by Holly Dunn
“Depending on the results of the DNA test,” she said, “we may be upgrading this burglary charge to capital murder.”
Resendiz was denied bond and dismissed. A team of bailiffs escorted him back out of the courtroom, his chains clinking and rattling with every step.
During the press conference that immediately followed, a reporter asked about the importance of the DNA results.
“It makes a good case excellent,’’ Devon responded. “If you have DNA, it’s hard to deny you’re the one that did it.”
“How relieved are you that you finally got him in the courtroom?” someone asked.
“I’m so happy,” she said. “I’m so happy to be a part of his welcoming committee. You don’t know—it is such a relief.”
“Describe for us the man you are charged with prosecuting,” asked another reporter.
“I don’t understand what makes somebody do that to people, and I don’t really care,” she said. “If he’s guilty, then I’m going to do everything I can to prosecute him to the fullest extent that the law will allow me.”
Detective Sorrell had made it his mission to determine who attacked me and ensure he was arrested. Now Devon Anderson was making it her mission to see that justice was finally carried out.
News outlets announced that shortly after his arraignment, another murder charge was filed against Resendiz for yet another victim. On October 2, 1998, eighty-seven-year-old Leafie Mason in Hughes Springs, a town in East Texas, was found bludgeoned to death by an antique flat iron inside her home. Her murderer hit her so hard the handle had broken off the iron. A palm print from a windowpane belonged to Resendiz. Leafie’s house was only 150 feet from a set of railroad tracks.
Leafie Mason was his ninth known victim at the time, but that number would continue to grow the longer Resendiz was in custody and confessing his crimes to investigators.
• • •
In the weeks that followed Drew Carter’s heroics in El Paso, I felt freer than ever to relish my time in Europe. After our study-abroad program wrapped up, I hung out in Lancaster for a couple of days and then rode the train through the Chunnel between the UK and France to meet up with my female classmates in Paris. We stayed in nice hostels with other young travelers and ate in bistros and saw everything we could fit into our ten-day stay. We visited the Mona Lisa at the Louvre and the Thinker at the Rodin Museum. We climbed to the top of the Eiffel Tower, walked around the Arc de Triomphe, and strolled along the Seine. We bought bottles of wine and baguettes at local boulangeries and had picnics in meticulously gardened parks.
The entire Parisian adventure was blissful and relaxing. The French media never called or came knocking. I felt completely carefree and removed from the drama still unfolding back at home.
The respite, however, would be short-lived. Now that my attacker had been apprehended, I tried not to think about what would happen next. His arrest meant only one thing: I would have to see him again. I would have to face him in court. But I also knew this meant I would finally get to fulfill the promise I made to myself the night we were attacked: If I live through this, I will get you. Leaving me alive was Resendiz’s biggest mistake, and I wanted to make sure he would regret it.
CHAPTER 15.
The Trial
As the days on the calendar rolled toward the new millennium, people’s fears were now focused on something entirely other than a mass murderer: the Y2K bug and the impending worldwide meltdown. While some people holed themselves up in remote bunkers with cases of water and canned food, my family and I took off for southern Florida. I didn’t truly believe we were facing the end of the world, but if I was going to die, I wanted to be at the beach with my loved ones, not in Lexington all alone.
By the time I left for winter break with my family, I had finished all the credit hours necessary for my degree. Rather than graduate that December, I chose to enroll for one more semester so I’d still be an active student when it came time to interview for jobs with my sorority in February. My sorority sisters meant the world to me in college, and especially during those early years of healing from the attack. The love and support I received was so overwhelming that I wanted to serve them somehow, and I found that outlet by working for the national Kappa Kappa Gamma organization as a consultant on things like proper procedures and leadership development to college chapters around the country.
With only one pass/fail class on my schedule, that last semester proved the easiest of my college career, for which I was deeply grateful—I had much bigger issues to deal with than schoolwork. Those months were also some of the hardest for me emotionally as I awaited the start of my attacker’s trial. Originally scheduled for February 14, the trial was postponed until May to give the attorneys on both sides more time to prepare. I wanted nothing less than to see justice done, but I cannot express the depth of dread I felt knowing that sooner or later I would be in his presence again.
Back in October, Harris County prosecutors came to Lexington to meet with me and assess my viability as a key witness. Detective Craig Sorrell, who was also slated to take the stand at the trial, hosted us in a conference room at the police station downtown. Among the prosecutors was the legendary Harris County District Attorney Johnny B. Holmes, famous for his white handlebar mustache and his devotion to the death penalty in capital murder cases. With him was Assistant District Attorney Devon Anderson. She was focused and determined and one of the sharpest, most dynamic women I’ve ever met. By the time the trial wrapped up, I would utterly adore her.
Though there were nine known murder victims in various states and jurisdictions, the case going to trial was the State of Texas vs. Angel Maturino Resendiz for the capital murder of Dr. Claudia Benton. Under Texas law, one of the prerequisites for a capital murder charge is homicide committed during the commission of another felony—in the Benton case, burglary. There were only two sentences available for capital murder: life imprisonment with no possibility of parole until at least forty years were served, or death by lethal injection.
