Chapter 18 | An angry crony tries to get Ortiz to talk about murder

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 spoke with Andy Ortiz, a suspect in the strangulation of a teenage girl. Ortiz said that he was with the girl at his house the night she died but that his friend Michael Olguin left with her.

CHAPTER 18

Andy Ortiz was not a good liar, Detective Curt Brannan thought as he drove away from the murder suspect's house that Wednesday night in July. After meeting and talking to the gang member for the first time, the veteran homicide investigator was even more certain that Ortiz had strangled young Krystal Minjarez then dumped her body at Marine Creek Lake, like so much garbage.

But what about Michael Olguin and Hector Gomez, the two guys who Ortiz said were with him the night Krystal was killed? That complicated matters. Brannan knew from long experience that most lies contain a shred of truth, so maybe Olguin and Gomez really had been there that night, had even participated in the killing. Brannan needed to find them both, pronto. So as the sun set on the summer day, the detective headed straight from Ortiz's north-side home to the south-side neighborhoods of Fort Worth, where the two men were believed to live.

Running down Gomez turned out to be easy. The 19-year-old was at home on Hemphill Street, and by the next day, July 27, 2000, he was sitting in a room at police headquarters, giving a statement. Gomez told detectives that he knew Ortiz; he had met him a few years before through Ortiz's cousin. Gomez said he and Ortiz hung out together for more than a year and often entertained teenage girls at Ortiz's house. And Gomez said Ortiz had recently told him of a girl named Krystal.

"He told me he had gone to her house and that she lived in a trailer," Gomez told police. "[Ortiz] told me he went to her house and they made out."

But Gomez never met Krystal, he said. He had not been to Ortiz's house in weeks. He had never met a guy named Michael Olguin. Gomez insisted that he had no part in Krystal's killing and had no idea who strangled her. (A polygraph exam administered Aug. 4 indicated that he was telling the truth.)

The 25-year-old Olguin was a tougher case. Through a check of state records, Brannan learned that the guy had been in and out of prison, sent away for crimes ranging from auto theft to assault to drug use. In fact, Olguin had just been released from the state pen in January. From his criminal record, it appeared that Olguin and Ortiz were cut from the same cloth. Olguin seemed either a likely accomplice or a fitting scapegoat. Either way, Brannan needed to find him.

The detective drove from place to place on the south side, but Olguin seemed to have vanished. Brannan spent the better part of a week tracking down his relatives and south-side homeys, urging them to pass along word that Brannan needed to speak to him immediately.

Days went by with no word, and Brannan began to suspect that Ortiz had gotten to him, that Olguin had gone underground.

Then, on July 31, as Brannan sat in his Chevy Lumina, staking out Olguin's last known residence on the south side, the detective's cellphone rang.

"I hear you're looking for me," Olguin said.

'Who's going to believe you?'

Later that day, the two sat across from each other in the homicide interrogation room. In his conversation with Ortiz, Brannan had been the "Cowboy Columbo," as pleasant and nonthreatening as could be. But after several days of looking for Olguin, the detective was in no mood to make nice. He wanted the truth, and he wanted it now.

"I'm tempted to hang this on the first person I get to, and you're it," Brannan said. "So you need to be really truthful with me, because if I catch you in one lie, I'm going to walk you across the street and I'm going to book you for capital murder, and then we'll let your lawyer figure it out next year sometime."

The color drained from Olguin's face. Capital murder. Was this big cowboy crazy? And Brannan wasn't talking about just one murder: He was talking about the killing of Krystal Minjarez and at least one more teenage girl, in 1997.

"Wait just a damn minute," he said. "I don't know no girl named Krystal, and I was locked up in 1997."

"Son, you're an ex-con," Brannan said. "Who's going to believe you?"

"Wait, man," Olguin said. "I can prove it."

He pulled out his wallet, fished out his prison release papers bearing the state seal and handed them to Brannan. The detective made a show of studying them closely, letting Olguin stew.

"OK," Brannan said finally. "So I need to ask you something else: You know a guy named Andy Ortiz?"

Olguin didn't hesitate.

"Of course I know Andy," Olguin said. "Who doesn't know that dude?"

Old friends

They were about the same age and had grown up together on the north side, just eight blocks apart. Olguin had spent many days at Ortiz's home when he was a kid, hanging out with Andy and his two brothers, Elton and David. Andy and Michael did time together in a state juvenile facility, and their lives had tracked closely ever since, both of them in and out of prison. But it had been years since they were close, and that was fine by him, Olguin told Brannan that day.

One day in prison, Olguin said, he opened a letter from his sister and found a news clipping about Ortiz's arrest in the 1997 killing of 15-year-old Armida Garcia. The killing struck close to home, because Armida had lived just a block away from Olguin's place on the north side. What was even more disturbing, Olguin said, was that Olguin's sister said that Ortiz had once attacked her, too, that he had wrapped his hands around her throat until she fought him off. The guy was clearly into sick stuff.

"When was the last time you saw him?" Brannan asked.

