The perp.
Posted on 06/25/2006 4:28:41 AM PDT by Jalapeno
June 25, 2006, 1:54AM
By ALLAN TURNER AND ROSANNA RUIZ
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle
After he was safely behind bars, it was easy to forget that Angel Maturino Resendiz once was a fearsome, self-annointed avenging angel of God. Peering through bottle-thick glasses, pathetically cadging quarters for sugary treats and fulminating in his whispery voice against abortion and homosexuality, the pint-sized killer seemed almost harmless, a creepy blowhard villain in a B-grade movie.
But that illusion was wrong. Dead wrong.
In a two-year rampage that repeatedly took him across the continent, the boxcar-riding killer slaughtered as many as 13 people. Victims of his delusional campaign against evil included a Weimar minister and his wife, a young Houston schoolteacher, a Kentucky college student, a 79-year-old Illinois man and two elderly Texas women.
On Tuesday, Maturino Resendiz, 45, is to be executed for the rape-murder of Claudia Benton, a Baylor College of Medicine clinical geneticist and mother of two found dead in her West University Place home just days before Christmas 1998.
Benton's murder, which catapulted Maturino Resendiz into headlines and launched one of the largest manhunts in recent American history, was outstanding for its brutality. Benton, 39, died of multiple stab wounds, one of which completely penetrated her chest, and head injuries resulting from a beating with a 2-foot-tall bronze statue. The attack snapped her right arm and shattered bones in her face.
Police found the woman face down on the floor of her ransacked, blood-spattered bedroom, her head partially enclosed in a plastic bag, her torso covered with blankets. Fingerprints and DNA evidence linked Maturino Resendiz to the crime.
The violence of the attack against Benton and others appalled even veteran investigators.
"Resendiz was brutal, sadistic," said former West University Police Chief Gary Brye. To former Harris County District Attorney Johnny Holmes he was "a threat everywhere he went." The killer's attacks, FBI crime analyst Alan Brantley testified, were "eroticized violence" intended to punish his victims. "He was," added former Texas Ranger Drew Carter, "a walking, breathing form of evil."
"It was terrible overkill," said West University police Sgt. Ken Macha, who was among the first investigators to arrive at the Benton residence. " ... It was out of this world, very much out of this world."
The 5-foot-6 Maturino Resendiz was resourceful, often trusting to chance for weapons — a sledgehammer, pickax, large rock or antique iron — and, as a killer, prolific.
He was lucky, too — once being arrested, then freed, by border authorities as police throughout the nation desperately hunted him — and tricky, traveling under as many as 30 fake names.
After his first brush with U.S. law in 1976, Maturino Resendiz, a Mexican national, was deported 17 times and sentenced to prison or jail seven times.
He has been linked, through confessions and other evidence, to the deaths of 13 people, dating to at least March 1997. The known crimes include the Aug. 29, 1997, death of a 21-year-old University of Kentucky student with a rock and other slayings in California, Florida and Georgia. Dozens of other law enforcement agencies across the nation have scrutinized him as a possible suspect in unsolved homicides.
The true death toll of Maturino Resendiz's years on the rails may never be known.
Said George Benton, the slain doctor's husband, "He had a kind of gift of really taking some of the best people from society."
'A chill came over me'
Homeward bound with his son after a hard day at work, West University Police Sgt. Ken Macha looked forward to an evening of cake, candles and birthday cheer. The date was Dec. 17, 1998, and his boy was turning 9.
But somewhere between the babysitter's and the policeman's home, Macha's pager sounded.
His countenance darkened as he heard the news: The body of a horribly beaten woman had been found in a house in the 4200 block of Lehigh, just yards from the Union Pacific tracks.
"Oh, my God!" Macha said. "Immediately a chill came over me."
Macha left his son at the boy's grandparents' home and responded to the call.
"I had been to suicides — gunshot suicides are gruesome — but never anything like this," he said. "I never imagined what human beings could do."
Benton was last known to have been alive about 10 p.m. the previous day when she telephoned a colleague. Her husband and the couple's twin, sixth-grade daughters had departed hours earlier to visit relatives in Arizona.
