committed any of the killings.
The trial was held in Houston in May 2000 before State District Judge William Harmon. Prosecutors Devon Anderson and Lyn McClellan tried the case. The defense did not dispute that he had killed Claudia Benton. Tanner told the jury that Resendiz had killed nine people in three states and argued that he was not guilty by reason of insanity.
Defense experts testified that he had paranoid schizophrenia, that he believed he had supernatural powers and that he thought he was doing God's work. A psychologist, Larry Pollock, described the defense theory as an evil force pulling him into homes and directing him to people he believed deserved to die. The defense expert's diagnosis, as Amnesty International later summarized it, was chronic paranoid schizophrenia with a delusion that he was an angel of God. Prosecution experts said he was mentally disturbed but knew right from wrong. Amnesty reported that the prosecution experts did not dispute that he was mentally ill and found evidence of brain damage, but said he was not legally insane. The FBI's Alan Brantley testified for the state to rebut the insanity defense.
The judge refused to let the defense show the jury crime-scene photographs from the other killings, which the defense expert had relied on and which the defense said would show the extent of his illness. That ruling became the main issue on appeal.
On May 18, 2000, after about ten hours of deliberation, the jury found him guilty of capital murder as charged and so rejected the insanity defense. The jury was polled.
He then told the judge he wanted the death penalty. He said he was 41 and that a long prison term might be more than he would survive. "I've decided that injection is better than spending life in jail," he said outside the jury's presence. Over his lawyers' objections he told them not to make an opening statement, cross-examine witnesses or present evidence at the punishment phase, Amnesty International reported.
The state called witnesses to show he would be a danger in the future, including evidence of the other killings. The woman who survived the Lexington attack testified about what happened to her and to Christopher Maier. Anderson asked the jurors to end the case. The jury of five men and seven women deliberated for just under two hours and voted for death, CNN reported on May 22, 2000. "It is now my responsibility to assess your punishment at death," Judge Harmon told him. Anderson said afterward that the jurors had found it difficult but had no choice given the evidence.
At sentencing Resendiz accused Ranger Carter of tricking him into surrendering. "That police officer lied under oath and I don't think it's right," he said. Tanner said the government had lured a sick man across the border. George Benton said that telling their daughters had been harder than anything else he would have to face. The Texas prison system received Resendiz on death row on May 24, 2000.
Under Texas law the appeal of a death sentence is automatic. Resendiz said at sentencing that he would drop all appeals, and in July 2001 he asked to end them. Judge Harmon ruled that the initial appeal had to be completed whatever he wanted.
On May 21, 2003, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state's highest criminal court, affirmed the conviction and sentence by a vote of seven to two in Resendiz v. State, 112 S.W.3d 541. Judge Meyers wrote for the court. It rejected all 16 points of error. On the main issue, it held that the trial judge had not abused his discretion by keeping the photographs of the other killings out of the guilt phase, because they risked distracting the jury and confusing abnormal behavior with legal insanity. It held that the evidence of future dangerousness was sufficient, that the FBI profiler's testimony was relevant to rebut the insanity defense, and that the words "know" and "wrong" in the Texas insanity statute did not need defining for the jury. Judge Paul Womack, joined by Judge Cheryl Johnson, dissented and would have ordered a new trial, finding the photographs relevant to his sanity.
One of his appellate lawyers, Robert Morrow, said that normally a defense lawyer fights to keep such photographs out, but that this time they would have shown the level of his insanity. McClellan said the photographs had no place in the guilt phase and predicted that Resendiz, despite his talk of wanting to die, would always back away when the time came. In a death row interview with the AP, Resendiz said, "I would rather have it over with."
His first federal habeas corpus petition argued that Texas unconstitutionally placed the burden of proving mitigating circumstances on the defendant. The federal district court denied it on the merits, and the Fifth Circuit later dismissed his appeal because the notice of appeal was filed late. Amnesty International said in 2006 that the petition filed for him was a generic document that did not mention his mental illness and was word for word the same as a brief filed for another prisoner, and that the missed deadline cost him federal review of his case-specific claims.
While waiting, Resendiz talked to investigators about other cases. In September 2001, investigators from the Bexar County and Harris County district attorneys' offices and San Antonio police detective George Saidler interviewed him at the Harris County Jail, and he gave a recorded confession to three killings in San Antonio between 1986 and 1991, according to the San Antonio Police Department's cold-case records. One was cleared at once. The Associated Press listed him as the prime suspect in the 1986 shooting of an unidentified homeless woman in Bexar County.
The third took longer. In 2006 Saidler compared a crime-scene map Resendiz had drawn by hand with the city's homicide records and matched it to the death of Michael White, 33, who was found shot in a yard on July 19, 1991, and had first been recorded as an unidentified man. The weapon and method Resendiz described matched, and San Antonio police cleared the case.
By June 2003 the AP reported that his information had helped close four killings in three states. He also claimed killings investigators did not accept. Prosecutor Vic Wisner told the AP that the details Resendiz gave about the June 1998 killing of a man in southeast Harris County did not add up, and prosecutors believed several of his confessions were false. Lawyers for two men serving life sentences hoped he could help their clients. "Nobody seems to be interested in these cases," Resendiz said. "One thing you can take back on this case, they can never prove one case that I've claimed that I haven't done."
