JUST IN: Texas Executes Peter Cantu — Gang Leader Ordered 2 Teen Girls Killed… Then Handed the loots

This week marks 30 years since two teenage girls were murdered. >> Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Peña were attacked and killed in 1993. >> Three men were executed by the state of Texas. Two had their death sentences reduced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. One was sentenced to 40 years and has been denied parole five times.

 Six people, one night, two girls who just wanted to get home before curfew. This is the case that shook the entire state of Texas to its foundation, the murders of Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Peña. On June 24, 1993, two teenage girls were dropped off by Jennifer’s father at a friend’s pool party at the Spring Hill Apartments in Northwest Houston.

 They never made it home. What happened to them in the hours that followed became one of the most talked about, most debated, and most heartbreaking criminal cases in the history of the state. And before this case was finished, it would drag in the president of the United States, the International Court of Justice, the Supreme Court, and a sitting Texas governor, all fighting over whether three men deserved to die for what they did.

 We are going to tell this story the way it deserves to be told, from the beginning. The friendship between Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Peña was not the kind that happened overnight. It built slowly the way good things tend to, through shared hallways and shared lunch tables at Waltrip High School in the Oak Forest neighborhood of Northwest Houston.

Jennifer Lee Ertman was born on August 15, 1978. She was 14 in the summer of 1993, finishing out her freshman year at Waltrip, a quiet and modest girl who did not draw a lot of attention to herself. People who knew her described her the same way across the board, steady, kind, not a girl who looked for trouble.

Elizabeth Christine Peña was born on June 21, 1977, which meant she had just turned 16 3 days before her death. She was 2 years ahead of Jennifer in school, 2 years older, and had gone through a period in her early teens that her parents would describe as rebellious. Nothing criminal, nothing serious, just the kind of restlessness that sometimes takes hold of teenage girls trying to figure out who they are.

But by the time Elizabeth and Jennifer became close friends, that phase was well behind her. Adolf Peña, Elizabeth’s father, watched the friendship form between his daughter and Jennifer and felt nothing but relief. He later said that he saw Jennifer as a settling influence, a good example, the kind of friend a parent hopes their child finds.

Jennifer’s parents, Randy and Sandy Ertman, felt the same about Elizabeth. Both sets of parents approved. Both sets of parents knew each other’s homes, knew each other’s daughters, knew each other’s rules. The girls visited back and forth freely, and the families took comfort in knowing where their children were and who they were with.

This was exactly the kind of friendship that parents point to when they tell their kids what a healthy social life looks like. It was genuine, it was mutual, and it had the full blessing of everyone who mattered. By the summer of 1993, the school year was winding down, and the girls were doing what 16- and 14-year-olds do when summer arrives.

Spending time with friends, staying out as late as curfew would allow, making the most of the warm Houston evenings. On the afternoon of June 24, 1993, Randy Ertman drove Jennifer over to the Peña household. From there, the two girls made their way to the Spring Hill Apartments, where a mutual friend was hosting a birthday gathering at the complex’s swimming pool.

It was a casual evening, nothing unusual, nothing that would have stood out in anyone’s memory as significant. They swam, they celebrated. They spent a few hours in the easy company of friends on a warm Texas night. At some point, they looked at the time and realized they needed to leave. Elizabeth’s curfew was 11:00.

Her house was close enough to walk to, but only if they moved quickly and only if they took the right route. There was a shortcut. People in that neighborhood knew it well. A set of railroad tracks that cut through the edge of T.C. Jester Park, running along White Oak Bayou, shaving significant time off the walk to the Peña family home.

Residents used it regularly. In daylight, the path was unremarkable. Joggers and cyclists passed through T.C. Jester Park constantly. And the tracks were a well-worn through-line for people who knew the area. At night, it was darker and more isolated, but it was also faster. And at 11:00 in the evening with a curfew looming, faster was what mattered.

