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World's Most Evil Killers S04E08
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00:07In December 1998, a man slipped undetected into the home of 39-year-old Claudia Benton.
00:16By the time he fled the scene, the mother of two had been brutally beaten, sexually assaulted, and fatally stabbed.
00:24He seemed to be almost ghost-like, the way he could get into houses without being heard, and, you know,
00:32ghosts scare people.
00:34The killer was a man named Angel Resendiz, who'd been illegally boarding trains across the U.S. border from Mexico
00:42for over 20 years.
00:44He would go on to kill at least nine people, but the authorities couldn't find him anywhere.
00:50There's 140,000 miles of track in North America, so how do you get your head around that?
00:56How do you find someone that's riding the rail?
00:59Capturing the phantom killer would prove to be one of the FBI's toughest cases to crack.
01:05No one was safe.
01:08You never really knew who was going to be the next victim.
01:12It was whoever had something that he wanted, and that could be anybody.
01:16Hidden away for so long, Angel Resendiz had emerged as one of the world's most evil killers.
01:45When Angel Resendiz handed himself into U.S. authorities in July 1999,
01:52it signaled the end of his reign of terror.
01:56The 38-year-old Mexican walked across the border and was never free again.
02:02For over 20 years, Resendiz had been illegally crossing into the U.S.,
02:08not by foot, but via the vast rail network.
02:12He'd murdered at least nine people from Texas to Illinois.
02:16The media had dubbed him the railroad killer.
02:21Detective Ken Maha helped crack the case that finally brought the elusive killer to justice.
02:28He turned out to be very mobile, extremely mobile.
02:33He was in one part of the country, and a few months later, he was in another part of the
02:38country.
02:38Ken has his own theory behind Resendiz's spate of murders.
02:44In Mexico, he had a wife and a kid, and he's stealing jewelry from these women
02:49and then taking it to Mexico to sell it.
02:51So it was a business, pure and simple.
02:54This killing and the raping of the women before and after death was just sidekick, just for fun.
03:03This killer story begins on the 1st of August, 1960.
03:08Angel Resendiz was born in the state of Puebla, in the east of Mexico.
03:14Little is known about his childhood, but during his eventual trial,
03:19Resendiz spoke to forensic psychologist Ramon Laval about his early years, south of the border.
03:28Angel Resendiz grew up in a dysfunctional family.
03:33He didn't have a lot of connections with his family, siblings, or, for that matter, his parents.
03:40Little or no contact with his biological father.
03:44He told me that he had grown up with his mother and father.
03:50In fact, upon further questioning, I realized he was talking about his maternal uncle, his mother's brother.
03:59He felt rejected by his mother.
04:02He felt rejected by his peers at school because he was quite awkward looking.
04:05He had protruding teeth.
04:07He wasn't one of the cool kids.
04:09And I think those feelings stayed with him, and they really did go on to shape who he became.
04:17Now, I'm not saying that unsettled childhood equals, inevitably, some kind of person who's going to turn to murder and
04:23serial killing.
04:24But I'm saying, in this particular case, that childhood gave Angel this sense that there was no one to depend
04:32on.
04:32He was the only person he could depend on.
04:35Violence was a fixture in the young boy's life.
04:39His uncle, whom he considered his father, was reported to have been physically abusive with Angel.
04:46And around 12, he quit school, and he actually left his uncle's home.
04:53Started living on the streets, just defending for himself.
04:59He was sexually molested by a local pedophile.
05:05Like many violent offenders, Resendez was a victim before he was a criminal.
05:11And this is a line that we don't like to talk about very much.
05:14We like to compartmentalize victims and offenders very clearly.
05:18But often that line is a very blurred one.
05:21Barely a teenager, Resendez found himself with no family and no home.
05:27He had to learn how to survive.
05:31It must have been a significant moment.
05:33It's on that cusp of adolescence and puberty.
05:36It's that moment when a young man, especially a young man from such a troubled background,
05:41struggles out of the cocoon and tries to find himself.
05:48Resendez took to illegally riding the far-reaching network of North American railroads.
05:54It was a transient lifestyle that would come to define him.
05:59Resendez managed to travel quite far and wide within the United States by jumping on trains,
06:04jumping on an empty freight train and holing up in one of the carriages.
06:08And that would take him to a range of cities all over the place.
