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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 detectives and Tarrant County prosecutors who brought him to justice.The story so farYoung 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. But the investigation turned cold, as suspects were eliminated one by one. Brannan promised the 20-year-old woman's parents the case would not be forgotten.CHAPTER 3Armida Garcia was a willowy teenage beauty of the sort who left boys her age tongue-tied. In fact, her friends said that she resembled the Tejano singer Selena, a particularly apt comparison because Armida's singing voice was lovely and the Fort Worth girl also seemed destined to perform. Years later, friends still recalled how she belted out Selena songs at a junior high talent show, how Armida sang a love ballad over the telephone to a special boy.But something more than looks and talent distinguished the girl, who was 15 years old in the summer of 1997 and was preparing for her sophomore year at North Side High School. It was her naivete, an innocence and purity that had somehow survived the hardscrabble life around her.Armida, her parents and her younger brother, Fernando, lived in a modest home on Denver Avenue in the Stockyards district of north Fort Worth. It was a mostly Hispanic neighborhood where life revolved around family and church, where baptisms, birthdays and quinceañeras brought large extended families together in celebration. But it was also a place where most families struggled to make ends meet, where street gangs battled over turf. Still, Armida clung to her idyllic view of the world.She proudly showed friends a photograph of her father, a house painter named Juan Garcia, as he hoisted his wife, Graciela, in the air. In a world where divorce was common, Armida boasted to friends that her parents were deeply in love, and the girl said she dreamed of a similar relationship with her own husband someday. Armida had her flirtations but insisted that she would remain a virgin until her wedding night.She was famous among her friends for her kindness, loath to hurt anyone's feelings. And she stubbornly believed, despite much evidence to the contrary, that there was good in everyone, absolutely everyone. That might have explained her friendship with a notorious neighborhood gang member named Andy Ortiz.'You could see the hate in him'They met one day in 1995 at a convenience store near Armida's home. Ortiz was relentless when it came to pursuing girls, the younger the better, and on that day Armida was still in junior high school. Ortiz lied to her, saying he was still a teenager himself, when in fact he was in his early 20s. He was a short, rather doughy young man with a scruffy goatee and short dark hair. But looks weren't everything to a girl as young and impressionable as Armida. Ortiz had a car, for one thing, and Armida could not help envisioning rides to the mall or to the movies. So when Ortiz asked for her phone number, she saw no harm in giving it to him.
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