LIVINGSTON, Tex. – A condemned killer who left a bloody trail of bodies across Texas in 1983 has died on death row of natural causes, state prison authorities report.

Raymond Martinez, 71, was saved from execution once by jury selection issues and twice by court appeals tied to his mental capacity. He had been diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic with an IQ of 65.

Prison officials said they found Martinez unresponsive in his death row cell Wednesday morning during a routine bed check. Efforts to resuscitate him failed. 

Martinez was sentenced to death in 1984 for the murder of a Houston saloon owner a year earlier during a robbery. He fled afterward to Fort Worth where authorities said he shot to death his sister and her boyfriend. They said he then killed a prostitute before being apprehended.

He was one of the longest serving death row prisoners in Texas history.

Kenneth Williams, Martinez’s court-appointed attorney, told the Houston Chronicle it was a “sad, tragic story. It’s unfortunate that the system doesn’t deal with a person like him better.”

Legal appeals resulted in his conviction being overturned in 1988 due to an error during jury selection. He was tried again the next year and again convicted and sentenced to death. But his execution was set aside by an appeals court in 2006 because the judge didn’t allow the second jury to consider his mental illness.

In 2009, another jury sent him to death row for a third time. That verdict was under appeal to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Texas on mental disability arguments when he died of natural causes.

“There was a decent chance that the ruling would have gone in his favor,” attorney Williams told the Houston Chronicle. “It was pretty obvious to me he was a seriously mentally ill person.”

Martinez’s mental health and criminal record dated to his teen years, serving two years in prison in 1964 for burglary, and then being committed to a state mental hospital three different times. In 1967 a jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity on another burglary charge.

But two years later he was sent back to prison for 14 years for armed robbery and jail breaking. He was released seven months before his murder spree that started in Houston and ended in the Fort Worth area.

But Martinez never saw the inside of the Texas death chamber.