Don't Quote Me

The Boston Phoenix
August 12 - 19, 1999

[Don't Quote Me]

Fear strikes out

When abstract evil hits home

by Dan Kennedy
We were half-watching the 11 p.m. news on Channel 5. Heather Kahn was looking at us. We were looking at her. I turned to my wife and asked, "Did she just say what I think she said?"
"Yes."
My flesh began to crawl. And before I'm accused of indulging in a cheap cliché, let me hasten to add that that's exactly what I felt. A previously empty phrase now had real meaning. Flesh crawling, neck hairs standing on end, chest pounding. All that.
The news that had set both of us off was that Rafael Reséndez-Ramírez, the suspected "railway killer" who was wanted in connection with nine murders in Texas, Illinois, and Kentucky, had been sighted in Danvers. As in Massachusetts. As in the town where we live.
Now, for most people, this might not have meant much. But just the day before, the Phoenix had published a piece I'd written about having gotten to know two of the victims Reséndez-Ramírez was suspected of killing ("Don't Quote Me," News, July 9). The Reverend Skip Sirnic, who had presided at my uncle's funeral in 1996 and at my aunt's funeral earlier this year, had been murdered -- along with his wife, Karen -- while they were asleep at home in the little town of Weimar, Texas. The idea that Reséndez-Ramírez was now after me was perhaps ludicrous, but no more ludicrous than the awful fact that Skip and Karen had been sledgehammered to death in the first place.
I called the Danvers Police. The dispatcher told me that someone had spotted a man who looked vaguely like Reséndez-Ramírez several days earlier. Not much there, it seemed; I relaxed a bit. Then I called the FBI, and was told that the agency was being bombarded with alleged sightings, and that I shouldn't worry. I relaxed a bit more.
But then came midnight, when New England Cable News replayed its 10 p.m. newscast, which we'd missed the first time around. And things took a sharp turn for the worse. R.D. Sahl read a report saying that the Boston office of the FBI had issued an advisory that Reséndez-Ramírez had been spotted in Danvers earlier in the week. Compared to Channel 5's report, Sahl's sounded frighteningly definitive. It also seemed to contradict the vague reassurances I'd received just a few moments before. This, after all, was the FBI going to the trouble of putting out an Official Warning that said: A suspected serial killer is here. Be afraid.
I was.
I hopped on the Internet. Nothing on the AP wires. But when I checked the latest on the Houston Chronicle's Web site, I found a story headlined OFFICIALS SAY SUSPECT IS `READING HIS PRESS.' The lead: "The suspected killer of at least eight victims in three states is well aware of the publicity his trail of terror is generating, investigators said Wednesday."
Great, I thought. He saw my column. He didn't like it. And he's coming over to let me know. Personally.
Silly as it may sound in retrospect, I'm not ashamed to admit that I stayed up until 6 a.m., alternating between the TV set and the computer, a 12-inch kitchen knife at the ready. I upbraided myself for not having a gun. (Sorry, NRA. I'm still here, obviously, and I'm still not getting one.) I tried to think through what I'd do if I heard someone breaking in. Would I have time to dial 911? Would I have time to herd my wife and kids out through a second-floor window onto the porch roof, then wait, around the corner at the top of the staircase, knife in hand, while Reséndez-Ramírez slowly, quietly made his way up? What if I lunged and missed? Jesus, what if I froze?

