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This series contains explicit language and graphic descriptions of violence.
Editor's note: To Catch a Killer is the true story of killer Andy James Ortiz, his young victims, and the Fort Worth police and Tarrant County prosecutors who brought him to justice.The story so far Fort Worth Detective Curt Brannan found a key witness in the killing of Armida Garcia, 15, allowing prosecutors to accept charges in that case, as they had in the murder of Brenda Salazar, 20.CHAPTER 23For veteran criminal defense lawyers Tim Moore and Robert Ford, the chore was grim but perfunctory. The odds of finding anything truly useful among the evidence collected in young Armida Garcia's case were remote. Still, the court-appointed lawyers for Andy Ortiz needed to take a look, which they did about a month before the first of two murder trials in October 2001.In a brightly lit evidence room of the Fort Worth Police Department, the attorneys donned rubber gloves to examine the young victim's clothing laid out for them on a table, next to the shoelaces allegedly used by their client to strangle her."It was kind of awful," Ford remembered recently. "In a murder case or capital murder case, that sort of stuff is death personified."Then they came to a large cardboard box. One of the lawyers opened the top and reached inside. What he found was chilling: dozens of snapshots of Hispanic girls and young women in suggestive poses and various states of undress; more than 100 scraps of paper, each with the names and telephone numbers of one or more females. The contents, the lawyers learned, were found by police in their client's bedroom."It was just normal crime scene stuff -- then, boom, this box," Ford remembered. "We just looked at each other. It took our breath away. ... It was like a collection."For the lawyers, the implications of their discovery were immediately clear. Since their appointment to defend Ortiz months before, Ford and Moore had pondered their strategy in the two capital murder trials he faced, looking for ways to plant reasonable doubt in jurors' minds. Putting the defendant on the stand was one possibility, because Moore and Ford found Ortiz to be reasonably articulate and soft-spoken, and he might have made a convincing witness.But now there was no way that would happen. Under the rules of evidence, if Ortiz testified, prosecutors would be allowed to counter and attack his credibility by introducing the contents of that box. Jurors would be able to thumb through the pieces of paper and look over the photographs. So no, Ortiz would not take the stand. Nor would his lawyers call any witnesses who might open the evidentiary door and allow the photos and slips of paper to be brought into court.That was why, in Ortiz's back-to-back trials in October 2001, the defense lawyers were mostly silent."We sat on our hands," Ford said.Overwhelming evidenceOn Tuesday morning, Oct. 2, 2001, a dark-haired, youthful-looking judge took the bench and smiled at about 60 prospective jurors.
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