Texas Executes Rosendo Rodriguez for Killing Pregnant Woman and Stuffing Her Body in a Suitcase.

Texas has [music] now executed its fourth inmate in 2018. A San Antonio man known as the suitcase killer died by lethal injection tonight. Rosendo Rodriguez III was executed for the 2005 murder of a 29-year-old Lubbock woman. He raped and beat her before stuffing her body into a suitcase and tossing it in the trash.

 He also confessed to killing a 16-year-old girl in a similar manner. Rodriguez’s execution is the seventh nationally this year. >> Rosendo Rodriguez III was pronounced dead at 6:46 in the evening on March 27th, 2018 inside the death chamber at the Huntsville unit in Texas. Lethal injection 1 day after his 38th birthday. After spending nearly 10 years on death row, the man they called the suitcase killer spoke for 7 straight minutes before he died and never once said the word sorry.

 In this video, we’re covering both of his victims. The 16-year-old girl and the pregnant mother of four he threw away like garbage. The barcode on a piece of luggage that cracked the entire case wide open. A 2-month excavation through a Texas landfill by hand. A plea deal one prosecutor would later call a deal with the devil.

 And a trial that exposed years of violence against women that came before either murder ever happened. To know why the state had to kill the condemned, we have to go back. Rosendo Rodriguez III was born on March 26th, 1980 in Wichita Falls, Texas. The family eventually settled in San Antonio and inside that house, his father ran things through fear. Rosendo Rodriguez Jr.

drank heavily and beat his wife regularly in front of his children for years. Rosendo’s sister would later describe their father as domineering and violent. A man whose presence turned a home into something to survive rather than live in. And yet outside that house, almost nobody saw it. Neighbors and relatives remembered a bright, likable kid.

 An aunt recalled him as loving and precocious. A boy who at 14 said he wanted to become the first Latino president of the United States. His mother described a respectful son. Two completely different versions of the same child. And the gap between them would define the rest of his life. By his teenage years, a pattern had already started to form.

 One that had nothing to do with ambition or intelligence. He began dating a girl named Julia Ross when they were both in high school. She was 15. When the relationship became physical the following year, she said he turned rough during sex and refused to stop, even when she screamed. Even when she asked him directly to. She said he raped her more than once and she stayed because at 16, leaving felt harder than staying quiet.

 Nobody outside that relationship knew. That was the first lesson Rodriguez learned about himself. He could do this and the world would keep treating him like the golden kid his aunt remembered. He graduated, enrolled at Texas Tech University in Lubbock to study political science and history, and joined the Marine Corps Reserve.

 On paper, that’s an impressive resume for a young man barely out of his teens. In practice, it gave him two things he needed. An image of respectability and unsupervised access to a fresh pool of young women who had no idea what he was. He pledged a coed Catholic service fraternity called She Row. Pledging meant a semester of proving yourself.

 Showing up to meetings, doing the service projects, building relationships with the active members who’d eventually vote on whether you belonged. For a new pledge, that meant one thing above all else. You wanted the active members to like you. Rodriguez understood that dynamic better than anyone and he used it. Over the course of one spring semester in 2004, at least four women in that fraternity would tell juries what happened when they trusted him.

 One pledge, a young woman named Imelda Montana, got drunk at a party and Rodriguez offered to drive her home. The kind of gesture that looks like decency until it isn’t. He helped her out of the car, steadied her when she stumbled, walked her into her dorm room. Her roommate wasn’t there that night. Once they were alone, they started talking and he moved closer.

When he kissed her, she didn’t pull away immediately, but when his hands went further than she wanted, she told him to stop. Her words came out slurred from the alcohol, but the meaning was clear. She said no. She said it more than once. He acted like he hadn’t heard her at all.

 She tried to push him off, tried to close her legs, but she was drunk and he wasn’t, and he was stronger than her weakened attempt at resistance. She remembered pain. She remembered continuing to say no. At some point, she lost consciousness completely. When she woke up the next morning, Rodriguez was still there, sitting in a chair, watching her.