Jennifer and Elizabeth turned toward the tracks. They were not the only ones in that park that night. Earlier in the evening, a group of young men had gathered near those same railroad tracks for a ritual that had nothing to do with the girls and everything to do with what was about to happen. The gang called itself the Black and White.

It was a small street gang, northwest Houston, not widely known or particularly feared across the city. More of a tight-knit crew of young men who drank together, fought together, and measured loyalty by how much pain you were willing to absorb. That night, June 24, 1993, the Black and White had come to the park to initiate a new member.

The man running the operation was Peter Anthony Cantu, 18 years old. Cantu was the self-appointed leader of the Black and White, the one who made the calls, the one the others fell in behind. People who knew him described him as hard and dominant, not particularly known for remorse or reflection. He was the oldest one there that night, and he carried himself like it.

The new initiate was Raul Omar Villareal, 17, who wanted into the gang and understood the price. Under the Black and Whites’ rules to be accepted, Villareal had to fight each of the existing members in turn for several minutes each, a ritual known as being jumped in. He took his beatings. He lasted through three fights before briefly losing consciousness.

 When he came back around, he was welcomed into the fold. Present that night were Jose Ernesto Medellin, 18 years old, born in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico, but raised in Houston from the age of three. He spoke English, attended Houston schools, had friends and a girlfriend in the city, and had lived his entire conscious life as a Texan.

His Mexican citizenship was a legal fact, but barely a lived one. Also, there was Derek Shawn O’Brien, 18, the only black member of the group. O’Brien had a history that already told you what kind of man he was becoming. School fights, a broken jaw he put on a classmate, a reputation for carrying a knife and stealing cars.

A Houston Police Department officer would later testify that months before this night, he had personally watched O’Brien and Peter Cantu attack a stranger at a fast food restaurant, punching and kicking him for no reason at all. Then there was Efrain Perez, 17 years old. And Roman Sandoval, along with his twin brother Frank Sandoval, neither of them fully initiated members, but present for the ceremony regardless.

And then there was Venancio Medellin, 14 years old. He was there because his older brother Jose was there. He had tagged along the way, younger siblings sometimes do, pulled into an older boy’s world without fully understanding what he was walking into. He was the same age as Jennifer Ertman. The initiation finished.

 The group drank beer and roughhoused near the tracks. The Sandoval twins, Frank and Roman, began heading home. But before they left, both of them saw Jennifer and Elizabeth approaching along the tracks. They saw the girls. They heard what came next, and they kept walking. Neither Frank nor Roman Sandoval called for help.

 Neither of them said a word to anyone. They simply left. It was approximately 11:30 at night on June 24, 1993, when Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena walked into the section of TC Jester Park, where Peter Cantu, Jose Medellin, Derrick O’Brien, Efrain Perez, Raul Villarreal, and Venancio Medellin were standing. Jose Medellin saw Elizabeth first.

He stepped toward her and grabbed at her. Elizabeth brushed him off and kept walking. He called out, “No, baby. Where are you going?” And then he wrapped his arm around her neck from behind, threw her to the ground, and dragged her down a gravel slope toward the rest of the group. Elizabeth screamed. She begged. She called for help.

Jennifer heard her. Jennifer was close enough to the tracks that she could have kept walking. She could have run. She could have disappeared into the dark of the park and been home in 10 minutes. She turned around and went back. Peter Cantu and Derrick O’Brien grabbed Jennifer and threw her to the ground. Both girls were now completely surrounded in the dark on a stretch of isolated track where no one was coming.

What followed lasted for more than an hour. Peter Cantu, Jose Medellin, Derrick O’Brien, Efrain Perez, and Raul Villarreal, all five of them, took turns raping both girls. Venancio Medellin, the 14-year-old, stood back and watched. At some point, with the assault still ongoing, Cantu told Venancio to participate.

 Venancio would later confess that he did. And then, while it was still happening, Cantu leaned close to Venancio and said something that the 14-year-old would carry for the rest of his life. “We’re going to have to kill them,” Cantu told Venancio to step away. He was, Cantu said, “too little to watch what came next.” The other gang members forced both girls into the wooded area off the tracks.

