Raul Meza Jr. first appears in the record in 1975, when he shot and wounded a man during a robbery in Austin. In 1982 he raped and strangled Kendra Page, who was eight. He admitted it under a plea agreement and was sentenced to thirty years. Texas law at the time required release once time served plus good-conduct credit equalled the sentence, and in 1993, after about eleven years, he walked out. The release caused an uproar. He was met by protesters in city after city and was, in the phrase the Associated Press used, run out of several Texas towns. The law that freed him no longer exists.
On the day he was arrested in 2023, Bruce Mills, who had been the lead investigator on the Page case and was by then Austin’s interim assistant city manager, called it a travesty of justice and called Meza a serial killer.
Gloria Elizabeth Lofton, sixty-five, was found strangled in her bedroom in East Austin in 2019. The case went unsolved for four years. In May 2023, Jesse Fraga, eighty, was found stabbed to death in a closet in his home in Pflugerville after his niece asked police for a welfare check. Fraga had taken Meza in; the two were living together. Within days Meza telephoned the police and confessed to both killings, and asked, according to reporting at the time, to be picked up. He was arrested in May 2023. Austin police said they were examining up to ten cold cases going back twenty-five years for a connection to him. None produced a charge.
The plea took eighteen months. In April 2024 his lawyers proposed fifty years. In August they proposed life for one murder and twenty years for the other, which would have left him eligible for parole at about a hundred and three. Judge Julie Kocurek refused to accept anything short of life without parole. Lofton’s family, through their advocate, asked the district attorney not to take any plea and to seek death at trial. On September 30, 2024, at sixty-three, Meza pleaded guilty to the capital murder of Lofton, committed in the course of attempting aggravated sexual assault, and to the murder of Fraga. He received life without parole and life, and waived his right to appeal. In court he said he was pleading guilty because he was guilty. Asked whether he was sorry, he said sorry was too late, and asked what the point was in saying it if the person was not going to accept it.
Sonia Houston, Lofton’s daughter, told the court that a lifetime in jail would not equal the pain, and that by accepting the plea they were giving Raul exactly what he wanted. Her sister Christina Fultz said it was obvious he did not care, and that was fine, because they were not the ones behind bars for the rest of their lives. Travis County District Attorney José Garza said his office’s hearts continued to break for both families.
In June 2026, serving his sentences in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Meza was charged with possession of child pornography.
Three convictions across forty-one years, with an eleven-year prison term and a thirty-year gap between the first and the second. The ten cold cases the police examined remain that: examined, and not charged.