06:13Because you could leap on, it's a stuff of movies, isn't it?
06:17It's a slow-moving railroad car, and the hobo is standing by the track.
06:22And he grabs it and lifts himself up into an empty car.
06:26It is thought that he first entered the United States when he was maybe 13 years old.
06:33And that's what he told me, that he was back and forth between Mexico and the United States.
06:39But in fact, the first record, formal record, is from when he was 16 years old, when he had entered
06:48and then deported.
06:50After serving five years of a 20-year sentence in a U.S. prison for burglary, aggravated battery, and grand
06:59theft auto in 1980,
07:02Resendez continued to ride the rails.
07:05In fact, by August 1996, the 36-year-old had been arrested 12 times and sent back to Mexico on
07:13no fewer than seven occasions.
07:15But nothing deterred him, and his crimes would soon turn deadly.
07:21One of the most complicated questions about Resendez in the first instance is why he started killing.
07:31He was getting by. Things were not easy.
07:34And he was being deported back and forth across the Mexican-U.S. border on a regular basis.
07:39But that was no real reason in itself to kill.
07:44And one of the most fascinating aspects of Resendez's character is where that initial spark came from.
07:54After illegally heading back north of the border on a train in the summer of 1997,
08:01Resendez carried out his first known murder in Lexington, Kentucky.
08:06In August 1997, there was an attack on Christopher Meyer and Holly Dunn, who were a young couple.
08:13So he'd spotted this couple after he'd jumped off one of the freight trains that he'd ridden on.
08:19And I think his intention from the outset was to get to Holly Dunn and to sexually assault her.
08:26And in order to do that, he needed to get Christopher out of the way.
08:30And he killed him relatively quickly with a 50-pound rock,
08:34which must have been the most horrendous thing for Holly to witness and for Christopher to experience.
08:40With her boyfriend taken care of, Resendez turned his attention to 20-year-old Holly Dunn.
08:48She is terrified.
08:49Her hands are bound.
08:51She pleads with Resendez for her life.
08:55He sits down beside her and shows her an ice pick and says,
08:58Look how easily I could kill you.
09:00But in the end, he doesn't kill her with an ice pick.
09:02In the end, he rapes her.
09:05It's impossible to imagine the terror she must have felt,
09:09because now Resendez goes away again and finds a wooden board and beats her mercilessly with it.
09:17Terrible injuries to her head, to her back,
09:19an attack so dramatic that he thought he'd killed her.
09:23But miraculously, Holly Dunn had survived the brutal assault.
09:28Holly Dunn, to her eternal credit, manages to struggle to her feet
09:35and literally walks away from the scene of the attack.
09:40She makes her way to some nearby houses,
09:42where, thankfully, they call an ambulance and the police.
09:47Resendez had got away with it for now and remained unknown to the authorities.
09:52But it was a mistake that would later come back to haunt the killer.
09:57By December 1998, the 38-year-old was regularly crossing the border into the USA.
10:04Border patrol authorities had apprehended Resendez for illegal entry into the country
10:11seven times in 1998 alone,
10:14unaware he'd killed 21-year-old Christopher Meyer the previous year.
10:19But now the killer was back on U.S. soil in Houston, Texas,
10:24and had murder on his mind.
10:27That day in particular was a Thursday, December 17th,
10:31and a day like most any other day,
10:35the afternoon was uneventful.
10:37I left for work around 3.30 and picked my son up at the sitter.
10:42It was his ninth birthday.
10:44And I picked him up, and on the way home,
10:47I got a call from the dispatcher at West University Place saying,
10:52we've got a body, a dead body.
10:54And I had chills and goosebumps thinking,
10:58it just can't be.
10:59It's got to be something else.
11:01It's just got to be something else.
11:03But she assured me that, yes, there was indeed,
11:06patrol officers had discovered a deceased female.
11:11The murdered woman was 39-year-old research physician Dr. Claudia Benton.
11:18She'd been home alone.
11:21Ken walked into a horrific scene.
11:23There was a bloody butcher knife on a pillow next to her head,
11:31blood all over the carpet, blood on the bed,
11:35blood in the hallway leading just out the threshold of the bedroom door.
11:41Overall, it appeared every room in the house had been rummaged,
11:47ransacked, drawers open.
11:50Everything appeared to be touched and looked through.
