Posted on Wed, Feb. 13, 2008

Chapter 4 | Opportunities missed and young lives forever damaged

By TIM MADIGAN with DEANNA BOYD and MELODY McDONALD

Star-Telegram Staff Writers

Star-Telegram photo illustration / Mark Hoffer

• Chapter 4: Opportunities missed and young lives forever damaged
• To Catch a Killer: A true-crime serial novel

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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.

Three victims in today's installment were not identified for their protection.

The story so far

Young Brenda Salazar was found strangled in her apartment near Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, and Fort Worth police, including Detective Curt Brannan, combed her apartment for clues. But the investigation turned cold. Meanwhile, north-side gang member Andy Ortiz kept adding to his rap sheet - and hitting on young girls.

CHAPTER 4

Most entries in Andy Ortiz's criminal dossier, which grew to be several inches thick, concerned burglary, along with auto theft, brawls and parole violations, typical gang stuff. But several police reports detailed more sinister allegations, such as one in which the victim was a 13-year-old girl.

She was walking past Ortiz's home on Lee Avenue on Sept. 4, 1991, when he called out her name. When she would not come into his house, the police report said, he grabbed her, pulled her through the front door, locked it and threw her on a sofa, where he began kissing her face and neck. The girl managed to break free, escape the house unharmed and run to the house of a friend, who called police.

Ortiz was arrested within hours and eventually charged with aggravated kidnapping. But the charge was dismissed as part of a plea bargain when Ortiz agreed to a nine-year prison sentence for earlier burglaries. He was paroled after nine months.

So he was free two years later, on Aug. 8, 1993, another night detailed in long police report narratives. This time the girl was a 15-year-old who joined two young friends using fake IDs to sneak into a north-side nightclub. That night, when the teenager declined the advances of a young man who approached her in the bar, he pushed something into her back. "Come with me now, or I'll shoot you here," the man said, according to a police report.

Outside, she was forced into the back seat of a car with the man. Another man was behind the wheel as they drove away. The 15-year-old remembered that her abductor wore a dark blue Dallas Cowboys T-shirt and jeans and smelled as if he had been sniffing paint. She wept and her heart raced as they turned left from the parking lot, passing a large school. The radio was tuned to a Spanish-language station. After several minutes, the car stopped in front of a light-colored house on the north side, and the abductor forced the teen from the car. Standing in front of the house, he began calling her a bitch and a whore and threatened to shoot her when she cried.

"Shut up so you don't wake anyone," the man said, according to the police narrative. "If you don't shut up I'll kill you."

Inside she saw the hardwood floors in the living room and two twin beds in a bedroom. She told police that she was raped and beaten on one of them and that when she began to scream, her assailant choked her and put a gun to her forehead. When he finished, he ordered her to dress and forced her back outside to a house a few doors down the street, where several other young men were drinking beer outside in the pre-dawn. The girl was certain the other men were about to rape her, too, so she ran.

"If you don't stop I'm going to shoot you!" the rapist yelled.

"Then shoot me!" she screamed.

The rapist did not pursue her. A few blocks away, she saw a man loading his pickup in the dark.

"Someone is going to kill me and I need to go home," she said, crying

The man agreed to help her. According to the police report, as they drove away, he asked the teenager if a young man by the name of David Ortiz was the one who had assaulted her, because the oldest Ortiz brother was "a very bad boy who lived just up the street." She said she didn't know.

Her mother called the police when her hysterical daughter got home. Within hours, witnesses from the bar led detectives to a suspect. In the hospital emergency room, when detectives laid out a photo lineup, it was not David Ortiz whom she identified. It was his brother Andy, who had been at the bar and given his pager number to one of the girl's friends.

Andy Ortiz was quickly arrested. When interrogated by detectives, he did not deny having sex with the girl. But he insisted that it was consensual and that, because of her fake ID, he did not know that the girl was underage. Investigators, after consulting with a Tarrant County prosecutor, determined that it would be difficult to prove otherwise. The teenager had been drinking heavily that night. She said she had been beaten repeatedly, but investigators found no corresponding bruises. She said her assailant had ripped off her underwear, but the panties seemed to have been cut off, a detail that detectives thought further weakened the case.

"There were a lot of credibility issues with the victim's story," said Judy Jones, the Fort Worth detective who investigated the case, in a recent interview. "That's why it wasn't filed."

Jones said that she studied Ortiz's lengthy rap sheet during her investigation.

