LAGUNA HEIGHTS, Texas — For more than a decade, Juan Martin Cantu lived in a ramshackle house near a Gulf Coast bay and worked odd jobs, sometimes earning money by grilling at backyard barbecues. Not even his wife suspected he was a convicted hit man who had been leading a secret life, authorities said.
The truth came out this week after Cantu was arrested on a charge of felony marijuana possession.
During his interrogation, he admitted he had served time in Texas and Mexican prisons and that he also was responsible for 26 murders for which he had never been charged, precinct Deputy Constable George Gavito said.
"I asked him, 'Do you get off on this, get a joy from it?' And he smiles and he tells me, 'You know, it gives me a thrill,' " Gavito said.
Cantu, jailed under the name Juan Martin Medrano, has a criminal record in Texas that dates to at least 1974, when he was convicted of burglary. After at least two more felony convictions for lesser offenses, he confessed in 1978 to six slayings, Gavito said.
He was transferred to a Mexican prison under the terms of a 1970s treaty allowing foreign nationals to transfer to facilities in their home countries, but he was released four years later, police said.
Cantu, 46, grew up the son of a poor rancher in the small Mexican state of Morelos. His first victim apparently had threatened his brother. By 17, he had become a contract killer, Gavito said. "He sat down with me and he told me that he started to kill people when he was 14," Gavito said. "He kind of thinks it's all behind him and wanted to get it off his chest. I was here to listen."
Gavito said Cantu placed the unsolved murders in several Mexican cities: Vera Cruz, Ciudad Juarez and Matamoros. He also said he killed people in Brownsville, Houston and Dallas; in Naples and Jacksonville, Fla.; and in Alabama.
Investigator Lt. Joe Garcia said Cantu had been a known hit man for drug kingpin Cacho Espinosa.
Neighbors couldn't believe that the confessed killer was the same person who fished with them or helped a neighbor who was distraught over a drug addicted son decorate a Christmas tree.
"With me, with my family, he was real nice," said Gilberto Loera, who lived across the street from Cantu. "He was never bad, never aggressive."
They would go fishing by the bay, and Cantu often shared the fish and shrimp he caught with his neighbors.
Cantu's common-law wife, Esmeralda, said she met "Johnny" in a bar.
"He told me he was from Mexico, he was a wetback, he didn't have no papers or nothing, and that he lived his whole life in Dallas," she said Thursday, in front of her home, as people milled about inside the house. Outside, a young man cooked over a charcoal grill.
As police raided the home on a search warrant Wednesday, they asked Esmeralda how she could live with a murderer. She told them she knew nothing about it. She said the same Thursday.
"Love is blind," you know," she said. She added, "I don't hate him... hey, everybody has a past."
On the Net: