RESIDENTS FEAR FUGITIVE SERIAL KILLER'S
WRATH
Massive Hunt Continues in Bludgeoning Crime Spree
June 18, 1999
By Valerie Kalfrin
HOUSTON (APBNews.com) -- The most wanted man in Texas has also become the most feared to people living near the suspected serial killer's bludgeoned victims or the freight lines he uses to travel, investigators said.
Authorities believe until they catch the
elusive Rafael Resendez-Ramirez -- who is suspected of slaying
at least six people in central Texas and Kentucky during a months-long
killing spree via railways -- residents will remain terror-stricken.
"There's a lot of rumors going around, that we chased him down the tracks and let him go, that we had him pinned under a house. We're just trying to squash some of those," Flatonia Police Chief Leonard Cox told APBNews.com today.
"It's got people concerned. It really does. Alarm companies have been selling over here quite frequently the past couple of weeks," he explained, noting that he fielded questions and gave safety advice to about 200 residents at an American Legion hall Thursday night.
Investigators compare notes
Meanwhile, a Texas ranger and an FBI agent today traveled to Gorham, Ill., a town about 650 miles north of Houston, to what may be the site of his latest attacks, said Rolando Moss, head of the Houston FBI office.
Authorities believe he may be responsible for the slayings of George Morber Sr., 80, and his daughter, Carolyn Frederick, 52. The two were found dead in their Gorham homes yards apart from each other and near a rail line on Tuesday.
Fingerprints and other forensic evidence link the 39-year-old Mexican drifter, who has been deported four times and spent 11 years in U.S. prisons since hopping a freight train here at age 16, to six nighttime burglaries near rail lines. Each of the victims was bludgeoned to death with whatever was at hand, including a sledgehammer, authorities said.
Inundated with calls
Over the past few weeks, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), Houston FBI and local investigators have fielded dozens of calls from police nationwide looking to compare notes and evidence from their own unsolved bludgeoning deaths with his six known victims, officials said.
"We have never been exposed to anything like this," said West University Police Chief Gary Brye, who suspects Resendez-Ramirez of a December 1998 killing. "He's an extremely dangerous man who's shown he can be extremely brutal, and he needs to be caught."
Officials are tight-lipped
Moss, who says the FBI still hopes to put Resendez-Ramirez on its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, was reluctant to divulge additional details.
"If you ... give out a lot of information, that really makes prosecution difficult -- and it makes it easy for a lot of copycats," he told APBNews.com.
Copycat killings are "always a concern," said Tom Vinger of the Texas DPS, which is probing another similar slaying in the northeast Texas town of Hughes Springs.
Friends found resident Lefie Mason, 87, beaten to death on Oct. 2, 1998, Vinger said. She, too, lived near railroad tracks. A nighttime intruder apparently entered her house through an unlocked window.
"We're taking that one quite seriously, but we don't know for sure yet," he told APBNews.com.
Had the wrong man
Meanwhile, the Border Patrol and other investigators continue to stop and search passing trains, encountering their share of false sightings of the fugitive, officials said.
On Wednesday night, an anonymous tip from an Austin resident caused officers to arrest five illegal immigrants on an eastbound freight train, only to discover that none of them was Resendez-Ramirez.
The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) handled another erroneous sighting the day before when a San Antonio woman reported seeing Resendez-Ramirez lurking near a house along Chicago Boulevard, said Ray Dudley, spokesman for the INS' San Antonio District.
"That kind of gossip in their neighborhood scares the heck out of people," he told APBNews.com.
Victims beaten to death
Authorities say Resendez-Ramirez, a 5-foot-7-inch, 150-pound man who has 18 known aliases and a snake tattoo on his left forearm, first killed on Aug. 29, 1997. He allegedly beat two University of Kentucky students -- Christopher Maier, 21, and his girlfriend -- with a rock while the couple took a common shortcut near Lexington railroad tracks. The girlfriend, who also was raped, survived.
Resendez-Ramirez allegedly struck again on Dec. 17, 1998, in West University Place, a Houston suburb, raping, stabbing and bludgeoning 39-year-old Baylor College of Medicine Dr. Claudia Benton, authorities say. Investigators lifted Resendez-Ramirez's fingerprints from the broken pieces of her Jeep Cherokee's steering column at her house before locating the Jeep in San Antonio.
On May 2, a parishioner of the United Church of Christ in Weimar found the Rev. Norman J. "Skip" Sirnic, 46, and his wife, Karen, 47, beaten to death in their beds with a sledgehammer from their garage.
Their Mazda pickup truck, missing at the time of the killings, turned up in San Antonio on May 28, police say, a week before relatives found the next victim, 73-year-old Josephine Kovnicka. The Fayette County grandmother was bludgeoned in her sleep early June 4.
Houston police announced Wednesday that a 26-year-old schoolteacher, Noemi Dominguez, was Resendez-Ramirez's latest victim. Officers identified his fingerprint inside her 1993 Honda Civic, which they believe her killer left at the International Bridge in Del Rio on Saturday after beating her repeatedly in the head.
Valerie Kalfrin is an APBNews.com staff writer
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/local/state/texas/story.html?s=v/rs/199 90618/tx/index_1.html#9
...Manhunt Has Added Benefit -
(SAN ANTONIO) -- The search for accused serial-killer Rafael Resendez-Ramirez results in the arrest of dozens of other illegal aliens at train yards across southwest Texas. Ray Dudley, of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in San Antonio, says the fact that Resendez-Ramirez rides the rails and leaves notes about trains at various crime scenes has prompted authorities to increase surveillance of freight trains. The trains are also often used by illegals to get to jobs in the interior of the U-S. Dudley says Resendez- Ramirez has been deported three times, but each time he returned.
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Manhunt Leads To Illinois...
- (HOUSTON) -- Investigators with the Houston Police Department are in the small town of Gorham, Illinois today trying to piece together clues in a double murder. Gorham Police believe the murders of an elderly man and his daughter may be the work of suspected serial-killer Raphael Resendez-Ramirez. The victims' home was within walking distance of railroad tracks, and the mode of killing was the same as in the other five murders Ramirez is suspected of committing. Police in Round Rock arrested some train- hoppers... one of whom they thought was Ramirez, but a fingerprint check proved otherwise. Ramirez is now considered to be the most wanted man in Texas. Authorities say he may have crossed the border into Mexico. ==============