 He told her, calmly, that what happened needed to stay between them, that if she said anything, people would assume she’d tried to sleep her way into the fraternity, that nobody would believe her over him. She was terrified, ashamed, and underage in a dorm room where alcohol had been involved. She said nothing. Weeks later, at a small off-campus gathering, Rodriguez found her in a hallway talking to another pledge.

 Without a word, he shoved her against a brick wall, pinned both her hands above her head with one of his, and started trying to pull her pants down with the other. She fought, got a hand free, and ran toward the rest of the group. When she looked back, he was just walking away in another direction, completely calm, like nothing had happened at all.

A second pledge, Jennifer Longmore, started what she thought was a real relationship with him, one he insisted had to stay secret because he told her fraternity rules forbade active members from dating pledges. She believed him. The secrecy made it feel intimate, special even. Their early encounters were consensual, but she started noticing something switch in him during sex.

 Sweet and funny one moment, cold and controlling the next, a different person entirely. He’d hold her down when she tried to move away, ignore her when she said no, treat her like something to be positioned rather than someone to listen to. Afterward, he’d apologize, swear he was working on himself, beg for another chance. That cycle kept her trapped in the relationship for months before she finally found a way out, and even then, he didn’t let go easily, showing up places, pushing for a second chance, refusing to accept it was over.

A third woman, Angelica Gonzalez, was someone he worked far harder for. She’d been saving herself for marriage and had never been in a serious relationship. Rodriguez slowed everything down. He asked about her faith. He met her parents, charmed them completely, talked about his service and his values like a young man with real intentions. It worked.

 Her parents approved of him, which only deepened her trust. When she eventually found out he was seeing other girls in the fraternity at the same time, she confronted him at his apartment, wanting an explanation. He told her the other relationships meant nothing, that she was the one he actually cared about, that he could explain everything.

 When she stood up to hug him goodbye, he blocked her path to the door. She tried to leave anyway, and he grabbed her hands, pinned them above her head, forced her legs apart, and assaulted her while she said no over and over until it was over. A fourth woman, Jennifer Milbeck, had met him years earlier at 16 when he photographed her at a mall studio and later used her contact information to show up at her house uninvited.

 When he tried to kiss her, she stepped back and told him that wasn’t why she thought he’d come. He asked her why else he would have bothered, then pushed her down onto the bed and assaulted her anyway. Five women, years apart, the same pattern every single time. Charm first, isolation second, violence third, and a warning afterward to keep quiet.

 None of them went to police. Rodriguez kept his grades up, kept showing up to Marine training, kept being the young man his professors and commanding officers had no reason to suspect of anything. And by the spring of 2004, he’d learned something dangerous. He could do this again and again, and nothing would happen to him.

 Then, in May 2004, he found someone he wouldn’t let walk away. Joanna Katherine Rogers was 16 years old and a junior at Lubbock High School. An honor student who worked shifts at a Subway sandwich shop and had a dance recital coming up she was excited about. Her father, Joe Bill Rogers, worked as a private investigator.

 On the night of May 3rd, she got home a little after midnight, told her mother, Kathy, about the AP exam she’d taken that day, said, “I love you,” and went to bed. It was an ordinary Monday night conversation between a mother and daughter. Neither of them knew it was the last one they’d ever have. The next morning, Kathy Rogers walked into her daughter’s room to wake her up, and Joanna was gone.

Her coat was still in the closet. Her wallet was still on the dresser. Her cell phone, her cash, her car keys, all of it untouched, exactly where she’d left it. Her car sat parked out front. No broken window, no sign of a struggle, nothing. A Lubbock County Sheriff’s Deputy would later put it plainly, “Teenagers don’t go anywhere without their phones.

” Whatever happened to Joanna, she hadn’t planned on leaving. Within days, investigators had launched a nationwide search. A regional Amber Alert with efforts to elevate it nationwide, and a $5,000 reward from a local foundation. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children sent people to Lubbock to help.

