Chapter 12 | For detective, a mysterious trail starts at the water's edge

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

Andy 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 12

As 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."

Darkness came over the lake. The cowboy detective had floodlights brought to the crime scene. It was nearly midnight by the time Cates and McGill made it back home. He would never forget the sight of that body. The couple never returned to the spot on Marine Creek Lake.

A grisly scene

Detective Curt Brannan's cellphone rang at 8 p.m. that Friday, one day after his 49th birthday. The detective, a black belt in karate, had been in his barn at home, pounding the heavy bag, working out the stresses of life in the homicide unit. When he answered the phone, he felt the familiar surge of adrenaline, the jolt that still hit him on tough cases, even after 16 years of investigating murders in Fort Worth.

Sgt. Freddy Garcia was calling from Marine Creek Lake. Brannan and Garcia usually chatted about their shared passion for rodeo, bull riding in particular. But not this time.

"It's a female," Garcia told Brannan. "Looks like she's been here awhile."

"Freddy, you got any witnesses for me out there?" Brannan asked.

Garcia assured him that they would be waiting. Brannan hung up, hurried to his house and showered, kissed his wife, grabbed his cowboy hat and sped toward his latest mystery.

After the 40-minute drive, a patrol officer was waiting on the service road to guide Brannan to the spot on the lake. But as was his habit, Brannan did not rush to the body, preferring to interview the officers and witnesses first. He talked to Garcia, the man who found the body, Cates and McGill, then a fellow named John Beach who said he had been living by the lake between jobs. Beach told Brannan that that side of the lake was a popular hangout for people like him and for prostitutes who liked to entertain their johns in the seclusion by the water.

All the witnesses seemed cooperative, and nothing about their demeanor invited suspicion. So after a half-hour, Brannan excused himself and followed crime scene officers down a path, noticing the hamburger wrappers, beer bottles and pieces of clothing that littered the ground. This was hardly a wholesome picnic area, Brannan thought. When the officers neared the water, they pointed down another little path to the right. Brannan, holding a notebook and tape recorder in one hand, fought his way through the brush for 20 feet until he stood over the body.

It was a terrible scene, and as the detective looked down in the fading light, he paused to pray. But Brannan could not afford to indulge the anger that welled up in him at times like these. He dictated into his tape recorder instead, noting that the body looked to be that of a female, on her back with her arms spread. She was barefoot, wearing dark blue pants and a white cotton tube top beneath a long-sleeved satin blouse with a dark floral pattern. Her reddish-brown hair was spread on the ground in a manner suggesting that she had been dragged feet-first to the spot by her killer.

By the advanced state of decomposition of the body, exposed as it was to the heat and humidity, Brannan figured that the corpse had been there about three days. The face and neck were infested with maggots. There was no purse or identification and no way to tell just by looking whether the victim was young or old, Anglo, black or Hispanic, large or small. The flowered blouse was the sort of thing an older woman might wear, Brannan thought. But the toenails and fingernails were painted a bright pink -- not a color an older lady would favor.

Then, looking closely, he saw a metal necklace or wire around the victim's bloated throat, protruding from the left side of the neck. Whoever this was, she had almost certainly been strangled.

Looking for any clue

After 30 minutes of studying the body and the surrounding area, Brannan told crime scene officers to gather the assorted debris, because it was impossible to tell what was garbage and what was evidence. Had one of those Budweiser cans belonged to the killer? Unlikely but not unthinkable.

Then the detective walked back to where Beach waited, asking the witness to follow him toward the water. Beach gagged when he saw the corpse, but after pulling himself together, he said that judging by the hair color, he thought the victim could be one of the twin hookers -- Lisa and Michelle -- who commonly worked this spot.

"Look for them at the Peppermint Hotel," Beach said.

After Brannan had spent nearly three hours at the scene, his cellphone rang again. Another death in another part of town. This was often the way it went, case piled upon case in a world where people killed each other with heartbreaking frequency.

Brannan instructed crime scene officers to return to the lake the next morning and comb the area in daylight, and he hurried off into the night.

The second death was on the west side of town, a man with a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the chest. That case was open-and-shut, yet it was nearly 2 a.m. when Brannan started home. On the way, a vice officer called to say that Lisa and Michelle had been located, alive and well. Back at his place, 3 acres in a suburb south of Fort Worth, Brannan tried to keep from waking his wife and two sons as he stepped into the house. He poured a glass of ice water and sat down on the sofa in his living room, replaying the night, anticipating the media calls that would probably await him in the morning. And he grappled with the question that needed to be answered first.

