Sylvia Garcia married Martin Gonzalez in Monclova, in the Mexican state of Coahuila, in May 1994. She was forty-four and divorced. He moved to Austin, Texas, late that year, and she followed him in March 1995. From Austin she telephoned her daughter in Monclova almost every day, and she sounded nervous and unhappy. She told her family about trouble in the marriage and said she was afraid, and she had filed for divorce. Her last call and her last letter came on June 8. She was last seen at the house she shared with him on June 24, 1995, and the next day he moved out, taking all the furniture they had brought.
In late September 1995, skeletal remains wrapped in a blanket were found buried in a vacant lot nearby. The skull had been fractured in several places. No missing-person report in Austin matched, and a facial reconstruction was made and given to the press. Four years later her relatives in Mexico recognized it. Confronted, Gonzalez denied ever having known or married her. DNA from the pulp of a tooth, compared with saliva from letters she had sent home, confirmed that the remains were hers, and mitochondrial DNA from a hair caught in a knot tied in the fabric around the bones was linked to him, the first time mitochondrial DNA had been used that way in Texas.
He had killed before. Thirteen years before the Austin murders, according to prosecutors, he had been convicted of a murder committed during a robbery near his hometown of Castaños, Coahuila. In Texas prison records he is Martin Gonzalez, born November 15, 1952; in court papers he is Martin Gonzalez a/k/a Martin Gonzalez Escamilla. In Austin he worked temporary jobs.
Maria Gladys Flores, a native of Panama, had moved to Austin in 1994 with two of her children. She met Gonzalez in 1998, when she was fifty-three, and soon moved in with him. Her daughter testified that he was jealous and beat her mother, and that Flores worked two jobs and had to hand him all her money. On May 20, 1998, she left for work with him and never came back. When her daughter asked him where she was, he seemed nervous. He reported her missing himself, and the police closed the case in June. Her skeleton was found in a field in southeast Austin on November 22, 1999, with at least fifteen blows to the head and face from something like a hammer.
Olivia Estrada, fifty-four, met him at a dance hall that same year. He had a violent temper, and she told her doctor he had threatened to choke her if she tried to leave him. She was too frightened to call the police. In October 1998 her family urged her to get a restraining order and worked out a plan to be with her when she ended it. On October 29 her daughter called the police after Estrada had not answered her phone for two days. The hall carpet in her empty house was soaked with water, there was blood spattered on a bedroom doorframe, in the hallway and on the kitchen door, and in the carport, next to her car, there was more blood and one of her rings. In November he was arrested for kidnapping her, and he told police she had left with another man who arrived and fought with him; they discounted it, because the man he named had been in jail. Her remains were found in a field in Bastrop County on October 18, 1999. She had been struck on the forehead and above the right eye and shot in the back of the head.
Once all three women had been found and identified, a Travis County grand jury indicted him for capital murder on the theory that he had killed them in the same course of conduct. The trial was heard by Judge Wilford Flowers in the 147th District Court. The lead investigator, Detective Robert Merrill, told the jury that he had been romantically involved with all three women and had lived with all three. The jury convicted him on August 28, 2000. Prosecutors asked for death, and the jury found that he would be a continuing threat but answered the mitigation question in his favor, so the court sentenced him to life.
On appeal he argued that three killings spread over five years could not be one course of conduct. The Third Court of Appeals disagreed on October 18, 2001. He had formed intimate relationships with three middle-aged women, the court wrote, and killed them and disposed of their bodies in much the same way: each died of multiple blows to the head, and each was left in a vacant lot or a field. He is held at the Coffield Unit and becomes eligible for parole in October 2038. Investigators have suggested there may be other victims, given his history of seeking out vulnerable women with few ties in the United States, and they looked into the whereabouts of Erica Perez, a woman who had worked temporary jobs with him.