After her family departed, the South American-born researcher got a haircut, then returned home to prepare a presentation she was scheduled to make the next day.
Authorities think Maturino Resendiz slipped into the two-story brick home about midnight, though how he gained entry still isn't clear. In the second-floor master bedroom, Benton had fallen asleep. A television droned softly in the background.
Macha theorized Maturino Resendiz, who considered himself an immortal avenging angel, might have spied on his victim as she worked in her yard. "She was an attractive woman," he said, "maybe that's what attracted him." Or maybe the Benton family's collection of ethnic artwork, visible from the street through the bedroom's uncurtained windows, caught the killer's eye.
In interviews with mental health experts, Maturino Resendiz, who ostensibly traveled from town to town to find abortion clinics to attack, explained that he often entered houses that seemed to radiate evil. On at least 20 occasions, he admitted, he entered houses while their occupants slept but left without taking action.
Once inside Benton's home, Maturino Resendiz spotted statues that struck him as demonic. Medical publications he saw in the house convinced him that Benton experimented on fetuses or performed abortions.
"Dr. Benton fought him," Macha said. "I'm certain that she gave him some pretty good licks. It looked like she almost got away."
Maturino Resendiz ripped through cabinets after the murder, taking ivory figurines, electronic gear and a meat cleaver. Jewelry boxes, a pager and pieces of broken pottery littered the scene.
The killer escaped in Benton's red Jeep Cherokee, later found in San Antonio.
The big break in the case came a week later. Fingerprints collected at the Benton house matched those of Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, one of the aliases he used.
All that remained for police to do was catch him.
Town of little success
Born in a wave of 19th-century boosterism, Weimar thought its new silver rails were a road to riches. The railroad was, in fact, a better way to get the town's pecans and poultry to market. But such successes weren't enough. And long before the last steam locomotive was relegated to the scrap heap, the tiny Colorado County farm town found itself stalled on history's sidetrack.
Though the trains keep rolling — 20 window-rattling freights barrel through each day — only rarely do they stop. Just about all of Weimar's 2,000 residents live within walking distance of the tracks, whose weedy right of way has become de facto public space.
Karen Sirnic, wife of Norman "Skip" Sirnic, minister of the Weimar United Church of Christ, used a trackside plot to garden, neighbors said. It was just one of many activities that ensured the childless, middle-aged couple a warm spot in townsfolk's hearts.
The Sirnics lived in a brown brick ranch-style house just around the corner from the chapel and across the street from the tracks. From her yard, Karen Sirnic told her parents, she often saw hobos riding past in boxcars.
The house was the first place worried church members looked on the morning of May 2, 1999, when the Sirnics failed to show up for the 9:30 a.m. Sunday service.
What they found — the preacher's garage door wrenched open and his truck missing — was disturbing. But the scene inside the house was unspeakable. In a back room, Sirnic, 46, and his wife, 47, lay side by side on the bed, their heads crushed by a sledgehammer.
Karen Sirnic had been posthumously sexually assaulted.
The double murder marked the first homicides in Weimar in half a century.
"The first thing we did was run through local people," said Police Chief Bill Livingston, who was attending Sunday services elsewhere when he received the sheriff's call. "Did we have anyone who could do something like that? We didn't think that was possible. We discussed and discussed and discussed who it might be, where he might be."
Authorities came closer to answering that question when Mark Moorhead, then a Department of Public Safety special crimes sergeant in El Paso, noted similarities between the Houston and Weimar murder scenes. In both cases, he said, the victims had suffered head trauma and their bodies had been covered. DNA tests later linked the crimes.
As police sifted through evidence, townsfolk marveled that Sirnic, a compassionate practical joker who bore a passing resemblance to Groucho Marx, and his wife could be targeted for such violence.
"You could talk to hundreds of people," Livingston said, "and not find anyone who would say anything bad about them. They were just good people."
The minister and his wife were a devoted couple, recalled Karen Sirnic's mother, Minnie Foltermann.
"She loved Weimar, and she loved working with Skip," she said.
Foltermann, a Bryan resident, saw her daughter "a couple of times a month" when the younger woman visited the Texas A&M University genetics lab at which she was employed. The minister filled the days of such brief separations by writing his spouse love poetry.