There's a romantic myth that we reporters often put ourselves at great risk. Of course, some of us do. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 24 journalists were killed in 17 countries in 1998, all as a direct result of their work. In places such as Congo, Brazil, and Bangladesh, journalists have been assassinated or "disappeared" for espousing views that the government considers dangerous.
But most journalists, especially in the United States, are like me: more likely to get run over by a car while on an early-morning jog than to run seriously afoul of the people we're covering. Because I write about media and politics, it's not unusual for journalists and politicians to be pissed off at me. It's certainly not pleasant to get an angry phone call or e-mail -- especially when the aggrieved party has evidence that I really did screw up. But editors and elected officials do not inspire the same kind of fear as someone who's been accused of jumping off freight trains, breaking into houses in the middle of the night, and killing the occupants with whatever tools happen to be available.
For me, Rafael Reséndez-Ramírez was an abstraction become real -- a monster who was out there somewhere, but of no particular concern to me, now suddenly on my trail. I guess I could even say it was exhilarating.
There's something one or two steps removed about much of journalism, and that's especially true for someone who, like me, reports on the media. I write not about news events, but about those who report on news events. Of course, this hasn't been true of my entire career. Over the past 20 years I've gotten to know mothers who have lost children to leukemia, hidden with a camera behind mounds of trash to catch illegal dumpers, and talked my way into a tiny suburban house that was crammed to the rafters with illegal aliens. But that's all pretty far removed from what I do these days. Waiting for Rafael put me in touch with a rawer, more elemental form of journalism, and served as a useful reminder that this can be a dangerous business indeed.
It also increased my respect for people such as Beverly Ford, a risk-taking crime reporter who's leaving the Boston Herald after 16 years to take a similar post at the Arizona Republic. (Extremely relevant footnote: in the 1970s, Republic organized-crime reporter Don Bolles was killed by a car bomb, one of the most infamous journalistic assassinations in US history.) Just before she took off to look for a place to live in Phoenix, I asked her how she lives with the fear.
Her response is fitting for someone who, at her farewell party at J.J. Foley's last week, was hailed as a woman with "balls of steel." "The people I wrote about were too busy hiding from the police to come after me and blow up my car," says Ford. Not that she didn't get threats. But she says she was more worried about the cops she'd written negative things about -- "that they would get pissed off at me, pull me over, plant drugs on me."
Pretty macho. So, too, is Armando Villafranca, the Houston Chronicle reporter who wrote the piece about Reséndez-Ramírez sitting around reading his press clippings. "I wish he had showed up on my doorstep," Villafranca says evenly. "I would have liked to talk to him."
I was rather relieved to catch up with Michael Hall, an associate editor for Texas Monthly, who wrote a piece for the August issue about the effect of the Sirnic killings on the residents of Weimar. Relieved because Hall's reaction was normal; that is to say, the same as mine. Hall says he lives within earshot of a freight-train line, and for weeks he couldn't hear the whistle without wondering whether Reséndez-Ramírez had just jumped off, and was looking for him.
"I got caught up in a lot of the paranoia, a lot of the fear," Hall says. "There was a sense that he could be anywhere -- first anywhere in Texas, then anywhere in the Midwest."
And anywhere in Danvers, too.

In fact, Reséndez-Ramírez almost certainly never came anywhere near Danvers.
The morning after my night before, I contacted the Boston Globe's city desk, told a sympathetic editor why I was calling, and asked what he'd heard about the FBI advisory. He told me he had already assigned a reporter to follow up, and suggested I check back later in the day.
A short time later, a friend at the Globe called. Word out of the FBI was that no advisory had ever been issued. The Globe published nothing. The Herald published nothing. As best as I could tell, not a sentence about the Danvers sighting was ever carried on the wires, either. Given that the "railway killer" was a big national story at the time, the previous night's bulletin was starting to look pretty shaky.
Tony LaCasse, the night assignment editor for New England Cable News, says the report was based on a fax sent by the FBI to local TV stations, and that he called the FBI to follow up. FBI spokeswoman Gail Marcinkiewicz now says the advisory was based on a report that a man fitting Reséndez-Ramírez's description had been seen driving a van with Texas plates. "It was quickly determined that it was not Reséndez," she says.
A few days later, on July 13, Reséndez-Ramírez turned himself in to authorities in El Paso, and it was clear that he'd been holed up in the border area for several weeks. He gave his name -- his real name -- as Angel Maturino Reséndez. The killing spree was over. I relaxed for the first time since Heather Kahn and R.D. Sahl had shaken me to the core. And, yes, my flesh stopped crawling.
Now that Maturino Reséndez is in custody, the national media have lost interest. He's neither wealthy, nor charismatic, nor handsome, nor well-educated. The next time we hear much about him will probably be as his execution date approaches. And approach it will, assuming he's found guilty -- a reasonably safe assumption, given that authorities say he's already confessed to some of the killings. You don't murder a minister and his wife, and elderly woman, and a female physician (among others) in Texas without meeting the Reaper. Texas, after all, is a state whose governor, George W. Bush, pulled the switch on convicted murderer Karla Faye Tucker, a sweet-natured born-again Christian -- and later, in an interview with Talk magazine, mocked her pleas for mercy.
But it will be some time before I forget about Angel Maturino Reséndez. And though I'm not exactly grateful for the experience, my Night of the Long Knife reminded me of something no one in journalism should lose sight of: that we're reporting on real people, not abstractions. Every so often, that truth will be brought home to us in a most uncomfortable way.

Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here