An execution date was set for May 2006, over the objection of defense lawyers hired by the Mexican government, who said appeals were still under way. The execution eventually took place on June 27, 2006; the reason for the change of date was not reported.
Mexico's consul general in Houston, Carlos Gonzalez Magallon, had already gone to federal court. On March 10, 2006, as his "next friend", the consul filed a civil rights suit arguing that Texas's lethal injection method was cruel and unusual. Judge Lee H. Rosenthal of the federal court in Houston dismissed it on April 27, finding no showing that Resendiz was incompetent to sue for himself and that the suit came too late. The Fifth Circuit held on June 16 that the consul could not sue on his behalf but let Resendiz substitute himself as plaintiff, which he did on June 23. On June 26 Rosenthal denied his request to block the execution, finding that he was seeking delay rather than pursuing a real challenge to the protocol, and on June 27 the Fifth Circuit affirmed in Resendiz v. Livingston.
On May 1, 2006, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights asked the United States to preserve his life while it considered a petition on his behalf, Amnesty reported. Amnesty said that on death row he had been moved to an inpatient psychiatric unit eight times and had injured himself more than 30 times, and that a recent assessment found him completely delusional and convinced he was immune to lethal injection.
The main fight was over his mental state. Under Texas law, the defense asked Judge Harmon to find him incompetent to be executed. Numerous experts examined him, and at a three-day hearing in Houston in June 2006, five testified. As the Fifth Circuit later summarized the state court's record, three experts, Drs. Stewart, Puente and Patino, concluded he was incompetent, and three, Drs. Gripon, Brown and Moeller, concluded he was competent. Defense psychiatrists said he was schizophrenic and delusional, feared government conspiracies and believed he would survive the injection and return three days after his execution. His lawyers said he believed he was half man and half angel. Prosecution psychiatrists agreed he might have delusions but said he was not schizophrenic.
Judge Harmon found that Resendiz understood that he was to be executed, that the execution was imminent and why. "He knows he's been convicted of capital murder," the judge said. His lead lawyer was Jack Zimmermann, and his defense team had been hired by the Mexican government. The defense argued that Resendiz had "no factual understanding of his impending death," and he had told a psychiatrist, "My mind will be like new."
He was taken back to death row near Livingston from the Harris County Jail, where the examinations had been done, and spent his last days visiting relatives. On June 26, 2006, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted 7 to 0 against a 180-day reprieve and 7 to 0 against commuting his sentence to life in prison. Governor Rick Perry did not intervene.
His federal petition claiming incompetence to be executed was treated by the district court as a second, successive petition, which it could not hear without permission. On June 27, 2006, the Fifth Circuit, in Resendiz v. Quarterman, 454 F.3d 456, denied him a certificate of appealability and a stay. Under its precedent, a claim of incompetence to be executed raised for the first time in a second petition was barred, and the court noted that his mental illness was known long before his first petition, since he had pleaded insanity at trial.
That afternoon the U.S. Supreme Court denied five separate applications for a stay of execution and two petitions for review. In one, Justices Stevens and Breyer said they would have granted a stay. The consul general's own appeal on his competency and on lethal injection was also rejected. The consul said his office watched to make sure the law was applied fairly to Mexican nationals.
The execution, set for 6 p.m., was delayed nearly two hours while the Supreme Court ruled. Resendiz declined to choose a last meal and signed papers donating his body to the Texas State Anatomical Board, a prison spokeswoman said. His sister, his mother, two brothers and a woman who said she was his wife were on his list of witnesses, with a Harris County Jail chaplain as his spiritual adviser.
He looked toward the room where victims' relatives were watching. "I want to ask if it is in your heart to forgive me," he said, and told them they did not have to. He said he had allowed the devil to rule his life, and that he deserved what he was getting, and he prayed for forgiveness. He was pronounced dead at 8:05 p.m. on June 27, 2006, at the Huntsville Unit. He was the 13th person executed in Texas that year and the 368th since the state resumed executions in 1982.
George Benton watched. He said he had come to show that people must understand what evil is.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice lists Angel Resendiz, TDCJ number 999356, Harris County, as execution number 368, carried out on June 27, 2006. The list was last updated on January 29, 2026. It gives his age at execution as 45; news reports at the time said 46. The killings with which he was charged in Illinois, Kentucky, Georgia and elsewhere in Texas were never tried.
On June 30, 1999, the Attorney General and the INS Commissioner asked the Justice Department's Inspector General to review how the INS had handled him. The report, "The Rafael Resendez-Ramirez Case," was released on March 20, 2000, after more than 130 interviews.