Derrick O’Brien and Raul Villarreal took O’Brien’s red nylon belt and looped it around Jennifer Ertman’s neck. They pulled from opposite ends, one boy on each side, until the belt snapped. They finished the job with one of Jennifer’s own shoelaces. Elizabeth Peña tried to run. Peter Cantu ran her down and tackled her, then kicked her repeatedly in the face with steel-toed boots.

Three of her teeth were knocked loose. Several ribs cracked under the force of the blows. Then Cantu, Jose Medellin, and Efrain Perez strangled Elizabeth to death with shoelaces. When both girls had stopped moving, the group took turns stomping on their necks, one by one, to make sure. Peter Cantu crouched down and stripped jewelry from Jennifer’s body, rings, necklaces, cash.

Before the group dispersed, he handed Venancio Medellin a Tweety Cartoon wristwatch he had taken from Jennifer’s wrist. “Take this,” he told him. “I don’t want it.” They left both girls in the woods and walked away. Later that same night, Cantu drove several of the others back to the house he shared with his older brother Joe Cantu and Joe’s wife, Christina Cantu.

When they came through the door, Christina noticed immediately that something was wrong. Villarreal was bleeding. Perez had blood on his shirt. She asked what happened. It was Jose Medellin who answered. He told Christina the group had had fun. He said she would see the details on the news.

 Then he told her plainly that he had raped both girls. Peter Cantu arrived and began dividing the jewelry and belongings he had taken from the bodies, passing things out like souvenirs. Medellin got a ring with the letter E engraved on it, which he said he planned to give to his girlfriend, whose name was Esther. He told the room that he had killed a girl.

He said it would have been easier with a gun. Derrick O’Brien, who had been at the crime scene when the bodies were discovered hours later, was captured on video footage in the crowd of onlookers that gathered at the park. He was smiling. The morning of June 25, 1993, Jennifer Ertman did not come home.

 Randy and Sandy Ertman started making calls. They reached out to every friend they could think of, every place Jennifer might have gone after the party, every name in the circle. Christina Almaraz, a close childhood friend of Jennifer’s, received a call from the Ertmans early that morning asking if she had heard from their daughter. She had not.

Adolph and Melissa Pena made the same calls about Elizabeth. By that evening, June 25, both families had contacted the Houston Police Department. What they found was that the department was stretched. 1993 was a brutal year for Houston. Hundreds of open homicide cases, detectives pulled in every direction. Two teenage girls reported missing did not immediately rise to the level of a full departmental response.

 The families were told to wait. They did not wait. They drove the streets of the Oak Forest neighborhood themselves. They retraced the routes the girls might have taken. They knocked on doors. Friends joined the search. The days passed. June 25th, June 26th, June 27th, and there was nothing. No sign of Jennifer, no sign of Elizabeth, no answer.

Then, on June 28th, 1993, 4 days after the girls had vanished, an anonymous male caller contacted Houston Crime Stoppers. He told them where to find the bodies. That caller was Joe Cantu, Peter’s older brother. Joe had been home that night when the killers came through the door. He had seen the blood on their clothes.

He had watched his brother distribute stolen jewelry. He had listened to Jose Medellin describe what they had done. And for 4 days, Joe Cantu had sat with all of that. Then, he picked up the phone. Officers went to T.C. Jester Park. What they found in the woods near the railroad tracks was consistent with everything Joe Cantu had described, and worse.

Houston in late June is merciless. Temperatures in the 90s, relentless humidity. Both bodies had decomposed severely over 4 days in that heat. Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Peña had to be identified by their dental records. The medical examiner confirmed cause of death for both girls as strangulation.

 Jennifer had three fractured ribs. Elizabeth had lost teeth and suffered significant facial trauma consistent with being kicked repeatedly by someone wearing heavy boots. The forensic picture confirmed the worst of what was already suspected. Houston Police Department investigators pulled together a task force. 12 to 15 detectives working the case around the clock. Joe Cantu cooperated fully.

