ShareHave more to add? News tip? Tell us
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 detectives and Tarrant County prosecutors who brought him to justice. The story so farTwenty-year-old Brenda Salazar was found strangled in her apartment near Dallas/Fort Worth Airport. Fort Worth police, including Detective Curt Brannan, combed her apartment for clues. The investigation began.
Chapter 02It was a Wednesday morning at 9 a.m., but Rosa Maria and Fermin Salazar were dressed in their Sunday clothes, sitting in a small room on the third floor of the Fort Worth Police Department. No environment could have been more foreign to the couple, migrant workers who had made the long drive north from their home in the Rio Grande Valley. No nightmare could have been worse than the one they were living that morning of May 28, 1997. Two days earlier, the body of their daughter Brenda had been found in her Fort Worth apartment, the strap used to strangle her still around her neck. Detective Curt Brannan now sat with the victim’s parents in the room at the Police Department, telling them how sorry he was for their loss.Brannan also said he needed to know everything about Brenda’s life because it might help him catch her killer. But how could Fermin and Rosa Maria tell everything about their beloved daughter, who was so beautiful that she dabbled in modeling, who loved gymnastics and ballet, who ran track and played volleyball, who had a rose tattooed on her hip, who loved dried flowers, who underlined her favorite passages of Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe?Perhaps it was inevitable that San Juan, Texas, could not contain such a spirit. Brenda’s parents were traditional people from large Hispanic families who believed that their daughter should remain at home until marriage and continue the same modest life they had made. They argued with her and pleaded with her to stay when she told them of her plans to move to North Texas. She was too innocent. She would be safer at home. The begging went on right up to that late summer day in 1996.Brenda had spent one last season with her family working in fields and orchards in Michigan.On their way back home, her parents planned to drop her off in Arlington at the trade school for travel- and aviation-related fields. They stopped to buy her towels and bedding, but before they got to the school, Fermin pulled into a park and tried one last time to persuade Brenda to come home. Then 19, she remained steadfast."She said she was doing it to have a career and help us," her mother would remember a decade later.It was some consolation that Brenda came home almost every other weekend and talked to her mother almost every day on the telephone, at least until the mounting long-distance bills forced them to cut back to mostly Sundays. On the visits home, Brenda spoke vaguely of her studies and her stopgap job at an Arlington telemarketing company and of her series of roommates. If there was romance in her life, she never mentioned it. In fact, she sometimes sounded sad and lonely, even afraid. Brenda occasionally wondered out loud whether she had made the right decision. But always there were the weekend visits home.
@Nyx.CommentBody@