The Boston Phoenix
July 8 - 15, 1999

[Don't Quote Me]

Touched by a/k/a Angel

A close encounter, once removed, with a suspected serial killer. Plus, how the Herald found 'The Lost Boy,' and Brill's latest cheap-shot victim: Mike Barnicle.

by Dan Kennedy

It's still on my schedule for Monday, March 15, at 1 p.m.: Rev. Sirnic at Weimar United Church of Christ, Highway 90 toward Schulenburg. My aunt had just died, at the age of 91, after a long bout with Alzheimer's. As the closest relative able to fly to Texas on short notice, I had the task of meeting with the Reverend Norman "Skip" Sirnic and planning the service.

I liked Skip, and I liked his wife, Karen. Despite the cultural divide -- Christian and non-Christian, rural Texas and urban Northeast -- I enjoyed talking with them, and was impressed with the care Skip put into his sermon, paying tribute to an old woman he barely knew.

Needless to say, I was shocked when I found out they'd been murdered.

It happened sometime during the first weekend in May. When Skip didn't show up for church that Sunday morning, a few members of his congregation walked over to the parsonage to see if there was a problem. Indeed there was. Skip and Karen had been beaten to death, with a sledgehammer, while they were in bed.

For weeks, I followed the investigation on the Houston Chronicle's Web site. There were few leads. Eventually, the name of a suspect emerged: Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, who was also wanted in connection with the murder of a female physician near Houston the previous December. Still, it seemed like just a local, if particularly awful, story.

Until recently.

Now, of course, Rafael Resendez-Ramirez -- whose real name is Angel Leoncio Reyes-Resendiz -- is on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, and is suspected of being one of the most prolific serial killers in the country. According to news accounts, Resendez-Ramirez is believed to hop on freight trains, spreading mayhem everywhere he goes. He's suspected of murdering eight people since 1997, in Kentucky, Illinois, and Texas. He even apparently returned to the Weimar area on June 4, when it is believed that he killed a 73-year-old woman in Schulenburg, just a few miles down the road.

When I get past the horror of what happened, I find myself fascinated by Resendez-Ramirez's rapid emergence as a media commodity. National newspapers such as the New York Times and USA Today have done major pieces on him. The networks, of course, have been all over the story. ABC's 20/20 re-ran a year-old report on railway killers, with the only connection to Resendez-Ramirez being Diane Sawyer's updated introduction. National Public Radio did some characteristically thoughtful reporting from Lexington, Kentucky, where Resendez-Ramirez is believed to have begun his murderous spree two years ago, and where authorities think he may return.

People made it a cover story. Time ran a story on Resendez-Ramirez in its June 28 issue. The following week, Newsweek published an almost-four-page spread featuring quotes from his mother ("What happened, little one? What have you done?"), a map with photos of his alleged victims, and details of what's purported to be his gruesome modus operandi, which involves beating people to death with whatever blunt instrument is handy, and sexually assaulting the women.

Resendez-Ramirez has become a political issue, too: Border Patrol officers picked him up on June 2 and merely deported him to his native Mexico because their computer system failed to reveal that he was wanted for murder. On Capitol Hill, politicians are calling for an investigation.

And, of course, no widely publicized string of serial killings would be complete without fear, panic, and tragic overreaction. On June 23, a man in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, shot and killed a woman who was knocking on his door because, he told authorities, he believed she was the killer he'd heard about on TV.

In all of the media accounts I've seen, there's nothing I can point to that's obviously wrong or sensationalistic. Yet, having gotten to know two of the victims, however superficially, I find the difference between media reality and personal reality interesting.

With the exception of a feature the Houston Chronicle published a week after the Sirnics' deaths, I've seen nothing that connects, even tangentially, with small-town life in Weimar (population 2000), where the best barbecue is in the back of a gas station/convenience store, where cattle graze outside the local hospital, and where the outward friendliness often hides a mean streak ingrained by the hard lives people lead.

After my aunt's funeral service at Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church, a tiny chapel amid the ranches of New Bielau, about nine miles south of Weimar, I approached Skip Sirnic. It was that awkward moment when you pass the envelope to the minister, when neither party knows quite what to say or where to put their hands. We exchanged pleasantries; I can't remember what we said.

Of course, I realized we wouldn't see each other again. But I had no idea how final our parting would be.


The Boston Herald's three-day series last week on "The Lost Boy," a 14-year-old runaway living in the woods, offered up a rare combination of narrative power and public-policy impact. The storytellers -- reporter Lauren Beckham Falcone (twentysomething daughter of op-ed-page columnist Beverly Beckham) and photographer Garo Lachinian -- not only pulled you into Joe's personal tale, but they also made you think about the failure of the social-services establishment.

