Pablo Lucio Vasquez told police he had heard voices in his head telling him to kill David Cardenas on April 19, 1998 in Donna, South Texas.
The convicted killer, then 21, lured his victim to a shed where he bashed his head with a metal pipe. He then slit the boy’s throat and lifted the still-conscious seventh grader so the blood would drip onto his Vasquez’s face.
‘Something just told me to drink,’ Vasquez said in a videotaped statement to police in Donna, a small town in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.
‘You drink what?’ a detective asked. ‘His blood,’ Vasquez replied.
Police believe the horrific killing may be linked with a satanic cult.
The good news is Vasquez will never do anything like that again. He was executed by lethal injection Wednesday.
But if you want to know how horrendous this case really was…
Cardenas had been scalped, both his arms were missing and his foot had been cut off. He was also missing several teeth while the killers had made an attempt to remove his head.
A blood trail showed the body had been dragged to the site, including crossing a four-lane main street in Donna.
‘They decided they were going to try to take his head off with a shovel and didn’t realize that it was a lot more difficult to cut someone’s head off,’ Joseph Orendain, the lead trial prosecutor, recalled last week. ‘It was a mutilated body left behind. … It was really horrendous.’
Vasquez, who said he took a gold ring and necklace from Cardenas, told police that Chapa helped in trying to decapitate the boy.
‘The devil was telling me to take (the head) away from him,’ Vasquez said, adding that ‘it couldn’t come off.’