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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 Fort Worth police were unable to solve the case. Meanwhile, north-side gang member Andy Ortiz kept adding to his rap sheet -- including accusations of rape. He struck up an acquaintance with teenager Armida Garcia. On a Sunday night in August, her younger brother found her strangled in their home with laces from his own tennis shoes.CHAPTER 6From appearances alone, two men could not have been more different than Curt Brannan and Joe Thornton, both detectives working homicide in the Fort Worth Police Department in 1997.Brannan was 45 that summer, a native Texan and a senior investigator with 13 years in the unit. Thornton was 37, grew up in New York and was homicide's rookie. Brannan was tall and strapping, Thornton short and slender. Brannan was easygoing and gregarious, but Thornton was unusually quiet, a cop whose gentle nature seemed to belie his choice of occupations.But the two investigators also had much in common. Both were keenly intelligent, thorough and highly organized -- essential qualities for a homicide detective. More important, both saw their work investigating the ultimate crime as a sacred mission, part of an ongoing battle between good and evil. That passion inspired in both of them an acute, often painful awareness of the human suffering that was such a large part of their work.Such sensitivity could be a homicide detective's greatest professional asset and an exhausting occupational hazard -- an obsession that motivated them but also kept them awake at night. In the summer of 1997, Brannan would have more sleepless nights than at almost any other time in his long career.After Brenda Salazar's murder in late May, Brannan spent two months pursuing fruitless leads. Finally, in the first week of August, he sketched out a ring stolen during Salazar's murder and had the drawing published in the Star-Telegram, hoping that a pawnshop dealer might recognize it and call with a lead. But there was no response. None of the stolen items ever turned up. As summer dwindled, the trail grew cold.Thornton's ordeal began on a Sunday night, Aug. 3. His telephone rang about 10:30 p.m., just after he finished watching the late news at his home in North Richland Hills. A police dispatcher told him that a 15-year-old girl had been strangled and that her younger brother had found her body at their home. The detective jotted down the address on Fort Worth's north side, hurriedly put on a necktie and stepped out into the steamy summer night, anger rising up in him when he thought of the victim's age. Thornton was always particularly appalled when the elderly or children were victims.
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