Exclusive: Police believe accused serial killer Raul Meza buried body of woman in field
When an Austin police investigator recently reviewed body camera footage of a March 2022 exchange between Pflugerville police and accused serial killer Raul Meza, he immediately feared he had stumbled upon clues leading to a new victim.
Detective Patrick Reed, in a search warrant affidavit obtained Wednesday by the American-Statesman, described how Pflugerville police were called to investigate a suspicious man who turned out to be Meza and who had hand and face wounds. Meza “offered no logical explanation for his injuries,” Reed wrote in the affidavit, based on his review of the video.
As a group of Pflugerville officers questioned why Meza’s 2001 Ford F-150 pickup was parked along a suburban road, he told them that he had given a woman “a lift, and she was heading toward Hutto,” the affidavit said. Police then found a smashed cellphone about 20 yards from the road, two cellphone cases and a set of brass knuckles.
Police did not arrest Meza at that time.
But 16 months later, that interaction prompted a vast search in recent days of a large tract of land near Pflugerville, where police suspect Meza might have buried a victim on March 11, 2022. The search unearthed grisly evidence – a possible gravesite, partially buried clothing, and a tarp – but no body or skeletal remains, the affidavit said.
The possibility of a new victim killed between the 2019 death of 66-year-old Gloria Lofton, which police have linked to Meza, and the 2023 death of 80-year-old Jesse Fraga, for which Meza also faces a murder charge, is particularly significant and deepens concerns that police could have stopped another killing.
Authorities previously offered no explanation for the property search, which drew media coverage and included agents from the FBI’s Evidence Response Team.
The affidavit did not provide a possible identity of the woman or offer an explanation about what might have happened to her body. It also was unclear Wednesday if police intend to continue searching the area near Pecan Street and Old Austin Pflugerville Road.
Austin police are still looking into how detectives acted upon a forensic report in May 2020 linking Meza to Lofton’s death and why they did not more aggressively investigate or arrest him at that time.
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It wasn’t until May that police arrested and charged Meza with Lofton’s and Fraga’s deaths. Authorities say they believe he strangled Lofton, a former neighbor, and fatally stabbed Fraga, a former probation officer with whom Meza had been living.
Police have said they now believe Meza might be responsible for as many as 10 murders.
Meza’s arrest came after detectives say he called the Austin police homicide tip line May 24 and confessed to killing Lofton.
Soon after that confession, Reed wrote in his affidavit that investigators began reviewing other interactions between Meza and police and took special note of the March 2022 interaction with Pflugerville officers.
The affidavit said that while some officers were speaking to Meza at the scene, another reported that he had earlier seen Meza walking through a field north of an apartment complex.
Meza first told authorities that he did not know how he had arrived in the area, tried to tell officers that his truck had been stolen and then said he thought it was in the parking lot of the apartment complex.
The Pflugerville officers also noted that the broken phone and other items they found near the area “were not weathered, worn or rusted,” the affidavit said.
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Based on that interaction, Reed wrote that he “became suspicious that the woman Meza claimed to have arrived in the area of Old Austin Pflugerville Road with was murdered and discarded in one of the fields and overgrown areas on either side of the road.”
Earlier this month, authorities used drones to review the area and found several areas that they thought were possible gravesites, prompting the on-ground foot searches July 12 and Monday.
Meza remains in the Travis County Jail on murder charges in the deaths of Lofton and Fraga. He was convicted of murder in the sexual assault of 8-year-old Kendra Page in 1982 and released from prison in 1993 when the time he served plus additional time counted off for good behavior and equaled the length of his sentence under the state’s mandatory supervision law, which has since been changed.