The Breakdown - Suspected serial killer charged

"So we've got at least one, two three homicides, one aggravated robbery, attempted murder and one home invasion robbery," Police Chief Art Acevedo said during a press conference.

After terrorizing north Houston for eight days, Jose Rodriguez was surrounded Tuesday morning. Three recent murders are believed to be his doing.

Rodriguez is no stranger to crime.

He served 25 years for burglary and aggravated sexual assault with a deadly weapon, and did part of a 10-year bid for auto theft.

Rodriguez's landlord said last time she saw the 46-year-old was a couple weeks ago.

“Something happened that set him off. I don’t know what it is,” landlord Theresa Williams says. “Had I had known that he was moving out then, and he was going through a situation, I would have talked to him.”

He got out of prison last September, but Hurricane Harvey rerouted him to Dallas. It wasn't until December that Rodriguez showed up in Houston, and his tracking began. Strapped with an ankle monitor, local authorities knew where he was at all times.

“They’re very accurate.  We get notified of how many satellites the ankle monitor is communicating with at any given time,” says Shannon Pena with EZ Monitoring. “If it's communitcating with 10, it's going to be very pinpointed within I would say maybe three feet."

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice says Rodriguez had been on his best behavior -- he got a job, registered as a sex offender, passed his drug tests and was even meeting with his parole officer. But on July 5th, his ankle monitor reported it had been tampered with.

Three days later, investigators say the device stopped working, and Houston saw a string of strange murders and robberies, leading police to ask Houstonians to look for Rodriguez. It worked.

"I'd seen the news story. I pulled up even with the car and looked over. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that it was the person that they were looking for," says Larry Cox, who spotted the suspect.