Posted on 06/23/2006 6:20:26 PM PDT by Extremely Extreme Extremist
(AP) WEIMAR, Texas -- The railroad tracks that gave birth to this small South Texas town over a century ago more recently brought terror and horror.
The gruesome slayings of a prominent minister and his wife at their home, and an equally violent murder of an elderly woman in her rural home a few miles away, are among at least 15 killings by the ruthless illegal immigrant known as the "Railroad Killer."
Angel Maturino Resendiz, who hopped on freight trains and committed random acts of carnage around the nation that earned him a spot on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, is set to die by injection Tuesday.
"I don't believe in death," Resendiz, 46, told The Associated Press in 2000 shortly after arriving on death row. "I know the body is going to go to waste. But me, as a person, I'm eternal. I'm going to be alive forever."
A Houston judge last week rejected Resendiz's lawyers claims that such mental delusions make him ineligible for execution, so he's set to be the 13th inmate executed this year in Texas.
Resendiz, known to death row colleagues as "Choo-Choo Man," was convicted of the rape-slaying of Claudia Benton, a Houston-area physician killed in her home a week before Christmas 1998. Resendiz has been linked to eight slayings in Texas, two each in Illinois and Florida, and one each in Kentucky, California and Georgia.
"I don't think everybody is looking forward to it, but he took three good people out of this town," says Cecil Ellison, 74, who for 49 years has run a service station in Weimar. His Texaco station on the town's main street is across from the Weimar United Church of Christ.
Church members there arrived for the regular Sunday service May 2, 1999, but there was no sign of their pastor, Norman "Skip" Sirnic, 46, or his wife, Karen, 47, the church secretary. The couple lived in a house at the back of the church property, adjacent to the railroad track that bisects Weimar, about midway between Houston and San Antonio.
The congregation president testified in Resendiz's 2000 Houston trial how he went to the parsonage, saw Sirnic's body and ran away.
Weimar Police Chief Bill Livingston was with his wife at their own church when his beeper went off. When he responded to the page, the message was dire.
"There was disbelief to begin with," Livingston recalled. "I knew we didn't have anybody in Weimar that could do anything like that."
The killer had used a sledgehammer.
Investigators later determined Resendiz raped Karen Sirnic after obliterating her face with the tool. He then stole the couple's pickup truck, which was later found in San Antonio. Some of their jewelry later would be found at Resendiz's home in Rodeo, Mexico.
With his town of fewer than 2,000 stunned, Livingston felt he needed to reassure folks they were safe. He said he didn't want to create a panic but didn't want to downplay the severity of the crime, either.
"A precarious situation," he said recently. "I made a statement people don't come back to the scene of the crime."
Livingston's credibility took a blow when just weeks later, four miles west of town, police found Josephine Konvicka, 73, in her blood-soaked bed with a garden tool resembling a pickax buried in her forehead.
Ellison, nodding toward the church across the street from his place, remembers stunned church members huddled in clusters talking about their loss. About the time that shock began to ease, "The poor little old lady out there," he said, turning his head west, where the main rail line runs across South Texas.
"I live over by the railroad tracks," he said. "Makes you think."
In a town where a homicide hadn't occurred for generations, where the message on the silver water tower a block from the church proclaims "Weimar Welcomes You," people were terrified.
"I had little ladies come into the office bringing me rusted guns and asking me: `Chief, show me how to use this thing,"' Livingston said. "Gun sales went up dramatically."
Authorities began to make some connections.
Resendiz's fingerprint was found at Benton's home in West University Place, a Houston enclave near the Texas Medical Center where she was doing research.
Mark Moorhead, a Texas Department of Public Safety intelligence officer, had been looking at the Sirnic case and was talking with Drew Carter, a Texas Ranger who was working the Benton case.
"I was struck by two things and neither had to do with railroad tracks," Moorhead said. "Whoever was coming into these residences brought nothing with them. They were using what was available."
The killer, who he believed was a transient, also covered his victims.
"It struck me as having some deep psychological meaning, either regret for something he had done or as he was going through the house to find something to take, he didn't want to see what he had done any more." said Moorhead, who found the two elements "way too bizarre and too unique to be overlooked."
