Raul Meza Jr. has been convicted of three killings in Central Texas, more than 40 years apart. In 1982 he pleaded guilty to the murder of Kendra Page, an eight-year-old girl in Austin, and was sentenced to 30 years. Texas good-conduct rules of the time let him walk out after about 11 years, in 1993, and the release set off protests that drove him from one Texas town to the next. Three decades later, in May 2023, he telephoned an Austin police homicide detective and confessed to killing his 80-year-old roommate, Jesse Fraga, in Pflugerville, and to killing a woman in Austin years earlier. On September 30, 2024, he pleaded guilty to the capital murder of Gloria Lofton, 65, killed in 2019, and to the murder of Fraga. He was sentenced to life without parole and a second life term, and he gave up his right to appeal.
The case drew attention for two reasons beyond the killings themselves. The first was the 1993 release, which came under a law that let prisoners earn their way out through credit for good behavior, whatever the crime. The second was a DNA match. Texas crime-lab staff linked Meza's DNA to Lofton's death in 2020, but the Austin detective who received the result did not act on it, and the department did not act on it until 2023, after Meza had called police himself and Fraga was dead. The Austin Police Department later apologized.
Little is known of Meza's childhood. A Policy Review article that follows his case into 1994 says that in 1975, at 15, he robbed an Austin convenience store and shot the clerk, who survived and testified against him. He was given 20 years and was paroled after five, according to that article. The Associated Press, reporting in 2023, said he was on parole for robbing a convenience store and shooting a man, who was left with permanent injuries, at the time of the 1982 killing.
Kendra Page was eight years old and a third-grader in Austin, the Policy Review article says. She was killed in Austin in early January 1982.
Meza was 21. He surrendered three days after the killing, according to the Policy Review article. He pleaded guilty that year under a plea agreement and was sentenced to 30 years in prison, the Associated Press reported. Bruce Mills, an Austin police investigator on the case who decades later became an assistant city manager, told reporters in 2023: "Somebody made a bad decision 41 years ago." He called the original outcome a "travesty of justice," according to KENS 5.
Kendra Page's family worked for years to return Meza to prison, KENS 5 reported. Her brother and her sister spoke publicly during the 2024 proceedings.
According to the Policy Review article, Meza collected disciplinary infractions in prison and had four years added after a knife was found in his cell, and he was denied parole seven times. Under the Texas law of the period he nonetheless qualified for automatic release through the good-time credit he had built up, under what was called mandatory supervision. The Associated Press has described his 1993 release as an early release "with credit for good time served." KVUE has said that the provision that freed him no longer exists.
Accounts of how long he served differ slightly: about 11 years (Associated Press, 2024), just over 10 years (Associated Press, 2023) and about a third of his 30-year sentence (Associated Press, August 2023). The month of his release is also reported differently. KSAT, in 2023, said he was paroled in June 1993; KENS 5 said he was freed in October 1993.
The Austin American-Statesman ran a front-page story before his release, according to the Policy Review article, and television crews followed him for months afterward. The release caused an uproar. Picketers drove him out of six Texas cities, sometimes with threats of violence, the Associated Press reported. He was moved from El Paso, San Antonio, Wichita Falls, Mineral Wells and Sweetwater, each time after protests, and then to rural Uvalde County, west of San Antonio, to live with his grandparents. He was jailed again there after his family said he had verbally abused them. The Policy Review article gives the same sequence in more detail: of 276 halfway houses asked to take him, 271 refused; on his grandparents' farm near San Antonio, in August 1993, he was charged with terroristic threatening and disorderly conduct, charges later dismissed; more than 1,000 residents signed a petition for his removal; and he was sent back to Austin, where he lived with his mother and found work.
At a news conference in August 1993, Meza described himself as a born-again Christian. "In my heart, I know that I will not willfully bring harm to anyone," he said, in words quoted by the Associated Press many times since. KENS 5 reported that residents of his Austin neighborhood protested his return there too. "We don't want him in our neighborhood," they said. His mother said he had changed. According to the Policy Review article, the girl's father publicly urged people to give Meza a chance to start over.
In August 1994 he was arrested for violating his curfew and was returned to prison, the Policy Review article says. It noted that he was taken back after a single violation, sooner than the usual practice of allowing three.
Little is known of Meza's life between the mid-1990s and 2019. The Associated Press, citing what Meza told police in 2023, said he had been released from prison in 2016. A KVUE report says he became friends in the 1990s, after he left prison, with Jesse Fraga, an adult probation officer who was trying to help him rebuild his life while he was on parole. At the 2024 plea hearing, a member of Fraga's family read aloud a letter Meza had written in 2009.
Gloria Lofton was 65 and lived in East Austin. Her daughters have described her as a mother who taught them to look for the good in bad situations. One of them has said her mother taught her to "set the standard." Some reports give her age as 66.
She was found dead in East Austin on May 9, 2019. According to KVUE, detectives saw possible signs that she had been killed. In July 2019 the medical examiner's final report listed both the cause and the manner of her death as "undetermined," and the death was not ruled a homicide until after Meza called police and admitted the killing. Her daughters have said the scene plainly looked like a crime scene to them, and they questioned why the family was not told about the results of a sexual-assault evidence kit taken in the case. Meza had been living next door to her, KVUE reported.