11:53Dr. Benton had been stabbed to death with a knife from her own kitchen.
11:57There were three fatal wounds on her body.
12:00In addition to that, she had 19 skull fractures from being beat upon the head.
12:07I can only surmise that some of them may have been from the bronze figurine.
12:12It was probably maybe about a foot in length that had been on the mantelpiece.
12:19Quite heavy.
12:20Part of it was broken off during the beating.
12:24It was a savage and brutal murder of a wife and mother of twin girls.
12:31I think there is an inherent misogyny to Rosenders.
12:35There is an inherent hatred of women, which I think goes back to his rather dysfunctional relationship with his mother.
12:42So he thinks that women are there to provide something for him, to give something to him.
12:48He feels entitled to take that.
12:50Further investigation at the home suggested that Dr. Benton had been literally fighting for her life.
12:58Dr. Benton had a complete fracture to her ulna and dislocated elbow as well.
13:06And so she put up a very, very fierce fight.
13:09From the blood in the hallway, it looks like she was very, very close to trying to escape from the
13:16bedroom and get away from him.
13:19But being hit so many times in the head already, he was just able to physically overpower her and subdue
13:25her.
13:26After analyzing the bloody crime scene, Ken had to make one of the most difficult phone calls of his professional
13:34career.
13:35To Dr. Benton's husband, George.
13:39Very, very difficult talking to the man because here I am, I'm having to explain to him that there's a
13:43dead body in his house.
13:45And he's telling me the only person that should be in there was his wife.
13:49And I felt sick, felt really, really sick inside because I'm thinking to myself, I mean, what if that was
13:56me?
13:56So I tried to be as gentle as possible.
13:58I tried to give him every avenue out.
14:00Could it have been a nanny?
14:01Could it have been a maid, anybody else?
14:04And he just kept telling me, no, it's just my wife's the only one that would be in there.
14:10While Ken took Dr. Benton's devastated husband on a somber tour of the crime scene,
14:17he helped to point out anything that was out of the ordinary around the house.
14:22It was actually George Benton that noticed the steering column housing in the garage.
14:28And he looked at it and said, that's got to be from the Jeep.
14:31The killer had made his getaway in Dr. Benton's vehicle, but he'd failed to find the keys that were hanging
14:38up in a kitchen cupboard.
14:39The next best thing he had to do was to try to hotwire the car.
14:44He knew he had to pop the steering column off, and so he did that.
14:48In doing so, he stuck his fingers in there to pry it out, and then he just set that into
14:54the garage.
14:55That was some of the best evidence that we had right there were his four fingerprints on the underside of
15:01that piece of plastic.
15:03This would become a crucial piece of evidence in the future trial of Angel Resendiz.
15:10Lynn McClellan was an assistant district attorney who would eventually help to bring charges against the killer.
15:17The car's recovered in San Antonio.
15:20His fingerprints are found on the car.
15:23The car belongs to Claudia Benton.
15:25That kind of ties everything back.
15:27What's her car doing in San Antonio?
15:30We would send his prints on it, and she's found dead back in Houston.
15:35So, put the two together, you say, he's probably the one who killed her.
15:40A week after the murder of Claudia Benton, Ken had a major breakthrough.
15:46For the first time, Angel Resendiz would become known to the homicide detective, albeit under a different name.
15:54It was the day after Christmas.
15:56I'd received a call from a sergeant with the Houston PD.
15:59He had received information from their fingerprint division.
16:03We had an identification of the perpetrator.
16:06Fingerprints came back to an individual named Carlos Cluthier Rodriguez, one of his numerous aliases that he was arrested under.
16:16So, his prints were in the automated fingerprint identification system in Texas under that name.
16:24Rusendiz had used many different aliases, which made it difficult for the authorities to link him to his numerous misdemeanors
16:32through the years.
16:33Every time he was arrested, it seemed to give a different name.
16:37I mean, Rusendiz is what we finally kind of settled on in terms of a name, but he had used
16:44so many names in the past.
16:45So, we knew he had fingerprint identification at that time.
16:49We knew who he was, we had pictures, and so we were slowly able to get these pictures out into
16:56the media and try to generate some tips and leads and so forth.
17:03The hunt for Rusendiz continued for over three months, but the killer remained elusive.
17:10By the spring of 1999, he was back in Texas, this time in the small city of Weimar.
