On the morning of Thursday, December 18, 2014, a passerby looked under a bridge on San Antonio's West Side, near the corner of Vera Cruz and Nueva Leon streets, and found the body of a girl on the cement embankment. Two days later the Bexar County medical examiner identified her as Natalie Chavez, fifteen years old. The cause of death was asphyxia. A police spokesperson called the death very suspicious and said there were signs of trauma on her legs.
Natalie's death led detectives, four months later, to a twenty-eight-year-old dishwasher named Johnny Joe Avalos. DNA from her body tied him to her case, and then to the deaths of four women whose cases had never been linked: one found in the San Antonio River in 2012 and three found on the West and South Sides in the first months of 2015. In February 2019 Avalos pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. The case never went to trial, and most of what is known about the killings comes from police and prosecutors, from court filings described in the press, and from what Avalos himself told detectives and one television reporter.
Little about Johnny Joe Avalos's early life has been published. Reports give his age as twenty-eight in 2015, twenty-nine at his indictment in November 2016 and thirty-one at his sentencing in February 2019. He lived and worked in San Antonio. Prosecutors said that during the years of the killings he worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant, described in different reports as on the West Side, in Southtown and near downtown, and that he got off work late at night.
He was known to the police, though not for violence against women. When he was arrested in April 2015, KSAT reported that his criminal record went back ten years and included arrests for making a terroristic threat against a family, criminal mischief, possession of a controlled substance and resisting arrest. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice record lists an earlier conviction for possession of a controlled substance, with an offense date of November 28, 2013, and a two-year sentence imposed in Bexar County on April 11, 2014. None of the published reports describe his family, his schooling or how he came to be living on the streets of the near West Side at night.
On Sunday afternoon, October 28, 2012, someone walking at Espada Park on the South Side, where the Mission Reach section of the San Antonio River was still under construction, saw a person with long hair floating about twenty feet out in the water. Firefighters used a ladder truck to bring her in. Detectives said she was young and had been in the water for several days, and SAPD Detective Ricky Lopez asked anyone missing a relative after that weekend's heavy rain to call the department's missing persons unit.
She was Vanessa Marie Lopez, twenty-five, a mother of three. Her mother, Velinda Guerrero, would wait more than six years to learn who had killed her. SAPD Detective Mark Duke, who worked her case, later said she had washed about seven miles downstream before she was recovered. In 2012 nothing connected her death to anyone, and nothing connected it to any other case.
At the sentencing in 2019, Assistant District Attorney David Lunan said the killings began with the strangulation and sexual assault of Vanessa Lopez. Duke said Avalos told detectives she was his first. "So we believe that was his first homicide. That's what he says," Duke told KSAT in 2022. "And we don't have any reason to not believe that, although we do know that they only tell us what they want to tell us."
Natalie Chavez had run away from home in 2014. San Antonio Police Chief William McManus said in December that she had run away before and that there was an old missing persons report on file for her, but that she had not been reported missing when she died. KSAT later reported that she had been gone for a few months and had tried a few times to ask whether she could come home.
On December 17, 2014, she sent a text to Carlos Johnson, identified in the first reports as her father and in later ones as her stepfather, saying she was ready to come home and that she loved them. No one answered it. "It's hard for me to talk about that because that's really the last thing," Johnson said three days later. "And I felt like maybe if we would have answered. There's a lot of what-ifs."
The next morning she was found under the bridge. Early reports placed it at Vera Cruz and South Zarzamora; most later reports, and the indictment as KSAT described it, put it on Vera Cruz near Nueva Leon. Her father, Juan Pablo Chavez, remembered her big dark eyes and her smile. "She would light up the room," he said. "She was a very good daughter," Johnson said. "We miss her a lot already." Her brother, also named Juan, called the first Christmas without her the hardest part of the year.
The neighborhood responded. Friends held a vigil at the bridge the Saturday after she was found. Diane Villarreal, who lived near the scene and had a daughter the same age who walked to Rhodes Middle School, organized a barbecue plate sale at a barber shop on Southwest 19th Street; motorcycle riders from the American Legion and other clubs rode through the area to spread the word, and Deputy Chief Anthony Trevino, who was about to succeed McManus as police chief, stopped by. A menudo sale at a VFW post on Guadalupe Street followed, with the money going to her funeral and to a Crime Stoppers reward. A local limousine company donated a car for the funeral at Palm Heights Mortuary.
The family also had to contend with what McManus called a Facebook assault, a stream of derogatory posts about Natalie that police said they were watching. "We're not interested in people calling in and bad-mouthing her," McManus said. In late January 2015 someone smashed the candles and tore apart the wreath at her memorial under the bridge; her uncle confronted the man and was cut with a knife in the fight that followed. Her father cleaned up the site and kept new candles lit. "When somebody passes away, you got to have a candle lit so they can see their way home," he said. By the first anniversary, lights had been installed under the bridge, which her family said made the area safer.
