Austin police link Dallas arrest to two cold-case Central Texas murders

Austin police say a Dallas arrest has cracked open not just one cold case, but a pattern that may reach far beyond two murders. Luis Fernando Benitez Gonzalez, 26, was taken into custody on April 27 by the Lone Star Fugitive Task Force, and investigators later tied him to the 2024 killing of Alyssa Ann Rivera in southeast Austin and the 2018 killing of Alba Jenisse Aviles Marti in Bastrop County.

The link began with DNA. Investigators said evidence from Rivera’s death produced a CODIS hit in August 2024 that matched material from the Bastrop County homicide, giving detectives a scientific bridge between two cases that had sat six years apart on separate timelines. Police said Benitez Gonzalez later confessed in an April 2026 interview, adding a second line of support to the DNA match.

Rivera’s body was found on June 21, 2024, inside an abandoned home in the 2600 block of Metcalfe Road. Investigators said she had been dragged, and her autopsy ruled the death a homicide caused by head trauma and blunt-force injuries. In the older case, Aviles Marti was last seen on April 14, 2018, leaving Club Caribe on Felter Lane in south Austin with an unidentified Hispanic male. Her body was later found in her vehicle on Old San Antonio Road in Dale, and an autopsy determined she had been sexually assaulted and strangled.

The arrest appears to have come together through a different violent encounter. Court documents and police reporting say detectives began closing in after two aggravated assaults in southeast Austin in late 2025. In one of those attacks, a victim fought back, escaped with Benitez Gonzalez’s cellphone, and investigators found selfies and location data on the device that helped identify him and place him near both homicide scenes. Ballistics evidence also suggested the same firearm may have been used in the two 2025 shootings.

Austin police have said Benitez Gonzalez may have had prior contact with other women across Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Hidalgo County and Lockhart. Deputy U.S. Marshal Brandon Filla described him as a Mexican national who had been voluntarily deported in 2020 before reappearing in Texas. Detectives are now reviewing other unsolved cases for similar patterns, because the DNA trail, the phone data and the confession all point to the same question: whether Rivera and Aviles Marti were only the beginning.