Tiny Barrow County town finds closure in killer's execution

<p>Nearly eight years after a fellow resident of small Barrow County town was murdered, Patty Nocera still doesn't feel safe leaving her house without her dogs.</p><p>But after last week's execution of the confessed murderer, Angel Maturino Resendiz, who was dubbed the "Railroad Killer," people in the hamlet of Carl in northeastern Georgia are finding some closure.</p><p>"Something like that really scared us," Annette Banks, one of Carl's 250 residents, said of the 1998 murder. "I'm glad he's gone. I do not have any sympathy (for him)."</p><p>Resendiz, a 46-year-old Mexican drifter and train-hopping serial killer linked to 15 murders, was executed in Texas on June 27 for the slaying of physician Claudia Benton, 39, in 1998. The Houston woman was raped, stabbed and bludgeoned to death.</p><p>In 2000, Resendiz also had confessed to murdering 81-year-old Fannie Byers in Carl. Police found the elderly woman after a neighbor called them because Byers, who almost never left home unaccompanied, wasn't answering the door.</p><p>Byers was found bludgeoned to death, laying in a pool of blood in a room off the kitchen in her home near the railroad tracks.</p><p>"Anybody who does that to innocent people, I'm glad they did it," Nocera said of Resendiz's death by lethal injection. "It was scary, it was really scary. Somebody that would attack a little old woman, that's horrible."</p><p>According to what Resendiz told authorities, in December 1998 he was trying to get to Florida but realized the train was carrying him north instead, and got off in Carl near Byers' small house.</p><p>He apparently saw her in the yard, where Nocera said Byers spent a lot of time, and got into her house. Byers died of a single blow to the head as she found the killer inside her house.</p><p>Resendiz has been linked to at least 15 slayings in Texas, Illinois, Florida, Kentucky, California and Georgia.</p>