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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 Fort Worth Detective Curt Brannan acted on a hunch and found that Andy Ortiz was linked by DNA to 1997 murder victim Brenda Salazar. Brannan began preparing an arrest warrant.CHAPTER 20For reasons both practical and personal, Detective Curt Brannan always wanted to be the one to slap handcuffs on a suspect at the end of a successful investigation. On the practical side, making the arrest allowed Brannan to size up his suspect, to see whether he was defiant, defeated or somewhere in between, which might suggest a method of interrogation later on. But just as important, for Brannan or any other homicide detective, the moment of arrest was one of supreme personal satisfaction."Do we get a star for it? No. Do we get extra pay for it? No," Brannan said recently. "But just to be able to look in this guy's face and look in his eyes and know that he knows we've got him. That's the fun part."Brannan had never anticipated an arrest with greater relish than the one he planned to make on Tuesday afternoon, Aug. 15, 2000. With both fingerprint and DNA evidence, Brannan felt he had nailed Andy James Ortiz for at least one murder -- the 1997 killing of 20-year-old Brenda Salazar. There would be no more slipping through the cracks. The north-side gang member, sexual predator and suspected serial killer would never be able to hurt young women or girls again.That afternoon in the homicide unit, after the DNA evidence fell into place, Brannan began spelling out the case against Ortiz in an affidavit for an arrest warrant. Brannan briefed chief felony prosecutor Alan Levy then called Joe Thornton, the former homicide detective who had arrested Ortiz three years before in the killing of 15-year-old Armida Garcia. Thornton had not been able to make the charges stick in that case, which had haunted him ever since. So Brannan knew that Thornton, by then a supervisor on the SWAT team, would want to be part of the arrest.At 3 p.m., Brannan and Levy walked to the Tarrant County Criminal Courts Building and into the chambers of visiting state District Judge C.C. "Kit" Cooke. The judge reviewed the affidavit, signed the warrant and set bail at $1 million. With a copy of the warrant in his pocket, Brannan set out in his Chevy Lumina for the familiar address on Lee Avenue on the north side. The house where Ortiz and his parents lived was already surrounded by Thornton's SWAT team.Brannan's cellphone rang when he was about halfway there. It was his supervisor, Sgt. Skeeter Anderson, who reported that Ortiz had gotten into his car and was about to drive away."What do you want to do?" Anderson asked.If Brannan couldn't be the one to nail the guy, at least Thornton would be there to take his place. "Go ahead and pop him," Brannan said.
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