Chapter 18 | An angry crony tries to get Ortiz to talk about murder

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 brought him to justice.

The story so far

Fort Worth Detective Curt Brannan spoke with Andy Ortiz, a suspect in the strangulation of a teenage girl. Ortiz said that he was with the girl at his house the night she died but that his friend Michael Olguin left with her.

CHAPTER 18

Andy Ortiz was not a good liar, Detective Curt Brannan thought as he drove away from the murder suspect's house that Wednesday night in July. After meeting and talking to the gang member for the first time, the veteran homicide investigator was even more certain that Ortiz had strangled young Krystal Minjarez then dumped her body at Marine Creek Lake, like so much garbage.

But what about Michael Olguin and Hector Gomez, the two guys who Ortiz said were with him the night Krystal was killed? That complicated matters. Brannan knew from long experience that most lies contain a shred of truth, so maybe Olguin and Gomez really had been there that night, had even participated in the killing. Brannan needed to find them both, pronto. So as the sun set on the summer day, the detective headed straight from Ortiz's north-side home to the south-side neighborhoods of Fort Worth, where the two men were believed to live.

Running down Gomez turned out to be easy. The 19-year-old was at home on Hemphill Street, and by the next day, July 27, 2000, he was sitting in a room at police headquarters, giving a statement. Gomez told detectives that he knew Ortiz; he had met him a few years before through Ortiz's cousin. Gomez said he and Ortiz hung out together for more than a year and often entertained teenage girls at Ortiz's house. And Gomez said Ortiz had recently told him of a girl named Krystal.

"He told me he had gone to her house and that she lived in a trailer," Gomez told police. "[Ortiz] told me he went to her house and they made out."

But Gomez never met Krystal, he said. He had not been to Ortiz's house in weeks. He had never met a guy named Michael Olguin. Gomez insisted that he had no part in Krystal's killing and had no idea who strangled her. (A polygraph exam administered Aug. 4 indicated that he was telling the truth.)

The 25-year-old Olguin was a tougher case. Through a check of state records, Brannan learned that the guy had been in and out of prison, sent away for crimes ranging from auto theft to assault to drug use. In fact, Olguin had just been released from the state pen in January. From his criminal record, it appeared that Olguin and Ortiz were cut from the same cloth. Olguin seemed either a likely accomplice or a fitting scapegoat. Either way, Brannan needed to find him.

The detective drove from place to place on the south side, but Olguin seemed to have vanished. Brannan spent the better part of a week tracking down his relatives and south-side homeys, urging them to pass along word that Brannan needed to speak to him immediately.

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