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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The authorities began using the term “serial killer.” On June 8 a task force was formed in Houston comprised of fourteen law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the Texas Rangers. Before long, two hundred cops and federal agents had joined the hunt. Posters with various mug shots of Resendez-Ramirez went up in every store window in the area. He looked arrogant, with hard, soulless eyes. Terrified locals saw him everywhere they looked. Police officers in Weimar and the nearby towns of Schulenburg and Flatonia doubled their patrols. “We’re getting twenty calls an hour about suspicious persons,” said Schulenburg patrolman John Sampson. “We’re searching trains, meeting them every ten minutes.” Resendez-Ramirez had become the bogeyman. At first the police were too politic to elaborate on what he had done to his victims, but finally their horror overcame protocol. “He is brutal,” said Ronald Walker, a spokesman for the task force. “In all instances there are massive head injuries. It’s a blitz-type attack. This is a purely mean man.” Clint Van Zandt, a profiler, would later tell CBS News, “This is someone who likes to use his hands. He likes to get up close and personal. He likes to see the life ebb away from his victims as he kills them.”
“Generally the serial killer has his reasons for killing, though they only make sense to him,” former FBI profiler Gregg O. McCrary told the Dallas Morning News. What were Resendez-Ramirez’s reasons? What had caused him to go from aimless hobo to frenzied killer? Maybe, as one Methodist minister in Weimar thought, an evil spirit had flagged down his restless soul. Maybe it was simpler. “This is a thrill ride for him,” says McCrary. “In his mind, he’s winning.”
Sometimes he would steal a car, but he would always abandon it and get back on the train. He could go anywhere he wanted. He could disappear.
ON FRIDAY, JUNE 11, I WENT BACK TO Weimar one last time. It was the weekend of Gedenke, the town’s yearly birthday festival (“gedenke” is German for “remember”), and everyone was in a weary frenzy. Two days before, at a Schulenburg town meeting, Fayette County sheriff Rick Vandel had sent a chill through locals by saying that serial killers kill until stopped: “He’s not going to stop until he’s caught.” The day after that, someone was sure that he had seen Resendez-Ramirez in Weimar. There were rumors of a shooting. One hundred officers from the task force stopped and searched trains in Flatonia, a major north-south and east-west rail intersection. The reward had gone up to $60,000. Gedenke began in earnest the night I arrived. On one side of the railroad tracks were arts and crafts booths, a Latino band, and a sausage-on-a-stick booth; on the other were carnival booths, rides, and a country band. It was hot, and the two bands played to sparse crowds. The rides, including the terrifying Zipper, sat mostly idle, and the games went unplayed. In a small antiques shop on Jackson Square, a small group huddled. “He’s gonna keep doing it till they catch him,” a woman said, and her friends nodded. Police officers patrolled in golf carts and cars. In a bar just off Main Street, two men compared guns and gauges. A drunk bragged about what he was going to do to the bastard.
It was about 95 degrees Saturday afternoon, and the parade was mercifully short, with floats from area chambers of commerce, the Weimar high school band playing a lethargic “Louie Louie,” and kids in fire trucks throwing candy to spectators pressed back against storefronts in what little shade there was. Afterward, many fled the festival for the air conditioning of home. At around five a rainstorm blew in, cooling everything down. People started coming out again—first for the Turtle Derby, then for the music. By nightfall more than six hundred people were on the streets: black kids running through the throngs, white men in cowboy hats clapping each other on the shoulder, Mexican American families walking en masse, teenagers holding hands, couples dancing. Several people told me that Gedenke crowds were usually much bigger, but there were still long lines to buy beer and ride the Zipper. The country band played “Amarillo By Morning,” and by the end of the first chorus, I saw five people singing along. The oldies band played “Brick House,” and I saw ten more do the same thing. For a while—within these lights, along these railroad tracks—Weimar was safe and friendly again, the way it used to be. In the silences, though, every thought and conversation drifted back to the killer.
Few knew it then, but earlier that day Noemi Dominguez’s car had been found in Del Rio not far from the in ternational bridge. It seemed that Ramirez had left the country again—or had he? Del Rio is a straight shot to San Antonio by train. “No one around here believes he’s in Mexico,” a resident told me a few days later.” On June 21 the FBI put Resendez-Ramirez on its ten most wanted list. In Texas he was Public Enemy Number One. Lawmen in other cities were starting to call Weimar about their own unsolved killings: A man beaten to death in Luling in 1998; a man found in mid-June in Stephen F. Austin State Park near Sealy; a woman in Hughes Springs. All the victims lived near the railroad tracks.
Investigators, meanwhile, were frantically trying to anticipate Resendez-Ramirez’s next move. It wasn’t a question of if but when. Somewhere out there, the Mexican drifter was one step ahead of hundreds of well-trained American cops. His picture was up all over Texas, and everyone in the state knew his name. He was the lead story on the national news. He was winning.
Weimar was a star too, also for all the wrong reasons. The town would never again be known just for its sausage and baseball. “We’re on the map,” said Reverend Craig with disgust.
They called him Angel.
ON THE DAY RESENDEZ-RAMIREZ made the Top Ten, the Gorham, Illinois, police announced that he was the main suspect in the June 15 killings of George Morber and his daughter, Carolyn Frederick. Weimar’s worst suspicions were confirmed: Resendez-Ramirez was still in the country. It turned out that he had left the U.S. twice—and had even been detained in New Mexico by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which deported him on June 2—but each time he had returned. He was free to come and go whenever he pleased. It was like one of those slasher movies in which the authorities make one maddeningly stupid move after another while the psycho runs amok. This psycho had come back to Weimar before. Why not again?
Other revelations about Resendez-Ramirez surfaced as journalists joined the hunt. He was known as Angel Resendiz in Rodeo, Mexico, a little town just north of Durango. He had a three-month-old daughter with his common-law wife, who said he was a model husband with no sexual problems. He was “absolutely normal,” she insisted. He’d never been in trouble with the police. “He was quiet and quite serious,” said a court official. “He never bothered anyone.” Of course one of the calling cards of a serial killer is a normal life: John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy were model citizens even as they butchered boys and young women. Like theirs, Resendez-Ramirez’s banality made his evil all the more horrifying.
As the reward climbed to $125,000, Weimarites settled in for a summer of fear. Several rued that the big city had come to small-town Texas. “I don’t think it will ever be back to normal,” said a neighbor of the Sirnics. It wasn’t just the locks and lights. It was the new attitude, the anger and hatred, and the choice underlying everything now: follow the good or give in to the bad. Sheriff Vandel was more specific at the Schulenburg town meeting: “Let’s not overreact. Before you shoot, make sure what you’re shooting at.” The last thing the area needed was more dead innocents. If there was ever a time to remember Skip’s sermons, this was it. “This town is very, very scared now,” one woman said, “but I’ve never seen people pull together like this community. They love each other.”
On my last night in Weimar, I went back to the UCC. It was around midnight. Again the streets were deserted. Again I stopped at the streetlight. Again I felt the tingle of fear. But instead of the bang-bang-bang of my heart, I heard the ding-ding-ding of the railroad crossing. A train, as loud as the hinges of hell, chugged past. I stood (bravely, I thought) and watched it roll by Skip and Karen’s garden, which is tended these days by diligent parishioners. That sound might have been the last the two ever heard. At one time the lonesome whistle was a comfort to the people of Weimar, a badge of their innocence—somehow preserved in a wicked world. Now it was a brutish reminder that, at least when the sun goes down, Weimar is no different from any other place.
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