Moorhead suggested Carter run DNA tests comparing the killings.
A week later, the Texas Ranger called him back.
Resendiz was their man. They were looking for a serial killer.
Theiz was taken to Houston for eventual trial for beating Benton with a statue, stabbing her 19 times and raping her. Lawyers argued he was insane. A jury found him guilty after 10 hours of deliberation and decided he should be put to death. It was a punishment he ordered his attorneys not to oppose.
The final witness against him was the only known survivor of his attacks, a former University of Kentucky student left for dead after Resendiz attacked her and her boyfriend in 1997 along railroad tracks near the school in Lexington, Ky.
She identified Resendiz as the man who raped, beat and badly injured her and as the man who fatally bludgeoned Christopher Maier with what "seemed like a big log, but it was a rock. I found out."
Resendiz's sanity remained an issue until last week as his appeals lawyers tried to keep him from the death chamber. The execution, originally set for May 10, had been postponed for additional psychological testing.
"He believes he is an angel," Antonio Puente, a psychologist selected by his attorneys, wrote of his meeting with Resendiz nearly three months ago.
The prisoner, Puente said, knew he was to be injected with drugs but didn't believe he would die and didn't understand why he was to be executed "as he has only carried out God's will and has not committed any wrongdoing."
His lawyers declined to make Resendiz available for interviews with reporters as the execution date neared.
Resendiz earlier described some killings as a reaction to the deaths of the Branch Davidians in Waco, others on Serbian atrocities, to his anti-abortion beliefs or because he believed the victims may have been homosexual. But he insisted he remembered each of the murders and compared them to watching something through a tunnel.
"Everything you see is in a distance," he told the AP. "Everything is slow and silent."
In Weimar, founded in 1873 by the president of the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railroad, security agency signs now dot the yards of homes, including the one where Sirnic and his wife were killed. The neat brick church whose property occupies nearly an entire city block continues to thrive, although the pastor who now directs the congregation politely declines to talk about the past violence.
And the trains -- as many as 40 a day -- still rumble through the Mayberry-like town. Some slow to a crawl, pull off on a side track and wait for another train to pass.
There hasn't been another homicide in Weimar since 1999.
"Thank God," Ellison said from his Texaco station.
But things are certainly different.
"Alarm systems -- we never had alarm systems," said Livingston, the police chief. "Now they're all over town. Night lights. Security lights.
"There are people who lock their houses now that never did before. It did change. It changed all sorts of things."
Are you going to hold a candle-light vigil? ROFL
I hope he suffers.
Via con Dios, MF.
Are you sure that's a good thing for you, mijo?
Now the State of Texas will do with him what the Republic of Mexico will not do. I pray they get him out of Texas for burial. He is unworthy of being buried in our soil.
I'm impressed! It's only taken about 8 years to put down this animal.
"I'm going to be alive forever."
And if it's at all possible, here's hoping he'll be one of the Zarkman's 72 virgins.
I wonder if the local crazies will be out protesting. I'll have to drive down to the Texas A&M Campus and see if the bozos are out.
We don't need to: It said it doesn't BELIEVE in death. Let him walk back.
He rode the train through my town within a few blocks of my house.
In Huntsville? Probably. I know what I'm gonna do that night. Sleep well.:-)
PS: Be kind to trolls. They are not yet fully developed.:-)
Here in Bryan/College Station we have a group that stands out in front of the main entrance to Texas A&M and protest most executions. One of these days I need to get a picture of them for our execution threads.
Even more impressive is that it has only be 6 years. (His trial was in 2000)
Plus, "Our Diversity Is Our Strength!"
This guy said it better...
Yippie kye yeh! MF! -- John McClane, Die Hard
Killing a bad guy ping.
Ron White- "Some states are trying to abolish the death penalty, in my state they're putting in an express lane."
Liberals adopt these people as their pets. Anyone who would do these things is insane. Who cares? Talk about excusing crime. Our judicial system is an upside down farce. If he let his lawyers fight, it would be another 30 years, and McCain would give him amnesty too.
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