 Detectives pulled her computer and her mother’s computer, searching for any thread that could explain it. They interviewed her co-workers, her boyfriend, anyone who might have seen something. They found nothing. What they didn’t know, not yet, was that Joanna’s name was already sitting inside Rodriguez’s computer. He’d been talking to her in online chat rooms for weeks.

 Phone records would later show he’d called her house several times that April and May. But at the time, his name was one contact among hundreds. And when detectives went looking for him, he was out of town for Marine Reserve training. His name dropped to the bottom of a very long list, and the investigation moved on without him.

Joanna’s family didn’t move on. They kept her room exactly as she’d left it, waiting. On her 17th birthday, still no answers. Her mother told reporters she couldn’t just assume Joanna would show up the next day. That hope had to be rationed carefully, or it would break you. Months turned into more than a year, and the case went cold.

 Rodriguez, meanwhile, kept living two lives. Marine Reservist, college student, devoted son in San Antonio. Nobody around him had any idea what he’d done, or that he’d get the chance to do it again. 16 months later, in September 2005, he came back to Lubbock. And this time, the woman in his path was Summer Baldwin. Summer was born on August 27th, 1976 in Tacoma, Washington and grew up in New Mexico where people remembered her as someone who could find something good in almost any situation.

She trained in cosmetology hoping to build a career doing hair and makeup and became a mother young. Four kids by her late 20s. All of whom she loved and struggled to provide for at the same time. Her mother, Uva Roback, stayed close to her through all of it even when the miles between New Mexico and wherever Summer landed made that hard.

Somewhere along the way, Summer developed a drug addiction that started eating away at everything else. By 2005, she’d moved to Lubbock hoping for a fresh start near an aunt who lived there and she was working the streets downtown to fund a habit that had taken over her life.

 Court records would later flatten her into two words, drug addicted and prostitute. The kind of label that makes it easy for people to stop seeing a person. But the people who actually knew Summer didn’t see a label. They saw someone’s daughter, someone’s mother, someone who, weeks before she died, found out she was 10 weeks pregnant and started looking at baby clothes with family.

Already imagining a different life on the other side of it. She was also, at the time, cooperating as a witness in a federal counterfeiting investigation. A detail that would later matter more than anyone expected. On the night of September 9th, 2005, Rodriguez checked into room 609 at the Holiday Inn Civic Center in downtown Lubbock using his middle name, Thomas, instead of his own.

His Marine unit was staying at a completely different hotel miles away. He’d chosen that separation on purpose. He arrived driving a rented red four-door pickup truck. The next night, an old fraternity friend named Chris called to make plans. Rodriguez said he already had a date. He didn’t say with who.

 That same evening, an acquaintance named Margie Estrada spotted Summer sitting in the passenger seat of a red pickup outside a 7-Eleven across from Rodriguez’s hotel. Summer got out, walked over, and told Estrada the man driving was a client, that they’d been using drugs together. She seemed fine, in good spirits by all appearances.

 Then she got back in the truck. Margie Estrada never saw her alive again. Sunday night, Rodriguez met up with Chris and a group of friends at Chris’s apartment. He told them stories about serving in Iraq, describing in detail how he’d killed a child there and slept with Iraqi women. None of it was true. He’d never deployed anywhere.

 His entire military record was weekend training in Texas. But the lie wasn’t really about impressing anyone. It was a window into what he wanted people to believe he was capable of. He and Chris went to a movie that sold out, went to a bar instead, had a few drinks, and split up around midnight. Chris went home.

 Rodriguez didn’t go straight back to his hotel. Hotel records show he entered room 609 again at 1:50 in the morning on September 12th. He wasn’t alone. Summer was with him, there for money she needed for drugs, the way she’d been with plenty of other clients before him. She had no way of knowing what he’d already done to a 16-year-old girl a year earlier, or what he was capable of doing to her in that room.

What happened next, Rodriguez would later try to explain away. He claimed Summer pulled a knife on him after they’d had consensual sex, and that his Marine training simply took over, that he choked her out defensively and didn’t mean for her to die. The medical evidence told a completely different story.