"But again, there were so many credibility issues with the case, it wouldn't have been easy to file anyway," Jones said. "Even with his criminal history, you've got to have somebody who can testify credibly about the facts."

So instead of charging Ortiz with rape, Tarrant County prosecutors asked that his parole on an unrelated weapons charge from earlier that summer be revoked. He spent only a year behind bars. The 15-year-old's case became another in a long series of missed opportunities to put Ortiz away.

The scars from that night linger today, 14 years later. The girl's mother wept bitterly while she recalled her daughter's alleged assault and what the mother called the failure of police.

"They didn't do (expletive)," the mother said. "Now three girls are dead, and my daughter's bulimic."

In her frustration and heartbreak, the mother says, she still drives by the Ortiz house on Lee Avenue every few months. Jones says she understands her pain.

"I wish it could have been different," said Jones, now a captain in the traffic division. "I wish I could have filed the case in 1993, but at the time it just wasn't prosecutable because of inconsistencies. I had worked many kid victims. This was a passion of mine. I would have filed it if I could have, but I just couldn't."

A typical target

Yet another girl, five days shy of her 13th birthday when Ortiz pulled up to her house, was typical of his targets - young and pretty, with long, brown hair. The guy who called himself "Jaime" said he got her number through a friend of a friend. And though he looked much older than her, he seemed harmless enough as they chatted on her front steps.

Her mother was at work when he stopped by that day, July 9, 1997, and her brother was out, too, so there was no way she would let Jaime into her house. But what harm could there be in getting him a glass of water?

So she stepped inside and filled a glass from the kitchen faucet. When she turned to go back outside, she saw that Jaime had sneaked in. He refused when she insisted they return to the porch, pulling her down on a sofa and begging her to kiss him. Then the threats started. He said he would kill her if she didn't do what he wanted and threatened to strangle her with a telephone cord if she did not submit.

The rape went on for nearly an hour.

"He took my jewelry and told me that if I told anybody he would come back and kill me," she said in a recent interview. The woman is now 23. "I told him, 'I'm not going to tell anybody. I'm not going to tell anybody. You don't have to worry about it.' That's the thing that saved my life."

Her aunt called the police that day. Detectives were inside the girl's home a few hours after the attack, questioning her, when the telephone rang. She nearly fainted when she heard Jaime's voice on the other end of the line.

"I thought you said you wouldn't tell anybody," he said.

"How do you expect me to keep something like that a secret?" she said, crying and handing the telephone to an officer. But the line had gone dead.

In the days to come, investigators checked gang records for suspects named Jaime but came up empty. Police tried unsuccessfully to find the person who had given him the girl's telephone number. But she learned the probable identity of her attacker a few days later.

When she described the rapist to a friend - a short, paunchy Hispanic guy, short hair, and a tattoo of a girl beneath a sombrero on his shoulder - the friend said it sounded like a neighborhood gangster named Andy Ortiz. Pretty much everyone on the north side knew Ortiz, the friend said. Pretty much everyone was afraid of him and his brothers.

That was why the girl and her friend never shared their suspicions with police. They were afraid. And that fear greatly intensified in the first week of August, less than a month after she was raped, when word spread across the north side about the fate of another beautiful girl, Armida Garcia.

Next: A flirtation turns deadly.

Timeline

1984: Detective Curt Brannan joins the homicide unit of the Fort Worth Police Department.

Nov. 25, 1990: Andy Ortiz is arrested in the burglary of a car, the first of his many arrests as an adult.

1992: Brannan works the high-profile Caren Koslow murder case.

Early 1995: Ortiz first meets 13-year-old Armida Garcia at a convenience store and gets her phone number.

1995: Ortiz begins corresponding with and calling Armida from jail, where he is doing time on a theft charge.

Summer 1996: Nineteen-year-old Brenda Salazar moves to North Texas to pursue a job in the airline industry.

May 26, 1997: Salazar's roommate returns from out of town and discovers Salazar's body in their apartment just after 5 p.m. She was killed either late on May 25 or early on May 26.

May 27, 1997: Salazar's parents, who live in the Rio Grande Valley, are notified of her death.

May 28, 1997: Salazar's parents come to Fort Worth to meet with Brannan.

June 5, 1997: The Salazars return to Fort Worth to get Brenda's belongings and give Brannan a letter that raises his suspicions about one of Brenda's co-workers; the lead doesn't pan out.