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Texas Executes "Railroad Killer" Angel Maturino Resendiz After the Supreme Court Rejects Final Appeals

Resendiz was put to death for the 1998 murder of Houston physician Claudia Benton. His lawyers and Mexico argued he was too mentally ill to be executed.

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Illustration of men standing by a barricade along a high red-brick prison wall topped with razor wire at sunset. Not an actual scene from the case.

Angel Maturino Resendiz roamed the country by freight train and was linked to at least 15 killings near railroad tracks. On June 27, 2006, Texas executed him for the murder of a Houston physician.

Resendiz, 46, was pronounced dead by lethal injection at 8:05 p.m., almost two hours late, after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected several last-day appeals. His lead lawyer, Jack Zimmermann, had argued that Resendiz, who described himself as half-man and half-angel, was not competent to be executed because he did not believe he could die. The court also rejected an appeal from Mexico's consul general in Houston, and Mexico's Foreign Relations Department protested that the execution went ahead despite medical evidence of severe mental problems.

He was executed for killing Dr. Claudia Benton in her Houston home, near a railroad track, on December 17, 1998. DNA linked him to her death and to other killings during a spree in 1998 and 1999 that put him on the FBI's Most Wanted list, and he surrendered at the international bridge at El Paso in a deal arranged by his sister. He had been on death row since May 2000.

"I want to ask if it is in your heart to forgive me," Resendiz said as he looked toward victims' relatives. "I deserve what I am getting." Benton's husband, who watched the execution, said, "What was executed today may have looked like a man, walked and talked like a man but what was contained inside that skin was not a human being."

The Associated Press linked Resendiz to at least 15 killings, while his Texas prison record says only that he is believed to have committed a series of murders in Texas and other states.

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