Chapter 2 | Amid loss and heartache, a desperate quest for justice

Editor's note: To Catch a Killer is the true story of killer Andy James Ortiz, his young victims, and the Fort Worth detectives and Tarrant County prosecutors who brought him to justice.

The story so far

Twenty-year-old Brenda Salazar was found strangled in her apartment near Dallas/Fort Worth Airport. Fort Worth police, including Detective Curt Brannan, combed her apartment for clues. The investigation began.

CHAPTER 2

It was a Wednesday morning at 9 a.m., but Rosa Maria and Fermin Salazar were dressed in their Sunday clothes, sitting in a small room on the third floor of the Fort Worth Police Department. No environment could have been more foreign to the couple, migrant workers who had made the long drive north from their home in the Rio Grande Valley. No nightmare could have been worse than the one they were living that morning of May 28, 1997. Two days earlier, the body of their daughter Brenda had been found in her Fort Worth apartment, the strap used to strangle her still around her neck. Detective Curt Brannan now sat with the victim's parents in the room at the Police Department, telling them how sorry he was for their loss.

Brannan also said he needed to know everything about Brenda's life because it might help him catch her killer. But how could Fermin and Rosa Maria tell everything about their beloved daughter, who was so beautiful that she dabbled in modeling, who loved gymnastics and ballet, who ran track and played volleyball, who had a rose tattooed on her hip, who loved dried flowers, who underlined her favorite passages of Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe?

Perhaps it was inevitable that San Juan, Texas, could not contain such a spirit. Brenda's parents were traditional people from large Hispanic families who believed that their daughter should remain at home until marriage and continue the same modest life they had made. They argued with her and pleaded with her to stay when she told them of her plans to move to North Texas. She was too innocent. She would be safer at home. The begging went on right up to that late summer day in 1996.

Brenda had spent one last season with her family working in fields and orchards in Michigan.

On their way back home, her parents planned to drop her off in Arlington at the trade school for travel- and aviation-related fields. They stopped to buy her towels and bedding, but before they got to the school, Fermin pulled into a park and tried one last time to persuade Brenda to come home. Then 19, she remained steadfast.

"She said she was doing it to have a career and help us," her mother would remember a decade later.

It was some consolation that Brenda came home almost every other weekend and talked to her mother almost every day on the telephone, at least until the mounting long-distance bills forced them to cut back to mostly Sundays. On the visits home, Brenda spoke vaguely of her studies and her stopgap job at an Arlington telemarketing company and of her series of roommates.

If there was romance in her life, she never mentioned it. In fact, she sometimes sounded sad and lonely, even afraid. Brenda occasionally wondered out loud whether she had made the right decision. But always there were the weekend visits home.

The last was on Mother's Day weekend, when Brenda flew home with a new dress and cake for her mother. Before she left, Brenda went to the beauty salon where Rosa Maria worked between migrant seasons and asked her mother to put her hair in French braids.

"I don't like for you to work so much," Brenda told her mother. "When I finish my career, I want to set up a beauty salon that will be yours. I want you to have a better house."

"You have to study so you can have your own house," her mother replied.

Brenda's next visit home was supposed to be a few weeks later, over the Memorial Day holiday. But she called her mother the Thursday before to say she would wait a week and come back for her sister's high school graduation instead. That was the last time Rosa Maria heard her daughter's voice. There was no call from Brenda on Sunday morning, when the family typically heard from her, and the phone just rang when her mother tried calling later in the day. By the next day, Brenda's parents were worried enough to begin making plans for a trip to Fort Worth.

Then, at 4 a.m. on Tuesday, May 27, the phone finally did ring. But it was a San Juan police officer who said he needed to come to their house. When he arrived, he told Brenda's parents and siblings to go back inside and sit down. The officer delivered the news that Brenda was dead, that she had been murdered in her apartment. He left the number of the Tarrant County medical examiner's office. Because Fermin and Rosa Maria spoke little English, the call was made by Brenda's 18-year-old sister, Rosalia, the one who would graduate the next weekend.

"Is this a hospital?" Rosalia asked over and over, hoping there had been some terrible mistake.

The man's answer was always the same.

"No. This is a morgue."

By the next morning, the family was seated in the third-floor office with Brannan. A decade later, he still remembered the pleading, heartbroken look in their eyes.

"It was a look of total dependence on us to help them," Brannan said.

'COLLAGE OF SUSPECTS'

Eight days later, minutes after arriving for work, Brannan got a message that the Salazars were in the lobby of the police building, hoping to speak to him. He hurried downstairs and brought them up to his office, learning that they had returned to Fort Worth to collect Brenda's car and the rest of her belongings. But there was something they wanted to deliver in person: a three-page handwritten letter from Rosalia.

After a brief visit, Brannan drove them to the auto pound and helped them get Brenda's car. Back at the office, he sat down to read.

"We have a couple of things we want you to be aware of concerning people Brenda knew here in Fort Worth," Rosalia's letter began.

Based on his investigation so far, Brannan knew that most of the sister's suspicions were unwarranted. But as he came to the end of the letter, his interest grew.

