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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 farYoung Brenda Salazar was found strangled in her apartment near Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, but that case went cold. North-side gang member Andy Ortiz was accused of rape in another case and arrested -- but not charged. He was sent back to prison for a parole violation.CHAPTER 5The collect calls kept coming from the Tarrant County Jail, at least until Armida Garcia's father saw the charges on the telephone bill. Armida was on the phone too much as it was, Juan Garcia thought, but talking to a prisoner? That had to stop. So in late 1995 he laid down the law with his 13-year-old daughter.But Andy Ortiz would not be deterred. The high school dropout, in his early 20s and in jail for gang-related crimes, began writing to Armida instead. The increasingly lurid letters became forbidden entertainment for the girl and her two closest friends, Alma Puente and Arianna Barbosa.To them, Ortiz had seemed sort of brotherly at first, promising to protect the girls from neighborhood toughs when he got out. But then he asked Armida and Alma to send him photographs. (They didn't.) He asked them to send a pair of their panties. (Neither would think of doing it.) Then he began to describe sex acts, which the girls found at once disgusting and sort of thrilling."We were surprised because nobody would speak to us like that," Alma remembered thinking of the letters, then hidden in Armida's bedroom. "We were like, 'Oh my God! Oh my God!' This is the first guy who is actually telling us how he liked girls, what he likes girls to do and we're like, 'Do you think we would ever really like that?' I guess we saw him as a teacher of sorts."Armida, for one, insisted that curiosity was as far as it went. On at least one occasion, she drew the line in a telephone conversation with the prisoner when he began to express more than a brotherly interest."Look, I don't like you in that way," she told Ortiz. "If you don't want to be my friend, then we just won't talk anymore.""Well, I'd rather have you as a friend so I'm going to treat you as a sister from now on," Ortiz replied.Ortiz was on his best behavior in a letter that Armida's mother later found stashed behind a picture in the girl's room."I know we've talked about weird [things] in the past, but I want to see you treated right," he wrote. "So will you let me offer you a good thing? Yes or no? I want to be like a big [brother] or best homie or [cousin] to you and I'll tell you why. Your nice as they come. Your pretty, sweet, dress all that, [firm] body, cute personality, etc. I could go on about you, [but] by now your blushing like a red apple."Ortiz continued in that vein when he was released from jail just after Christmas 1995. Armida agreed to meet him once or twice, usually at the convenience store near her home, where other people would be around. But as time passed and Armida matured, her friends noticed that Ortiz's interest intensified. He would scream at her when she refused his increasingly blatant advances.
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