Who was the murdered woman by Marine Creek Lake?

The autopsy

At his desk the next morning, Brannan sorted through missing-persons reports, focusing on one that described the disappearance of a 17-year-old girl from her home in north Fort Worth. The girl had told her father that "she didn't want to be his little girl any longer," then vanished.

"This shall be followed up thoroughly," Brannan wrote in his case notes.

At 2:30 p.m., he drove from police headquarters to the Tarrant County medical examiner's office, a nondescript brick building in the Fort Worth Hospital District. He was shown into a sterile-looking classroom where pathologist Dan Konzelmann was beginning to work. Brannan put on an apron to stand at the coroner's elbow, which he considered a crucial part of his job. Brannan always wanted to watch the autopsy so he could see the contents of the victim's stomach or the trajectory of a bullet wound. By the end of the postmortem, he often had a fairly clear picture of the victim's last few minutes of life.

That Saturday afternoon, Brannan watched as Konzelmann washed the body and maggots ran off into a drain beneath the gurney. (The gory parts of the job, the biological processes at work, never bothered Brannan. He was known to eat lunch after observing an autopsy.) Konzelmann then noted the clothing and the sparkly pink nail polish. There was a dark-colored band caught in the victim's hair that Brannan hadn't noticed the night before, used to pull her hair into a ponytail.

Then Brannan peered in closer as Konzelmann clipped off the ligature, a piece of white and yellow wire with frayed ends, probably from a stereo, tied at the left side of the victim's throat in an elaborate bow. The wire was only 10 inches long.

As he stood next to the coroner, Brannan tried to imagine the crime, how the killer had used his weapon, how he had overpowered this person before him. But too much mystery remained. There were too many unanswered questions to have a hint about who committed this murder, how and why. Before Brannan left that day, Konzelmann gave him a few important pieces of information. The victim had weighed about 100 pounds. And judging by her teeth, she was not an old woman, but a young one.

Neither Brannan nor the pathologist could have guessed then just how young.

Next: A Crowley woman grows increasingly concerned about her missing young niece.

On TV: A Star-Telegram documentary about Andy Ortiz's crimes will debut at 8 p.m. March 9 on KTXA/Channel 21.

Timeline

Nov. 25, 1990: Andy Ortiz is arrested in the burglary of a car, the first of his many arrests as an adult.

Sept. 4, 1991: Ortiz is accused of kidnapping a 13-year-old girl. An aggravated-kidnapping charge is dismissed as part of a plea bargain when Ortiz agrees to a nine-year sentence for earlier burglaries. He is paroled after nine months.

Aug. 8, 1993: Ortiz is accused of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl, but there isn't enough evidence to go to trial. He is returned to jail on a parole violation and serves one year.

Early 1995: Ortiz first meets 13-year-old Armida Garcia at a convenience store and gets her phone number.

1995: Ortiz begins corresponding with and calling Garcia from jail, where he is doing time on a theft charge.

December 1995: Ortiz is released from prison.

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

Early 1997: Ortiz meets a 15-year-old girl named Anna.

May 26, 1997: Salazar's roommate discovers Salazar's body in their apartment just after 5 p.m.

July 9, 1997: A 12-year-old girl is raped by a man matching Ortiz's description; she decides not to pursue the case.

July 19, 1997: Ortiz tries to kiss Garcia and is rebuffed; they don't speak for two weeks.

Aug. 3, 1997: Garcia is strangled in her parents' bedroom.

Aug. 4, 1997: A caller tips off Detective Joe Thornton that Ortiz might be her killer.

Aug. 5, 1997: A warrant is issued for Ortiz on a charge of capital murder.

Aug. 8, 1997: Ortiz is arrested in Garcia's killing; Thornton tries to get a confession from Ortiz.

Fall 1997: The Salazar murder case grows cold.

Late 1997: Ortiz is jailed on parole violations; he begins corresponding with Anna.

January 1998: Thornton gets a tip that someone may have seen Ortiz fleeing from Garcia's home the night of the killing, but he's unable to find the witness.

Summer 1998: Ortiz's brother Elton is arrested for killing a man in a dispute over a girl. He would be sentenced to 99 years in prison.

July 1999: Andy Ortiz is released from jail; he moves in with Anna.

Jan. 29, 2000: Ortiz marries Anna.

March 8, 2000: Ortiz's mother-in-law kicks him out of the house.

March 22, 2000: Ortiz threatens his estranged wife; the next day, she contacts the police.