Eliseo Hernandez Moreno — 1983 Texas Spree Murders
Overview
On October 11, 1983, 24-year-old Eliseo Hernandez Moreno went on a rapid, multi-county killing spree in southeast Texas that left six people dead and others kidnapped at gunpoint. The rampage began in College Station and moved through rural highways and into Hempstead, with kidnappings that carried him to Pasadena before he was captured later that night at a roadblock near Wharton. He was executed by lethal injection on March 4, 1987, for the capital murder of a Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) trooper.
The Day of the Crimes (October 11, 1983)
Between roughly 5:30 p.m. and 8:00 p.m., Moreno committed a sequence of murders and abductions. He first shot his in-laws, Juan and Esther Garza, inside their College Station apartment. About thirty minutes later, north of Hempstead on Texas Highway 6, DPS Trooper Russell Lynn Boyd—who had stopped a maroon Ford—was shot multiple times; Moreno stole the trooper’s Remington 870 shotgun and his service .357 revolver before fleeing. In Hempstead, three elderly residents were shot at a home after an encounter at the door.
Kidnappings and Flight
Moreno abandoned his maroon Ford at La Casita Restaurant in Hempstead, then carjacked Genaro Cibrian at gunpoint, loading a pistol and shotgun into the vehicle. He soon forced Bill and Patricia Shirley to drive him toward Houston, discarding the stolen shotgun out the window near the Highway 610/225 interchange in Pasadena. After releasing the Shirleys, he abducted Ronald Gangle and ordered him south on U.S. 59 toward the Rio Grande Valley. Officers arrested Moreno at a Wharton County roadblock later that night; the stainless-steel .357 revolver used in the murders and Trooper Boyd’s stolen .357 were recovered.
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