JUST IN: Rosendo Rodriguez III Execution | Crime, Last Meal + Final Words | Death Row US Texas 

JUST IN: Rosendo Rodriguez III Execution | Crime, Last Meal + Final Words | Death Row US Texas 

On March 27th, 2018, after spending nearly 10 years on death row, Rosendo Rodriguez III was executed by lethal injection at the Huntsville unit in Texas. He was 38 years old, just one day past his birthday. In this video, we will talk about what happened, his last words that shocked witnesses, and the brutal crimes that earned him the nickname the suitcase killer.

But to uncover the events of that fateful day and why Rosendo ended up being executed, we have to go back to a warm September weekend in 2005 and a hotel room in Lach, Texas that would become a chamber of horrors. On September 9th, 2005, downtown Lach, Texas, a young man checked into the Holiday Inn.

 His name was Rosendo Rodriguez III, but he used a different name at the front desk, Thomas Rodriguez. He was 25 years old, cleancut, handsome, with a charming smile that disarmed people. He was in town for Marine Corps reserve training that weekend, but Rodriguez didn’t stay at the same hotel as his unit. He chose this one alone, and he had plans that had nothing to do with military training.

 Rodriguez came from Witchah Falls, Texas. Born on March 26th, 1980. On the surface, he seemed normal. He attended Texas Tech University right here in Lach. He was a member of a co-ed fraternity. He worked as an office clerk and in food service. He served his country as a marine reservist. No criminal record, no arrests, just an ordinary young man.

 But beneath that charming exterior lived something dark, something violent, something that had been hurting women for years. That Friday, Rodriguez rented a brand new red four-door pickup truck from Enterprise. He checked into his hotel room and he waited. Saturday came and went. Rodriguez’s friend Chris called to make plans.

Rodriguez said he already had a date. Sunday arrived, and on that Sunday night, September 11th, 2005, Rodriguez found what he was looking for. Her name was Summer Lee Baldwin, 29 years old, a mother of four children, a native of Washington State, who had ended up in Leach, Texas. Summer was struggling.

 She was working as a prostitute to survive. She was battling drug addiction and she was approximately 10 weeks pregnant with her fifth child. Summer was somebody’s daughter. Her mother’s name was Uva Robach. Summer was her only child, the light of her life. Despite her struggles, Summer was still loved, still remembered for who she was before addiction took hold.

 There was something else about Summer that made her case unusual. She was a witness in a federal counterfeiting case. The FBI knew her name. When she disappeared, it would bring federal attention to what happened in that hotel room. But on that Sunday night, Summer was just trying to survive another night on the streets of Lach.

 Around 10 Parsm, Margie Estrada pulled into a 7-Eleven convenience store in Levik. She noticed a woman she recognized, Summer Baldwin. Summer was sitting in the passenger seat of a red pickup truck. A man was driving. Margie walked over to talk. Summer seemed relaxed, maybe too relaxed. She told Margie the man was her client. They had been using drugs together.

 The man behind the wheel was Rosendo Rodriguez. This would be the last time anyone saw Summer Baldwin alive. Rodriguez drove Summer to his hotel room at the Holiday Inn. According to hotel keycard records, he entered his room at 150 a.m. Summer went inside with him. What happened next was pure evil.

 Inside that hotel room, Rosendo Rodriguez unleashed a level of violence that shocked even seasoned homicide investigators. He beat Summer Baldwin. The medical examiner would later count approximately 50 blunt force wounds across her body. 50 separate impacts, her face, her head, her arms, her torso. He beat her with his fists, with objects, with anything he could find.

 But the beating was just the beginning. Rodriguez raped her. The medical examiner’s report detailed injuries consistent with violent sexual assault. This was not consensual. This was brutality. This was torture. And then as Summer lay broken and bleeding, Rodriguez strangled her. His hands wrapped around her throat. He squeezed. He watched the life drain from her eyes.

But Summer wasn’t dead yet. Not quite. She was dying, gasping for air, fighting to stay alive. And Rodriguez knew exactly what to do next. 3:30 a.m. Monday, September 12th, 2005. Security cameras at a Lach Walmart captured a young man walking through the store at 3:30 in the morning. Rosendo Rodriguez, calm, collected, not a care in the world.

 He walked straight to the luggage section and selected a brand new Protege brand suitcase. Then he picked up a box of latex gloves. He took both items to the checkout counter. And here’s where Rodriguez made his fatal mistake. He paid with his debit card. That single transaction would seal his fate. Rodriguez returned to the Holiday Inn at 3:45 a.m.

 He entered his room where Summer Baldwin’s brutalized body lay dying. He opened the new suitcase. And then he did the unthinkable. He forced Summer’s naked body into that suitcase, folded her limbs, bent her broken body into an unnatural position, zipped it closed. Medical examiners would later determine that Summer Baldwin may have still been alive when he sealed her inside that suitcase.