Even Lorraine Carli, spokeswoman for the Department of Social Services, which didn't exactly come off well in the series, praised Falcone, saying, "I actually thought she did a very good job. It was pretty obvious that she followed this kid for a long time." Adds Linda Wood-Boyle, executive director of the Somerville Homeless Coalition and the teen shelter Shortstop: "I think that it highlights the problem -- there are lots of kids out there, and if they want to avoid services, there's not much anyone can do."

The connection with Joe was initially made by Lachinian, a former Concord Monitor photographer who was recruited from the Baltimore Sun about six months ago, when Brian Walski left for the Los Angeles Times. After Lachinian spent some time developing the story and gaining Joe's trust, Falcone was brought in to do additional reporting and to write the series. Around One Herald Square, folks are buzzing about how Falcone -- who was previously best known for writing the Monday "Teen Scene" feature -- rose to the moment.

"She impressed a lot of people around here who thought she was just a nice kid," says one newsroom veteran who asked not to be identified. "There are a lot of people who've been here a lot longer who've never done anything that good -- like me."

The series has not been without controversy. "Gypsy" -- the adult male who's taken Joe under his wing -- wrote a letter to the Phoenix several weeks ago complaining that Joe had sought to pull out of the project, but was told it was too late. Gypsy claimed Joe's family had "begun to repair itself" and that Joe was seeking counseling, adding that the Herald's refusal to halt publication plans could jeopardize Joe's future. Gypsy also reportedly camped out in protest in front of the Herald for several days the week before publication.

Herald editor Andy Costello is obviously sensitive to charges that his paper went ahead against the wishes of a 14-year-old boy. He even declined to make Falcone available for comment. But he argues, persuasively, that part of the Herald's motivation from the beginning has been to help Joe get the services he needs -- regardless of what Joe or Gypsy say they want.

"This kid has been living on the streets now for two months, and I don't think that anybody would think that having a 14-year-old living on the streets is a situation that we should tolerate in this society," Costello says. "We spent quite a bit of time with him, and it didn't look like there was any sort of solution in the offing. Oftentimes newspapers really become the last resort for people in this kind of dire situation. Hopefully this series will force people into action who haven't been acting."


Odds and ends from 135 Morrissey Boulevard:

  • Barnicle's beef. What's wrong with this picture? Former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle writes a column for the New York Daily News in which he quotes Hillary Rodham Clinton as saying of her planned Senate run: "I need this for me." Barnicle attributes this to a "prominent politician" who, he claims, overheard Clinton. The Brill's Content Web site (http://www.brillscontent.com) calls it a "juicy but implausible quote" and whacks the News for using it, given that Barnicle lost his Globe job for fabricating quotes and characters. But Barnicle's News boss, Sunday opinion editor (and former Content editor) Michael Kramer, later tells Content, "I know who this quote came from, and I'm confident the sourcing is correct." Rather than retract the item, Content merely splices in Kramer's comments at the end, as if they prove nothing. And the New York Post, the Boston Herald, and even the Boston Globe have a fun time reporting that yet another Barnicle column has been questioned, even though no one has questioned it but Content, and even though Kramer has knocked those questions down. This time, Barnicle got screwed.

  • The rumor mill. For several weeks, talk has been flying around the Globe newsroom that New York Times bigfoot editor John Geddes was arriving from the Mother Ship to take a senior editing position. One source even reports receiving seven or eight e-mails to that effect. Apparently no one thought to pick up the phone and call Geddes -- until now. "Someone asked me the other day in the newsroom, and I laughed," he told the Phoenix. And lest you think Geddes, a former Times business editor who recently took a top position with the Times Company's electronic-publishing operations, is being Clintonesque (i.e., "I said I laughed, but I didn't say it wasn't true"), he followed that up with a flat-out denial.

  • Half bull, half dog? In an effort to shore up sagging Sunday sales, the Globe has decided to unveil a so-called bulldog edition later this year. The ersatz Sunday paper will be available at retail outlets inside Route 128 early in the afternoon on Saturdays. Trouble is, insiders say they've been told the bulldog will cost about $1 million a year in new salaries and production costs -- and there's grumbling that that's an awfully steep price to pay for a gimmick that won't actually improve the paper itself.

  • Leaving, sort of. Globe veterans Martin Nolan and Curtis Wilkie have accepted the buyout offered by management to reduce costs. Both, though, are sticking around. Nolan, a former editorial-page editor who's written a twice-weekly op-ed column from San Francisco in recent years, will simply cut back to weekly and be paid on a freelance basis. And Wilkie, the New Orleans bureau chief who achieved minor-celebrity status in Timothy Crouse's 1972 campaign diary, The Boys on the Bus, will be back next year, to cover the presidential campaign on a contract basis.


  • 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


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