A case in Kentucky
As Weimar grappled with the tragedy, the scope of Maturino Resendiz's crimes kept growing.
Investigators in Kentucky cited evidence linking Maturino Resendiz to the August 1997 murder of university student Christopher Maier, 21, and the beating and rape of his girlfriend.
Police in northeast Texas became convinced Maturino Resendiz was implicated in the October 2, 1998, murder of Leafie Mason, 87, bludgeoned with an antique iron at her home in Hughes Springs.
Then, in the first week of June, the bottom fell out.
In Houston, the body of Rice University graduate student Noemi Dominguez, 26, was found in the bedroom of her home in the 6900 block of Van Etten, a short distance from railroad tracks. Dominguez, described as "the sweetest, nicest teacher — a darling who went the extra mile," recently had left her job at Franklin Elementary School to complete her master's degree.
In Fayette County, the body of Josephine Konvicka, 73, was found in her rural home, just 3 1/2 miles from the scene of the Sirnic killings.
Both women had been slain with a pickax. Fingerprints linked the crimes to Maturino Resendiz.
In a back room of the Konvicka home, authorities found chilling, taunting mementos left by the killer: a Schulenburg newspaper containing an article about his crimes and a toy train.
One week later, police in tiny Gorham, Ill., reported that retired prison guard George Morber, 79, and his daughter, Carolyn Frederick, 51, had been murdered in their home, a short distance from the railroad tracks. Morber was slain with his own shotgun, which then was used as a club to kill his daughter. Maturino Resendiz's fingerprints were found at the scene.
Maturino Resendiz's continuing rampage vaporized the last vestiges of Weimar's small-town trust and complacency. More than a few residents left town to board with relatives.
"What makes this so scary," said Carter, the former Ranger, "is that these victims were in their own beds, behind locked doors. Every one of these victims was like the average citizen — and, therefore, the average citizens could view themselves as victims. ... This guy was the boogeyman."
The killer was more than that, concluded Bruce Beal, editor of the weekly Weimar Mercury. He was nothing less than "the devil incarnate."
Typical of frightened Weimar residents, said Mayor Bennie Kosler, was a woman living near town who spotted an unidentified man in her pasture.
"She got horrified," the mayor said. Every available area law officer responded to her call. "They cut fences to get in with horses," the mayor recalled, "but this guy, whoever he was, just slipped away. He was probably just looking for his cows."
Livingston recalled that elderly women appeared at his office with rusty pistols seeking help in loading them.
Beal — toughened by decades in the news business — kept a butcher knife by his bed.
Time of frustration
By late spring 1999, investigators in almost half a dozen jurisdictions were at wits' end. They hardly would arrive at the scene of Maturino Resendiz's latest murder when the killer would strike again. It almost seemed as if he had wings, or, as the killer later claimed, could become invisible and travel outside his body.
From West University to Columbus, Ohio, authorities scrutinized passing trains — sometimes stopping them for car-to-car searches — to no avail. After the Illinois slayings, FBI profilers warned that Maturino Resendiz, now on the FBI's Top 10 Wanted list, almost certainly would kill again.
Investigators worked the case around the clock.
"There were many days when you might watch the sun rise and see it set and rise again before you got to lay your head down," Carter said. "And even then it might not be in your own bed."
Then, just as the body count seemed about to spiral out of control, investigators received a tip that Maturino Resendiz's aunt in Los Angeles had contacted another relative in New Mexico for information that could help her collect a reward for turning him in.
By mid-June, Carter and other investigators were en route to Albuquerque in hopes of talking with Manuela Karkiewicz, the killer's half-sister. Already FBI agents, using an aggressive approach, had failed to gain her cooperation.
"I said, 'Hey, I'd like to come out to avail myself to you, to answer any questions you might have,' " said Carter, who moved to West Texas after leaving the Rangers last fall. "I don't think the family knew at that time that their brother was running around all over the United States killing people."
The initial meeting, at which Karkiewicz visibly was wary, grew into a series of contacts with members of Maturino Resendiz's family, all aimed at securing his surrender.
