FUGITIVE TURNS SELF IN; HANDSHAKE, SURRENDER END `RAILROAD KILLER' SEARCH.

Byline: Michael Janofsky The New York Times

After eluding an international manhunt for months, a Mexican fugitive suspected of jumping freight cars to commit at least eight brutal murders in Texas, Illinois and Kentucky surrendered Tuesday morning after his family negotiated his arrest.

The suspect, Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, walked across a bridge from Juarez, Mexico, to the Usleta border checkpoint in El Paso at 9 a.m. and extended his hand to a Texas Ranger who greeted him with a handshake and handcuffs. Resendez-Ramirez, 39, a slight man who wore a striped shirt and wire-rimmed aviator glasses, was described as calm and ``very pleasant.''

In the end, after thousands of law enforcement officers in the United States and Mexico followed thousands of tips in vain, the case broke because a sister of the suspect called the Texas Ranger who later made the arrest on the bridge. The ranger, Andrew Carter, had traded calls with the sister, who lives in Albuquerque, for two weeks before she reached him Sunday on his cellular telephone as he fished off the Texas coast.

``Ramirez's sister called him on his cell phone and said, We need to talk,'' said Mike Cox, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety. ``She thought her brother was ready to surrender.''

It was an unexpected break in a case that had looked hopeless as recently as last week when the authorities and the suspect's common-law wife in Mexico had issued a public plea for Resendez-Ramirez to surrender. With each of the eight killings occurring near railroad tracks, guns sales in many railroad communities in Texas rose sharply as law enforcement officials warned that the ``railroad killer'' could strike again.

For months, grainy photographs of the suspect had been plastered in post offices across the country as Resendez-Ramirez was named to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List on June 21. A federal, state and local law enforcement task force in Houston had followed thousands of tips, most of them false leads. The last credible sighting came June 18 when he was spotted at a homeless shelter in Louisville, Ky.

Appeared before judge

Resendez-Ramirez appeared Tuesday morning before a state magistrate in El Paso on a pending burglary charge from the Houston area. He was then flown to Houston, accompanied by Carter, and placed in the Harris County Jail in Houston.

The Harris County District Attorney's Office is expected to charge him with murder. He has been linked to five slayings in Texas since December. He faces two murder charges in Illinois for the June 15 shotgun slayings of an elderly man and his daughter. Another murder charge is pending in Lexington, Ky.

If convicted, Resendez-Ramirez faces the death penalty.

``Mission accomplished, for the moment,'' said Don K. Clark, the FBI special agent in charge in Houston, speaking at a news conference Tuesday afternoon.

Surrounded by a phalanx of investigators, Clark paused to make a statement to the families of the victims. ``We cannot bring your loved ones back,'' he said, ``but we did pledge to work endlessly to work for justice, and we did just that.''

Investigation under gun

But until Tuesday's arrest, the investigation had met with criticism, particularly after it was discovered that Border Patrol agents had picked up the suspect June 2 and released him into Mexico even though the FBI was searching for him and the Houston police had told the Immigration and Naturalization Service that Resendez-Ramirez was wanted for questioning.

Two days after the suspect was released, a 73-year-old woman, Josephine Konvicka, was found beaten to death in her home in Fayette County west of Houston. On the next day, June 5, a Houston schoolteacher, Noemie Dominguez, 26, was found clubbed to death in her home. Dominguez's car was found later in the border town of Del Rio, reportedly with fingerprints of the suspect inside.

Throughout the investigation, Resendez-Ramirez had remained a mysterious figure. Even his true identity was uncertain since investigators say he has used more than 30 aliases. Born in the Mexican city of Puebla, he first entered the United States illegally in 1976, when he was arrested in Brownsville by Immigration and Naturalization Service agents.

Long history of offenses

For the next 23 years, Resendez-Ramirez led the life of a transient, illegally jumping freight cars from Mexico into the United States. His adventures carried him from Vermont to California, and he bounced in and out of federal prisons and local jails on a long string of immigration violations and other minor nonviolent offenses.

But despite his nonviolent history, investigators have linked him through physical evidence, including fingerprints in some of the cases, to the five Texas killings as well as the slayings in Illinois and Kentucky.

The first killing occurred Aug. 29, 1997, when Christopher Maier was slain along the railroad tracks in Lexington. Maier's girlfriend was raped and beaten but survived the attack.

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Photo: (color) Rafael Resendez-Ramirez jumped freight cars to commit at least eight brutal murders, officials say.