Texas executed Peter Cantu tonight, the gang leader who ordered the brutal murders of two teenage girls in 1993, bringing an end to a 17-year legal battle that reached the highest courts in the nation and the White House.
Cantu, 18 at the time of the killings, was pronounced dead at 6:17 p. m. at the Huntsville Unit.
He declined to make a final statement. The execution came after years of appeals and a series of legal challenges that tested the boundaries of state versus international law.
The victims were Jennifer Ertman, 14, and Elizabeth Peña, 16. They were walking home through T. C.
Jester Park in northwest Houston on June 24, 1993, when a street gang called the Black and White attacked them. Cantu led the assault, ordering the gang to rape and 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 the girls after an initiation ceremony nearby.
Cantu and five others took turns raping both teenagers for more than an hour. Then Cantu ordered the killings. Derrick O’Brien and Raul Villarreal strangled Jennifer with a belt that broke, then finished with a shoelace.
Cantu kicked Elizabeth in the face with steel-toed boots, then strangled her with her own shoelace along with two others.
After the murders, Cantu stripped jewelry from Jennifer’s body, handing items to the others like souvenirs. He gave a Tweety Bird wristwatch to a 14-year-old member, telling him, “Take this, I don’t want it.”
The gang members went home that night. Cantu’s brother Joe Cantu called police four days later, leading to the discovery of the bodies. Both girls had to be identified by dental records due to decomposition in the June heat.
Cantu was convicted of capital murder in 1994 and sentenced to death. At his trial, he sat in the courtroom smirking as the verdict was read. The families of the victims had to wait 16 years for the sentence to be carried out.
His execution tonight follows those of two co-defendants. Derrick O’Brien was executed in 2006. Jose Medellin was executed in 2008 after a legal battle that reached the International Court of Justice and drew intervention from President George W.
Bush.
Randy Ertman, Jennifer’s father, has said he wanted to see Cantu die. “He should have been hung outside the courthouse,” Ertman told reporters before the execution. “If they hung all five of them, that would have been a deterrent.”
Adolph Peña, Elizabeth’s father, was present in the witness room tonight. He has attended each execution, pressing his hand against the glass after Medellin died. “It doesn’t make me happy,” he has said, “but this is the punishment he was given.”
The case also sparked a change in Texas law. The families fought for the right to witness executions, which was granted in 1996. Before Jennifer and Elizabeth, victims’ families were barred from the death chamber.
Two of the five original death sentences were commuted to life in prison after the U. S. Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that executing juveniles violated the Constitution.
Efrain Perez and Raul Villarreal, both 17 at the time, now await parole hearings in 2029.
The youngest member, Venancio Medellin, was 14. He testified against the others and received a 40-year sentence for aggravated sexual assault. He has been denied parole five times.
His projected release date is 2033.
Tonight’s execution completes the cycle for those originally condemned to die. The families say they will continue to fight any future parole attempts. “She can’t defend herself anymore,” Adolph Peña has said.
“As long as I live, I’m always going to do that.”
The murders remain one of the most discussed cases in Texas history, raising questions about gang violence, juvenile justice, and the death penalty. A memorial stands at Waltrip High School, where the girls were students, and another at T. C.
Jester Park, near where they died.
Cantu was 35 years old when he was put to death. He spent more years on death row than the girls had lived. He is buried in Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery, the state’s potter’s field, alongside O’Brien and Medellin.
For the families and the state, a chapter ends tonight. The memories of Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Peña remain, preserved in the law they changed and the lives that were lost.