17:17On the night of April the 30th, he entered the home of Norman and Karen Cernick.
17:23The Cernicks were both asleep in their bed.
17:27From the evidence that was found, Mr. Cernick was laying on his left side, and the blow to the head
17:34with the sledgehammer woke up Mrs. Cernick.
17:38She sits up in bed, and Rusendiz takes the sledgehammer left-handed like a baseball bat and strikes her square
17:49in the forehead, killing her instantly.
17:51He then goes back and hits Mr. Cernick one more time with the sledgehammer, for good measure.
17:58Rusendiz had bludgeoned the church pastor and his wife to death.
18:02It was a vicious double murder by the seemingly opportunistic killer.
18:08Rusendiz was not an offender who would take weapons along with him to the crime scene.
18:12He would use whatever he could find that was there.
18:15He would decide to kill when he saw the opportunity to do so.
18:20There is an advantage to this as an offender, because if you're not carrying weapons around with you, then you're
18:26not carrying evidence around with you.
18:29The escalation in Dr. Benton's case, he hit her with a smaller figurine, and she fought back.
18:37This case with the Cernicks and Weimer, there was no fighting back.
18:42He made sure with that first blow, but he didn't want to fight.
18:46He had enough fighting the last time.
18:49Evidence at the crime scene linked the Cernick murders to the killing of Dr. Claudia Benton.
18:56They collected, of course, very good DNA evidence from the Weimer case.
19:00That was sent to Department of Public Safety laboratories, and DNA testing was done,
19:06and it was an exact match to our perpetrator in our case.
19:11With at least three confirmed murders on his macabre resume, the FBI entered the search for the man who would
19:19later be given the moniker, the railroad killer.
19:23Ankel Rusendiz, however, continued to use various aliases, so tracking him down wasn't going to be straightforward.
19:31Special Agent Bobby Knox Eckerd was part of the team assigned to the case.
19:37There's 140,000 miles of track in North America, so how do you get your head around that?
19:43How do you find someone that's riding the rail?
19:45So what you do is you go in, you meet with the seven major railroad companies.
19:50They all have agents that work for them.
19:52They have railroad police.
19:53So they started pulling all of his records, and he had dozens of trespass records on the railroad.
20:01The crimes that Rusendiz committed had a significant impact, especially on those living by railway tracks,
20:08because there wasn't a specific victim type.
20:12You never really knew who was going to be the next victim.
20:16It was whoever had something that he wanted, and that could be anybody.
20:21So the level of fear, the level of anxiety that his crimes generated was horrendous.
20:27Not long after the FBI's involvement in the case,
20:31they were able to link the unsolved murder of Christopher Meyer almost two years earlier to Rusendiz.
20:38We received a hit from 1997, where a couple was brutalized.
20:44The male was killed.
20:46The female was the only survivor of Rusendiz, and that was in Kentucky near railroad tracks.
20:51Through DNA, through eyewitness testimony of the survivor,
20:55and through a sketch that she was able to give to the officers there,
21:01we were pretty sure it was the same person.
21:03Once the DNA came back, it was a positive hit.
21:06So now we had him responsible for at least four homicides.
21:11At that point, we knew we had a serious, serious killer on the loose.
21:18But Angel Rusendiz was only just getting started, and there would soon be even more victims.
21:25By late May 1999, authorities across the U.S. were desperately searching for a man they now knew was a
21:33serial killer.
21:34The 38-year-old Mexican had been linked to at least four murders, three of them in Texas in the
21:41previous five months.
21:43The so-called railroad killer was headline news across the Lone Star State.
21:49Rusendiz is attracting growing notoriety in Texas.
21:54Inevitably, it feeds the vanity that has been growing inside him.
22:01He knows people are beginning to look for him, and yet he still feels he can get away with it.
22:06In fact, he was to kill again.
22:08On June the 3rd, Rusendiz was back in Houston, and his bloodlust had become insatiable.
22:14Under the veil of night, he entered the home of 26-year-old Noemi Dominguez.
22:21Noemi is an elementary school teacher.
22:23She is at home, and he breaks in, picks up a pickaxe-like tool, and attacks her.
22:31By now, Rusendiz is quite clearly out of control.
22:35Any sense of order, of civilization, of propriety is gone.
22:44He is now literally like an animal, lusting for blood, with blood dripping from him.
