Martin Gonzalez Escamilla killed three women in Austin, Texas over three years, all of them women he was in a relationship with. He had already been convicted of murder in Mexico. He was convicted here of capital murder and sentenced to life after a jury declined to sentence him to death.
He is recorded in Texas prison records under the name Martin Gonzalez, born November 15, 1952, and appears in court papers as Martin Gonzalez a/k/a Martin Gonzalez Escamilla. Thirteen years before the Austin killings he was convicted of murder in Mexico, committed during a robbery near his home town of Castanos, Coahuila.
He married Sylvia Victoria Garcia in Monclova, Mexico in May 1994. She was forty-four and divorced. He moved to Austin late that year and she followed in March 1995, telephoning her daughter in Monclova almost daily and sounding nervous and unhappy. Her last call came on June 8. She was last seen at the house she shared with him on June 24, 1995; he moved out the next day, taking everything they had brought to it. Skeletal remains were found in a nearby vacant lot that September, the skull fractured in several places, but could not be identified for years. A facial reconstruction was circulated to the press, her family recognised it, and mitochondrial DNA from a hair caught in a knot in the fabric around the bones was matched to him. The first use of mitochondrial DNA in a Texas prosecution. He denied ever having known or married her.
Maria Gladys Flores, fifty-three, a native of Panama who had moved to Austin in 1994 with two of her children, was last seen in May 1998 and had lived with him briefly; he had reported her missing himself. Olivia Estrada, fifty-four, disappeared five months after that. He was arrested in November 1998, and gave police an account of another man that they discounted because the man he named was in jail at the time.
He was indicted for all three murders as one course of conduct and convicted of capital murder in Travis County on August 28, 2000. Prosecutors sought the death penalty; the jury found he was a continuing threat but returned life imprisonment. The Third Court of Appeals affirmed in October 2001. He is held at the Coffield unit with a parole eligibility date of 2038. Investigators considered that there may be other victims, on the pattern of women with few ties in the country, and the disappearance of a woman he worked with, Erica Perez, was examined; nothing further has been established.