 Summer had suffered somewhere between 50 and 70 blunt force injuries across her entire body. The trauma was consistent with a violent, prolonged sexual assault and with her legs being forced apart against resistance. This wasn’t a woman who pulled a knife in self-defense. This was a woman who was beaten and raped before she died.

 At 3:30 that morning, hotel surveillance caught Rodriguez’s truck leaving the parking lot. He drove to a nearby Walmart, walked in, and bought a new suitcase and a box of latex gloves, paying with his debit card. Cameras recorded the entire transaction. He looked completely calm. Nothing about his body language suggested a man who just killed someone.

At 3:45, he was back in room 609. He folded Summer’s body into the suitcase, carried it out, and threw it in a dumpster like it was trash he was taking out on his way home. Her wallet went into a different dumpster entirely, so it wouldn’t be found next to her. Then he went and ate a meal, rented a movie, went to sleep.

 In the morning, he checked out, returned the rental truck, and took a bus back to San Antonio, leaving behind a hotel room that would be discovered exactly as he’d left it. Once home, he searched the internet for news out of Lubbock. He typed his own name into a search engine to see if anyone had connected him to anything yet.

 Then he browsed dating sites, looking for more young women. On Monday morning, he called Chris just to laugh about how much they’d had to drink the night before, like it was any other Monday. On September 13th, a worker at the Lubbock City Landfill was moving trash with heavy equipment when he spotted a suitcase that didn’t belong among the debris.

He opened it and found the body of a young woman folded inside, dead less than 3 days. The landfill stretched roughly three football fields long and was, in places, 2 years deep in accumulated garbage. Not exactly a promising place to build a case. But, the medical examiner counted somewhere between 50 and 70 separate blunt force injuries on the body, found manual strangulation marks on her neck, and confirmed she’d been 10 weeks pregnant, meaning Texas law now allowed for two counts of capital murder instead

of one. She was identified by her fingerprints and an ankle tattoo that read “Summer” in script. Summer Baldwin, 29 years old, last seen alive two days earlier. The break in the case came from something almost absurdly small. Sewn onto the suitcase was a UPC barcode, functioning essentially like a fingerprint for that specific product line.

Investigators traced it back to the manufacturer, then to the retailer. A Protégé brand suitcase sold only at Walmart in the Lubbock area. Detectives pulled purchase records and found exactly two of that suitcase sold within 48 hours of the murder. One buyer was cleared almost immediately.

 The other purchase happened at 3:30 in the morning, paid for with a debit card belonging to a man named Rosendo Rodriguez. When his name came back, it wasn’t new to them. It was already sitting in the Joanna Rogers file from over a year earlier. The chat room contact, the phone calls to her house, the interview that never happened because he’d been out of town for training.

 Now, it was sitting at the top of a fresh murder investigation. Detectives found the hotel reservation. They found the rental agreement for the red pickup. They matched surveillance footage from the Walmart parking lot to the truck description witnesses had already given them. On September 15th, they traveled to San Antonio, searched his parents’ home, and arrested him.

He had scratch marks on his arm, invoked his right to a lawyer, and said nothing else. Investigators seized his computer, his phone, a bus ticket, the rental agreement, and a green shirt that matched what he was wearing in the Walmart surveillance video. Back in Lubbock, they got a warrant for room 609, which hadn’t been cleaned since he’d checked out.

 Inside, they found a dried pool of Summer’s blood on the carpet and spatter on the mattress. In a hallway trash can, they found Walmart bags, the suitcase’s warranty card, a condom wrapper, and two pairs of latex gloves, his DNA inside them, hers on the outside. Three weeks after his arrest, Rodriguez gave a videotaped statement laying out his self-defense story.

 It didn’t hold up against the evidence, and everyone involved in the case knew it. But something else in that same investigation was tugging at prosecutors. The computer searches showing he’d looked up news about Joanna Rogers even after killing Summer Baldwin. District Attorney Matt Powell had a strong case for one murder and a gut feeling about a second one he couldn’t yet prove.