22:51Again, she's sexually assaulted, and again, he kills her.
22:55She lived near railroad tracks.
22:58Her body was covered up.
23:00Almost looked very similar to the way Dr. Benton was covered up.
23:03The legs sticking out from underneath the cover.
23:06She was face down, and she had been beaten to death.
23:10Rusendiz decided to cover some of his victims with blankets,
23:14because this essentially dehumanizes them.
23:17It depersonalizes them.
23:19But also, it's about looking.
23:21It's about seeing and being seen.
23:23So, he's covering his victims because he doesn't want to look at them,
23:28but he also doesn't want them to look at him.
23:31So, it's this constant theme of shame that comes up time and time again.
23:36As the killer grew more experienced, he became more brazen in his actions.
23:42Rusendiz had started leaving calling cards at the scene of his murders.
23:47When he murdered the victims, he would find their ID, driver's license, or some other type of ID,
23:57and would display them in such fashion that whoever entered the home later would find out who they were,
24:07in my mind, he wanted to see how they looked like before he blottened them to death,
24:14before he raped them, and see what it would have been,
24:19almost as if he had already developed a relationship with the victim.
24:23After killing Noemi Dominguez, Rusendiz wasn't finished.
24:29Just as he'd done after murdering Claudia Benton,
24:32he stole the schoolteacher's car and headed 100 miles west.
24:38It was a white Honda, and it was taken and driven to Fayette County near Schillenberg,
24:45small community of Dubina, where he then murdered Josephine Convichico.
24:52He toyed with law enforcement at that scene by displaying a toy train,
24:59displaying newspaper articles about the cases, the murders.
25:03This is like reading an article that says,
25:08I am the railroad killer, and I'm leaving this here for you to know and make sure that you know
25:16it is me.
25:17Nobody else. I am the railroad killer.
25:21He was proud of that.
25:23It is yet further proof, if anyone needed, that he is now utterly out of control
25:28and glorying in every moment of his celebrity.
25:31It is one of the most troubling of moments when a killer starts to live up to his own hype,
25:39who becomes obsessed with his own fame.
25:44Rusendiz had killed 73-year-old Josephine Convichico
25:48with the same pickaxe he'd used just hours before when murdering Noemi Dominguez.
25:54When he left the premises, he'd actually left the pickaxe in Josephine's head
26:00and he tucked her up in bed, which was quite a bizarre kind of behaviour.
26:05But he'd left behind a really important piece of evidence
26:09because on that pickaxe was some of Noemi Dominguez's blood,
26:13so those two murders were connected.
26:15Less than two weeks later, Rusendiz had travelled far from Texas,
26:21over 800 miles north to Illinois.
26:24On June the 15th, 1999, he committed another double murder.
26:29The victims were 79-year-old George Morber
26:33and his 51-year-old daughter, Carolyn Frederick.
26:37George's home in the quiet village of Gorham
26:41was less than 100 yards from the railroad.
26:45In Illinois, he found a shotgun.
26:49The elderly gentleman was in his easy chair reading his newspaper.
26:54Rusendiz is able to gain entry into the house,
26:57ties him up with telephone cord, ties him to his easy chair,
27:02gets behind him with a 12-gauge shotgun
27:05and shoots him in the back of the head
27:07through the back seat of the recliner.
27:11A little while later, his daughter comes in
27:14and she is immediately beat to death
27:18with the 12-gauge shotgun.
27:22The slain father and daughter
27:24took the tally of known victims to eight.
27:28Authorities were becoming desperate
27:29to capture the elusive railroad killer.
27:33He seemed to be almost ghost-like
27:37the way he could get into houses
27:38without being heard, without disturbing the occupants.
27:43And that was one of the strangest things.
27:46I still don't know how he got into Dr. Benton's house
27:49and all the other houses.
27:51And that was the scary part.
27:52And ghosts scare people.
27:53It's just a natural reaction to something that can't be explained.
27:58And the way he was able to enter people's homes
28:00couldn't be explained.
28:03The killings were becoming more frequent
28:06and the hunting ground had become wider spread.
28:09The FBI immediately took action.
28:13On June 21st of 1999, working with our FBI headquarters,
28:18we were able to add Resendez to our top 10 most wanted fugitives.
28:24When anyone is made a top 10,
28:27both the media and the public
28:29are made aware of how important this case was.
