Sole Survivor

by Holly Dunn

  Chris used to carry around in his pocket a small wooden box made by hand by an artisan in Kentucky. It was the color of oak and had a lid that slid straight back and a small, engraved heart on the bottom. Two of our friends found it by the railroad tracks after Lexington investigators cleared the crime scene, but they decided not to turn it in knowing how special it was and that we were unlikely to ever see it again if they did. As we came to the close of our tribute, Brian cradled Chris’s wooden box in his palm, and then arched his arm backward and sent it hurling over the cliff. We watched it clear the rocks and fly through the air, never seeing where it landed. Adrienne divvied up a measure of Chris’s ashes between us in similar artisan-crafted wooden boxes like the one Brian had consecrated to the Gorge. That gift, which I have treasured ever since, is tucked away in my jewelry box. I see it when I get ready for the day, and the memory of Chris makes me smile.

  • • •

  One afternoon at the end of May, Detective Sorrell showed up at my apartment unexpected. His face was glowing. I was surprised to see him, but I knew his excitement must be good news. He came inside and stood in my bright, very green kitchen.

  “Holly, it looks like we finally know who attacked you.”

  Detective Sorrell had a name. He had a picture to show me. I was stunned. After nearly two years of waiting and wondering, of fear and uncertainty, he had finally determined a suspect. I felt immobilized—weighted to the linoleum by the gravity of the moment.

  “The sad news is that this lead only arrived after your case matched up with some recent murders in southeast Texas,” he said.

  My heart fell. More people were dead—just what I had feared.

  Detective Sorrell went on to describe the efforts that had led to this big break. Shortly before he went to DC to meet with the FBI profilers, Detective Sorrell also submitted the details of the case to an FBI database called ViCAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. ViCAP warehoused exhaustive details of criminal activity in hopes of finding similarities and making connections between unsolved crimes in disparate areas of the country. On May 27, months after Detective Sorrell had submitted our case, he received a call from an FBI agent in Houston who had been reviewing cases in ViCAP.

  “The agent says to me, ‘I’m not sure if this means anything, but there were three other murders near railroad tracks down in Texas,’” he said.

  I shuddered at the mention of railroad tracks.

  Detective Sorrell then gave me only the briefest account of these other crime scenes, but I later learned the horrific details from reports in the news.

  On December 16, 1998, just weeks before Detective Sorrell sent in the information about our case to ViCAP, a woman named Dr. Claudia Benton, a pediatric neurological researcher originally from Lima, Peru, was beaten to death and sexually assaulted in her home in West University Place, a small, affluent suburb in southwest Houston. Her husband, George, and their twin preteen daughters had left town that day to visit George’s family in Arizona. While her family was away, someone broke into Dr. Benton’s house through the garage, grabbed a bronze statuette from their mantle, and bludgeoned her skull nineteen times. Police noted that Dr. Benton fought hard for her life, but beyond the merciless beating, the attacker also stabbed her repeatedly with a huge kitchen knife. Then, he raped her as she lay there dying. She was found face down on the floor of her bedroom, her head in a plastic bag, her upper body covered in blankets.

  Investigators described this attack as “overkill,” meaning he inflicted much more damage than was necessary to end his victim’s life. Before he left Dr. Benton’s home, this pitiless, sadistic killer fixed himself a snack in her kitchen. He opened one of her daughter’s Christmas presents. And then he made off with a few pieces of jewelry, some musical instruments, a stereo, and the Bentons’ red Jeep.

  Dr. Benton’s attacker left behind just enough evidence to be identified. Police found fingerprints in the Bentons’ home and from broken pieces of the Jeep’s steering column. The Jeep itself was found abandoned near a motel in San Antonio a few days later—right near a set of railroad tracks. Investigators from the Houston Police Department checked the fingerprints against state, regional, and federal automated fingerprint identification systems and found that they matched a Mexican national who had repeatedly entered the US illegally and who had committed an extensive list of crimes in several states under numerous aliases. By early January, a Harris County judge issued a warrant for his arrest on a primary charge of burglary.