 She died from positional asphyxiation. Unable to breathe, unable to move, trapped in darkness, suffocating in a suitcase. While Rosendo Rodriguez decided what to do with her, Rodriguez carried the suitcase out of his hotel room. He found a dumpster. He threw Summer’s body away like garbage. Then he went back to his room.

 He rented a movie from the hotel’s pay-per-view service. He watched it. Then he went to sleep. Think about that for a moment. He had just murdered a woman, raped her, beat her 50 times, stuffed her dying body into a suitcase, and then he watched a movie, and went to sleep. The next morning, Monday, Rodriguez called his friend Chris.

 He laughed about drinking too much over the weekend, made plans to hang out on Wednesday. Then he checked out of the hotel like nothing had happened. He returned the red pickup truck to Enterprise. No blood, no evidence. He had cleaned it thoroughly. Then he took a bus back home to San Antonio. Rodriguez thought he had gotten away with murder, but he hadn’t counted on the workers at the Lach landfill.

Tuesday, September 13th, 2005. Landfill workers in Lach were sorting through trash when they spotted something unusual. A brand new suitcase still had the tags on it. Who throws away a perfectly good suitcase? One worker approached. He tried to lift it. Heavy. Too heavy for an empty suitcase. Curious, he unzipped it.

 Inside was Summer Baldwin’s naked, battered body. Folded, broken, dead for about 24 hours. The police were called immediately. Homicide detectives arrived at the landfill. The FBI got involved because Summer was their witness. And the investigation began. Investigators had a body, but no suspect, no identification, just a woman in a suitcase.

 They started with the suitcase itself. The Proteéé brand suitcase still had its UPC barcode label attached. Detectives traced it to Walmart. They pulled surveillance footage from every Walmart in Levik for the previous 48 hours. And there he was. 3:30 a.m. Monday morning. A young man purchasing a suitcase and latex gloves.

The footage was clear enough to see his face. But the real break came when they pulled the transaction records. The man had used a debit card, his name, Rosendo Rodriguez III. Detectives now had a name. They pulled his records. Marine reservest lived in San Antonio. had been in love that weekend for training.

 They obtained a warrant and searched his hotel room at the Holiday Inn. What they found was damning. A dried pool of Summer Baldwin’s blood on the carpet. Blood spatter on the mattress and box springs. The suitcase warranty card in the hallway trash. A used condom wrapper. Two sets of latex gloves with Rodriguez’s DNA inside and Summer’s DNA outside.

 Walmart bags matching the store where the suitcase was purchased. The DNA evidence was conclusive. The seaman found on Summer Baldwin’s body matched Rosendo Rodriguez. On September 15th, 2005, just 4 days after Summer’s murder, police arrived at Rodriguez’s parents’ home in San Antonio. They found him there. He had fresh scratch marks on his left arm.

Rosendo Rodriguez III was placed under arrest for the murder of Summer Baldwin. But there was something else. Something that would shock investigators and connect Rodriguez to another crime. A crime that had haunted Lach for over a year. Joanna Katherine Rogers, 16 years old.

 Joanna had disappeared from her parents’ home in South Lev on May 4th, 2004. Around midnight, she left behind her coat, her wallet, her car keys, and her cell phone. Just vanished into thin air. Her father, Joe Bill Rogers, had heard a noise around 3:30 that morning. He got up to check, saw nothing, went back to bed. By morning, Joanna was gone.

 For 904 days, Joe Bill and Kathy Rogers searched for their daughter. Police investigated. Tips came in. Nothing led anywhere. Joanna Rogers had simply disappeared until investigators started looking at Rosendo Rodriguez’s computer. His search history revealed something chilling. After Summer Baldwin’s body was discovered, Rodriguez had been following the news coverage obsessively.

He searched for articles about the murder. He searched his own name to see if he had been identified. And then investigators found something else in his search history. Rodriguez had been searching for information about Joanna Rogers. They pulled phone records. On the morning Joanna disappeared, someone had called the Rogers family home twice.

 Once at 3:13 a.m. for 10 minutes, again at 3:33 a.m. for one minute. The calls came from Rosendo Rodriguez’s phone. Rodriguez lived approximately 20 minutes from the Rogers home. He had been chatting with Joanna in an internet chat room. He had called her that night. Her father heard a noise at 3:30 a.m.

 and by morning she was gone. About 1 month after his arrest, with his attorney present, Rosendo Rodriguez gave a statement to police. He confessed to killing both women. For Summer Baldwin, he claimed it was self-defense. said they returned to his hotel room Sunday night, had consensual sex. Then she pulled knives on him over drug use.

 He said he put her in a chokeold and accidentally killed her. The forensic evidence told a different story. The 50 blunt force wounds, the sexual assault injuries, the strangulation, the suffocation in a suitcase. This was no accident. This was murder. For Joanna Rogers, Rodriguez claimed she became violent after he refused to pay her.

