Chapter 20 | The beginning of the end for Ortiz

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 acted on a hunch and found that Andy Ortiz was linked by DNA to 1997 murder victim Brenda Salazar. Brannan began preparing an arrest warrant.

CHAPTER 20

For reasons both practical and personal, Detective Curt Brannan always wanted to be the one to slap handcuffs on a suspect at the end of a successful investigation. On the practical side, making the arrest allowed Brannan to size up his suspect, to see whether he was defiant, defeated or somewhere in between, which might suggest a method of interrogation later on. But just as important, for Brannan or any other homicide detective, the moment of arrest was one of supreme personal satisfaction.

"Do we get a star for it? No. Do we get extra pay for it? No," Brannan said recently. "But just to be able to look in this guy's face and look in his eyes and know that he knows we've got him. That's the fun part."

Brannan had never anticipated an arrest with greater relish than the one he planned to make on Tuesday afternoon, Aug. 15, 2000. With both fingerprint and DNA evidence, Brannan felt he had nailed Andy James Ortiz for at least one murder -- the 1997 killing of 20-year-old Brenda Salazar. There would be no more slipping through the cracks. The north-side gang member, sexual predator and suspected serial killer would never be able to hurt young women or girls again.

That afternoon in the homicide unit, after the DNA evidence fell into place, Brannan began spelling out the case against Ortiz in an affidavit for an arrest warrant. Brannan briefed chief felony prosecutor Alan Levy then called Joe Thornton, the former homicide detective who had arrested Ortiz three years before in the killing of 15-year-old Armida Garcia. Thornton had not been able to make the charges stick in that case, which had haunted him ever since. So Brannan knew that Thornton, by then a supervisor on the SWAT team, would want to be part of the arrest.

At 3 p.m., Brannan and Levy walked to the Tarrant County Criminal Courts Building and into the chambers of visiting state District Judge C.C. "Kit" Cooke. The judge reviewed the affidavit, signed the warrant and set bail at $1 million. With a copy of the warrant in his pocket, Brannan set out in his Chevy Lumina for the familiar address on Lee Avenue on the north side. The house where Ortiz and his parents lived was already surrounded by Thornton's SWAT team.

Brannan's cellphone rang when he was about halfway there. It was his supervisor, Sgt. Skeeter Anderson, who reported that Ortiz had gotten into his car and was about to drive away.

"What do you want to do?" Anderson asked.

If Brannan couldn't be the one to nail the guy, at least Thornton would be there to take his place. "Go ahead and pop him," Brannan said.

'Remember me?'

Thornton's SWAT unit had been in the field earlier that Tuesday, working a plainclothes stakeout, though seven years later he could not remember exactly where. But he would never forget the call on his cellphone from Brannan, just after the DNA results came in. Brannan would say only that he had some "interesting information" about the murder suspect.

"He kind of saved it until I got up there" to the homicide unit, Thornton remembered, chuckling. "He probably just wanted to see my reaction. I'm not sure, but maybe he thought I'd be so excited if he told me I wouldn't come back to headquarters. I'd just want to go sit on Andy's house."

When Thornton arrived at police headquarters a few minutes later, Brannan spelled it out. The police had a fingerprint and DNA evidence linking Ortiz to Salazar. Brannan was one of the most laid-back cops in the department, but as he briefed Thornton, he had a hard time concealing his excitement.

Thornton, a quiet man not prone to showing much emotion, was also elated and shook Brannan's hand. For two years, until the moment he had transferred from homicide to SWAT, Thornton had persisted in his efforts to prove that Ortiz had raped and strangled Armida Garcia. The case kept him up nights even after he left homicide. Now, Brannan figured, Thornton would want to be part of the arrest.