  According to the news reports, a few months later another gruesome murder scene was discovered in a rural farming town called Weimar, about halfway between Houston and San Antonio. One Sunday morning at the start of May, a pastor named Norman “Skip” Sirnic and his wife, Karen, were found dead in their bed, their heads bashed in by a sledgehammer from their own toolshed—the murder weapon leaning against a wall and still covered in blood. The assailant had also raped and sodomized the pastor’s wife. When the pair didn’t show up for services at the Weimar United Church of Christ, the president of their congregation went searching for them at the church parsonage where they lived. The church elder returned stunned and shaken to tell the congregation what he had found. Pastor Skip would have turned forty-seven that day.

  Investigators determined that the murderer had likely broken into the Sirnics’ home the Friday before through a rear door near the carport. After killing the couple, the assailant made himself something to eat, stole jewelry and other items from their home, and fled in their red pickup truck. The Sirnics’ truck was found in San Antonio just a few weeks later, not far from where authorities had found Claudia Benton’s Jeep.

  Detective Sorrell explained that the Texas Rangers investigating the murders noticed a number of similarities—not the least of which was that the Bentons and the Sirnics both lived close to a set of Union Pacific railroad tracks. DNA evidence collected from the victims’ bodies at the two crime scenes proved to be a match. Once the cases in Texas were connected, the FBI special agent in Houston compared the crime scenes in ViCAP, and that’s when he called Detective Sorrell to point out how much they resembled the attack on Chris and me.

  “After I talked to the FBI agent, I reached out to a Texas Ranger named Drew Carter who was assigned to the Benton investigation back in March,” said Detective Sorrell, leaning back against my kitchen counter. “Sergeant Carter tells me he knows who his guy is, because they have his fingerprints. I asked him to send me photos of his suspect, and when I compared them to our artist rendition of your attacker, they look remarkably alike.”

  My heart started pounding as he pulled out the images Drew Carter had sent and handed them to me. I could feel my face blanch at the sight of them. It was true—the sketch artist who came to Evansville while I was recuperating had nearly nailed the likeness. Staring back at me from this collage of mug shots was a range of similar faces—some thin, some puffy, at varying ages, with differing hairstyles, and most of them wearing glasses, just like I told Detective Sorrell during my statement in the hospital. That was the guy. That was him.

  “We’re still waiting to hear back from the Harris County forensics lab on whether the DNA sample from your rape kit is a match,” said Detective Sorrell, taking the pictures from my hand and tucking them back into his folder. “It was no small feat to get the samples compared—it almost didn’t happen at all.”

  He explained that the Harris County district attorney, Johnny B. Holmes, at first refused to let the DNA sample from our case be submitted. At the time, Texas was using a newer process to analyze DNA, and their format was different from Kentucky’s. Detective Sorrell wanted to ensure the forensics labs could compare apples to apples, so one of his colleagues who had a private plane flew him and a forensic specialist to the FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, where the DNA sample from my rape kit was converted to the version Texas used.

  When Detective Sorrell got word that Holmes wasn’t comfortable with having our converted DNA sampl
e compared to the evidence in Texas, Detective Sorrell and the Fayette County district attorney flew to Houston for a meeting. Harris County prosecutors had only one case in mind—the murder of Claudia Benton—but Detective Sorrell and his district attorney were dead set on solving Chris’s murder and the attack on me.

  While I felt overwhelmed by everything Detective Sorrell shared during his visit, what I felt most in this moment was deep gratitude for how dedicated he was to my case.

  “Holmes feared that the defense attorneys could point to the two different types of DNA to create doubt and hurt the rock-solid case he was building,” Detective Sorrell explained. “Things got rather heated until a young woman from their forensics lab assured DA Holmes the comparison could be done. We’re waiting on the results, so we’ll find out soon whether it’s the same guy.”

  The man who had called himself something like James Wilford to me on that warm night in August two years earlier turned out to have had around thirty aliases over the course of his criminal career. At the height of the manhunt, law enforcement would be calling him Rafael Resendez-Ramirez.