 Another self-defense claim. But Joanna was 16 years old, a child. Rodriguez told investigators where to find Joanna’s body. The same Leach landfill where Summer had been found, stuffed in another suitcase. In October 2006, landfill workers found Joanna Rogers’s remains. She had been in that landfill for over 2 years. Her body was badly decomposed, mummified, but it was her.

 The Rogers family finally had their daughter back. Rosendo Rodriguez was a serial killer. Both victims stuffed in suitcases, both disposed of in the same landfill, both involved strangulation. He had a pattern, and there was every reason to believe there might be more victims no one had found yet. Prosecutors offered Rodriguez a deal. Plead guilty to both murders.

 Wave the death penalty. Receive life in prison. Help locate Joanna Rogers body. And give the family’s closure. Both families supported the deal. Joe Bill and Kathy Rogers wanted to bury their daughter. Huva Robach wanted justice for summer. The plea agreement was scheduled. On the day of the plea hearing, Rodriguez appeared before the judge and then suddenly he backed out.

He claimed he didn’t understand anything his attorney told him. Said he couldn’t comprehend the questions being asked, withdrew from the plea deal at the last minute. His attorney withdrew from the case. Prosecutors were done negotiating. They decided to seek the death penalty. And because of legal complications with Rodriguez’s confession, they couldn’t use his admission about Joanna Rogers at trial.

 They would focus solely on Summer Baldwin’s murder and pursue capital punishment February through March 2008. Due to extensive media coverage in Lev, the trial was moved to Randall County near Amarillo. Rodriguez faced two counts of capital murder. Murder during the commission of aggravated sexual assault and murder of more than one person because Summer Baldwin was pregnant.

 The prosecution’s case was overwhelming. The surveillance footage, the debit card transaction, the hotel room evidence, the DNA match, the computer searches, every piece fit together perfectly. Medical examiner Dr. reader Natarajin testified about the sexual assault injuries, about the 50 blunt force wounds, about the strangulation, about the 5-week old fetus that died with Summer.

 The defense argued self-defense, claimed Rodriguez couldn’t have known Summer was pregnant, challenged the DNA evidence as potentially contaminated, but they had no answer for the mountain of forensic evidence. On March 8th, 2008, after deliberating for less than three hours, the jury returned a verdict.

 Guilty on both counts of capital murder. The punishment phase of the trial revealed the true extent of Rosendo Rodriguez’s violence against women. What jurors heard would convince them he was a future danger to society. Five women took the stand. Five women who had been sexually assaulted by Rosendo Rodriguez. Their testimony painted a picture of a serial predator who had been hurting women for years.

Julia Ross, his high school girlfriend. They started dating when she was 15. Sex began when she was 16. She testified that Rodriguez would get rough during sex and wouldn’t stop when she asked. He raped her multiple times. Even when she screamed, he wouldn’t stop. Emldda Montana, a Texas Tech fraternity pledge in spring 2004.

Rodriguez was an active fraternity member. He drove her home from a party one night and forced himself on her. He warned her not to tell anyone or she would be kicked out of the fraternity. Jennifer Longore, another Texas Tech student. She dated Rodriguez briefly in 2004. At first, their sexual relationship was consensual, but she testified that something would switch in his personality.

 He became forceful, scary, and controlling during sex. Angelica Gonzalez from the same Texas Tech fraternity. She was dating an acquaintance of Rodriguez. She testified that he overpowered her during intercourse. Worse, he gave her a sexually transmitted disease. Jennifer Milbeck. She met Rodriguez when he took glamour shots of her at the mall.

 He was only 16 at the time. He contacted her afterward and came to her home. The moment he arrived, he tried to kiss her. Despite her protests, he pushed her down on the bed and sexually assaulted her. Five women, five sexual assaults, and these were just the ones brave enough to testify. How many others were there? How many women did Rodriguez hurt who never came forward? District Attorney Matt Powell summed it up perfectly.

 He’s really good at killing people. Very calm, very calculated. Women were terrified of him. He used his charm and good looks and status for a long time to victimize women. The jury voted for the death penalty. They found Rodriguez to be a future danger to society. In May 2008, he was formally sentenced to death and transported to the Palansky unit to await execution.

Rosendo Rodriguez spent nearly 10 years on death row. That’s below the Texas average and well below the national average. His appeals moved relatively quickly through the courts. In 2011, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed his conviction. In May 2017, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals denied his habius petition.

 In October 2017, the US Supreme Court denied his appeal. In January 2018, the Governor of Texas signed Rodriguez’s death warrant. The execution was scheduled for March 27th, 2018. Rodriguez’s final appeals focused on the medical examiner’s testimony. His lawyers claimed Dr. Shreder Natarajan had settled a whistleblower lawsuit and wasn’t credible.