He sat down with investigators and laid out everything. Who was there, what they had said when When came home, the blood, the jewelry, the bragging. His wife, Christina, was equally cooperative. Within days, all six suspects were located and taken into custody in rapid succession. Peter Cantu confessed.

 Some of Jennifer’s jewelry was recovered from his bedroom. Derrick O’Brien confessed. He admitted that he and Jose Medellin had each held one end of the belt around Jennifer Ertman’s neck. Jose Medellin confessed. Efrain Perez confessed. Raul Villarreal was charged. Venancio Medellin gave both a taped confession and a written one.

When the suspects were walked into the Houston courthouse for their initial proceedings, several of them cursed at the crowd. Some of them kicked and struggled. Peter Cantu, when the jury later returned its guilty verdict, sat in the courtroom and smirked. The trials were conducted separately but ran simultaneously through 1994 and into subsequent years.

Prosecutor Kelly Siegler handled several of the most significant cases and would later say publicly that Raul Villarreal was the most difficult to prosecute, not because the evidence was lacking but because of the argument that he was simply being initiated that night. That the gang had set the entire context.

Her response to that argument, the one she made to the jury, was direct. Don’t get caught up in comparing Raul Villarreal to Peter Cantu. Raul Villarreal could have walked away. He could have stopped. He could have not participated. The jury agreed. Peter Cantu was convicted of capital murder in February 1994 and sentenced to death.

He was also later implicated, alongside O’Brien and Jose Medellin, in a separate murder that had occurred on January 4th, 1993, 6 months before Jennifer and Elizabeth died. That victim was Patricia Lopez, 27 years old, a mother of two young children, Lopez had run out of gas on the north side of Houston. The group had offered to help her buy fuel, then kidnapped her, took her to Melrose Park, raped her, stabbed her, and disemboweled her.

Investigators found a beer can beneath her body bearing Derrick O’Brien’s fingerprint. DNA evidence from Lopez’s body matched Jose Medellin. O’Brien later gave a taped confession admitting he was present, but claimed he was too drunk to know who did what. None of the three were ever charged with Lopez’s murder.

Contu had already been sentenced by the time the connection was fully established. But the case was presented at the sentencing phases for O’Brien and Medellin as evidence of the kind of men they were. Derrick O’Brien was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death on September 9th, 1997. Jose Medellin was convicted and sentenced to death.

 Efrain Perez, 17 at the time of the crime, was convicted and sentenced to death. Raul Omar Villarreal, also 17, was convicted and sentenced to death. Venancio Medellin, 14 years old, pleaded guilty to aggravated sexual assault of Jennifer Ertman, testified against the group, refusing only to testify against his older brother, and received the maximum sentence the law allowed for a juvenile, 40 years in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

 The Ertman and Pena families attended those proceedings. They sat through the testimony. They sat through the appeals. And when it was all over, when every verdict had been read and every sentence imposed, they went to work on something beyond the courtroom. Before this case, the state of Texas did not allow the families of murder victims to witness the executions of the people who killed their loved ones.

Randy Ertman, Adolf Pena, and their wives fought to change that law. They argued before legislators, they testified, they pushed, they succeeded. Texas now grants that right to every victim’s family in the state. A change that came directly from what these two families refused to accept about the way the system worked.

The five men sat on death row in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice as the years ticked by. For Efrain Perez and Raul Villarreal, the wait ended not with an execution, but with a Supreme Court ruling. In 2005, the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in Roper v. Simmons, holding that executing a person for a crime committed before the age of 18 was a violation of the 8th Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

The ruling was immediate in its effect on both men. Their death sentences were commuted overnight to life in prison with the possibility of parole. Efrain Perez eligible for parole on October 10, 2029. Raul Villarreal eligible September 20, 2029. They had not appealed, they had not argued. The court’s hand simply reached down and lifted them off the row.

