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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 far A friend of murder suspect Andy Ortiz wore a police wire and tried to get Ortiz to talk about the murder of 13-year-old Krystal Minjarez, but the tactic failed.CHAPTER 19On a mostly sleepless night in the second week of August 2000, Fort Worth Detective Curt Brannan wrestled with the dark riddle of Andy Ortiz. Three weeks after the strangulation of 13-year-old Krystal Minjarez, Brannan remained certain that Ortiz had killed her and another teenager, Armida Garcia, three years before. But proving it was another matter, and as the summer dwindled, Brannan found himself largely stymied.As he tossed and turned early that Thursday morning, Aug. 10, another frustrating investigation began to intrude on his thoughts. Brannan kept coming back to the May 1997 murder of a 20-year-old woman named Brenda Salazar, a telemarketer and aspiring flight attendant found strangled in her apartment near Dallas/Fort Worth Airport. The killing was one of just a handful that Brannan had not solved during his 16 years in the homicide unit. He would never forget the heartbroken, pleading eyes of the victim's parents -- migrant workers from the Rio Grande Valley -- or his own frustration at not bringing her killer to justice."When you've got a case like this, it will pop up at odd times," Brannan said in an interview last year. "Maybe you're watching the national news and there's a story about a girl who was murdered and, poof, there's Brenda. Maybe I'm in a theater and a girl screams and there's Brenda."At the time, there seemed to be nothing more that Brannan could have done. Convinced that Salazar had known her killer, the detective interviewed dozens of her friends, acquaintances and fellow students at an Arlington travel academy. He acquired DNA samples from the leading suspects. (Semen had been found in Salazar's mouth, which meant her attacker had probably left a sample of his genetic material.) Brannan also had lie-detector tests administered to many of those who had known the victim. One by one, the suspects were cleared. Eventually, there were no more clues to pursue.As the months turned into years, the Salazar case would haunt Brannan as few others did. So it was natural that Brannan would wonder: What about Ortiz? Could he have murdered Brenda, too?The detective's instincts said no. Brenda was older than Armida and Krystal, who fit the profile of the underage Hispanic girls Ortiz was known to prey upon. Armida had been strangled with shoelaces, Krystal with speaker wire, and both ligatures had been tied in a bow. Brenda had been strangled with a strap.And it was hard for Brannan to imagine Brenda -- a demure young woman with lofty ambitions -- hanging out with a high school dropout and longtime gang member like Ortiz. Finally, Brenda's apartment near D/FW was a long way from the north side of Fort Worth, Ortiz's known hunting grounds.
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