Chapter 15 | A frightening question: How many other victims?

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 24 chapters will continue through March 9, with a chapter published most days.

The story so far

Fort Worth police suspected that Andy Ortiz, a north-side gang member with a long criminal record, killed 13-year-old Krystal Minjarez of Crowley. A judge signed a warrant for police to search the Ortiz home.

CHAPTER 15

Stella Ortiz had stood up for her son all his life, loudly insisting to anyone who would listen that Andy Ortiz was a good boy. No matter how many times Fort Worth police came by the family home on Lee Avenue looking for Andy, no matter how many times Andy was accused of crimes against young girls -- rape and even murder -- Stella would proclaim his innocence. She would say that Andy, the middle of her three sons, was harassed by police because he was Hispanic. She knew people. She would call the police chief or her city councilman.

The mother was no different on Wednesday morning, July 26, 2000. A team of police officers arrived about an hour after sunrise with a search warrant, looking for evidence that might link her son to the killing of another young girl. Stella Ortiz greeted them in her nightclothes with a big German shepherd at her side. The officers would not be allowed into her home, she shouted. Andy wasn't a killer. In fact, at that very moment, he was at work for a contractor doing odd jobs. This was racism. Yes, she was aware of all the girls going in and out of her son's room, but being popular with the ladies was not a crime.

But this time, the police had little patience for her protestations.

"Ma'am, you need to put that dog on a chain," Curt Brannan, the homicide detective in charge, recalled saying. "No ma'am, we're not going to wait out here while you call your attorney. That's not how this works. Here's a copy of the warrant. You see it's been signed by a judge. We're coming in, and we're going to search. We'll do it as professionally as possible, but please step aside."

Piecing the puzzle together

Brannan had arrived at the house on Lee Avenue at 6 a.m., conducting surveillance more than an hour ahead of the rest of the search team. As he pulled up, he noted that the clapboard house was dark but that a light still burned in the garage apartment out back. The cars around the residence remained as they were late the night before, when Brannan and his supervisor had come by.

As he sat alone in his sedan, the veteran homicide detective's stomach tumbled with anticipation. He had been working murder cases for 16 years by then, hundreds of them, but most were pretty much open-and-shut. This was different. The strangulation of 13-year-old Krystal Minjarez was what Brannan referred to as a "big deal," a tragedy and bona fide whodunit of the sort that came along only so often in a detective's career. And the more pieces that fit together, the bigger the case became.

As he waited, Brannan went over the puzzle in his head. Eight days earlier, on July 18, the teenage victim had sneaked out of her aunt's suburban trailer home and called Andy Ortiz from a friend's house. Ortiz, a north-side gang member, had been the primary suspect in the rape and strangulation of another teenage girl, Armida Garcia, three years before. Frustrated Fort Worth detectives could not put Ortiz away in that case, could never find the evidence to satisfy prosecutors. But Brannan was convinced as he sat alone that morning that they would get him this time.

Speaker wire and flip-flops were at the forefront of the detective's thoughts. Five days before, Brannan had stood on the shore of Marine Creek Lake in northwest Fort Worth, looking down at the decomposing and barefoot body of a female who had a length of speaker wire coiled tightly around her neck. A few days later, after the body was identified, Brannan learned that Krystal was last seen wearing blue flip-flops. Where were they now? Where was the rest of that wire?

Wouldn't it be cool, Brannan thought, if matching wire or those flip-flops were inside the house on Lee? That would go a long way toward proving that the girl was in the Ortiz home before she was killed, go a long way toward finally putting Ortiz away. The minutes passed slowly as Brannan waited for the others. He was eager to get going.

Searching for clues

The search team arrived at 7:20 a.m., and 10 minutes later, Brannan knocked on the front door. When there was no answer, he led the officers around to the back, where Stella Ortiz met them in the back yard with her dog. Her husband, David, also stepped out of the garage apartment but seemed more interested in getting to work on time than interfering with police. Stella Ortiz had to eventually relent or be arrested. She chained up her dog and lingered, watched the police and continued her diatribe about harassment. (David and Stella Ortiz declined repeated interview requests for this story.)