 They argued Summer wasn’t actually sexually assaulted. The courts rejected these arguments. Dr. Natarajin had personally conducted the autopsy. The lawsuit involved a different employee who started working 5 years after the trial. The forensic evidence was solid. On March 26th, the day before his execution, the Fifth Circuit denied a successive habius petition.

 On March 27th, approximately 5:30 p.m., less than 30 minutes before the scheduled execution, the US Supreme Court denied his final appeal. All legal options were exhausted. The execution would proceed. March 27th, 2018. March 26th had been Rosendo Rodriguez’s 38th birthday. He spent it on death row knowing he would die the next day. It was also Holy Week in the Catholic calendar.

Palm Sunday had been just 2 days earlier. Rodriguez had been born and raised Catholic. The timing was not lost on him. In his final days, Rodriguez was transferred from the Palinsky unit to the Huntsville unit, home of Texas’s execution chamber. He was visited by three family members. Among the witnesses who gathered that evening were Joe Bill Rogers and Kathy Rogers, Joanna’s parents, Uva Robach, Summer’s mother, law enforcement officials from Levik, and Rodriguez’s own family members.

At 6 Warren, Rodriguez was strapped to the gurnie. An IV was inserted into his arm. The warden asked if he had any final words. Rodriguez spoke for 7 minutes. He never apologized. He thanked the prison guards and staff. He urged people to write to death row inmates, calling them all good men. Then he made accusations against the medical.

Examiner and district attorney Matt Powell, claiming they engaged in false and illegal acts that wrongfully convicted thousands of people. He called on the FBI to investigate. He mentioned it was Holy Week, that yesterday had been his birthday. He said the state may have my body, but they never had my soul.

 He quoted religious scripture, “I fought the good fight. I have run the good race.” He urged people to boycott Texas businesses to pressure the state to end the death penalty. Then he mouthed, “I love you to his family.” He never looked at the victim’s families. his final words to the warden. I’m ready to join my father. At 6:24 p.m.

, the pentobarbital began flowing through the IV. Rodriguez showed signs of unconsciousness within minutes. His chest heaved. Then all movement stopped. At 6:46 p.m. Central Daylight Time, Rosendo Rodriguez III was pronounced dead. 22 minutes from injection to death. He was 38 years old. He was the fourth execution in Texas in 2018, the seventh execution in the United States that year.

 After the execution, the victim’s families spoke to the press. Joe Bill Rogers, Joanna’s father. This has been quite a traumatic event for all of us. We’re just fortunate it’s all done. An apology from Rodriguez wouldn’t have made a bit of difference. He just cared about himself. Just a sociopath.

 Kathy Rogers, Joanna’s mother. Thank God it’s happened. I’m so thankful for the jury doing the job that they did. Uva Robach, Summer’s mother. He went to his maker and he’s got his justice now. He put Summer in that suitcase while she was still alive. So, she suffocated. How horrible that must have been. He is just a horrible, horrible person, she continued.

 I don’t believe anyone can say the word hate until you’ve run into somebody like this that is evil. Then you learn what true hate is. There will never be closure because you know she is gone and we miss her every day. The Baldwin and Rogers families had known each other even before Summer was killed.

 They met while Joe Bill Rogers was searching for his missing daughter Joanna. The tragedy that led to finding Joanna’s body only deepened their connection. Rosendo Rodriguez III was a predator who hid behind charm and good looks. He was a marine, a fraternity member, a college student. On the surface, he seemed normal, but beneath that surface was a monster who hurt women for years.

 At least five women testified about being sexually assaulted by him. Two women were murdered. One was 16 years old. How many others were there that we don’t know about? The pattern was clear. He targeted vulnerable women, young women, women struggling with addiction, women who might not be believed if they reported him. He used violence.

 He used strangulation. He stuffed their bodies in suitcases and threw them away like garbage. Summer Baldwin was 29 years old when she died. A mother of four, she was pregnant with her fifth child. Despite her struggles, she was loved. She mattered. Joanna Rogers was just 16. A whole life ahead of her.

 Her parents searched for her for 94 days before they found out what happened. These women deserved better. They deserved justice. On March 27th, 2018, they got it. The case of Rosenda Rodriguez III is closed. But the pain he caused will never fully heal. Summer’s children grew up without their mother.

 Joanna’s parents will never get to see their daughter graduate, get married, have children of her own. And somewhere out there, there may be other families who never got answers. Other women who Rodriguez hurt who will never know about. Rest in peace, Summer Baldwin and Joanna Rogers. You are not forgotten. The case of Rosendo Rodriguez III is now closed.

A brutal double murder. Two women stuffed in suitcases, nearly 10 years on death row, and finally on a Tuesday evening in March 2018, justice was served.