DNA collected in the Lofton case was linked to Meza's profile in the national CODIS database in 2020. The month is given as April 2020 in one KVUE report and as May 2020 in another, citing the arrest affidavit. The detective who received the notice from the Texas Department of Public Safety laboratory did not follow up. At the time he was on a special assignment connected with the protests in Austin in 2020, the department later said.
Austin police began an administrative review after Meza was charged in Lofton's death. Chief Joseph Chacon said at the time that he had only just been made aware of the problem. The internal investigation concluded, according to KVUE, that "the detective received the information and did not follow up."
Jesse Fraga was 80. He had worked as an adult probation officer, and, according to KVUE, he had befriended Meza in the 1990s and spent years trying to help him. By 2023 the two men were living together in Pflugerville, a suburb of Austin. At Meza's plea hearing in 2024, Fraga's brother-in-law described Fraga and his family as good people.
Fraga's niece told police that Meza moved out on May 12, 2023, the day Fraga was last seen alive, according to the probable cause affidavit described by ABC News. On May 20, after loved ones had not heard from him for several days, Pflugerville officers went to the home on a welfare check, around 12:30 p.m., and found him dead. He had been stabbed to death, Cox Media Group reported. Meza had been seen driving Fraga's pickup truck, which police later recovered, KVUE reported. On May 23 Pflugerville police said they were looking for Meza in connection with Fraga's death, and they asked the public for tips.
The U.S. Marshals Service said he had been traveling the Interstate 35 corridor and staying in hotels, and it described him as armed, dangerous, suicidal and violent, according to KVUE.
While the search was on, Meza telephoned the Austin Police Department's homicide line. "I think you are looking for me," he said, according to an affidavit quoted by the Associated Press. Reports differ on the date of the call: the Associated Press gave May 23 in its first report and May 24 in later ones, and ABC News and KSAT also gave May 24.
The call lasted about 14 minutes, KSAT reported. Meza confessed to killing Fraga and gave details that had not been made public. He told Detective Patrick Reed, who took the call, that he had been released from prison in 2016 and had killed a woman soon afterward, and he said police had got that case wrong. He did not name her, but he named the street where she was killed, and detectives matched his account to Lofton's death. He also said he had killed two people in San Antonio in earlier years, and San Antonio police said they were looking into the claim.
On Memorial Day, May 29, 2023, the U.S. Marshals Service Lone Star Fugitive Task Force arrested Meza in north Austin without incident. He was carrying a backpack with a .22-caliber pistol, extra rounds and other items, the Associated Press reported. KVUE reported that he was booked into the Travis County Jail early on May 30, charged with two counts of murder and a state jail felony count of unauthorized use of a vehicle.
Detective Reed said afterward: "Meza said he was ready and prepared to kill again and looking forward to it." Officials called him "the worst of the worst." Mills, the former investigator on the 1982 case, said Meza should never have been released. Authorities described him as a serial killer.
Russell Hunt was listed in Travis County records as his lawyer. He said his firm had just taken the case and declined further comment. Meza was held on bond totaling more than $3 million on four charges, KVUE reported at one stage of the case. The Associated Press, in August 2023, described a $1 million bond.
At the same news conference, Austin police Detective Katie Conner said investigators were looking at eight to 10 unsolved cases dating back to 1996 that might be connected to Meza, and that the number could grow. There were no immediate connections between the victims, she said, but the cases "fit the circumstances" investigators were examining. By the time of his plea in 2024, KVUE was reporting that police thought he might be linked to as many as 10 cold cases going back more than two decades. No charge in any of those cases was reported.
In July 2023, the FBI, Austin police, Pflugerville police and Round Rock police searched a field in Pflugerville. A search warrant obtained by KVUE said the search grew out of the possible death of a woman in March 2022, which police had not previously disclosed. According to that warrant, Pflugerville officers answering a 911 call one night in March 2022 had found Meza by a roadside, giving unclear answers about how he got there; when an Austin officer watched the body-camera footage in 2023, he suspected that a woman had been killed and left nearby. Investigators found a site with partly buried clothing and a tarp and exhumed it on July 12, 2023, but found no human remains. Austin police searched again on July 17 and said only that the search was "related to the current Raul Meza Jr. case." No charge connected with that search was reported.
The claims about San Antonio and the cold cases remain allegations. None of them was tested in court.
On August 10, 2023, a Travis County grand jury indicted Meza on one count of capital murder in the death of Gloria Lofton and one count of murder in the death of Jesse Fraga, the Associated Press reported. Lofton, the Associated Press reported, had been strangled. Under Texas law the capital murder count carried two possible punishments, death or life in prison without parole. The murder count could bring a life term.
The Travis County District Attorney, José Garza, is an opponent of capital punishment, KVUE noted, and he did not agree to the families' wish for a trial that could end in a death sentence.
At a pretrial hearing on April 11, 2024, Meza's lawyer, Russ Hunt, offered a deal: 50 years on each murder charge, served at the same time. Hunt said that would amount to a life sentence, since Meza would not be eligible for parole for 30 years, at 93. Prosecutors said they had not yet weighed the offer. The victims' families urged them to turn it down.