"I came away with the impression that they definitely had an understanding of right and wrong ... and knew now that what Maturino Resendiz was accused of doing was heinous and wrong ... ," Carter said. "Manuela, especially, came across as a woman of strong faith. There was a very deep emotional strain and burden placed on her in this investigation. She had to make some very difficult choices that impacted her and her family. And, in the end, her actions alone speak to her character."
With Karkiewicz's help, arrangements were made for Maturino Resendiz's surrender.
The surrender
On July 19, Carter nervously waited at the center of El Paso's international bridge for the killer's arrival from Mexico.
"It wasn't until I saw that pickup truck coming and saw him in the middle seat that I thought this was actually going to happen," Carter said. "He looked like someone who was surrendering. When you're giving up, you're giving up. I don't think he had any place to go."
In pleading not guilty by reason of insanity, Maturino Resendiz bet his life that jurors in Judge William Harmon's 178th state District Court would agree he was crazy.
"I went in there prepared to try a plea of not guilty," said Holmes, who headed the prosecution team. "I about fell out of my chair when I heard the plea."
In Texas, the question of a killer's sanity hinges on his ability to distinguish right from wrong at the time of the crime.
Maturino Resendiz's relatives from Puebla, Mexico, testified that he repeatedly had suffered head injuries as a youth. His mother said he had been dropped on his head at birth, a fall that knocked him unconscious. At about age 3, he fell off a building, again suffering serious injuries. At 11, he was attacked by a group with a brick, leaving him bleeding from ears and nose.
Others told jurors that Maturino Resendiz had suffered sexual abuse at the hands of an uncle, with whom he lived. On reaching his teens, he disappeared for lengthy periods, returning only to disturb his relatives with unintelligible, apocalyptic discourses on religion.
Defense experts testified Maturino Resendiz was a paranoid schizophrenic who was psychotic at the time of the murder.
Prosecution experts countered that he merely was depressed.
"There was a big argument going back and forth over his sanity," said juror Kristin Roland. "We must have gone over that 19 times. ... If he was insane and didn't think he was doing anything wrong, he wouldn't have been ... trying to elude authorities."
Some observers found Maturino Resendiz's bloody criminal record hard to reconcile with his courtroom demeanor.
"Everything I had heard about him was terrifying," Roland said. "But in the courtroom, he seemed very timid. He didn't have that scary presence. He looked scared."
Carter scoffed.
"All murderers are people," he said. "They look like you and me. It's their acts that define who they are. What do you think a serial killer looks like?"
On May 22, 2000, the jurors deliberated one hour and 45 minutes before sentencing Maturino Resendiz to death.
allan.turner@chron.com rosanna.ruiz@chron.com
This is the animal the Mexican government wants to keep alive.
Doing jobs Americans wont do.
I cant say that: Americans have some pretty good serial killers too. Hopefully they all get executed poste haste.
Along with this POS.
The perp.
On May 22, 2000, the jurors deliberated one hour and 45 minutes before sentencing Maturino Resendiz to death.Which means what? Actually will die when?
How many catholic priests have created murderers, I wonder?
It is amazing the lengths this very long article goes to in order to avoid saying that this monstrous killer who terrorized Texans for years was an illegal alien who crossed the border illegally at will and used returning to Mexico as an escape plan. The article only hints at these essential facts.
I believe that the mainstream media cannot bear to bring these facts to light since they have been advancing a pro-illegal immigration policy for decades and have also been covering up the harm, both economic and criminal, done to Americans by illegal immigration. Just like the politicians who have enabled this illegal invasion against the will of the vast majority of Americans and in defiance of our democratically enacted laws they must suppress the truth that points to their own moral culpability in these crimes.
If the executioner at the TX prison calls in sick the day this 2-legged vermin is scheduled to die, just give me a call and I can be there in a few hours and ready to work.
MMTU will attempt to twist any thread, no matter how unrelated, into an attack on Catholicism.
BUMP
Tuesday I believe.
Perhaps he's a soul mate of Eric Rudolph.
MMTU may well do that however I read that and used it to see how lame the defenses argument was. I.E. sexual abuse as a youngster does not make you a serial killer.
PS execution by lethal injection is to good for this POS.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.