 So, Powell made a decision he would later call making a deal with the devil. If Rodriguez confessed to killing Joanna Rogers and told them where to find her, the state would take the death penalty off the table for Summer’s murder. He’d plead guilty, get a life sentence, and walk away from a courtroom without ever facing execution.

 Both families, the Rogers’s and Summer’s mother, agreed to it after Powell consulted them directly. Not because they wanted him to live, but because they wanted answers more than they wanted revenge. Rodriguez took the deal, and his attorney, Jeff Blackburn, negotiated the terms. In the summer of 2006, Rodriguez confessed.

 He told investigators he’d met Joanna in the early hours of May 4th, 2004, that they’d had sex, that afterwards she’d asked him for money, and that he’d choked her to death when she did. Then, he said, he found a suitcase, put her inside it, and threw her in a dumpster. The same method, the same coldness, described with the same flat, unbothered tone he’d used to describe killing Summer, as if he were talking about something as mundane as making coffee.

 Based on his information, investigators believed Joanna’s body had ended up in that same landfill. Finding her meant digging through roughly two additional years of buried trash covering the spot. In August 2006, the Lubbock County Sheriff’s Office began one of the largest landfill searches in Texas history, led by Captain Don Carter, who knew the odds were slim, but understood exactly what finding her would mean to a family that had waited 2 years.

 Teams of 25 to 50 people worked every single day for 2 months. They started by targeting a 100 by 150 ft section, 24 ft deep, based on when the trash from that period would have been dumped. The landfill had distinct layers by date, and the bottom layer was the one that mattered. First, they searched for dated materials, old newspapers, receipts, anything with a timestamp, to confirm they’d found the right layer. In early October, they did.

Then came the second phase, hand searching the debris, because heavy machinery could destroy what they were looking for. Workers sifted through trash by hand in the smell and the heat, an exhausting, demoralizing task that nobody would have kept doing without a reason bigger than a paycheck. The search area eventually expanded to 250 by 150 by 175 ft, 30 ft deep.

 By the time it ended, crews had gone through an estimated 48,211 cubic yards of debris. On October 24th, 2006, at 11:55 in the morning, they found mummified remains inside a suitcase, along with long red hair that matched Joanna’s. 2 and 1/2 years after she vanished from her bedroom, they’d found her. At a press conference that afternoon, Sheriff David Gutierrez announced the discovery.

Joanna’s father, Bill Rogers, thanked everyone for the extraordinary hours put into finding her. Her mother, Kathy, struggled to hold back tears in front of the cameras, talking about the thousands of people who had waited for this day. District Attorney Powell said there wasn’t enough money in the world to properly repay the people who’d made that discovery possible.

The deal should have wrapped up cleanly from there. Rodriguez would plead guilty, take his life sentence, and disappear into the Texas prison system. The court date was set. And then, on the day he was supposed to enter that plea, Rodriguez stood in front of the judge and said he didn’t understand what was happening.

 His own attorney, blindsided, called it the strangest thing he’d seen in his career. A man who’d negotiated his own plea deal, confessed on video, and shown clear understanding through the entire process, suddenly claiming he couldn’t follow a word of it. The court couldn’t proceed. The deal collapsed on the spot. His attorney withdrew, and new counsel, Richard Wardrip and Fred Stangle, was appointed to a client who’d already confessed to two murders, whose DNA sat at both crime scenes, and whose own computer searches showed a man tracking

the story of his own crime. There wasn’t much of a defense to build. District Attorney Powell filed notice that he was seeking the death penalty after all, telling reporters they’d essentially get both outcomes now. Joanna’s remains had already been recovered, and a jury would decide whether Rodriguez lived or died for Summer’s murder.

 There was a catch, though. Because his confession to killing Joanna had been given as part of a plea deal he later walked away from, it legally couldn’t be used against him at trial. Jurors would learn that Joanna’s case existed, that her body had been found in the same landfill, under strikingly similar circumstances, but they would never hear him admit in his own words that he’d killed her.