For the Ertman and Pena families, who had spent years preparing themselves to watch all five of these men die, it was a blow that arrived without warning and left without apology. Three remained. Derrick Shawn O’Brien died first. By July 2006, O’Brien had been on death row for nearly nine years.

 His appeals had run out. His execution date was set for July 11, 2006. In the weeks before the date, Randy Ertman gave an interview to the Associated Press. He did not soften his words. “I hope the son of a [ __ ] rots in hell,” he said. “He deserves it.” Adolph Pena, Elizabeth’s father, said something different, quieter, more complicated.

 “It doesn’t make me happy, he told a reporter. But this is the punishment he was given and it’s justifiable. I kind of feel numb in a way knowing that I’ve been waiting so long for this day to come. On the evening of July 11, 2006 at the Walls Unit in Huntsville, Texas, Derrick Shawn O’Brien was strapped to the execution gurney.

 Randy Ertman was in the witness room. Adolf Pena was there, too. O’Brien was 31 years old. He looked through the glass at the people assembled on the other side and he lifted his head. “I am sorry,” he said. “I have always been sorry. It is the worst mistake that I ever made in my whole life. Not because I am here, but because of what I did.

And I hurt a lot of people, you and my family.” He said it again. He kept saying it. He told his family he loved them. He told them to look after each other. At 6:19 p.m., Derrick Shawn O’Brien was pronounced dead. The drugs had taken 7 minutes. Adolf Pena walked out of the witness room and spoke to reporters.

Someone asked him whether O’Brien had appeared to suffer. Pena shook his head. “I didn’t see any suffering,” he said. “He just closed his eyes and went to sleep.” He paused for a moment. “I wish to God my daughter could have died like that. Put a needle in her arm and just go to sleep. I wish to hell he could have died the way she did.

” Two years later, Jose Ernesto Medellin came close to stopping his own execution through a legal battle that eventually involved the president of the United States, the International Court of Justice, and the Supreme Court of the United States. Medellin was a Mexican national. His citizenship was undisputed. Under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, an international treaty signed by the United States in 1963, any foreign national arrested in the United States has the right to be informed that they may contact their country’s

consulate. Medellín claimed that right had been denied to him at the time of his arrest in 1993. Mexico took the matter to the International Court of Justice, the principal judicial body of the United Nations, filing suit against the United States on behalf of Medellín and 50 other Mexican nationals sitting on American death rows.

 In 2004, the ICJ ruled in Mexico’s favor and ordered that each of these men be given new hearings. In early 2005, President George W. Bush issued a memorandum ordering all American states to comply with the ICJ ruling and provide those hearings. Texas refused. The state of Texas, represented in the legal challenge by its solicitor general, a man named Ted Cruz, argued that neither an international tribunal nor the president of the United States could override Texas state law or the finality of a Texas criminal conviction.

 The United States Supreme Court agreed with Texas. It ruled that Bush’s memorandum had no legal force and that only Congress had the authority to mandate such compliance. The ICJ then ordered a direct stay of Medellín’s execution. Texas Governor Rick Perry rejected it. His position was unambiguous. The International Court of Justice did not govern Texas criminal proceedings.

The execution would proceed. On the evening of August 5, 2008, Medellín’s attorneys filed a last-minute appeal to the United States Supreme Court. The court stayed the execution for 4 hours while the justices considered the petition. At the end of those 4 hours, the court denied it. At 9:57 p.m.

, José Ernesto Medellín was executed by lethal injection at the Huntsville Unit. He was 33 years old. His last words were, “I’m sorry my actions caused you pain. I hope this brings you the closure that you seek. Never harbor hate.” Adolf Pena was there. When the execution was complete, he walked to the glass panel separating the witness room from the chamber, and he gently pressed his hand against it.

 Then he turned and walked out. Standing outside the prison, he told reporters, “We feel relieved. 15 years is a long time coming.” Outside Medina’s former home in Houston’s East Side, family members had hung a black bow on the fence and a banner that read, “No to the death penalty. May God forgive you.

