Chapter 19 | A stunning connection puts police on brink of an arrest

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

A friend of murder suspect Andy Ortiz wore a police wire and tried to get Ortiz to talk about the murder of 13-year-old Krystal Minjarez, but the tactic failed.

CHAPTER 19

On a mostly sleepless night in the second week of August 2000, Fort Worth Detective Curt Brannan wrestled with the dark riddle of Andy Ortiz. Three weeks after the strangulation of 13-year-old Krystal Minjarez, Brannan remained certain that Ortiz had killed her and another teenager, Armida Garcia, three years before. But proving it was another matter, and as the summer dwindled, Brannan found himself largely stymied.

As he tossed and turned early that Thursday morning, Aug. 10, another frustrating investigation began to intrude on his thoughts. Brannan kept coming back to the May 1997 murder of a 20-year-old woman named Brenda Salazar, a telemarketer and aspiring flight attendant found strangled in her apartment near Dallas/Fort Worth Airport. The killing was one of just a handful that Brannan had not solved during his 16 years in the homicide unit. He would never forget the heartbroken, pleading eyes of the victim's parents -- migrant workers from the Rio Grande Valley -- or his own frustration at not bringing her killer to justice.

"When you've got a case like this, it will pop up at odd times," Brannan said in an interview last year. "Maybe you're watching the national news and there's a story about a girl who was murdered and, poof, there's Brenda. Maybe I'm in a theater and a girl screams and there's Brenda."

At the time, there seemed to be nothing more that Brannan could have done. Convinced that Salazar had known her killer, the detective interviewed dozens of her friends, acquaintances and fellow students at an Arlington travel academy. He acquired DNA samples from the leading suspects. (Semen had been found in Salazar's mouth, which meant her attacker had probably left a sample of his genetic material.) Brannan also had lie-detector tests administered to many of those who had known the victim. One by one, the suspects were cleared. Eventually, there were no more clues to pursue.

As the months turned into years, the Salazar case would haunt Brannan as few others did. So it was natural that Brannan would wonder: What about Ortiz? Could he have murdered Brenda, too?

The detective's instincts said no. Brenda was older than Armida and Krystal, who fit the profile of the underage Hispanic girls Ortiz was known to prey upon. Armida had been strangled with shoelaces, Krystal with speaker wire, and both ligatures had been tied in a bow. Brenda had been strangled with a strap.

And it was hard for Brannan to imagine Brenda -- a demure young woman with lofty ambitions -- hanging out with a high school dropout and longtime gang member like Ortiz. Finally, Brenda's apartment near D/FW was a long way from the north side of Fort Worth, Ortiz's known hunting grounds.

But as he thought about the case on that fitful night, Brannan remembered how Brenda's stolen car was abandoned in the Riverside neighborhood, within a long walk of Ortiz's home on the north side. Although Brenda had been killed with a strap, there was something familiar about the way the cord used to bind her hands was tied -- three wraps and a bow. The shoelaces used to kill Armida had been fashioned much the same way.

So Brannan decided to cast a net in another direction. After he arrived at headquarters that Thursday morning in August, his first call was to the Police Department crime lab. Brannan said he wanted testing to compare a sample of Ortiz's DNA -- taken after his arrest in Armida's murder in 1997 -- with the seminal fluid recovered from Brenda's mouth. In a meeting that day with Tarrant County prosecutors Alan Levy and Robert Foran, Brannan described his hunch in the Salazar case. The three agreed that Ortiz needed to be thoroughly investigated in Salazar's killing.

A day later, on Aug. 11, Brannan contacted police fingerprint technician Loyd Courtney, asking that Ortiz's prints be checked against those lifted in 1997 from Salazar's stolen car. It was certainly worth a try, Brannan thought. But after all the frustrations in the Salazar case, the detective was not particularly hopeful.

A haunting question

In the make-believe world of television crime-fighting, a microscopic hair fiber is dropped into high-tech machinery, which spits out a suspect's identity before the next commercial break. Fingerprints commonly link the villain to the scene of his crime. Real life, any homicide detective will tell you, is another matter.