On January 12, 2015, less than four weeks after Natalie was found, the body of Rosemary Perez, twenty-eight, was found wrapped in a sheet along a sidewalk in the 2100 block of San Fernando Street on the West Side. The published reports say almost nothing about her life. For months her death was not even classed as a homicide: in 2015 KENS 5 reported that the cause of death was listed as undetermined and that the county had not confirmed a homicide, though investigators regarded Avalos as a person of interest. The November 2016 indictment alleged that on or about January 10, 2015, Avalos killed her by asphyxiation with his hand and arm.
Genevieve Ramirez, forty-six, was found unconscious in a grassy alleyway in the 100 block of Avondale Avenue on the South Side in early April 2015. Police gave the date as April 4; the District Attorney's office later gave April 3. According to SAPD, she was partly undressed and bruised but had no obvious signs of trauma.
Michea Marquez, who ministers to women on the streets of the South Side, had met her at a bus stop at Avondale and South Presa. Marquez told KENS 5 that Ramirez wanted to go to the Women's Home to change her life. She was found critically hurt a block from that bus stop. She was taken to a hospital and then a nursing home, and she died of her injuries in June 2015. Her family and friends held a vigil for her on June 27. The Associated Press, reporting the 2019 sentencing, gave a different chronology, saying she was attacked in March 2015 and died the following month; the local reports from 2015 support April and June.
On April 15, 2015, KSAT reported that residents of the area had described another woman who had disappeared under similar circumstances about two weeks earlier and had been found beaten and strangled but still alive. The station did not name her, but the timing and place match Ramirez's case.
Celia Ann Lopez, twenty-nine, was known to friends as Gizmo. She was four feet ten inches tall. She was last seen between 4:30 and 5 a.m. on Friday, April 10, 2015, in the Southcross and South Presa area of the South Side, wearing a black T-shirt with a picture of Gizmo the gremlin. Her hands carried the tattooed names "Nyshya" and "Dolores," and the backs of her calves read "Southside." Within days her personal belongings were found less than a mile from where she was last seen, and San Antonio police and the Heidi Search Center, a volunteer missing persons group, put out an appeal.
On the afternoon of Wednesday, April 15, a passerby found a woman's body in a fenced-in area in the 4400 block of South Presa. She had been there for some time, and there was trauma to her head and face. Sgt. Javier Salazar said investigators were looking at several missing persons cases from the area and would wait for the medical examiner. The woman was Celia Lopez.
The break came from the crime lab. Detective Leroy Carrion, who joined the police academy in 1994 and had worked homicide since his promotion to detective in 2008, had been assigned Natalie's case. "I knew the condition of the surroundings, how we found Natalie," he told KSAT in 2022. "I knew what we collected at the scene was going to be very important." Foreign DNA was recovered from her body.
Shortly after Carrion began work on Natalie's case, there was another death, and he suspected a connection. He asked the detective handling it to send both sets of findings to the crime lab together. "There's a link," he recalled telling his colleague. The results matched. Carrion then went around the homicide office asking whether anyone had a case with a female victim that fit the same profile. "Boom. There was. We found several others," he said.
The DNA was entered in CODIS, the national DNA database, and in April 2015 it returned a name. The match surprised both Carrion and Duke. Avalos, KSAT reported, "was never someone on their radar." "We all wanted to know; who is this person?" Carrion said.
KSAT reported that SAPD took Avalos into custody late on Tuesday night, April 21, 2015, on the West Side, questioned him and booked him into the Bexar County Jail on a charge of sexual assault of a child. In 2016 the District Attorney's office gave a different account of the timing: that he had been in custody since April 15, 2015, initially on municipal court warrants, and that the CODIS hit came back later that day after a warrant was run on him for sexual assault. The two accounts have not been reconciled in any source found.
According to the arrest warrant, Avalos admitted having sex with Natalie for "a predetermined amount of money" and said he had not known her age. He did not confess to her killing, and on April 22 police said he had been charged only with sexual assault of a child. Sgt. Salazar called him a person of interest in Natalie's murder and in "several violent incidences on the South Side, one of which has led to the death of a young woman on Presa Street and another that has led to critical injuries to another victim on the South Side," references to Celia Lopez and Genevieve Ramirez.
Natalie's step-aunt, Nina Zavala, said the arrest brought the family a small measure of relief. "We were worried that they wouldn't have caught anybody and now that they have it's like, wow," she said. "What kind of a sick person would do that?"
He was soon charged with capital murder in Natalie's death. On Friday, June 19, 2015, San Antonio police announced that, as a result of further investigation, Avalos had also been charged with murder in the death of Celia Lopez. Two days later police named him a person of interest in the death of Genevieve Ramirez, who had died the week before. He was held in the Bexar County Jail on bond of more than $1 million. Jim Wheat, chief of the Special Crimes Division at the District Attorney's office, told KENS 5 that police had filed paperwork to charge him in Ramirez's death but that the charge could not move forward until the investigation was complete.
