Why Did Holly Dunn Crawl 200 Yards With a Shattered Jaw After the Railroad Killer?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is History's Hidden Killers. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:09)
Everything's gonna be okay. Chris Maier said that on his knees, beside railroad tracks in Lexington, Kentucky, his hands were tied behind his back with his own backpack straps. A stranger was standing over him, holding a 52-pound rock. Chris was 21 years old. He was looking at the woman he loved when he said it.
He was dead within minutes. She wasn't. This is Surviving Serial Killers, part of History's Hidden Killers, our series. Every episode in the series comes back to the same truth. The people in these stories survive because they save themselves. But this one's different. Holly Dunn survived because of a promise made by a man who didn't.
Let's back up and we welcome your thoughts in the comment section on Substack and YouTube. August 28th, 1997, University of Kentucky campus. Holly Dunn was 20 She was a junior. Chris Maier was 21, her boyfriend. They went to a fraternity party near campus that evening. It was a little boring, so they packed Chris's backpack with some beers and walked under the railroad tracks a few blocks away. It's just what kids at the University of Kentucky did. It sat on the tracks and talked. It wasn't dangerous. It wasn't reckless. It was a Thursday night in the college town, and two people wanted to be somewhere quiet together. They found a spot. They sat down. Holly would describe the moment later in the simplest terms. She was gazing in his eyes. They stayed for a while, not paying attention to the world around them. And they got up to walk back towards the party. The night felt normal. It was normal, right up until it wasn't.
At an electrical box beside the tracks, a man stepped out. He asked for money casually, like it was nothing. He told them they didn't have any.
Just broke college kits. He had something sharp in his hand, something metallic. Holly wasn't sure if it was an ice pick or a screwdriver or something else.
And he held it on Chris the whole time. The man told Chris to get on his hands and knees. He went through the backpack, found nothing. He found Chris' hands behind his back with the straps. Then Chris bowed on his knees, staring at what was about to happen, looked at Holly and said the words, everything is going to be okay. The man who killed Chris Maier was Angel Maturino Reséndiz, a Mexican national who's crisscrossed the country by freight train. Over the course of the 90s, he killed at least 15 people across six states, Texas, Kentucky, Georgia, Illinois, Florida and California. He targeted people who lived near railroad corridors, the communities that grew up alongside the lines, the neighborhoods where you could hear the trains at night, elderly couples in their homes, women living alone, a college kid kneeling beside the tracks. He would eventually land on the FBI's 10 most wanted lists, become known as the Railroad Killer, and be the subject of a nationwide manhunt. But in August of 1997, none of the killings had been connected. The railroad tracks were just railroad tracks. Nobody knew they were hunting grounds.
Reséndiz picked up a rock, weighed later as evidence at 52 pounds, and killed Chris Maier with it while Holly watched. Then he turned on Holly. He shattered her jawbone, broke her eye socket, stabbed her multiple times, attacked her in ways I'm not going to detail for you to understand how bad it was. And then he walked away, left her on the tracks, left her for dead. She wasn't dead. Here's a part of the story that earns every word, because this is where Holly Dunn, alone, broken, without a single institution or first responder or system in sight, demonstrated something that goes beyond survival instinct into pure will. She got up, with a shattered jaw, a fractured eye socket, stab wounds and lacerations across her face and head. She somehow got to her feet. She could not call for help. Her jaw was destroyed. She could barely see through the swelling in the blood, but could move. And about 200 yards from where she'd been left on those tracks, she could make out the shape of a house. 200 yards, two football fields with injuries that should have kept her on the ground. Every step was a choice. Her body was screaming at her to stop, to lie down, to give in. She didn't listen. Each step was one more commitment to a promise someone else made on her behalf. She kept walking because Chris Maier told her everything was going to be okay, and she was not going to make him a liar. She reached the house. She pounded on the door until someone answered, and to help came Ambulance University of Kentucky Hospital. Her sister Heather saw her and described what the injuries looked like. Her face was disoriented. She had a broken eye socket, a broken jaw, very bruised, lots of cuts across her face, staples where they could just to stop the bleeding. They couldn't.