"On TV, fingerprints are everywhere," Brannan said recently. "But in all these years, I've had maybe one or two cases where fingerprints have actually been critical, put somebody there."

That investigative rarity only added to Brannan's elation when his telephone rang at 3:45 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 11. Courtney completed his analysis in less than an hour, and he gave the detective the news he wanted to hear: Latent print No. 10, found on the outside of the passenger-side door of Salazar's car, matched the left index finger of Andy Ortiz, Courtney said.

"Hot dog," Brannan said. "I'll be right down."

The detective hurried from the third-floor homicide unit to the elevator and made the short ride to the first floor, where Courtney, a small, bespectacled man in his 70s, was emerging from his office. Brannan engulfed Courtney in a bearhug. The fingerprint expert laughed, and his face turned red.

"I owe you a steak dinner," Brannan said.

But lost in the euphoria of the moment was a question that, to this day, haunts those involved in the case. While investigating the Salazar murder in the summer of 1997, Brannan had asked Courtney to enter prints from the victim's car into the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AFIS, a national database containing prints of arrested suspects and convicted offenders. Because of his criminal history, Ortiz's fingerprints had long been in the system. If the print had been entered in AFIS, why wasn't there a match then?

Had Courtney done his job in 1997? Or had he neglected to run the print? The technician, who was known around the department as "the oldest living fingerprint expert," was generally well-liked but could be temperamental and sloppy in his work. In fact, in 1991, Levy, Tarrant County's chief felony prosecutor, had written to Fort Worth Police Chief Thomas Windham "complaining about [Courtney's] inability to identify prints that were identifiable," Levy said recently.

Additionally, Levy said in a recent interview, "The claim was made by the police that the fingerprint had been entered into AFIS [during the Salazar investigation in 1997]. While they said that, they could never provide any documentation that that was done, which is troubling."

The issue also later troubled Fort Worth Police Chief Ralph Mendoza, who succeeded Windham in February 2000. Mendoza ordered an internal investigation into why the fingerprint was not linked to Ortiz in 1997, a match that theoretically could have put Ortiz away and possibly spared the lives of Armida Garcia and Krystal Minjarez.

In an e-mail to Mendoza, the Star-Telegram requested the results of the investigation. Lt. Dean Sullivan, a police spokesman, said that most personnel who dealt with the fingerprint inquiry are no longer with the department.

Sullivan said he has been unable to locate any report on the matter, adding that the 7-year-old inquiry extends beyond the department's normal retention period for such records.

"[Chief Mendoza], unfortunately, had no direct recollection, other than calling into [question] why the fingerprint match didn't return initially, since we now know that Mr. Ortiz's fingerprints were in the database," Sullivan said. "We don't have a legitimate explanation."

In an interview last year, Brannan said that several times in 1997 and in the summer of 2000, he asked Courtney about the fingerprints when the two ran into each other at the Police Department. Courtney insisted that he had run the prints from Salazar's car through AFIS as requested in 1997 but that the prints had not been of sufficient quality for a match, Brannan said.

That had been known to happen with the nationwide system. Another high-profile example occurred in 2005, when a man named Jeremy Jones was arrested on minor offenses in Georgia but released when an AFIS check failed to match his fingerprints to those already in the system from criminal charges he had in Oklahoma. Jones went on to kill three women and a teenage girl in three states.

"There were enough [fingerprint] points for comparison [only] when you had a known suspect, and that happens periodically," Brannan said of the Salazar case. "It seems like that was the way Loyd explained it to me. He was concerned about people pointing the finger at him, but he assured me that he had submitted it and that it had come back with nothing on it."

The answer died with Courtney a year later. In another tragic turn of events, he and his wife, Agnes Courtney, were bludgeoned to death in their home in November 2001. In 2003, their daughter, Deborah Lynn Pieringer, was found guilty of killing her parents, allegedly to collect a $225,000 inheritance. Pieringer is serving a life sentence.

