He told a Dallas television station that he wanted to die. "I would rather die than spend the rest of my life in prison," he said in a WFAA-TV report in March 1981. "I know I'll never get out if I go down there." He said he felt no remorse, and that he had been brutal because he wanted to be certain the men were dead.
He did not get what he asked for. He was convicted of five murders, three in Dallas and two in San Antonio, and given five life sentences. As of January 2023 he was held at the James V. Allred Unit in Wichita Falls.
David Villarreal was born in San Antonio on October 12, 1955. He moved between San Antonio and Dallas, worked out of labor pools and lived in transient homes, and he knew every one of the men he was convicted of killing. The United Press International report on his arrest described him as a self-described homosexual. One later account says he denied being gay when police and his own court-appointed lawyer raised it.
On March 17, 1979 the body of Ernesto Carbajal Garcia, twenty-six, was found in an abandoned building in downtown Dallas. His skull had been crushed with a concrete block. He had been hit over the head with a piece of wood and stabbed with an ice pick first, and the autopsy indicated he had been tortured.
On April 18 Villarreal got into the apartment Garcia had shared with two roommates, Tony Natal Gutierrez, thirty-two, and Charles Edward Moya, thirty. He said later that he wanted to kill them because he did not like them. He stabbed Gutierrez in the chest in the main room and cut his throat, then caught Moya in the hallway and cut his throat too. Then he went back to their faces. He forced a teaspoon up Gutierrez's nose, stabbed him near both eyes and put a pillow over his head. He burned Moya's right eyelid with a wooden match.
He was picked up for questioning about Garcia shortly afterward and released for lack of evidence. One Dallas officer, asked about motive, said that homosexual overtones were present and that the killings were brutal because the man wanted to be sure. Beyond that, the only reason he could offer was that the killer liked it.
While Dallas detectives worked the case, Villarreal was in prison on a burglary conviction out of Austin. Accounts put the stretch at fourteen months or almost two years. When he came out he went back to San Antonio.
On March 3, 1981 he met Joe Edward Duque, eighteen, or nineteen in another account, at a city park in San Antonio, and beat him to death with a cedar post. He left the post where it fell.
A week later someone recognized him in Dallas as the suspect in the three 1979 killings and called the police. He was arrested without incident on Tuesday, March 10, 1981, while working labor pools in the city, and in the county jail he volunteered that he had killed seven men since 1974. Dallas filed three murder charges and held him on ninety thousand dollars bond. San Antonio said it would file its own within days.
One of the things he volunteered was an address. He gave Dallas detectives the San Antonio house of Robert Manley, and Dallas called San Antonio, and early on the Wednesday officers went to the house and found Manley dead in his bedroom, wearing only his trousers, with a bloodied claw hammer beside him. Neighbors had known him as eccentric and out of work. He was seventy by the wire report and seventy-one by another account.
When Manley died is not settled. One account places his killing in late 1978 or early 1979, which would make him the first of the confirmed victims. The wire report filed on March 13, 1981 calls him the latest victim, found that week, and his death certificate, which gives his name as Robert Joseph Manley, puts his death in early March 1981.
At trial in Dallas he pleaded guilty and received life terms for Garcia, Gutierrez and Moya. Taken to San Antonio, he pleaded guilty again and received two more for Manley and Duque. The other two men he claimed to have killed were never identified, and it has never been established that they existed.
The name is a common one. At least two other men called David Villarreal appear in reported Texas criminal decisions, a David Asa Villarreal convicted of murder in Bexar County and a David Villarreal Jr. convicted of murder in San Patricio County. Neither is this man.