28:32The media helped us immensely in this case.
28:36Everybody in the United States and in Mexico,
28:39to a certain extent, wanted this guy captured.
28:42He had turned from a serial killer,
28:45now he was a spree killer.
28:46And I think everybody in the world wanted him caught.
28:51The addition of Resendez to the most wanted list
28:54brought nationwide TV exposure.
28:57So that's one of the tips for coming in.
28:59And as the tips came in,
29:01anything that was really, really helpful,
29:04that sounded legitimate,
29:07was funneled to the task force.
29:09And it was just a huge coordinated effort
29:12in trying to find this guy.
29:16I don't know if it was the media or the FBI,
29:18but he was given the name the railroad killer.
29:21And in every media blitz,
29:23you would see the railroad killer is on the run again.
29:26He's been here, he's been there,
29:28he's committed this crime.
29:29The national exposure put pressure on the family and friends
29:33of Angel Resendez across the Mexican border.
29:38This was the most complex case most of us had ever worked
29:41because the jurisdiction was huge.
29:43It was all the way in North America.
29:45You know, you just didn't know where he was going to be.
29:48Once we identified he had a wife or a common law wife in Mexico
29:53was the pivotal point for me.
29:56Resendez's wife was brought across the border
29:59to be questioned by the FBI.
30:02Bobby led the interview.
30:04She was brought up here.
30:05She brought her daughter,
30:06who was approximately three or four months old,
30:08and we conducted the interview over a two-day period.
30:12During that interview, I was able to provide her with enough information
30:18that she came to believe that he had committed the homicides.
30:24We showed her the DNA.
30:26We showed her fingerprints.
30:28We asked her if she had ever received anything from his trips into the U.S.
30:34After her visit here, the U.S. Marshals, the Texas Rangers,
30:39went back down into her village,
30:40and she provided everything that he had ever given her
30:44that she still had in her possessions,
30:46and they were, in fact, stolen at the crime scenes.
30:50Resendez remained in hiding,
30:52but the authorities were doing all they could to flush him out.
30:56Once you take away all their comfort zones,
30:58they have nowhere to go, and they generally make mistakes,
31:01and you'll be able to apprehend them that way.
31:04The tactics worked.
31:06With nowhere to run to, a sister of Ángel Resendez
31:10convinced the killer to turn himself over to the U.S. investigators.
31:15We had one sister who lived in New Mexico
31:18that would prove to be the person that negotiated surrender
31:22that Texas Ranger developed trust with this individual,
31:27and through that development,
31:29she ended up contacting him and arranged a surrender.
31:32And then it was his brother who accompanied him
31:37when he turned himself to the Texas Ranger in El Paso,
31:41the crossing between Mexico and the United States by the Rio Grande.
31:48Now, this is something straight out of a movie.
31:51It really does have a lot of dramatic effect,
31:53and I think that is very revealing about Resendez.
31:57He's the director in his own drama.
32:00He is calling the shots. He's in control.
32:02After hunting the railroad killer for nearly seven months,
32:07Detective Ken Maha was stunned when Resendez gave up the ghost.
32:12I'm amazed that he did it.
32:14All he had to do was just stay in Mexico
32:16and then come across on a train
32:19or come across the border whenever he wanted to
32:22and commit more murders
32:24and keep up his little side business of selling jewelry in Mexico
32:27and live happily ever with his wife and kid.
32:31I'm grateful that he turned himself in to this day.
32:36Still, I'll never know the real motive.
32:39I think he was maybe a bit concerned about his wife and daughter in Mexico
32:44being harmed if there were some bounties on his head.
32:48Soon after the capture of Resendez,
32:51Ken found himself face to face with the serial murderer.
32:55After speaking to so many potential suspects over the previous few months,
33:00there was one thing in particular that Ken was looking for
33:03to make sure they definitely got their man.
33:07There were many times that my partner, Joey Sanders, and I
33:11would just get a friendly call at the police department,
33:16sometimes transferred from Houston PD,
33:18saying that the people swear they've seen Resendez in some part of Houston.
33:22And one of the first things we'd do is grab his right hand,
33:26look at the ring finger,
33:27and if it didn't have a scar, even though it looked like him,
33:30we knew it wasn't him
33:31because it showed up on every fingerprint card that he had.
33:35It was an extremely noticeable scar
33:37just straight through the pad of his ring finger.