  The media would be calling him the Railroad Killer.

  Before he left, Detective Sorrell turned to tell me one more thing.

  “You know how we tried to get America’s Most Wanted to profile your case back in 1997, but they wouldn’t do it without a suspect?” he asked. “They profiled this guy in March in connection to the Benton murder, but they didn’t get any leads. They’ll be running a follow-up episode this weekend. Be sure to watch it.”

  I remained in disbelief for several days after Detective Sorrell revealed our suspect.

  That Saturday night, I huddled on my couch to watch America’s Most Wanted on the local FOX channel. Detective Sorrell and a colleague flew to DC to be on hand in case the live broadcast resulted in any new leads or tips from viewers. Though a lot of my friends had gone home for the summer, I invited those still in town to come to my apartment and watch with me. I needed them there, and they faithfully showed up. No one asked many questions—they just knew I needed the support.

  We sat in expectant silence as the episode unfolded. Host John Walsh appeared on screen.

  “Good evening,” he said. “We’re starting tonight with some breaking news. It appears we have a serial killer on our hands.”

  The hunt for Rafael Resendez-Ramirez was the lead story of the evening. Journalist Ashleigh Banfield took viewers through the Sirnic murders in Weimar, Texas, pointing out how the killer was suspected to be the same one who murdered Dr. Claudia Benton in West University Place the previous December.

  “If this is the same individual,” noted Weimar police chief Bill Livingston, “then our feeling is he’ll probably do it again. And the quicker we can get him in jail, the better off all of society is gonna be.”

  Resendez-Ramirez was described as a drifter who hopped freight trains and crisscrossed the country, randomly targeting victims who lived close to railroad tracks. After a screen provided viewers with his physical attributes—his height and weight, his known scars and tattoos—Ashleigh Banfield returned to announce another piece of breaking news.

  “Just as we were going to air with this story, police in Lexington, Kentucky, called us, and they just received evidence that they believe links Resendez-Ramirez to yet another case—the case of a young man and a young woman. He was killed. She was raped and left for dead. And they were walking next to the railroad tracks.”

  Her mention of the attack on Chris and me gave me chills—though that was only the very beginning of my involvement with America’s Most Wanted. Once our case was connected to the ones in Texas, I agreed to be interviewed; their crew was set to film in Lexington in a matter of days.

  A few days after I watched the America’s Most Wanted episode, the crime lab in Texas confirmed that the samples from my rape kit matched the DNA taken from the two other crime scenes.

  We finally had a viable suspect—and he was a serial killer.

  I couldn’t wrap my mind around it.

  I trusted all along that God would be faithful to lead us to the man who had attacked me. And though I knew the only way to find him was to wait for him to strike again, I couldn’t have prepared myself for the scope of his crimes, the extent of the misery he inflicted, his sheer brutality. It all seemed just too much to fathom.

  Not long afterward, I saw old court footage of my attacker defending himself in a case in St. Louis, Missouri, back in 1989. He had been charged with sixteen different counts, including making false statements to federal authorities, carrying fraudulent identification, possessing a gun while being both an illegal alien and a convicted felon, and re-entering the US after he’d been previously deported.

  He gave the jury a rambling closing argument. I don’t remember much of what he said. What struck me most—what made my whole body tremble—was hearing his voice.

  That was the voice I knew.

  That was the voice that hissed in my ear, “Do you see how easily I could kill you?” That was the voice that told me, after I asked him to help Chris, “You don’t have to worry about him no more.”

  The jury in that St. Louis trial convicted him on all counts and he was sentenced to thirty months in prison. No sooner was he released and deported than he was back in the US, and less than a year later, he was burglarizing someone’s home. And so it continued for another decade.

  Now that we knew who our suspect was, we still had to catch him. He was notoriously elusive, but it wouldn’t be long before the entire nation had joined the hunt.

  CHAPTER 13.

