A Lost Boys Slide Show 
Evil
A minister and his wife brutally murdered. A serial killer on the lam. A small town that has never before known fear. It’s like a Texas version of In Cold Blood— and as the people of Weimar know too well, the final chapter hasn’t been written.
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Reverend Glen Schoeneberg, a Weimar native who is the UCC pastor in nearby Burton, spoke for the longest time. “The world is an imperfect place,” he said. “Evil things happen—sometimes by cause and effect, but sometimes simply by chance.” Some in the church that day were no doubt thinking, So why pray? If the whole world is in His hands, what good is prayer if it can’t prevent something like this? Schoeneberg had an answer: If God could intervene to prevent all evil, we would just be puppets, incapable of love, which we’re clearly not. “We are free, free to err, free to be afflicted, free to be affected by evil,” he said, “but make no mistake about it: Our faith in an omnipotent and omnipresent God will not be disappointed. Evil happens, death sometimes occurs, but ultimately it cannot win. That’s the Good News of the Scripture. Ultimately, God will not let those things separate us from Him.”
The news wasn’t so good in Weimar. “Nobody here, even the old-timers I’ve talked to, ever remembers a murder in Weimar,” the chief of police, Bill Livingston, told a reporter. In fact, someone had killed a local man in a bar brawl in 1981. But that had been a drunken argument; this was sick, mean, evil. People speculated that the killer had been crazy or high on drugs. He stole Skip and Karen’s pickup truck, their VCR, and a video game. He left the bloody sledgehammer leaning against a bedroom wall.
“We don’t think it’s someone local,” Mayor Kosler said when the news broke. People from Weimar just didn’t do things like this. Chief Livingston said much the same. They were clearly trying to calm the people of Weimar, many of whom, for the first time in their lives, began locking their doors and windows at night. A reward of $10,000 was offered by Hill Bank and Trust.
On May 13 the Weimar Mercury reported that Livingston had said of the murder, “It looked like rage.” To some this meant that Skip had known the killer. No one wanted to consider the possibility, but it gave rise to some interesting rumors. “It ain’t random,” one local said, noting Skip’s leadership role at Child Protective Services. “He had taken a child away that very day.” Others thought it was a troubled drug abuser Skip had counseled: “We have drug addicts in Weimar just like every city has ’em.” There was a rumor that he had tried to sell a coin collection on the Internet; maybe it had been worth a lot of money. A Catholic woman mused that the killings may have had something to do with Skip’s divorce.
For two weeks nothing much happened in Weimar. People relaxed a little; the murders surely were an aberration. “They seem to be going back to sleeping with their windows open,” said someone the next town over. Then, on May 25, came word of the first big break in the case. The good news was the police had a suspect. The bad news was he had killed the Sirnics at random, and he had killed before.
He had a ritual. He waited until after midnight, then broke in through the garage, carport, or back of the house. He found something hard and heavy and attacked their heads, beating them so viciously you couldn’t tell who they were afterward. He took pleasure in their agony. He covered them with a blanket or a sheet, then casually left the weapon behind. He didn’t care about his fingerprints. It was almost as if he didn’t care about getting caught.
RAFAEL RESENDEZ-RAMIREZ WAS A MEXICAN national in his late thirties with a twenty-year criminal record—including burglary, aggravated assault, and felony possession of a firearm—in Texas, New Mexico, Florida, and other states. He had been caught and deported several times and had served time in U.S. prisons. He went by at least thirty aliases and five birth dates and rode the rails, living the hobo’s life. He had chosen the Sirnics’ home possibly because their garage, where their pickup was parked, faced the railroad tracks. (The parsonage looks like any other house and is separate from the church, which is at the other end of the block.) He was identified because DNA tests concluded that the Sirnics’ killer was also the killer last December of Claudia Benton, a doctor who lived in the West University Place neighborhood of Houston. Resendez-Ramirez’s fingerprints were lifted from Benton’s red Jeep Cherokee, which was stolen after her murder and later abandoned in San Antonio. Benton—who lived one hundred yards from the train tracks—had been raped, stabbed, and brutally beaten to death with a statuette. The news about the DNA tests substantiated at least one fear: Karen had been raped. Another rumor went unproved: The violation had occurred both before and after her death.
On May 28 the Sirnics’ truck turned up in San Antonio not far from where Benton’s Jeep had been found. There were reports that Resendez-Ramirez had been spotted there walking along the railroad tracks. If Weimarites felt relief at having a face and a name to go with the murders, they were terrified at the randomness of it all. A crime this heinous needed a reason. Weimar needed a reason.
America’s Most Wanted came to town at the end of May and filmed a second segment on Resendez-Ramirez (the show had already filmed one after Benton’s murder). It aired on June 5, the same day I drove through Weimar en route to the Fireman’s Festival, a yearly shindig held eight miles away in the town of Oakland. When I went by the UCC, the police tape around the parsonage was gone. Perhaps some kind of closure was coming. I saw in the Mercury that the reward had grown to $35,000. Soon after I arrived, I met up a woman I’d come to know as a source of reliable gossip. She did not have her usual friendly look. “Did you hear?” she asked. “Another woman. Weimar is gonna really be…” She trailed off, exasperated. “I’m gonna keep all my doors locked day and night. I don’t care. I don’t care.”
Josephine Konvicka was 73. She lived alone in the house where she had lived all her life, about a mile from the railroad tracks and three and a half miles from the Sirnics, just over the line in Fayette County. She usually watched TV until eleven or so and then went to bed. Sometime in the wee hours of June 4, someone broke into her house through an unlocked rear window, bashed in her head with a grubbing hoe, ransacked the place (looking in vain for her car keys, said police), and left. “She was the sweetest, dearest little old lady,” said one of her neighbors. “She would not have hurt a fly.”
Word of the killing swept through Weimar like a summer storm. According to one source, Konvicka was found with the grubbing hoe lodged in her head. The area had a tormentor, a killer who took delight in terror. The lights came on again; doors were locked. Some residents, especially the elderly, went off to spend some time with relatives in towns and cities that had no railroad tracks. “A lot of these older people have lived in these homes for fifty years,” one local whispered, “and they don’t have a clue where the key is.” Gun stores sold out of guns; hardware stores sold out of locks, security lights, and alarms. Weimar was not used to being a town full of victims, and it was hard to tell if people were more scared or angry. “He’s playing a game with us,” former mayor Julius Bartek told me. “I feel sorry for him if he tries to play that game at my house.”
By the end of the weekend the game had gotten deadlier. Within 36 hours of Konvicka’s butchering, 26-year-old Noemi Dominguez was raped and bludgeoned to death in south Houston. She lived near the tracks. Her car was missing. And now police officers in Lexington, Kentucky, were saying they were sure Resendez-Ramirez was the guy who in 1997 beat a college student to death with a fifty-pound rock and beat and raped his girlfriend, leaving her for dead (she somehow survived). They had been talking late at night, down by the railroad tracks.
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