 They wouldn’t need to. The case against him for Summer Baldwin’s murder stood on its own. The trial began March 24th, 2008 in Randall County. Rodriguez walked in wearing a dark suit and a white tie, projecting exactly the kind of respectable image he’d spent years perfecting. Assistant District Attorney Trey Payne opened by telling the jury Rodriguez had treated Summer and her unborn child like garbage instead of human beings.

That he might look calm and put together, but underneath it was something else entirely. Evil that hid well. Prosecutors walked the jury through everything piece by piece. Hotel staff confirmed he’d checked in under a false name in a different hotel than the rest of his unit. Marjie Estrada described seeing Summer alive and unharmed getting into his truck.

 Jurors watched the Walmart surveillance video of him calmly buying a suitcase and gloves at 3:30 in the morning, paying with his own debit card like he had nothing to hide. Detectives described the blood in room 609, the DNA on the gloves, the green shirt matched to the footage. Computer forensics experts laid out his searches, his own name, news about Summer’s murder, dating sites, and then jurors watched his own videotaped confession in which he described folding Summer’s body into a suitcase with no visible emotion

at all. Not trauma, not regret, just a man narrating a task. The medical examiner, Dr. Sridhar Natarajan, testified that Summer had suffered up to 70 blunt force injuries, manual strangulation, and internal trauma consistent with violent rape rather than anything resembling self-defense. And that all of it happened at or near the time of death inside that hotel room.

 The defense tried arguing the injuries could have come from a trash compactor at the landfill or that she might have died inside the suitcase rather than the room, which would have changed the legal picture entirely. Dr. Natarajan rejected it outright. The injuries were internal and they had happened before death, not after. Then came the five women.

 Julia Ross took the stand and described being raped repeatedly starting at 16. Amelda Montana described the dorm room, waking up to him watching her, the warning about the fraternity, the brick wall weeks later. Jennifer Longmore described the secret relationship and the switch that would come over him. Angelica Gonzalez described being blocked from leaving his apartment and assaulted after she confronted him.

Jennifer Milbeck described being pushed onto a bed at 16 after telling him no. Jurors heard, one after another, how long this had been going on before Summer Baldwin ever got in that truck, a pattern stretching back nearly a decade, never once interrupted by consequences. On March 25th, the jury returned guilty verdicts on both counts of capital murder, Summer and the child she was carrying.

During the punishment phase, Rodriguez’s family took the stand to try to save his life. His father admitted, under oath, to years of alcoholism and violence against Rodriguez’s mother, confirming everything his son had grown up watching. His sister backed it up. An aunt talked about the sweet, ambitious boy he’d once been, the one who wanted to be president.

 The defense argued his childhood had shaped him, that he was only 25 when he killed Summer, that his intelligence and education meant something, that he could serve a life sentence safely without ever hurting anyone else again. Prosecutors didn’t dispute the abuse. They just pointed out that Rodriguez had assaulted five different women while living away from that house, in college, in the Marines, with every opportunity to become someone different than his father.

 He hadn’t acted in a moment of panic or rage. He’d bought a suitcase. He’d bought gloves. He’d thrown her belongings in two separate dumpsters so she’d be harder to identify. Then he’d gone and eaten dinner and watched a movie. Powell asked the jury a question that would end up defining the entire case. Who puts a human being in a suitcase and throws them out with the trash? On April 4th, 2008, the jury found that Rodriguez would remain a danger if he lived.

 And that nothing in his background outweighed what he’d done. Texas law required the judge to sentence him to death. He showed no reaction as it was read. Rodriguez was sent to the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas, assigned a number, and placed in a cell where he’d spend 23 hours a day for the better part of a decade.

 He filed appeal after appeal. A direct appeal to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals with 42 separate claims of error. A petition to the Fifth Circuit that was denied in 2017. A petition to the US Supreme Court that was denied without comment that October. By late 2017, he’d run out of ordinary appeals. And Texas set his execution date for March 27th, 2018.

