Claudia had fallen asleep watching television: she was exhausted after a hard day at work. On the other side of the window, an intruder, crouched in the dark, was watching for the best time to sneak into the house, located near the train tracks. Once inside her, the individual pounced on her and hit her with a small bronze statue.
The impacts woke up the woman, who tried to get away in a hard struggle. It was of no use to him. That man continued to beat her, proceeded to rape her, and once he finished, stabbed her several times with a butcher knife. He then covered her head with a plastic bag, stole her money and jewelry, and ran away from her. It was about Maturino Reséndiz, The Rail Road Killer (the railway murderer), one of the most wanted criminals by the FBI, and Claudia was his seventh victim. He would still take the lives of a dozen more before he was stopped.
Ángel Leoncio Reyes Recendis, better known as Ángel Maturino Reséndiz, was born on August 1, 1959 in Izúcar de Matamoros, in the Mexican region of Puebla. As his mother, Virginia, says, since he was very little, our protagonist was the victim of accidents and violent situations.
On the one hand, a sharp fall on the right side “left a mental disability” in the boy, says the woman, although this could never be proven. And, furthermore, he was subjected to physical mistreatment and sexual abuse by some residents of his neighborhood. This led him to develop a series of mental disorders, such as schizophrenia and paranoia, to escape from reality by inhaling glue, and to wander the streets hanging out with bad company.
In fact, throughout his life, Ángel lived as a criminal and homeless, who clandestinely crossed the border with the United States to commit his misdeeds. So much so that the US authorities deported him on numerous occasions and he was convicted of multiple crimes.
When he wasn’t working as a seasonal worker for oranges, tobacco, lettuce, or asparagus in the states of Florida, Kentucky, California, or Washington, he stole vehicles, broke into homes, and forged documents. All this always using illegal weapons.
In 1979, Ángel was sentenced to twenty years in prison for robbery and assault. At that time, he already used different aliases -Rafael Resendez-Ramírez or Ángel Reyes Reséndiz- and had married Julietta Domínguez. At the age of six, the authorities released him and deported him back to Mexico.
Although the chain of crimes began in 1991, Ángel began to kill in 1986. His first victims were another homeless man and his partner, whom he shot and whose bodies he abandoned at a farm. The next few years he was arrested for forgery and illegal possession of firearms, and returned to prison for a period of 18 months.
On July 19, 1991, the Mexican assassinated 33-year-old Michel White in the garden of an abandoned house in the city of Lexington. He had hit him on the head with a brick because, according to what he said, the victim was homosexual. This crime and his body were never heard from until his arrest years later.
At this time and up to 1999, Ángel killed 23 people without a specific profile: they were men and women of any age and social status, although with something in common, all the victims lived close to a train station or the railway tracks passed through very close.
As for the modus operandi, our protagonist did use the same one in all cases: he attacked inside the houses or close to them, and he did so with stones, bricks, picks or any blunt object. In some cases, he also stabbed the victims and, if they were women, he proceeded to sexually assault them.
As soon as the assault was over and before fleeing the crime scene, Ángel stole money and valuables, including jewelry, from the deceased, and then used the train to escape to other towns. Many of the jewels stolen from the deceased went to the mother and wife of this criminal, nicknamed the railroad murderer precisely because of the way he walked away from the scenes.
Among the victims who fell at the hands of Ángel, it is worth noting: Jesse Howell and his girlfriend Wendy Von Huben, aged 19 and 16 respectively; Christopher Maier and Holly Dunn Pendleton, the latter managed to survive and physically describe the murderer, which allowed a robot portrait to be drawn; or Claudia Benton, 39, who was brutally murdered inside her home and where the agents collected the killer’s fingerprints that served to connect him to the previous murders and discover his identity.
After seven murders in such a short time, the FBI took action on the matter and mounted a special operation to catch the elusive criminal. It was called Operation Train Stop (Operation Train Stop) and had the collaboration of more than 200 agents and volunteers from the United States, Canada and Mexico.
