Posted on Sat, Feb. 16, 2008

Chapter 7 | A case builds against Ortiz, but will it be strong enough?

By Tim Madigan, With Deanna Boyd and Melody McDonald

Star-Telegram staff writers

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 finally brought him to justice.

The story so far

Two young women, ages 20 and 15, were found strangled in Fort Worth in 1997, but the two cases remained unconnected. Police were unable to solve the case of Brenda Salazar, and the investigation had just begun into the death of Armida Garcia, 15, on Aug. 3. Homicide Detective Joe Thornton spent a long night at the crime scene and the hospital, where he broke the news to the girl's parents.

CHAPTER 7

On Monday, Aug. 4, 1997, the day after 15-year-old Armida Garcia was raped and strangled in her home, Andy Ortiz's days of freedom seemed numbered. The notorious north-side gang member had terrorized his Fort Worth neighborhood for much of the previous decade but managed to sidestep a long prison term -- until now, police thought.

Fort Worth homicide Detective Joe Thornton arrived at his desk before 8 that morning, and within minutes he got a call from a woman who said she was the mother of a boy who had dated Armida. The caller said she had been on the phone much of the night with the victim's closest friend, Arianna Barbosa, and Arianna had speculated that Ortiz was the killer.

Thornton's pulse skipped the moment he heard the name. He had known about Ortiz for years, since his days as a rookie patrol officer working the north side, where other cops frequently complained about the criminal exploits of Ortiz and his two brothers, David and Elton. Thornton came face to face with the brothers on a June night in 1993 when he was supervisor of the SWAT unit and led a raid on the Ortiz home. He helped bust open the front door to serve a search warrant, because the brothers were suspected of making Molotov cocktails for use in gang reprisals. That night, three homemade bombs were found beneath the hood of an Ortiz family car. All three brothers were home at the time, and Thornton helped take them into custody.

But it was just another missed opportunity to put Andy Ortiz away. The brothers insisted the bombs were planted by members of a rival gang, and ultimately police believed they could not prove otherwise. So Andy Ortiz's criminal odyssey continued. He was free on a day in 1995 when he happened into Armida Garcia at a neighborhood convenience store.

The day after Armida's murder, Thornton learned quickly how the next two years had played out between the two. As time passed, Ortiz had been increasingly aggressive in his pursuit of the girl and had grown angrier when she refused his advances. The last time Armida had spurned Ortiz was on the day of her death.

So before lunch on the first day of the investigation, the detective was almost certain he knew the identity of Armida's killer. But his excitement was momentary.

"Now," Thornton wondered, "how am I going to prove it?"

A witness comes forward

The answer, or at least part of it, came that same morning. Just after 11 a.m. Thornton and his partner in the homicide unit, Manny Reyes, pulled up in front of the Garcia home on Denver Avenue. They planned to interview the girl's family and also hoped to get a look at sexually suggestive letters Ortiz had supposedly sent to her.

The detectives spoke to Armida's grieving parents and helped them search her bedroom for the letters, with no luck. But while they were there, Thornton and Reyes were introduced to Roberto Jordan, Armida's cousin, who volunteered his description of his visit to the Garcia home the night before. By the end of the day, Jordan had also picked Ortiz out of a photo lineup, saying he was almost certain that Ortiz was the man he saw with Armida.

"Now we really have something," Thornton thought.

That afternoon, almost every passing hour seemed to bring greater certainty. Thornton interviewed a boy who had dated Armida and talked to a grocery sacker nicknamed Mimo who had planned to take her out the night she died. Both had alibis and were quickly eliminated as suspects.

Thornton spoke to Armida's friend Arianna while his partner interviewed her older sister, Angelica Barajas. Arianna described Ortiz's growing obsession with Armida, while Angelica spoke of how she had also been stalked by the suspect.

Just before 3 p.m. Thornton got his first look at Ortiz's long rap sheet, amazed that the guy had remained free after everything he had done. But what jumped out was Ortiz's arrest six years earlier on an aggravated-kidnapping charge. He was accused of grabbing a 13-year-old neighborhood girl off the street near his home, pulling her inside and trying to rape her. The case was dismissed as part of a plea bargain, but Thornton began to see Ortiz as a child predator whose dangerous tendencies had been unchecked for too long.

By that night, word about Ortiz had begun to filter in from the street. At 8:50 p.m. a gang unit officer called to say that Ortiz had admitted killing Armida to an anonymous informant and was preparing to flee the city. Thornton immediately conferred with the homicide supervisor, Sgt. Paul Kratz, and the two decided they had enough evidence to bring in Ortiz. Working alone in the homicide unit past midnight, Thornton summarized the evidence in a two-page affidavit.

At noon the next day, a city magistrate signed an arrest warrant accusing Ortiz of capital murder. The hunt for Ortiz had officially begun.

