Death Sentence For Railroad Killer

A Mexican drifter who became known as the "railroad killer" was sentenced to death Monday for killing a Houston-area doctor, one of nine murders he was accused of committing.

The same jury that convicted Angel Maturino Resendiz of capital murder last week met for just less than two hours before deciding on the death sentence. The panel could have sentenced him to life in prison.

Maturino Resendiz's attorney has acknowledged his client embarked on a two-year killing spree that included the slaying of Dr. Claudia Benton in her West University Place home, but that he is innocent by reason of insanity.

During the trial, prosecutor Lyn McClellan asked psychologist Dr. Ramon Laval if he thought Maturino Resendiz was sane when he stabbed, beat and raped Benton.

"He was sane," Laval replied.

Maturino Resendiz's beliefs he has supernatural powers, such as the ability to predict disasters or leave his own body, are not signals of major mental illness, Laval testified.

"However idiosyncratic, strange or weird, these are not delusions," he said.

Dr. Melissa Ferguson, a psychiatrist and director of the Harris County Mental Health-Mental Retardation Authority's jail unit, said she detected no severe mental illness upon Maturino Resendiz's arrival July 14.

He later was admitted to the jail's psychiatric ward on a suicide watch, but Ferguson said she diagnosed him with depression-related psychosis, not paranoid schizophrenia.

"I didn't see any paranoia at all," said Ferguson, who met with him more than 40 times. "And at that point, I did not see any frankly delusional thought content."

She did note, however, his thoughts seemed to revolve around "hyperreligious" subjects that indicate a personality disorder. The defense claimed deluded Judeo-Christian beliefs were at the root of the killings.

But the prosecution produced a rebuttal witness who testified that he and Maturino Resendiz counseled fellow inmates on how to plead insanity or incompetence at the Marianna Federal Corrections Institute in Florida.

Scott Mitchell Rollins, 43, who remains at a federal prison in Florence, Colo., said Maturino Resendiz even helped him make a bogus incompetence claim to try and win a new trial when they were prison mates in 1990.

"We ordered some books and read up on it," Rollins said.

Maturino Resendiz is accused of killing six people in Texas, two in Illinois and another in Kentucky. Authorities in the other two states have vowed to pursue their capital murder cases regardless of outcome in this trial.