The murders of Dr. Claudia Benton and Noemi Dominguez both happened in Harris County, but the prosecution decided to focus on Dr. Benton because the amount of evidence made the case exceptionally strong. The prosecution’s first goal was to secure a guilty verdict for Resendiz, and then the trial could move into the punishment phase to determine his sentence. District attorneys, law enforcement officers, and other officials from sixteen jurisdictions in Texas, Illinois, Kentucky, and Florida collaborated with Harris County in hopes that the outcome of this trial would be the endgame of the entire ordeal. Following a guilty verdict, Harris County district attorneys planned to call witnesses and present evidence from the other known murders during the punishment phase to illustrate beyond a doubt that Resendiz was a continued, uncontainable threat to society.
As the prosecution’s star witness, my taking the stand was meant to be the final play.
During our meeting in Lexington, Devon explained how she would ask point-by-point questions to guide me through the details of the attack. I had told my story a few times by this point and was fairly good at separating the emotion from it, but Devon didn’t want me to separate the emotion this time around. There would be plenty of straightforward expert testimony on the investigation’s facts and findings, but I was the only victim left alive to put a face and name to Resendiz’s atrocities. And, as she pointed out, I was going to be in the courtroom with my attacker, so the emotion was bound to be there no matter what.
Jury selection started around the end of March. I received the official subpoena by certified mail sometime in April. Thankfully, I wouldn’t have to testify until after graduation. In the interim, I tried not to let it loom over me. I was as ready as I would ever be, so I did my best to put it out of my mind until the time arrived.
• • •
On Sunday, May 7, 2000, the University of Kentucky campus was teeming with faculty in full regalia, graduates in black caps and gowns, and families and friends in their
finest attire, all of whom had gathered for Commencement exercises. Several ceremonies were scheduled to take place, though I elected to skip the main event. Instead, my parents, my sisters Heather and Kathy, Heather’s husband Fred, and several of my sorority sisters went with me to Memorial Coliseum for the Gatton College of Business and Economics school ceremony.
After I’d walked the stage to receive my diploma, we went to eat in a nice restaurant. We reveled in the joy of being together, celebrated my accomplishment, and avoided talking about the impending trial—which was due to begin the very next day. Beneath my cheerful exterior, I was barely holding the panic and anxiety at bay. My testimony in the trial’s punishment phase was still a couple of weeks away, so after moving out of my apartment on Fontaine Road, I went home to Evansville and holed myself up in my room to wait it out.
The Harris County prosecutors had advised me not to follow the media reports of the trial ahead of my testimony, so I learned most of the details only after the case was over. DNA evidence, palm prints, and fingerprints at nine brutal crime scenes all pointed to Resendiz, and neither he nor his attorneys ever denied that he committed all these murders.
Instead, Resendiz’s plea was not guilty by reason of insanity.
The crux of the trial centered on whether Resendiz was legally insane when he murdered Dr. Claudia Benton in her bedroom in West University Place shortly before Christmas in 1998. The question of insanity wasn’t simply whether he had a medically diagnosed mental illness, but whether he knew the difference between right and wrong at the time of the crime. Resendiz’s attorneys hoped—and the prosecution feared—that the jury would look at the sheer horror of what he had done to her and the rest of his victims and conclude that no one in their right mind could have perpetrated such acts. The prosecution’s task, therefore, was to prove that Resendiz did know what he was doing when he bludgeoned and stabbed Dr. Benton to death—that he wasn’t insane but entirely depraved.
Over the course of several days, multiple experts in forensic psychiatry and psychology took the stand on behalf of either the defense or the prosecution to testify in regards to Resendiz’s sanity at the time of Dr. Benton’s murder. The witnesses for the defense testified that Resendiz suffered from paranoid schizophrenia brought about by early childhood head injuries, extended alcohol and drug abuse, and a family history of mental illness. They claimed he had a delusional perception of the world, believing himself to be half-human, half-angel, and capable of causing floods, earthquakes, and explosions. One defense expert who interviewed him recounted how Resendiz claimed to kill victims he believed “radiated evil.” Though he knew his actions were illegal, he was, in his own sick mind, answering to a “higher calling.”
The prosecution was having none of this. They countered that Resendiz’s actions were calculated and deliberate—from his string of aliases and disguises to the way he rode the rails to constantly elude authorities. His lucidity was evident in how he chose victims at their most vulnerable, snuck up on them and killed them before they could even see it coming, usually using a makeshift weapon he devised from his victims’ own belongings.
The assistant district attorneys were also out to prove Resendiz was intelligent and a master of manipulation. To that end, they called to the stand one of his former cellmates from a prison stint in Florida back in 1990. His fellow prisoner testified that the two of them had spent time in the prison library researching the very issue of insanity and sharing ideas and techniques with other inmates on how to use the insanity defense to overturn their convictions.
Houston crime victims’ advocate Andy Kahan submitted evidence that Resendiz was profiteering from his own notoriety by selling letters, autographs, fingernail clippings, locks of hair, even a callus from his foot. According to Kahan, Resendiz said, “I will no longer sell anything for less than $50, because I’m famous now.”
