On April 9, 1989, the body of 62-year-old Hispanic male Anthony Garcia was discovered near the rail yards in West Sacramento, California. The victim, a fellow transient who was known to ride the rails in search of day labor, had been bludgeoned with a heavy blunt object—consistent with a “goon stick” or pipe—leaving massive cranial trauma that proved fatal.
Authorities noted that the 62-year-old Hispanic male's few personal belongings, including his identification and bedroll, were missing, suggesting robbery as a secondary motive.
Homicide detectives initially struggled to generate leads. No eyewitnesses came forward, and the remote industrial setting offered little forensic evidence. The killing of the 62-year-old Hispanic male Anthony Garcia nevertheless bore the hallmarks of a series of rail-side murders then surfacing across the West: sudden blunt-force attacks on older male drifters whose valuables were stripped away. Investigators suspected a transient assailant but lacked a name or description.
A decisive break arrived nearly seven years later. On March 2, 1996, railroad police in Roseville, just northeast of Sacramento, arrested 37-year-old drifter Robert Joseph Silveria Jr.—later dubbed “The Boxcar Killer”—on an outstanding probation warrant. Inside his knapsack were IDs and personal effects belonging to several murdered transients. Under questioning by detectives from multiple states, Silveria confessed to more than two dozen killings committed while hopping freight trains between 1981 and 1996; among his earliest admissions was the bludgeoning of 62-year-old Hispanic male Anthony Garcia in West Sacramento.
Jurisdictional negotiations followed Silveria's sweeping confession. Oregon obtained the first indictment, and in January 1998 he pleaded guilty to three murders there. Kansas and Florida secured additional pleas, while California prosecutors accepted the confessions but declined to try separate cases after Silveria received consecutive life sentences without parole. Although Anthony Garcia's 1989 murder was never tried in court, investigators formally closed the file, attributing the death of the 62-year-old Hispanic male to Silveria's cross-country spree. Today Silveria remains incarcerated under double life terms, and Anthony Garcia is remembered as the earliest documented victim in the Boxcar Killer's brutal campaign.