33:39Sure enough, we caught him.
33:41It's one of the first things I was able to do, I think,
33:43and if you're enough, it was there and it was true to life.
33:46Resendez may have surrendered himself to the police,
33:49but there was no way this was going to be an open and shut case for prosecutors.
33:54With the trial looming,
33:56defence attorneys were going to tell the judge that the killer was insane.
34:01By now, investigators were aware that he'd killed eight people
34:05and were still looking into whether there may be even more.
34:09The unsolved murder of an 87-year-old woman named Leafy Mason
34:13in Hughes Springs, Texas, was high on their list of potential victims.
34:21At one of the task force meetings,
34:23we had a police officer from Hughes Springs,
34:27where Leafy Mason was murdered.
34:29They took out the complete window frame
34:32where the suspect, in their case, made entry,
34:37and they preserved it as evidence.
34:39And sure enough, they matched up his fingerprints.
34:41Resendez, there he was.
34:42So we had a good match to that case as well.
34:47Resendez had bludgeoned the 87-year-old woman to death
34:50with a flat iron in October 1998,
34:54two months before the killing of Dr. Claudia Benton.
34:58Leafy Mason became the ninth known victim of Angel Resendez,
35:04but it's believed the total number of people
35:06who died at the hands of the railroad killer is even higher.
35:10He confessed to 12 or 13 crimes,
35:14and they were able to confirm through DNA evidence
35:17that he had, in fact, committed those crimes.
35:19The killer talked about his many possible victims
35:23with forensic psychologist Ramon Laval.
35:27We didn't discuss the full chronology
35:30and what came first and second, third, fourth,
35:32but I have an idea that it started, as far as we know, in 86.
35:39Ramon had been asked to evaluate the mental state of Angel Resendez
35:44after a judge informed the defense attorneys
35:47that the killer would be prevented from pleading
35:49not guilty by reason of insanity
35:52unless he was assessed by an independent psychologist.
35:56He was not only willing to admit culpability.
36:00He talked about them.
36:02He said, yeah, he was the actor.
36:04He was the one who perpetrated them,
36:06and he would not be willing to give anybody else credit.
36:10He was very narcissistic, very self-absorbed.
36:13His manner of communication about the crimes
36:17was very calm, emotionally collected.
36:21He did not display any extreme emotional feelings about them,
36:27no sorrow, no regret.
36:29Despite admitting to many murders,
36:32the prosecution only needed Resendez to be found guilty of one.
36:37So they had to find the most airtight case against him,
36:41the murder of Dr. Claudia Benson.
36:44We had the strongest case by far.
36:47I think some of the other counties might have wanted to have
36:50had their own trial and convict him,
36:53but once he's convicted of capital murder in Texas,
36:58there's not much need to do it again.
37:01Assistant District Attorney Lynn McClellan
37:04was part of the prosecution team.
37:07In every criminal case,
37:08you have to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.
37:12So it's really just proving the elements of that crime.
37:16The evidence that who did it
37:17came from his fingerprints,
37:20you know, in Claudia Benson's case,
37:22and fingerprints in the apartment,
37:25fingerprints on the car that was recovered
37:27in San Antonio afterwards.
37:29So that's really not a real difficult case to prove
37:34because all the evidence is there.
37:37Fingerprints and DNA are much better than eyewitness
37:41because eyewitnesses can make mistakes
37:43and fingerprints and DNA are not.
37:46The trial began on May the 8th, 2000, in Houston, Texas.
37:52Ken Maha was in the courtroom.
37:54One thing that stuck out immensely
37:57was the amount of weight that Resendez gained.
38:01He looked like a completely different person.
38:06He must have put on 40 to 50 pounds,
38:09maybe even more.
38:10He was quiet, didn't say a word.
38:12I don't believe he said one single word
38:15throughout the trial
38:16unless he was conversing with his attorneys.
38:19As expected, the defense attorneys
38:22claimed that 39-year-old Resendez
38:25was not guilty by reason of insanity.
38:29Let's say he's schizophrenic.
38:32Let's say he's any kind of a mental disease.
38:35Did that cause him to do it?
38:38Did he know right from wrong?
38:41Obviously he knew right from wrong
38:43because he was trying to get away,
38:45and he got away.
38:47I mean, there are lots of people
38:48that have mental diseases.