It found that the Border Patrol agents who returned him in 1998 and 1999 had followed standard practice and that their processing mistakes did not change the result. The failure lay with INS investigators and intelligence officers in Houston, none of whom entered a lookout in IDENT, told police about it or used it to find him. They gave reasons that included lack of training and confusion about whether a lookout could be entered for someone not in custody. The report said he clearly qualified for a lookout under an August 1998 policy that had been sent out without training. It also found that IDENT had been treated mainly as a Border Patrol tool, that the INS had rejected an earlier recommendation on training, and that the FBI's new fingerprint and crime-information systems had been launched in July 1999 without any link to IDENT, with a plan to connect them that might take five years.
The Inspector General made 25 recommendations, including integrating IDENT with the FBI's fingerprint system as soon as possible, training every part of the INS on lookouts, telling police agencies about IDENT and reviewing prosecution thresholds that varied widely between Border Patrol stations. "We agree and believe that IDENT and its use should be improved rather than abandoned," the report concluded.
Proven by final judgment: only the capital murder of Claudia Benton, by a Harris County jury on May 18, 2000, with the insanity defense rejected; affirmed in 2003.
Charged but never tried: the killings of Christopher Maier (Kentucky), Leafie Mason, Norman and Karen Sirnic, Josephine Konvicka and Noemi Dominguez (Texas), Fannie Whitner Byers (Georgia), and George Morber and Carolyn Frederick (Illinois), as listed by the AP in 2003. The appeals court described several of these as acts he committed, on the basis of evidence heard at the punishment phase of the Benton trial, but they were never the subject of a verdict.
Confessed or attributed, never charged: Jesse Howell and Wendy Von Huben (Florida, where he was reported to have immunity); an unidentified woman in Bexar County (1986) and an unidentified man in Colton, California (1997), for which the AP called him the prime suspect; and Michael White (San Antonio, 1991), cleared by San Antonio police in 2006 on the strength of his confession. His claim to a June 1998 killing in Harris County was doubted by prosecutors, and they believed several other confessions were false.
Counts vary: nine killings admitted at trial; 13 linked by the AP in 2003; 14 in an AP list later in 2003; at least 15 by 2006.
Dates vary between sources: the Benton killing (December 16, 1998, in the Inspector General's report; December 17 in AP and prison records), the Sirnic killings (April 30, 1999, Inspector General; May 2, AP, the day they were found) and the date of the 1999 Border Patrol stop (June 1 local time; June 2 in IDENT and in news reports). His birth date is given as August 1, 1959 (Inspector General) and August 1, 1960 (prison system).
The surrender agreement: his family said they understood he would not face death; Carter denied it, and the Ranger commander said the agreement did not protect him from the death penalty. Resendiz accused Carter in court of lying under oath.
August 1, 1959: born at Izúcar de Matamoros, Puebla, Mexico, according to the Inspector General (the prison system gives 1960).
August 31, 1976: first immigration record, excluded at San Antonio.
1977 to 1996: convictions in Mississippi, Florida, Texas, Missouri, New Mexico, California and Kentucky; three formal deportations and several voluntary returns.
1986: an unidentified woman is shot in Bexar County, Texas; he later confessed.
July 19, 1991: Michael White is shot in San Antonio; he later confessed.
March 23, 1997: Jesse Howell is found on the tracks at Belleview, Florida; Wendy Von Huben is missing.
July 1997: a transient is beaten to death in Colton, California.
August 29, 1997: Christopher Maier is killed in Lexington, Kentucky; his companion survives.
1998: the Border Patrol returns him to Mexico seven times.
October 1998: Leafie Mason is killed in Hughes Springs, Texas.
December 1998: Fannie Whitner Byers is killed in Barrow County, Georgia.
December 16 or 17, 1998: Claudia Benton is killed in West University Place.
December 26, 1998: fingerprints from her Jeep are matched to him.
January 5, 1999: Harris County warrant for burglary of the Benton home.
April 30 to May 2, 1999: Norman and Karen Sirnic are killed in Weimar.
May 27, 1999: federal fugitive warrant.
June 1, 1999: caught by the Border Patrol at Santa Teresa, New Mexico, and returned to Mexico.
June 4 and 5, 1999: Josephine Konvicka and Noemi Dominguez are found dead.
June 8, 1999: FBI task force formed in Houston.
June 15, 1999: George Morber and Carolyn Frederick are found dead in Gorham, Illinois.
June 1999: placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list as Rafael Resendez-Ramirez.
June 30, 1999: Inspector General review requested.
July 13, 1999: surrenders to Ranger Drew Carter at El Paso.
March 20, 2000: Inspector General's report released.
May 18, 2000: convicted of capital murder; insanity defense rejected.
May 2000: sentenced to death by Judge William Harmon.
July 15, 2000: remains found in Florida on his directions.
July 2001: asks to end his appeals.
September 2001: confesses to three San Antonio killings.
May 21, 2003: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirms, 7 to 2.
March 10, 2006: Mexican consul general files lethal injection suit.
May 1, 2006: Inter-American Commission issues precautionary measures.
June 2006: Judge Harmon finds him competent to be executed.
June 26, 2006: Board of Pardons and Paroles votes 7 to 0 against reprieve and commutation.
June 27, 2006: Fifth Circuit and U.S. Supreme Court deny stays; executed at Huntsville, 8:05 p.m.