Come to think of it, Olguin said, it was just a week or so before. Olguin had pulled into a 7-Eleven on the south side and saw Ortiz talking on the pay phone. When Ortiz hung up, the two hugged each other as homeys do, talked about old times, then went their separate ways. That was it.

"That's not what Andy says," Brannan said.

"What do you mean?"

"He says you were at his place the night this girl Krystal disappeared," Brannan said. "He said you were kissing Krystal that night, and you were the one who offered to take her home. He said you were the one she was last seen with."

"No way," Olguin said. "That's a lie. Andy wouldn't say that."

"I'm afraid he did," Brannan said.

"That's completely messed up," Olguin said.

Brannan became convinced that Olguin was telling the truth. When someone was faced with that kind of an accusation, there was only one appropriate response: vehement denial. That's exactly what Olguin had given him. Brannan saw the look on Olguin's face when "capital murder" was mentioned -- he was scared silly.

And Brannan also had seen the fury on Olguin's face when Brannan suggested that Ortiz had implicated him in Krystal's murder.

Which gave Brannan an idea. In another interview with Olguin a few days later, the detective pulled out his tape recorder and pressed the "Play" button. Olguin, who returned voluntarily for the second talk, immediately recognized Brannan's voice.

"Now you said this guy is named Michael what?"

Then Olguin heard another familiar voice.

"Olguin," Andy Ortiz said.

"Spell that," Brannan said.

"I think it's H-O-L-G-U-I-N."

As he listened that day in the homicide unit, tears of anger flooded into Olguin's eyes. He clenched his fists.

"They were messing around, like, laying on the floor," Andy Ortiz said on the tape. "That's about it. Just, like, giggling and kissing and stuff like that."

"Giggling and kissing and stuff," Brannan repeated on the tape.

"Nothing, like, real major," Ortiz said. "He, like, got his hands around her, like, hugging her, cuddling her, something like that."

Then, on the tape, Ortiz described how Olguin and the girl drove off together, just a few days before Krystal's body was found at Marine Creek Lake.

"That's so low," Olguin told Brannan after the detective shut off the tape. "I'm out here, trying to stay straight. Trying to be a dad to my little girl. And this guy ..."

"Son, let me ask you this," Brannan said. "How would you feel about wearing a wire?"

"I'll do anything you want," Olguin said.

The confrontation

At 3:30 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 13, 2000, Olguin stood in the homicide unit while Eddie Mann, an electronics technician from the narcotics division, planted a microphone beneath Olguin's shirt. Then Olguin and Brannan discussed his mission: Get Ortiz talking about Krystal's murder. The detective suggested that Olguin confront Ortiz about what he had heard on the tape.

Olguin was a street-wise guy who had spent most of his adult life in prison, but now he was clearly nervous.

"When they put a microphone on my body, that freaked me out," Olguin said in a recent interview. "Only in the movies, you know."

Brannan, his new supervisor in homicide, Skeeter Anderson, and Mann followed Olguin's white pickup to Buck Sansom Park on the north side, where Ortiz was known to hang out. After more than an hour of waiting, Brannan told Olguin to head to the suspect's home on Lee Avenue. Ortiz was standing in his front yard. Olguin made a U-turn and parked in front. The officers stopped around the corner, listening from a few blocks away.

"That's when I hit him with the questions," Olguin remembered. "I said, 'What's with you trying to get me in trouble? Cops came looking for me. They say you're the one who said that I did it to that girl.' I put it all on the table for him.

"He said, 'Oh, man. I didn't do none of that.' All that homeboy stuff," Olguin said. "He denied talking to Brannan. He denied saying all that stuff about Krystal and me. He said he never mentioned my name."

Before Olguin could argue, the conversation was interrupted. A girl walked by, and Ortiz launched into his litany of pickup lines. He told the girl how cute she was. Did she want to go for a ride with him sometime? Could Ortiz get her phone number and give her a call? Before walking off, the girl gave her number to him. The exchange sickened the detectives.

"I remembered wanting to talk to her parents, to tell them how close she had come to potential disaster," Brannan said years later.

But that Sunday afternoon, he had more immediate concerns.

Next: A hunch changes everything.

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 the case doesn't go to trial. He returns to jail 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 and calling 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.

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.

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

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

Late 1997: Ortiz is jailed on parole violations; he begins corresponding with a 15-year-old named Anna.

January 1998: Thornton gets a tip about 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 is kicked out of the house by his mother-in-law.

July 18, 2000: Krystal Minjarez sneaks out of her home in Crowley and calls a man named "Jaime." He picks her up, 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, Detective Curt Brannan gets a search warrant.

July 26, 2000: Police find photos of scantily clad young women and phone numbers of hundreds of girls in Ortiz's bedroom; Ortiz agrees to talk with Brannan that afternoon and implicates a friend, Michael Olguin, in the Minjarez killing.

Late July-August 2000: Police spend weeks contacting the young women whose phone numbers were found in Ortiz's room.