"Brenda had told ... one of her close friends that she had met this guy by the name of Tommy at work," Rosalia wrote. "Tommy tried to choke her, he put his hands around her neck and said jokes about it, and he also kissed her without permission."

Who was this Tommy? The detective needed to find him, pronto. Brannan's interest intensified later that day after learning that there was indeed an employee named Tommy at the telemarketing firm where Brenda worked. Further checking revealed that the guy had a burglary conviction. More than a week after the killing, Tommy had moved to the top of Brannan's list of suspects.

"I felt good about him," Brannan recalled later. "We jumped on him pretty quick."

But Brannan's suspicions dissipated as quickly as they had arisen.

Tommy agreed to come in for questioning and denied even knowing Brenda Salazar. He underwent a polygraph test to prove it, and other parts of his story checked out. So Tommy fell back into a "collage of suspects," as Brannan called them.

Brenda Salazar

They were young men Brenda had briefly dated named Martin and Michael; co-workers and fellow students; friends of friends who Brannan learned had criminal records. The detective couldn't afford to ignore any of them. You never knew which rabbit trail might lead to the killer.

And he could be sure that someday, if he made it to the witness stand of a murder trial, a defense attorney would want to know exactly what he had done to eliminate each possibility.

That meant a long, frustrating summer of knocking on doors, leaving business cards, and talking to dozens of witnesses and potential suspects whose stories and recollections ultimately led nowhere.

Brannan knew only a few things for sure: On the Saturday evening of Memorial Day weekend, Brenda had gone to an Arlington bar called Desperado's to apply for a part-time waitressing job, but she was home sometime before 10. (A co-worker had called the apartment at that time and found her alive and well.) Sometime the next morning, her car was found about 15 miles away, out of gas and in the middle of an intersection. What had happened in the interim?

As Brannan continued working and the frustrations grew, he reminded himself that he had made some progress. He had gathered valuable pieces of evidence that would make a conviction likely if he could zero in on the right guy. For instance, a few unidentified fingerprints were found on Salazar's car. In early June, Brannan asked the Police Department's fingerprint expert, Loyd Courtney, to run the prints through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, a nationwide database of known offenders, and Courtney promised to comply. Courtney later told Brannan that he had run the print and nothing had come up.

Later in June, Brannan received a key piece of information. He learned from the Fort Worth crime lab that semen was found in Salazar's mouth and that there was a sufficient sample to identify the DNA. With the DNA evidence, Brannan encouraged his long list of suspects -- classmates, colleagues and ex-boyfriends -- to give blood samples. Many also agreed to submit to polygraph exams. One after another, each was cleared.

As the investigation continued, Brannan looked into a possible link to the so-called Railway Killer, who was raping and killing his way across Texas and the United States at the time, but the DNA in the Salazar investigation did not match genetic material from those cases. The Fort Worth detective also talked to Arlington counterparts who were investigating the "Bathtub Murders" of young women in that city, but again the DNA proved there was no link.

THE TRAIL GOES COLD

Early in the investigation, in late May through June and much of the summer, Brannan's case notes in the Salazar investigation consisted of several entries every day. By September, the entries had dwindled to four for the entire month. Then there were none. By that fall, the murder of Brenda Salazar had become a cold case. Without further clues, there was nothing else Brannan could do.

"When I was a little kid watching TV, I thought every murder case was solved," Brannan said years later. "When you watched The Lone Ranger, the good guys always won. By the end of the show and the bottom of the popcorn bucket, everybody knew what happened. But you know what? Now I know that's not the case. They're not all humanly solved."

Brannan would continue to live with the Salazar case. Maybe he would see a young woman who resembled the victim or drive by a place associated with the case, and the minimovie that played in his head when he first saw a crime scene would start again. Several times over the next three years, he dug the Salazar file out of his desk to look it over, searching for something he might have missed. And he continued to give assurances to the Salazar family.

"This case will not be forgotten," Brannan once told Brenda Salazar's mother. "It's not going to be put in a drawer, Mrs. Salazar, and forgotten as long as I'm a detective in this unit. ... I know [the case] and anything that comes in, I will compare to this case, any other similar cases. Sometimes people start talking; information comes in with a phone call and all of a sudden it cracks ... wide open."

And he was right. Three years later, the truth would be known, and Brannan himself would play a crucial role in revealing it. But it was an uglier reality than anyone could have known, an investigative trail that would lead back to a lovely young girl named Armida, to a criminal named Andy Ortiz, and to the sickening contents of the murder suspect's bedroom.

Next: Ortiz and Armida meet.

Timeline

1984: Detective Curt Brannan joins the homicide unit of the Fort Worth Police Department.

1992: Brannan works the high-profile Caren Koslow murder case.

Summer 1996: Nineteen-year-old Brenda Salazar moves to North Texas to pursue a job in the airline industry.

May 26, 1997: Salazar's roommate returns from out of town and discovers Salazar's body in their apartment just after 5 p.m. Salazar was killed either late on May 25 or early on May 26.