  America’s Most Wanted

  The man investigators were calling Rafael Resendez-Ramirez—the alias he gave US authorities when he was deported the first of many times back in 1976—was born August 1, 1959, to an impoverished family in Puebla, Mexico. He allegedly snuck into the United States as a young teenager, years before my father ever formed his company, Dunn Hospitality Group, in 1978. By the time Chris Maier was just a few months old, our attacker had been caught and deported back to Mexico two or three times already. I hadn’t even learned to walk yet before Resendez-Ramirez was racking up the first of many convictions for crimes like destroying private property, grand theft auto, burglary, and aggravated assault.

  On Chris’s third birthday—when my eventual tall, handsome boyfriend was still just a toddler—the sadistic drifter who would wreck my life and end Chris’s broke into a home in Miami, Florida, and beat an eighty-eight-year-old man named Gilbert Chase nearly to death. As he would do many times in the future, he stole his victim’s car. Weeks later, after being arrested for burglary in a Kentucky county not far from Lexington, he was sent back to Miami to face charges for what he’d done to Mr. Chase. He received a twenty-year prison sentence, but served only six years before he was released on parole and sent back to Mexico. He made his way back to the US less than a month later.

  The elderly Gilbert Chase died a few months after he was attacked. Prosecutors couldn’t charge Resendez-Ramirez (known in that case as Jose Angel Reyes) with murder because there was no way to prove Mr. Chase hadn’t died of natural causes.

  I can’t help but wonder how long Mr. Chase might have lived if Rafael Resendez-Ramirez hadn’t crashed into his life. I try not to wonder what Chris’s life and mine would have been like if he hadn’t crashed into ours.

  Questions like these simply have no answers.

  Between the time our attacker left his prison cell in Miami in the late summer of 1985 and when his face was finally being plastered across newspapers and television screens throughout America in the early summer of 1999, he had been arrested and convicted of a continuous list of crimes, including falsely representing himself as a US citizen, trespassing, carrying a loaded firearm, and receiving stolen property. He rarely served full sentences, spending about a collective decade in prison in different states, before being released and deported.

  He found countless opportunities to return across the border, sometime
s working benign migrant jobs in orange groves or tobacco fields, but too many other times unleashing a barbarous rage on completely innocent, unsuspecting people. After attacking Chris and me, he darted from one murderous rampage to another, anonymous, leaving entire communities traumatized and baffled. National news networks were slow to catch onto the story—they didn’t recognize the connections, but rather assumed the crimes were a local matter. America’s Most Wanted was the first program to broadcast Rafael Resendez-Ramirez’s face on television screens across the US, and the show’s producers were soon begging the national news networks to do the same.

  America’s Most Wanted holds a special place in television history for its twenty-five-year run time and the pivotal role it played in collaboration with viewers and law enforcement. By the time it finally went off the air in 2013, the show would be credited with helping recover more than sixty missing kids and helping catch more than 1,200 fugitives, including seventeen from the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

  Before he became the show’s host in 1988, John Walsh’s life path and passion as an advocate for missing children and victims’ rights was forged by the kidnapping and brutal murder of his young son, Adam, in 1981. His son’s case languished for years—until December of 2008 when Florida investigators finally determined that Adam had been murdered by serial killer Ottis Toole, who died in prison in 1996 while incarcerated for other crimes. In response to what they endured, Walsh and his wife, Reve, lobbied tirelessly for legislation that would help protect and recover children, and they were pivotal in the founding of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

  I never personally met John and Reve Walsh, but they are models of how the most profound grief and pain could be channeled into something positive and constructive for so many other people.

  Without a suspect in my case, the producers at America’s Most Wanted kept turning down Detective Sorrell’s pleas for a profile on the show—but once we were connected to the Benton and Sirnic cases, they jumped at the chance to book an interview. As the only living witness, I knew speaking out could put me in danger. If my attacker realized I was still alive and helping the authorities, would he come back for me? Could he find me if he wanted to? I couldn’t dwell on the prospect. Instead, I stayed focused on one singular goal: I would do whatever it took to catch this monster.