One day after his 38th birthday. In early 2018, his attorneys found one more angle. A former employee of the Lubbock County Medical Examiner’s office had filed a whistleblower lawsuit back in 2015 alleging the chief examiner, the same Dr. Natarajan who’d testified at Rodriguez’s trial, routinely let unqualified staff make critical calls.

His attorney argued the state should have disclosed that. Prosecutors responded that the lawsuit came 7 years after the trial, filed by someone who hadn’t even started working there until years after Rodriguez was convicted, and that the settlement itself explicitly stated there was no reason to question the science behind the office’s findings.

 A state judge rejected the motion without comment. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied the appeal. The Fifth Circuit denied it, too. His legal team filed one final emergency application with the US Supreme Court. While all of that played out through his final weeks, Rodriguez spent his time on death row writing.

 He contributed essays to a blog for death row inmates, writing about criminal justice and politics. He said he spoke English and German, that he read science fiction, that he played Dungeons and Dragons, presenting himself, right up to the end, as an intelligent man trapped by circumstance, never fully reckoning with what had put him there.

 On March 27th, 2018, Rodriguez turned 38. It was his last birthday. That evening, less than 30 minutes before he was scheduled to die, the US Supreme Court denied his final appeal without comment. There would be no stay. He was strapped to a gurney in the death chamber, an IV line placed in each arm.

 On one side of the glass sat his family and friends. On the other sat the families of Summer Baldwin and Joanna Rogers, there to watch it happen. District Attorney Matt Powell told reporters that day he found no joy in what was about to happen, but that Rodriguez had been extremely dangerous, calm and calculated, and very good at killing.

 Someone who would have kept hurting women if he’d ever been given the chance. When the warden asked if he had a final statement, Rodriguez spoke for 7 minutes straight. He said he’d been on death row since 2005 and had come to know many of the guards and staff, whom he thanked by name. He encouraged people watching to write letters to men on death row, calling them good men whose lives deserve to be known.

 He brought up the medical examiner and the district attorney again, calling for an FBI investigation into both of them, claiming they’d been involved in wrongful convictions. He talked about his Catholic faith, noted that it was Holy Week, that the day before had been Palm Sunday, and said the state might have his body, but would never have his soul.

 He quoted scripture, “I have fought the good fight. I have run the good race.” He called on Pope Francis and asked people to boycott every business in Texas until the state ended the death penalty. And then he said, “With that, Lord, I commend my spirit.” And told the warden he was ready. In 7 minutes, he never said Summer Baldwin’s name.

 He never mentioned Joanna Rogers at all. He never apologized to either family, sitting right there behind the glass, watching him. At 6:24 that evening, the pentobarbital began flowing. He was pronounced dead at 6:46, 22 minutes later. Afterward, Joanna’s father told reporters the lack of an apology hadn’t surprised him.

 That Rodriguez only ever cared about himself, that he was a sociopath, and that no apology would have changed anything anyway. He said the execution had been hard to sit through, but that he was relieved it was finally over. Summer’s mother, Uva Roebuck, said her daughter had finally gotten her justice from her maker, even if it could never bring her back, and even if it could never bring back the grandchild she’d never get to meet.

 Two families waited more than a decade for a moment neither of them ever wanted to need in the first place. One of them got their daughter’s body back after a landfill search most people would have given up on. The other watched a man use his own execution as a stage for causes that had nothing to do with the women he killed.

 And somewhere in the middle of it sat a decision one prosecutor made years earlier, to offer a confessed killer his life just to bring a missing girl home. So, here’s the question worth sitting in the comments over. That plea deal worked exactly as intended, right up until it fell apart in a courtroom and sent the whole case to trial anyway.

If it hadn’t collapsed, Rodriguez would still be alive today in a cell instead of a grave. Was trading a killer’s execution for a family’s closure the right call or too big a risk to hand a man like Rodriguez? If you want more cases like this one, subscribe and let me know what you think down below.