Chapter 1 | A dream is shattered and a nightmare begins

By Tim Madigan, Deanna Boyd, Melody McDonald

Star-Telegram Staff Writers

This series contains explicit language and graphic descriptions of violence.

Prologue

Just after sunrise on a steamy July morning, a team of Fort Worth detectives arrived with a search warrant, pushed past the murder suspect’s belligerent mother and entered her clapboard house. Among the officers that morning of July 26, 2000, was homicide Detective Michel Carroll, an experienced investigator who slowly made his way through old furniture and assorted junk piled in the living room. He and his supervisor, Skeeter Anderson, proceeded to search the kitchen and finally stepped into a small room where a bare mattress on a simple frame was pushed up against a wall. A dresser with a mirror sat against another wall. Barbells and soda and beer cans were strewn around the floor of the room, which obviously belonged to a young man.

Then Carroll saw them. Photographs of young Hispanic girls, dozens of them, stuck to the mirror, scattered across the top of the dresser and on the floor. In the photos, some of the girls were lying on the bed with the suspect, Andy James "Jaime" Ortiz, or being fondled by him or just staring sadly toward the camera. Almost all of them were teenagers or preteens with shoulder-length dark hair.

Carroll’s stomach turned, and he was momentarily speechless. He had worked homicide for four years and had often chuckled at the ridiculous ways his job was portrayed on television. But this room seemed straight out of a horror film about a serial killer. And there was more. Everywhere Carroll looked, he saw the artifacts of sexual obsession. Address books were filled with name after handwritten female name (there were only a few males listed) with accompanying phone numbers. A photo album contained dozens more photographs of young girls. In one corner sat a box full of women’s underwear, near a blue bra lying on the floor. Souvenirs, Carroll thought. The driver’s licenses of two young women were also in the mess. Officers found the credit card of a third.

And scattered about the room like confetti were small scraps of paper, torn from restaurant menus or supermarket receipts or maps or envelopes, anything that might have been handy at the time. Written on each of them were the name and telephone number of at least one female, sometimes several. There were 126 pieces of paper in all.

"I wonder if we’ll be able to find all these girls," Carroll said to Anderson.

Carroll stepped out of the room to find Detective Curt Brannan, who was working in another part of the house. Five days earlier, on the shore of Marine Creek Lake, Brannan had stood over the rotting corpse of a girl who had likely spent the last few hours of her life with Andy Ortiz in that very bedroom. Police also suspected that Ortiz, a north-side gang member, had raped and strangled another teenage girl three years before.

But this ...

Brannan, the lead investigator, stood wordlessly with Carroll and Anderson, studying the bedroom. "You’re going to have your hands full on this case," Carroll said.

Looking for comments?