38:50They don't all go around killing people.
38:54Before the trial,
38:55Resendez had been quoted in the media
38:57calling himself an angel of God,
39:00but Roman Laval didn't agree
39:02with the killer's theory.
39:05My main concern was
39:07if he was insane at the time of the offense
39:11and if he was doing the will of God,
39:15where did the rape come from?
39:18He could not quite explain that.
39:20He was like,
39:21huh, I wonder why you're asking me that question.
39:24You know, I hadn't quite thought about that.
39:26So basically it's almost a confession
39:28that I did this,
39:29but when I did this,
39:32I didn't know right from wrong.
39:33I didn't know what I was doing,
39:36and thus I can't be held legally responsible.
39:38I get a get-out-of-jail-free card
39:40because I didn't know right from wrong.
39:43Roman's testimony put the idea
39:46that Resendez was insane firmly to bed.
39:50My conclusions at the end
39:52were despite his expression of delusions,
39:58statements that had a very delusional flavor,
40:00I came to believe that he was not insane
40:03and that he was just smart and manipulative
40:07and knew how to use information.
40:10As a final nail in the coffin,
40:13prosecutors called Holly Dunn to the stand.
40:16The testimony of the girl who cheated death
40:19at the hands of Resendez in Kentucky
40:22three years previously
40:24left the jury in no doubt.
40:27On May the 18th, 2000,
40:29Onkel Resendez was found guilty
40:32of the murder of Dr. Claudia Benton.
40:35Four days later, he was sentenced to death.
40:39I knew that the verdict was going to be guilty.
40:42There was really no defense put up.
40:45When he was sentenced to death,
40:47I was happy.
40:48To me, it was the appropriate punishment.
40:50Not to get into any of the debates
40:52about death penalty right or wrong in Texas,
40:56that was a punishment,
40:57and that's what he got.
40:59Resendez was on death row for six years
41:02before his stay of execution came to an end.
41:06On June the 27th, 2006,
41:09FBI Special Agent Bobby Knox Eckerd
41:12went to Huntsville, Texas,
41:15to witness the death of the railroad killer firsthand.
41:19He's brought in, he jumped up on the table,
41:23and they prepare him,
41:24and they allow him to make a statement.
41:27In this case, he apologized to the victims,
41:30but he then kind of claimed that the devil made him do it.
41:34He said, it was my fault
41:35because I let the devil into my life,
41:36but the devil was responsible.
41:39And the drugs were administered at that point,
41:42and the very last thing,
41:44he was asking in Spanish for forgiveness from God.
41:47And then he died very peacefully.
41:51I felt no joy in the fact that he had been executed.
41:55I felt nothing towards him
41:57other than anger for what he had done to the victims
42:00and what he left the victims' families
42:03to deal with for the rest of their lives.
42:05He was gone, but they still are here
42:07having to deal with his crimes.
42:11What Claudia Benton's husband said
42:13probably sums it up.
42:15He was evil, contained in human form.
42:19A creature without a soul.
42:21No conscience, no sense of remorse,
42:25no regard for the sanctity of life.
42:27Because with Rescindous, it's all about him.
42:30He's the one in charge.
42:32He's the one he's trying to satisfy.
42:34He went through his whole life, you know,
42:36thinking he had the right to do all these things,
42:39and whatever he wanted to do, he did it
42:40because he was the one in charge.
42:43After taking the lives of so many others,
42:4645-year-old Angel Rescindes
42:48had himself been put to death.
42:51He is no longer a danger to innocent people.
42:55He was probably the most evil person
42:58that I ever was involved in the investigation,
43:00and I've investigated lots of murders,
43:04child molesters, kidnappers,
43:07but I think Biscoe is inherently evil.
43:10He's just a savage animal,
43:12an absolutely savage animal.
43:14The way he dealt with his victims,
43:16it was just completely savage.
43:19Angel Rescindes spent his entire life
43:22in the shadows of society.
43:25Hulled up in freight train carriages across America,
43:28he was able to carry out his crimes
43:30completely undetected.
43:32Why he started raping and killing
43:35the victims of his burglaries,
43:38we shall never know.
43:39But the amount of people he slayed
43:41suggests that he enjoyed the act of murder,
43:45and proves that Angel Rescindes
43:47is one of the world's most evil killers.
43:50Who exists?igencia
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