A Stolen Phone's Selfies Led Austin Police to a Suspect in Two Killings Six Years Apart
Luis Fernando Benitez-Gonzalez, 26, is charged with murder in the 2024 death of Alyssa Ann Rivera and linked by DNA to a 2018 killing in Bastrop County, police said.
Published
The woman fought back. In one of two assaults on women in Austin in November and December 2025, the victim struggled with her attacker and got away with his cellphone. Detectives obtained a search warrant for it and found that he had taken selfies. "He had a photo of himself," Austin police homicide detective Chris Anderson said. "At that point, we had some identifiers for him."
At a news conference on May 12, 2026, Austin police said that phone led them to Luis Fernando Benitez-Gonzalez, 26, and from him to two killings of women six years apart that had gone unsolved. He was arrested on April 27 in Dallas by the U.S. Marshals Service's Lone Star Fugitive Task Force, taken into custody without incident after a traffic stop. He is charged with murder in the June 2024 death of Alyssa Ann Rivera in southeast Austin, and police say DNA links him to the April 2018 killing of Alba Jenisse Aviles Marti in Bastrop County.
The two deaths had been tied together long before anyone had a name. DNA recovered where Rivera was found produced a match in the FBI's CODIS database to evidence from the Aviles Marti case. What investigators lacked was a name. The photos on the phone carried location data, police said, which helped identify him and placed him near the scene of the 2018 killing in Bastrop County.
After his arrest, police said, Benitez-Gonzalez confessed to both killings and claimed that he had acted in self-defense each time. Investigators said the physical and forensic evidence contradicts that.
"These two murders were never forgotten," Anderson said. Police believe there may be more. Detectives noted that people whose crimes follow a pattern this distinct rarely go six years between offenses, and they are reviewing other cases in the Austin area and asking other agencies to check their own unsolved files. Authorities said Benitez-Gonzalez, a Mexican national who had been deported in 2020, is believed to have had contact with women in the Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and Lockhart areas. Anderson also asked co-workers and acquaintances to think back: police have reason to believe, he said, that over the years Benitez-Gonzalez made incriminating comments to people who did not realize at the time how serious they were.
The investigation, police said, took 108 days from the time the fugitive task force was formally brought in.
Benitez-Gonzalez is charged, not convicted, and is presumed innocent. He is charged with murder in Alyssa Ann Rivera's death; Alba Jenisse Aviles Marti's killing is linked to him by DNA, according to police, and this story does not say whether he has been charged in it. His reported confession and self-defense claim are as police described them. No police statement on the case could be found; this account rests on CBS Austin's report of the May 12, 2026 news conference.
Sources
- Selfies on murder suspect's phone tied him to a second Central Texas homicide, police say, CBS Austin (KEYE), Tara Brolley and Bettie Cross