KENS 5 reported that the arrest warrant in the Celia Lopez case said Avalos had told a confidant he killed her to take her money, that his DNA was found on men's underwear near her remains, and that she was not his first female assault or robbery victim. These were allegations in a police affidavit, and the eventual plea did not test them in court.
While in the Bexar County Jail in 2015, Avalos agreed to talk to a KENS 5 reporter. He asked to be paid, first $100 and then $50, saying he wanted to buy a radio and hygiene items. The station does not pay for interviews and refused. According to KENS 5, he asked for money twenty-two times in nine minutes, and talked anyway.
"I'm about to admit to you things that I have never admitted to detectives," he said. He did not deny killing the three women and the girl when their names were put to him. Asked about Genevieve Ramirez, he said, "Oh yeah, yeah." Of Natalie, he said, "I knew she was 15. Blah. Blah. Blah," which contradicted what he had told detectives about not knowing her age. He also referred to "four other girls" he would not describe, and claimed the police did not know about one of them. The station reported the interview under the headline that he had hinted at a fifth victim. No published source states whether that remark referred to Vanessa Lopez.
On November 29, 2016, Bexar County District Attorney Nico LaHood announced two grand jury indictments charging Avalos, then twenty-nine, with capital murder of multiple persons in the deaths of Natalie Chavez, Rosemary Perez, Celia Ann Lopez and Genevieve Ramirez between December 2014 and April 2015, along with aggravated sexual assault. The indictments alleged that he asphyxiated each victim with his hand and arm and used plastic bags on three of them. Prosecutors told the Associated Press the victims were killed during attempted sexual assaults.
Texas law makes killing more than one person a capital offense when the killings are committed at different times as part of the same scheme or course of conduct. "That's what we call serial murder enhancement. The statute allows for that," LaHood said. His office announced it would seek the death penalty, and he expected two trials, each covering two of the deaths.
LaHood also addressed the fact that some of the women had been involved in prostitution. "But that's irrelevant," he said. "Every life matters in this office and there's value to that. Those victims' voices and their families' voices need to be heard in our community." The case was assigned to the 437th District Court, with a first scheduling hearing on December 19, 2016.
The trials never took place. Over the next two years Avalos was evaluated by doctors, and prosecutors concluded that he was intellectually disabled. Lunan explained that under Texas law the assessment begins with an IQ test, with 70 or below as a starting point, combined with evidence of deficits in adaptive functioning, reasoning and judgment. "A person who is intellectually disabled cannot receive a death sentence," Lunan said. To execute him, he said, would violate the Eighth Amendment's protection against cruel and unusual punishment. The State dropped the death penalty. A defense attorney, not named in the AP report, said Avalos had the mental capacity of a juvenile.
On Tuesday, February 19, 2019, Avalos appeared before Judge Lori Valenzuela in the 437th District Court. Under a plea agreement, he pleaded guilty to two indictments of capital murder of multiple persons. "Guilty" was the only word he said during the hearing, KSAT reported. Judge Valenzuela sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole in both cases. "He ended up getting two capital life sentences, meaning he has no opportunity for getting parole at any point," Lunan said afterward. The San Antonio Current, citing MySanAntonio.com, reported that the sentences run concurrently.
The plea covered five deaths. Reports of the hearing said Avalos acknowledged killing Vanessa Lopez in 2012, Natalie Chavez in 2014, and Rosemary Perez, Genevieve Ramirez and Celia Lopez in 2015. Lunan said Avalos's DNA matched DNA found on the bodies of the four women as well as on Natalie. The Texas prison system lists the two convictions under Bexar County case numbers 2016CR10374 and 2018CR7068, with offense dates of December 18, 2014, and April 15, 2015. The published reports do not say how the five deaths were divided between the two indictments, or when Vanessa Lopez's death was formally charged.
Prosecutors described a pattern from Avalos's own statements. "He'd walk around and prowl the streets of the West Side, and later the South Side, and he'd look for ladies, perhaps engaging in prostitution," Lunan said. According to Lunan, Avalos offered women money for sex, went with them to a secluded spot, caught them off guard and strangled them with his arm around their neck, then sexually assaulted them. Lunan said that all of the women except Natalie had at some point engaged in prostitution.
Court records introduced at the sentencing included Avalos's statements to police. "His details and his memory of events were pretty good," Lunan said. "He could describe each one of them and was certainly willing to tell it." In those statements Avalos said he stalked women on the near South Side in the middle of the night after he got off work, and he claimed that at least twenty other women he tried to attack had gotten away.