Shoring up the connection

With Courtney's call in August 2000, Brannan's focus was jolted back to the Salazar murder. Less than an hour after talking to the fingerprint expert, Brannan got a call from crime lab technician Ron Fazio, who said that Brannan's recollections were correct. Both the cord used to bind Salazar's hands and the ligature around Garcia's neck were wrapped and tied in a similar way -- three wraps, then a knot. The Minjarez ligature had been tied slightly differently, the way you would tie a shoe, Fazio said.

Two days later, on Sunday, Aug. 13, Brannan listened as a wired-up Michael Olguin, who had been implicated by Ortiz in Minjarez's murder, tried without success to coax Ortiz into implicating himself instead. But that disappointment was greatly mitigated by the break in the Salazar case.

At 8:20 a.m. Monday, Aug. 14, Brannan called the crime lab to inquire about the progress of the Salazar DNA analysis, and he was told it would take an additional two to four days. He dialed up the International Travel Academy in Arlington, where Salazar had been a student, asking whether Ortiz had ever been a student or employee there. A supervisor said Ortiz had not.

Brannan tracked down Salazar's roommate, Jennifer Ledesma. Was she at all familiar with Andy Ortiz or a young man who called himself "Jaime"? Ledesma told Brannan that she didn't know Ortiz and that Salazar had never mentioned that name. That same morning, the detective also spoke with a Texas prison official, who confirmed that Ortiz was free at the time of Salazar's killing.

As the day progressed, Brannan resisted the temptation to seek a warrant for Ortiz's arrest, one that would have been based solely on the fingerprint on Salazar's stolen car. It was the sort of physical evidence lacking in the Garcia and Minjarez cases and would be highly compelling to a jury. But what if the DNA analysis implicated someone other than Ortiz? A defense lawyer would have a field day with that, Brannan knew.

"We didn't want to bust him on this and find out that it was one of his partners who sexually assaulted her," Brannan said recently. "We had compelling evidence against him in three separate cases, none of which alone is probably going to get him convicted. He had this print on the outside of this car, but he could have said, 'I just walked by the car and looked inside.' But I was really hopeful about the DNA. I mean, who else could it have belonged to?"

So Brannan would wait. Since Ortiz had first come under suspicion in the Minjarez slaying, patrol and gang officers had kept him under periodic surveillance. That would continue until detectives heard from the crime lab.

The wait would be only one day.

A satisfying breakthrough

Brannan was at home that Tuesday afternoon when he received the call from Skeeter Anderson, who had succeeded Paul Kratz as the homicide supervisor. Preliminary results from the DNA test were back, Anderson said. There was a positive match between Ortiz's genetic profile and the semen found in Salazar's mouth. In a homicide career that would eventually stretch more than two decades, Brannan couldn't remember a more satisfying moment.

"Brenda's case had gone on for so long and had been such an intense investigation," Brannan recalled. "And now, after all that, this is the guy. We've got him. There was no way he could explain both the fingerprint and the DNA."

Brannan immediately left his home for the 20-minute drive to police headquarters, where he would begin preparing an arrest warrant. During the drive, he thought of the victim's parents, the grief-stricken migrant workers who had sat with him in the homicide unit three years before, completely dependent on the detective to help them.

"I'll tell you what, it makes it a real high when you know you can go to Brenda's family and tell them what happened," Brannan recalled.

"...We've got DNA tying him to Brenda Salazar. No matter what happens on these other two cases ... I'm going to be able to sit down with Brenda's family and tell them that the guy who did this is in jail."

Next: "Remember me?"

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 number.

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 and is picked up by a man named "Jaime." 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 listed 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 room; Ortiz agrees to talk with Brannan that afternoon and implicates an acquaintance, 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.

July 31, 2000: Olguin meets with Brannan.

Aug. 13, 2000: Olguin wears a wire and tries to get Ortiz to implicate himself; he is unsuccessful.

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