Death Rides the Rails

By Hilary Hylton/Austin

His most sinister visible feature is the tattooed snake that creeps up his left forearm. But the uncapturable horror of the alleged serial killer Rafael Resendez-Ramirez is his rage. Investigators shy away from discussing the "commonalities" among his victims--at least five of them, perhaps more, over the past seven months. But they obliquely refer to the way his victims are beaten to death by blunt instruments, which can include brutal blows by the killer's hands and feet. Says Mike Cox, spokesman for the department of public safety in Texas: "It takes a lot of rage to beat someone to death if the killer knows the person. But to have that kind of rage against a stranger is spooky."

Ramirez haunts the railroads. His first known Texas victim, Dr. Claudia Benton, was found 100 yds. from railroad tracks in West University Place, an affluent community in Houston. She had been sexually assaulted. All the others lived near or were found along the web of tracks surrounding Houston, one of which leads to San Antonio. Ramirez, says Cox, has a "fascination" for train travel. Ramirez is 38 or 39, and was first arrested when he tried to cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. But he returned again and again. Ingenious enough to be issued a voter-registration card and driver's license in St. Louis, Mo., according to the Dallas Morning News, he allegedly voted in the 1988 presidential election. Says Cox: "This guy has used 12 different aliases, three or four dates of birth. I've seen six pictures of him, and they all look different." There have been several false sightings, and police and an FBI task force have rousted illegal aliens out of freight trains in their search.

Ramirez has taunted the authorities with conflicting clues. He all too obviously left the Honda Civic of his most recent Texas victim, Noemi Dominguez, near the international bridge on the border, indicating he'd fled into Mexico. Yet his suspected depredations also point north of Texas. Last week investigators were dispatched to Gorham, Ill., where George Morber, 80, and his daughter Carolyn Frederick, 52, were found beaten to death. They lived alongside railroad tracks. Ramirez is also wanted for questioning in the 1997 assault and murder of Christopher Maier, 21, a University of Kentucky student, who was slain as he was walking with his girlfriend near tracks in Lexington, Ky. The woman was beaten and raped but survived.

Ramirez breaks into homes, but his intention is not to steal but to annihilate. That viciousness has cleared store shelves of guns in the small towns along the tracks that crisscross Texas. "Right now," says Cox, "Ramirez is the most wanted man in Texas. And he might be the most wanted man in the U.S."