In fact, the authorities offered a reward of 125,000 dollars (about 115,000 euros) or the residence card to illegal immigrants if they provided the exact location of Ángel, in addition, they included him in the list of the Ten Most Wanted and, for a time, his face shared a poster with the terrorist Osama Bin Laden.
However, it took almost seven months and another seven murders for the police to hunt down this individual. Faced with the panic established in the houses near the train tracks, the television program America’s Most Wanted (The most wanted in America) broadcast a special requesting citizen collaboration. It was urgent to find the whereabouts of this serial killer before he continued to swell the list of his corpses.
It was then that the criminal’s family saw the program and contacted the police. In this case, it was her wife who provided the real name of her husband, describing him as a calm and “exemplary” man.
He also asserted that he had never been violent with her or with her family. Of course, she offered a revealing fact: Ángel used to send her money and jewelry during the trips he made with her. What he did not know, as they confirmed, is that everything belonged to the murdered victims.
For several days, the FBI and the assassin’s family held arduous negotiations for Ángel to turn himself in. Finally, he agreed and on July 13, 1999, a Texas Ranger handcuffed him at the border crossing between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso. From there, the murderer was taken to Houston accused of the murder and rape of Claudia Benton.
In cross-examination, Ángel provided details of eight other murders, although he was only tried for Benton’s, whose trial began in May 2000 in Houston. During the court hearing, those present verified how the defendant called himself an “immortal avenging angel” and stated that his mission came from God and consisted of destroying abortion clinics and eliminating homosexuals.
But, under that inoffensive appearance, he was hiding “a form of walking evil”, as the FBI came to describe him, due to that randomness in the choice of his victims that always made him so dangerous. During the prosecution’s argument, Lyn McClellan made it clear that “the defendant is suffering from an illusion. The illusion that he has is that he will be able to convince one of you that he is crazy.
In fact, the railroad murderer’s defense claimed insanity to exempt his client from any responsibility in the murder of Claudia Benton. That strategy did not help them, because the prosecutor pointed out that Ángel “was not motivated by the will of God. He was motivated by anger, by power, by sexual desire, by a desire for control and domination… if you know it’s illegal, you know it’s wrong.”
The court found Ángel Maturino Reséndiz guilty of all charges and sentenced him to death. The execution date was set for June 27, 2006, and until then, the killer remained in a maximum security prison south of Livingston.
On the day and a few hours before the capital punishment was to be carried out, Ángel gave an interview in which he acknowledged a dozen more murders, although he did not reveal their identities. “I’m not going to give the authorities the information,” he said, they’re going to kill me anyway, so what for? The only thing I can have with me and protect from the gringos is the truth.”
Ángel was taken to the Huntsville Unit (Texas) to be executed by lethal injection in front of twenty witnesses. While the prisoner was waiting for the moment, assistant prosecutor Devon Anderson, also present in the room, noticed a detail: the murderer’s feet trembled under the sheet. “That gave me a little sense of satisfaction, that he was scared,” he later told the media.
Before expiring his last breath, the murderer exercised his right to have the last word: he apologized for his actions and went directly to the relatives of the victims. “I want to ask you if it is in your heart to forgive me. You do not have to do it. I know that I allowed the devil to rule my life. I only ask that you forgive me and ask the Lord to forgive me for allowing the devil to deceive me,” he said.
“I thank God for being patient with me. I don’t deserve to cause you pain. You didn’t deserve this. I deserve what I am receiving ”, he concluded to, immediately afterwards, pray in Hebrew and in Spanish. Across the room, Claudia Benton’s husband, George, watched every move of his wife’s killer.
Once Ángel Maturino Reséndiz was declared dead at 8:05 p.m., George spoke to the assembled media: “It was evil contained in human form, a creature without a soul, without conscience, without a sense of remorse, without regard for the sanctity of the human life”. He could never forgive the one he had taken from him in such a way the love of his life.
