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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 farAndy Ortiz, a felon with a long rap sheet, was a suspect in the murder of 15-year-old Armida Garcia on Fort Worth's north side in 1997, but police couldn't pull together enough evidence to satisfy the district attorney. So Ortiz, imprisoned on an unrelated parole violation, was back on the streets in 1999.CHAPTER 12As leisure spots go it wasn't much, just a pond really, tucked into the grassy hills off the freeway in northwest Fort Worth. But to Danny Cates and his girlfriend, Tammy McGill, Marine Creek Lake was a slice of heaven, a place to escape the noise and pressures of the inner city, put out a line for catfish, sit back and drink a cold beer or two. It was their favorite place, in fact, until July 21, 2000.That Friday about 6 p.m., he and McGill loaded a cooler and fishing poles into their Pontiac Sunbird and set off for the lake from their home in east Fort Worth. A thunderstorm had passed through that afternoon, but now the weather was bright and clear as they turned off Northwest Loop 820 onto a service road. The last stretch to the lake wasn't really a road at all, just a deeply rutted path that wound through thick brush, up and down hills, to the hidden spot by the water where Cates liked to fish.He never got the chance to cast out a line. As they drove down a hill, he and McGill saw a parked pickup and a heavyset guy who was pacing. Cates pulled up and stopped."Hey, man, you lose something?" he asked."I don't know how to tell you this," the man said. "I just saw something down there."The man gestured toward the water."I don't know what to make of it," he said. "I think it's a body."The guy was clearly terrified. As Cates followed the man through the brush toward the water, a strange odor grew stronger and stronger, "a sweet, chocolaty, nasty smell," as Cates would later describe it. Then, near the water, the man pointed off to the right, and Cates' stomach rose into his throat.The corpse was on its back, its feet dangling toward the water. The body, dressed in what looked like blue pants and a blue and green shirt, was bloated and discolored."I thought it was a real old lady at first," Cates said years later. "It was the saddest sight I've ever seen in my life. I never want to see it again."Suspecting foul play, Cates stayed at least 20 yards away, not wanting to invite suspicion. The other man wanted to vanish for the same reason. But Cates said the right thing to do was to call the police. Patrol cops pulled up to the lake within a few minutes, followed an hour or so later by a cowboy detective with white hair, a white mustache and a big white hat."I'll never forget him, that big old cowboy," Cates remembered. "He was tall. Huge. ... He had this deep voice and that cowboy hat and brown blazer. He told us who he was, who he worked for and where it would go from there."
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