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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 farDetective Joe Thornton was in the middle of an investigative nightmare trying to prove that Andy Ortiz had killed 15-year-old Armida Garcia. He had high hopes for a break in the case from Ortiz's friend Michael Botello, who first claimed that Ortiz told him he had killed the girl but who later changed his story.CHAPTER 10On a September morning in 1997, more than a month after the murder of Armida Garcia, Detective Joe Thornton carried a summary of his investigation to the Tarrant County Criminal Courts Building across the street. There, in a fourth-floor office, Assistant District Attorney Robert Foran reviewed the file and delivered the bad news: Although Andy Ortiz had been arrested in connection with Armida's death and was still being held on an unrelated parole violation, Thornton's case was not strong enough to take to a grand jury for a capital murder indictment, much less to trial.It was a difficult moment, and for years afterward, both Thornton and Foran were haunted by what might have been. If a young girl named Ann had come forward to testify that she had seen Ortiz fleeing down the alley near Armida's home, Foran's decision might have been different. Cooperation from Michael Botello, who let Ortiz stay at his place after Armida's killing, might also have made the difference.And there was more: A crucial piece of evidence that could have provided a definitive link to Armida's killer instead sat ignored in a freezer in the Fort Worth Police Department crime lab.Armida had been a demure teenage girl, but clearly, given the bruises on her arms, she had fought desperately against her attacker on the night she was killed. It would not have been surprising if her killer had left a deposit of flesh beneath her fingernails. Nail clippings were taken from Armida during her autopsy and carefully preserved for DNA testing. But three long years would pass before the tests were done.Blame for the oversight remains a matter of speculation but likely lies with the crime lab, which was understaffed and poorly managed at the time and was described by one former worker as "a train wreck." Staff training and scientific methods were later found to be so dubious that in 2003, the Tarrant County district attorney launched a criminal investigation into the lab. No charges were filed, but testing of all DNA evidence was suspended and outsourced to private laboratories. (That is still the case today.)Despite the operation's shortcomings, in 1997 Fort Worth detectives still relied on crime lab technicians to screen evidence and suggest whether costly DNA analysis might yield valuable clues. In Armida's case, Thornton said, the crime lab advised against testing her fingernails for Ortiz's genetic material, though a decade later he could not remember why.
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