'She was a nice person'

Four days after Armida's murder, Ortiz's mug shot appeared at the top of the Star-Telegram's front page, next to the large headline: "Parolee, 23, sought in girl's rape and killing."

The story described what was known about the girl's murder and the suspect's long criminal record, which included arrests for burglary, kidnapping, criminal mischief, disorderly conduct, assault and theft. The paper also described a somber scene inside the Denver Avenue home where the girl had been raped and strangled. Friends and relatives brought food, talking quietly to Armida's parents and younger brother. Amid the whispered condolences, Armida smiled out from a large photograph taken on her quinceañera, her 15th birthday party, just a few months before. In the picture, she wore a dazzling white dress.

"I am glad the police are doing something," her father, Juan Garcia, said that night. "I want them to find him, but that's not going to bring my daughter back again.

"She was beautiful. She was a nice person. I don't know how anyone could do this to my family," Garcia said.

That same evening, just a few blocks away, Thornton and several other officers knocked again on the front door of the white house on Lee Avenue, attempting to serve the arrest warrant on Ortiz. They were met with the well-known hostility of the suspect's mother, Stella Ortiz. Her son was not at home but planned to turn himself in the next morning, she insisted. If the police didn't leave immediately, the mother said, she would file a grievance with Fort Worth Police Chief Thomas Windham. "I'm not leaving until I know your son isn't here," Thornton replied.

The officers looked through the house without finding Ortiz. But that night, seeing how vehemently Stella Ortiz defended her son, Thornton became less concerned that the fugitive would flee the city. Andy Ortiz, the detective thought, was unlikely to stray too far from his mother.

On the run, but close to home

Gang unit officer Dean Christensen joined the search with relish. He and other gang officers had been putting up with Ortiz and his bravado for too long. "You can't do nothin' to me," Ortiz would tell cops in one scrape after another. And most times, in the end, he would pretty much be right.

Police would pop him, thinking that they had him good, only to see him back on the street a few weeks or months later. Christensen also remembered his own confrontation with Stella Ortiz, who once drove up to where her son had been stopped for a traffic violation and loudly accused the officer of harassment. (Stella Ortiz declined repeated interview requests for this series.)

By that first week of August 1997, north-side police were more than fed up with mother and son and were not surprised when the inevitable happened: Ortiz had finally crossed the line, had committed the kind of crime that would get him put away forever. Not even the most lenient judge or the most crowded prison system would allow Ortiz to slip through the cracks this time, they thought.

Christensen and other members of the gang unit pursued a series of tips about Ortiz's location. Informants said Ortiz was staying with this friend or that. One night he was said to be hiding at his grandparents' home. But when police closed in, they would often find that Ortiz had slipped away hours before. And the suspected killer had let it be known that he would not be taken alive, that he would kill any cop who tried to arrest him.

The final tip came in on Friday night, Aug. 8. Just after 8 p.m., police surrounded a wood-frame house on Northwest 17th Street, the home of an Ortiz friend named Michael Botello. A young woman came out and told police that the suspect was inside and ready to surrender. Officers trained their weapons on the front door as it swung open, and Ortiz stumbled out with his hands raised. He fell to the ground, sobbing like a child.

"Don't kill me!" he pleaded. "Please don't kill me!"

A decade later, Christensen vividly remembered the moment.

"I thought to myself, 'Man, you are so fricking pathetic,'" he said.

Police took a plastic grocery bag containing a pair of maroon underwear, a black tank top, a pair of blue-and-white tennis shoes, and a Motorola pager. Ortiz asked officers to give his belongings to his mother. Then he was shoved into the back seat of a squad car and driven to police headquarters, where Joe Thornton would begin the most important interrogation of his career.

Next: Face to face with Andy Ortiz.

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.

Sept. 4, 1991: Ortiz is accused of kidnapping a 13-year-old girl. An aggravated-kidnapping charge is dismissed as part of a plea bargain when Ortiz agrees to a nine-year sentence for earlier burglaries. He is paroled after nine months.

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

Aug. 8, 1993: Ortiz is accused of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl, but there isn't enough evidence to go to trial. He is returned to jail on a parole violation and is released after serving one year.

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 Garcia from jail, where he is doing time on a theft charge.

December 1995: Ortiz is released from prison.

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

1997: Detective Joe Thornton joins the homicide unit of the Fort Worth Police Department.

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 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.

July 9, 1997: A 12-year-old girl is raped by a man matching Ortiz's description; she decides not to pursue the case after becoming fearful of reprisals.

July 19, 1997: Ortiz tries to kiss Garcia and is rebuffed by her; they don't speak again for two weeks.

Aug. 3, 1997: Garcia is strangled in her parents' bedroom on Fort Worth's north side.

Fall 1997: The Salazar murder case grows cold.