On June 22, 2024, Austin police were called to an abandoned house in the 2600 block of Metcalfe Road, near East Riverside Drive, after a resident reported seeing a body inside; some accounts date the call to June 21. Alyssa Ann Rivera, thirty-four, lay face down in the entryway. According to court documents she had been dragged into the house and had tried to escape before she died, and investigators found blood, drag marks and handprints throughout. The autopsy found blunt-force trauma to her head and signs of strangulation, and her death was ruled a homicide.
Six years earlier and about three miles away, Bastrop County deputies had been sent to a car on the shoulder of San Antonio Road after a passing driver reported it. Inside was Alba Jenisse Aviles Marti, twenty-eight. According to the authorities she had been sexually assaulted and strangled with a seatbelt. She died in April 2018. Neither case was solved for years.
On April 27, 2026, the Lone Star Fugitive Task Force arrested Luis Fernando Benitez-Gonzalez, twenty-six, at an apartment complex in the Dallas area, on two felony counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, arising from shootings in November and December 2025 in which the women who were shot survived. He was then charged with first-degree murder in Alyssa Rivera's death. Police said DNA evidence also linked him to the Aviles killing, though as of May 12 no charge had been filed in that case. One account says that in custody he confessed to it; the police, at their news conference, spoke of the evidence and "his own statements" together.
"This investigation has revealed a disturbing pattern of conduct involving violence against vulnerable female victims," Austin Police Detective Chris Anderson said on May 12, 2026. "We believe that there is a strong likelihood that Benitez is responsible for further acts of extreme violence." Police asked anyone with information to come forward.
Deputy U.S. Marshal Brandon Filla said Benitez-Gonzalez was a Mexican national who had been removed to Mexico in 2020; federal officials said he had been arrested by the Border Patrol in Texas that year, and that his record also included an arrest for possession of dangerous drugs. When he returned to the United States was not known. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement asked the Dallas authorities not to release him.
He has not been tried on any of the charges.