A second proposal was filed in late August. It called for life in prison for one murder and 20 years for the other, with parole eligibility after 40 years. At a hearing in Travis County, Judge Julie Kocurek refused to accept anything short of life without parole. Hunt said his client wanted to avoid a trial and was "not terribly interested" in having damaging details aired in court. Kendra Page's sister said the judge's decision brought her relief. One of Lofton's daughters said she still wanted a trial and the maximum punishment. Kocurek set September 30 as the date to take up a new deal.
On September 30, 2024, Meza, then 63, pleaded guilty to the capital murder of Gloria Lofton, committed during an attempted or completed aggravated sexual assault, and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. He also pleaded guilty to the murder of Jesse Fraga and received a second life sentence. Both sentences are to be served in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. He waived his right to appeal both convictions, so neither case is open to further litigation, the Travis County District Attorney's Office said. The office moved to dismiss the separate charge of unauthorized use of a vehicle.
In court Meza said he was a confirmed gang member and asked to be placed in protective custody. Kocurek denied the request, KVUE reported. One of Lofton's daughters said the request was outlandish and that she herself did not feel safe.
Members of the victims' families addressed the court. "A lifetime in jail will not be equal to the pain," one of Lofton's daughters told the court. "By accepting this plea, we are giving Raul exactly what he wants." She said the outcome was not a complete win. Her sister criticized the Austin Police Department's handling of their mother's case. Fraga's brother-in-law called Meza a "wordsmith" and read from the 2009 letter. Kendra Page's brother called Meza "pure evil" and said he had lied for decades.
"Our hearts continue to break for the Lofton and Fraga families," Garza said in a statement. He said the result meant Meza would never threaten the community again, and he thanked the prosecutors and the police agencies that had worked on the case.
Under the plea agreement, Meza will not be eligible for parole, the Associated Press reported.
Several claims about Meza were made in public but were not tested in court, and some details of his record differ from one report to another.
The San Antonio claim. In his May 2023 call Meza said he had killed two people in San Antonio in earlier years. San Antonio police said they were looking into it. No charge was reported.
The cold cases. Austin police said in 2023 that eight to 10 unsolved cases dating to 1996 were being examined for a possible link, and later reports put the figure at up to 10. Police did not announce findings, and no charge in any of those cases was reported.
The March 2022 search. A search warrant tied a July 2023 field search in Pflugerville to the possible death of a woman in March 2022. No human remains were found, and no charge has been reported.
The details of the 1982 case. Only a summary of the 1982 plea record has ever been made public. Reports agree that he pleaded guilty and received 30 years. They differ on how much of the sentence he served (just over 10 years, about 11 years, about a third of the term, or just under 12 years) and on the month of his release in 1993 (June in one report, October in another).
The spelling of names. Most reports spell the 1982 victim's surname Page; some Associated Press copies printed in 2023 spell it Paige. Most reports give Gloria Lofton's age as 65; some give 66, and one report spells her surname Loften.
1975: At 15, Meza robs an Austin convenience store and shoots the clerk, who survives (Policy Review). He is sentenced to 20 years and later paroled.
January 1982: Kendra Page, 8, is killed in Austin. Meza, 21 and on parole, surrenders days later.
1982: Meza pleads guilty to her murder under a plea agreement and is sentenced to 30 years.
1993: He is released under mandatory supervision with good-conduct credit. Protests follow him from El Paso, San Antonio, Wichita Falls, Mineral Wells and Sweetwater.
August 1993: At a news conference he says he will not "willfully bring harm to anyone."
August 1994: He is arrested for a curfew violation and returned to prison (Policy Review).
1990s: He becomes friends with Jesse Fraga, an adult probation officer.
2016: Released from prison, by his own later account to police.
May 9, 2019: Gloria Lofton, 65, is found dead in East Austin.
July 2019: The medical examiner lists her cause and manner of death as undetermined.
2020: DNA from the Lofton case is matched to Meza in CODIS; the detective notified does not follow up.
May 12, 2023: Meza moves out of Fraga's home in Pflugerville, the day Fraga was last seen alive, according to Fraga's niece.
May 20, 2023: Fraga, 80, is found dead in Pflugerville during a welfare check.
May 23, 2023: Pflugerville police say they are looking for Meza.
May 23 or 24, 2023: Meza telephones Austin police and confesses.
May 29, 2023: He is arrested in north Austin by the U.S. Marshals Service Lone Star Fugitive Task Force.
July 12 and 17, 2023: Law enforcement searches a field in Pflugerville; no human remains are found.
August 10, 2023: A Travis County grand jury indicts him for the capital murder of Lofton and the murder of Fraga.
April 11, 2024: The defense offers a plea to 50 years on each count; the families object.
Late August, before the September 30 hearing: A second defense proposal is filed; Judge Julie Kocurek refuses anything short of life without parole.
September 30, 2024: Meza pleads guilty to the capital murder of Lofton and the murder of Fraga; he is sentenced to life without parole and life and waives his right to appeal.