"If Johnny is to be believed, then I would expect that there are other women that have been assaulted or that he attempted to assault," Lunan said. "Whether or not he murdered anyone else, we don't know." No additional charges were reported.
Detective Duke, whom KSAT described as the only active trained criminal profiler in Texas, said Avalos appeared to take pleasure in recounting what he had done. "He enjoys reliving these events in his life," Duke told KSAT. "And you can even see it on his face when he was reliving it." Duke added that physical evidence alone leads to arrest and successful prosecution in a minority of cases, and that most solved cases rest on witnesses or confessions. In this one the DNA identified Avalos, and his own statements filled in the rest, including the first killing in 2012.
Several relatives spoke in court after the sentence was imposed. Velinda Guerrero, Vanessa Lopez's mother, said she was pleased with the life sentence. "That's what I'd been praying for, for him to have that (life in prison), because I don't believe in the death penalty," she said. Carlos Johnson addressed Avalos too, and afterward described the sentence differently. "I thought it'd be satisfying, but it wasn't. Nothing's going to change," he said.
The next month Victory Outreach Church on Hammond Avenue held its first vigil for all five women. Michea Marquez, who had known Genevieve Ramirez, called them "the twilight treasure angels" and said the vigil was meant to bring peace, healing and closure.
Detective Carrion kept in touch with Natalie's mother and stepfather. "We're still thinking of Natalie and it's tough. She's a young girl," he said in 2022. "A mom lost her daughter. And she was taken, she was taken from her, taken from all of us. Yeah, that motivated me then, it still does now." Of the sentence, he said: "The only satisfaction I really get is just I know that there's not going to be another victim."
Johnny Joe Avalos is convicted. He pleaded guilty, and no appeal of the convictions or the sentences has been reported in any source found for this page. When the Texas Department of Criminal Justice inmate database was checked on October 14, 2026, it listed him as inmate 02252506, age thirty-nine, held at the Robertson Unit, with a sentence of life without parole and no release date scheduled.
Proven by guilty plea: two convictions for capital murder of multiple persons, which the sentencing reports say covered the deaths of Vanessa Lopez, Natalie Chavez, Rosemary Perez, Genevieve Ramirez and Celia Lopez. The plea was not tested at trial, and no jury heard the evidence.
Supported by forensic evidence, according to prosecutors: DNA linking Avalos to Natalie Chavez and to the four women.
Alleged but not tested in court: the arrest-warrant statements in the Celia Lopez case that he told a confidant he killed her for her money, and that she was not his first robbery or assault victim.
Admitted by Avalos but unverified: his claim that at least twenty other women escaped his attempts to attack them; his 2015 jailhouse remarks about "four other girls" and a victim unknown to police. No one else has been charged or linked to him publicly, and prosecutors said they did not know whether he had killed anyone else.
Unresolved details: the exact date and circumstances of his first arrest in April 2015 (April 15 on municipal warrants, by the DA's account, or April 21 on the sexual assault charge, by KSAT's); the dates of Genevieve Ramirez's attack and death (April and June 2015 in local reports, March and April in the AP's 2019 report); and whether Carlos Johnson was Natalie's father or stepfather, since reports call him both.
October 28, 2012: Vanessa Marie Lopez, 25, is found in the San Antonio River at Espada Park.
November 28, 2013: offense date for Avalos's drug possession case; he is sentenced to two years in Bexar County on April 11, 2014.
December 17, 2014: Natalie Chavez texts her family that she is ready to come home.
December 18, 2014: Natalie Chavez, 15, is found under a bridge on Vera Cruz Street.
January 12, 2015: Rosemary Perez, 28, is found on San Fernando Street.
April 3 or 4, 2015: Genevieve Ramirez, 46, is found critically injured on Avondale Avenue.
April 10, 2015: Celia Lopez, 29, is last seen near Southcross and South Presa.
April 15, 2015: Celia Lopez's body is found in the 4400 block of South Presa. The DA's office later says Avalos was taken into custody this day on municipal warrants.
April 21, 2015: Avalos is arrested, per KSAT, on a charge of sexual assault of a child after a DNA match.
June 2015: Genevieve Ramirez dies of her injuries.
June 19, 2015: police announce a murder charge in Celia Lopez's death; Avalos already faces capital murder in Natalie's.
June 21, 2015: police name Avalos a person of interest in Ramirez's death.
2015: Avalos gives a jailhouse interview to KENS 5.
November 29, 2016: two indictments for capital murder of multiple persons; the DA announces it will seek death.
February 19, 2019: Avalos pleads guilty and is sentenced to life without parole in two cases after being found intellectually disabled.
March 2019: Victory Outreach Church holds a vigil for the five women.
August 2022: KSAT's South Texas Crime Stories revisits the case with Detectives Carrion and Duke.
October 14, 2026: TDCJ lists Avalos at the Robertson Unit, serving life without parole.