The jurors were also provided a binder of Resendiz’s letters. Dozens of letters he wrote to members of the media from the county jail were filled with his delusional religious ramblings and his tale about being half-angel and having special powers. It didn’t surprise me to learn about Resendiz’s courtship of the press. I remembered how, during the attack in Lexington, he practically panted with enthusiasm about how Chris and I would “see him on the news” because he had just broken out of jail. Nothing he said was true—he was only saying those things to control us. I was disgusted by how much he relished in and encouraged his own notoriety.
But then there was a thick stack of letters to his common-law wife back in Mexico—benign messages sent over the course of two years that referred to nothing more sensational than sending money for home maintenance and other everyday needs.
The defendant’s truest delusion, noted Assistant District Attorney Lyn McClellan, was that he could convince a jury he was insane.
Following closing arguments, the jurors were released to deliberate shortly before 11:00 a.m. on Wednesday, May 17, but the deliberations lasted so long the jury was sequestered overnight. On Thursday morning, after a collective ten hours debating the evidence, the jury returned to the courtroom to hand over their decision to Judge Harmon.
“Mr. Resendiz, would you please rise?” the judge asked.
Then he read the verdict to the courtroom.
“‘We, the jury, find the defendant Angel Maturino Resendiz, also known as Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, guilty of capital murder as charged.’”
Before Devon Anderson had a chance to call me herself, Evansville news anchors were breaking the news that Resendiz had been found guilty. I felt a deep sense of calm and satisfaction. I was convinced all along the trial could have gone no other way. Given the stress and uncertainty caused by the long deliberations, however, I can only imagine the sense of victory and relief that swept the prosecution team and the other victims’ families in that moment.
While the jury was out on lunch recess, Resendiz told Judge Harmon he’d decided the death penalty was better than spending the rest of his life in jail. He told his attorneys before the trial ever started that if he lost his insanity plea, he wasn’t going to fight the death sentence. He knew what prison life was like—he’d been incarcerated before for years at a time. He didn’t want defense attorney Allen Tanner to make any opening statements or to cross-examine the witnesses slated for the punishment phase, and he declined his right to testify or have any character witnesses testify on his behalf. His attorneys reluctantly agreed to his requests, though they told him they would still try to talk him out of his decision. If I had been there, I might have suggested this submission to justice was the first decent thing this serial killer had done since we encountered him. I would have been content to give him exactly what he wanted, but from that point onward, there would always be another defense attorney fighting to keep him alive.
The punishment phase began that same day and continued through Friday. Detective Sorrell and I were scheduled to testify on Monday. As planned, my story would be the final word. As the punishment phase got underway, the prosecution’s goal was now to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Resendiz was a continued threat to society and that there were no mitigating circumstances to warrant a life sentence rather than death.
Devon Anderson made her opening statements to the jury. For two days, she and her team presented crime scene photos and videotape and expert witnesses who described the volumes of forensic evidence collected at the scenes of each murder. But the primary approach was to finally put real faces to the suffering Resendiz had caused.
“You’ve heard a little bit about these other crimes,” Devon told the jury in her opening statements. “You’ve heard the psychiatrist’s antiseptic clinical description of the crimes, you’ve heard the defendant’s excuses or triggers, but what we’re going to present to you are the people who’ve been murdered, most in their own homes, and found by their loved ones.”
Dr. Claudia Benton’s husband, George Benton, had testified during the guilt phase of the trial and described
to the jury what it was like to receive a phone call from police that a woman had been found beaten and stabbed to death in his home, and how excruciating a task it was to tell his twelve-year-old twin daughters that their mother had been murdered. First to take the stand during the punishment phase was George’s brother John who lamented how wrecked his brother was by his wife’s murder. His brother and young nieces spent that Christmas in the most profound grief they’d ever know. They never returned to live in their home in West University Place, and George never went back to work.
“I don’t want to say he’s lost,” said John Benton, “but he is. He’s got two girls, wakes them up in the morning, makes their breakfast, sends them to school, waits for them to come home alive.”
The second story detailed the murders of George Morber and his daughter Carolyn Frederick in Gorham, Illinois. Carolyn’s husband, Donald, walked in to find his father-in-law’s house ransacked, his wife’s dead body half-naked and bloody beneath a blanket in the living room. Too stunned and afraid to approach her, he banged on a nearby wall, and when she didn’t move, he ran back outside to call police.
Young Noemi Dominguez was discovered in her Houston apartment when her brother and sister came to see why she hadn’t shown up at an event the day before. Her brother Alex took the stand to describe what it was like to search her apartment, everywhere but underneath a large pile of clothes and a quilt on her bedroom floor, until he got a sick feeling that he should see what might be under that mound of fabrics.
“I lifted this quilt my mother had made for her, and a few articles of clothing, and I saw my sister,” said Alex. “Honestly, I jumped back, and I think I shrieked.”
Noemi was killed by multiple sharp forced injuries to the head, but no weapon was found at the scene.