The officers divided up the property. Teams of detectives searched the parents' garage living quarters and found nothing of interest before moving into the main house, which still smelled strongly of smoke from a fire more than a year earlier. Just inside the back door, on a screened-in porch, Brannan found at least half of what he was looking for: a stereo system, other electronic equipment and speaker wire everywhere.

Brannan's pulse quickened. He was more convinced than ever that the investigation was on the right track. Seeing the wire scattered throughout the residence, Brannan was certain that Ortiz had used it as a weapon of opportunity. The detective could finally picture how the suspect attacked the unwitting teenager, reaching out for what was handy as Krystal struggled, grabbing a piece of wire, coiling the ligature around her neck.

The problem, as Brannan saw it during the search that morning, was that there was so much wire, in several sacks and everywhere in the house. As he examined it with gloved hands, Brannan saw pieces very similar to the white and yellow wire used to strangle Krystal, but finding the mate to the murder weapon might take days, like looking for a needle in a haystack, Brannan thought.

Then, more than an hour into the search, Brannan was distracted by more sobering concerns. Detective Larry Taylor walked onto the porch, where Brannan sorted through the wire, and said he had found a pornographic video that featured underage Hispanic girls. A few minutes after that, Brannan's partner, Michel Carroll, emerged from a bedroom to report a discovery of his own.

"Curt," he said, "there's something you have to see."

Another Ted Bundy?

Later that morning, detectives cleared off several desks at the Fort Worth homicide unit to make room for the grim harvest of their search. The haul included dozens of photographs, almost all of underage Hispanic girls, some posed suggestively with Ortiz; the pornographic video; address books; and 126 scraps of paper bearing the names and phone numbers of females.

All of it had come from the suspect's bedroom, the place where detectives believed Krystal had spent her last few minutes alive. The search that morning had yielded promising evidence, especially the mounds of speaker wire similar to the murder weapon. Krystal's flip-flops did not turn up, but several beer and soda cans were collected. Maybe, in his attempts to seduce the girl, Ortiz had offered her a drink, detectives thought. If he had, her fingerprints would likely be on one of the cans, important physical evidence placing her inside the suspect's home.

But what Brannan and his colleagues would most remember from that morning were the teenage girls sadly staring out from the photographs; the address books; the pieces of paper scattered around the bedroom like confetti. It had been enough to sicken the most hardened investigator.

That morning, as Brannan made the short drive from Ortiz's residence back to police headquarters downtown, he wondered about the magnitude of what he had just seen, whether investigators had stumbled onto a criminal of historic proportions.

"I was thinking, 'Lord, how many others do we have out there?'" Brannan remembered. "As a homicide detective, you're certainly aware of other big cases, like the Ted Bundy case or the Green River killings [in which more than 40 women were slain in the Pacific Northwest] and I was wondering, 'Is this going to be something of that magnitude?' I was praying and hoping it was not, but I realized that morning it very well could be."

Next: Police start making more than 100 phone calls.

Timeline

Sept. 4, 1991: Andy Ortiz is accused of kidnapping a 13-year-old girl. That charge is dismissed 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 jailed on a parole violation and serves one year.

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

1995: Ortiz begins corresponding with Garcia from jail, where he is doing time for theft.

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.

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

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

Aug. 8, 1997: Ortiz is arrested in Garcia's killing; Detective Joe Thornton tries to get Ortiz to confess but is unsuccessful.

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 can't find the witness.

July 1999: Ortiz is released from jail; he moves in with Anna's family.

Jan. 29, 2000: Ortiz marries Anna.

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

July 18, 2000: Krystal Minjarez sneaks out of her home in Crowley and calls a man named "Jaime." He picks her up during the early morning, and she calls a friend later to say she is at his home.

July 21, 2000: Minjarez's body is found at Marine Creek Lake.

July 25, 2000: After finding Ortiz's address in Minjarez's address book -- listed under "Jaime" -- Detective Curt Brannan gets a warrant to search the Ortiz home.

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