” Peter Anthony Cantu was the last. He had been the first of the five to be tried, the first to be convicted, the first to be condemned. He had been sitting on death row since 1994, which meant that by the time his execution date arrived, he had spent more years on death row than Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena had been alive.

He had been convicted, sentenced, and processed through the system while the parents of his victims built an entire advocacy movement around the hole he had left in their lives. His lawyer reached out to Randy Ertman in the weeks before the execution and offered him a letter of apology from Cantu. Randy Ertman’s response was recorded.

“It’s a little late,” he said. “I told him to stick it.” When asked what he thought should happen to Cantu, Ertman gave an answer that made headlines. “He should have been hung outside the courthouse,” he said. “I don’t mean this in a gruesome way, but if they want to make the death penalty a deterrent, up in front of City Hall, they’ve got all those beautiful trees. They should have hung them.

If they hung all five of them, that would have been a deterrent.” On August 17, 2010, at 6:09 p.m., Peter Anthony Cantu was executed by lethal injection at the Huntsville unit in Huntsville, Texas. He was pronounced dead at 6:17 p.m. He had declined to make a final statement. He said nothing. The man who had organized the initiation, ordered the killings, kicked a 16-year-old girl in the face with steel-toed boots, stripped jewelry from the body of the girl he had just murdered, and distributed it to his friends like

trophies, died without a word. Peter Cantu, Jose Medallin, and Derek O’Brien are all buried at Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery in Huntsville. The state buries executed inmates who have no one to claim them. The three of them lie there together in the same ground. That left Efrain Perez and Raul Villarreal, both alive and both serving life sentences in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, both eligible for parole in 2029.

The families of Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena have already said publicly that they will be at every one of those hearings. They will fight every single time. And then there is Venancio Medellin. He is 46 years old today. He was 14 the night it happened, the same age as Jennifer Ertman, and has been in prison for 32 years.

 He has been denied parole five times. In 2023, he broke his public silence and spoke to an ABC 13 news crew for the first time. He said he had been frozen by fear that night. He said he had lived with regret every day since. “I’m sorry for what happened,” he told them. “I wish that I could take it back, but I cannot.” His projected release date, if the board continues to deny him, is 2033.

Andy Kahan, the city of Houston’s long-time crime victims advocate, traveled to appear before the parole board in person every time Venancio Medellin comes up for review. He made that promise to Randy Ertman before Randy died of lung cancer on August 18th, 2014. Adolf Pena, Elizabeth’s father, now elderly and living far from Houston, still makes himself available by phone for every hearing.

“It still hurts me every day that my daughter is not here with us.” he has said. “The way they killed and raped my daughter is beyond words. She can’t defend herself anymore. I’m the only one who can do that. And as long as I live, I’m always going to do that.” A memorial to Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena stands at Waltrip High School, the school they attended together and never finished.

Another memorial sits at T.C. Jester Park, steps from where they died. They are both buried at Woodlawn Garden of Memories Cemetery in Houston. The case produced a change in Texas law that now extends to every family of every murder victim in the state, the right to stand in a room and watch justice carried out.

Before Jennifer and Elizabeth, that right did not exist. Now, here is the question this case refuses to let go of, even 30 years later. Peter Cantu gave the order. He is dead. Derek O’Brien pulled the belt. He is dead. Jose Medellin bragged about it the same night it happened. He is dead. But, Ever Perez and Raul Villarreal, who were there, who participated, who were old enough to make a choice, are still alive sitting in a Texas prison with a parole hearing coming in 2029.

And Venancio Medellin, who was 14 years old, who was told to stay back, who by his own admission stood frozen while it happened, he is the only one with a real chance of ever walking out. The question is not whether any of them are innocent. None of them are. The question is whether the law did right by the girls when it spared some of these men the same fate it handed to the others.

Whether a birthday and a calendar date, the difference between being 17 and being 18 is the right place to draw the line between dying in Huntsville and living to see parole. The families of Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena have already answered that question for themselves. What do you think?