They devised a plan to capture Ortiz outside his home in hopes of reducing the possibility of a standoff. When the meeting broke up, Thornton and his officers sped to the north side. On Lee Avenue, Thornton positioned two plainclothes SWAT team members in an unmarked car near the front of the house. Two more officers guarded each end of an alley behind the house. Several other officers from the fugitive division lingered in the area, carrying photographs of Ortiz so they could recognize him if he set out on foot. A patrol unit was also parked nearby.

The surveillance lasted less than an hour. At 5 p.m., Thornton spotted Ortiz as he walked out of the back of his house and slid behind the wheel of his mother's Ford Taurus. Thornton notified Anderson, who called Brannan. Ortiz backed out of the driveway and started driving north on Lee. He didn't make it to the end of the block before the patrol unit blazed around the corner with lights flashing. Ortiz, perhaps thinking it was a routine traffic stop, pulled over immediately. Within seconds, his car was surrounded by four other police vehicles and about a dozen officers.

Thornton popped out of his vehicle and jogged to the driver's side of Ortiz's car as other officers yanked open the door. Ortiz did not resist as Thornton pulled him out and applied the handcuffs. He saw that the young man was largely unchanged from the night three years earlier when Thornton had spent hours trying to coax a confession out of him to Armida's murder. Now, Thornton knew, because of the evidence against him in the Salazar case, a confession was probably not necessary. That moment on Lee Avenue was one of the most satisfying of his life.

"Remember me?" Thornton asked.

An angry reunion

Brannan rolled up in the Lumina seconds later. Wearing his white cowboy hat, he strode quickly toward where Ortiz stood in handcuffs. A crowd was gathering in the hot afternoon, and the suspect's mother was seen heading down the street in the police's direction, so Brannan didn't tarry. He grabbed Ortiz by his collar and one arm, hustling him to the Lumina. Brannan put Ortiz in the front seat and buckled him in, got behind the wheel and sped off down the street. He turned the corner but didn't go far, a block or two, before he slammed on the brakes so suddenly that Ortiz jerked forward.

A few weeks before, when he and Ortiz were seated in the same car, Brannan couldn't have been nicer. This time, the detective's blue eyes flashed with anger.

"I wanted him to see the rage in me when I arrested him," Brannan remembered. "I wanted him to glean that we've got the goods on him. I wanted him to think, 'Brannan is no longer curious about what I've done. He knows what I've done.' I wanted him to be convinced that he wasn't going to walk on this the way he did the last time."

"You knew this day was coming, didn't you?" Brannan asked.

Ortiz was slumped, looking down at the floor with his hands cuffed in front of him. He did not reply.

"Let me tell you something," Brannan said. "When I talked to you before, I treated you like a man, and you lied to me. I know exactly what happened. I've got the evidence now, not only on Armida and Krystal [Minjarez] but on this other girl."

Brannan pulled a card from his breast pocket and read Ortiz his Miranda rights.

"You understand those rights, son?"

"Yeah," Ortiz said softly. "I've done this before."

"Yes, sir," Brannan said. "That's a fact. You've done this before. Anything you want to say before we get going?"

Ortiz didn't answer.

"Now we're going to drive up to the homicide office, and you and I are going to sit down together, and I'm going to explain some things to you," Brannan said. "I want you to understand the futility of lying to me anymore."

Brannan drove off down the street. On the five-minute drive to police headquarters, neither man spoke.

A silent suspect

No matter how compelling the physical evidence against Ortiz was, Brannan knew it would be important for a jury to hear the suspect describe how he choked the life from his victims; what he did before, and what he did afterward; and how he might try to justify his actions. But during the interrogation late that August afternoon, much more was at stake. Three weeks before, while searching Ortiz's bedroom, detectives had found photographs, names and telephone numbers of hundreds of girls and young women. The implications were horrifying.

"I was convinced that he had done three murders," Brannan said. "And I strongly believed then, as I do now, that there were other bodies out there. I was hoping and praying I could loosen him up and he would talk about those. I would have loved for him to tell me about the bodies out there that hadn't been found yet."

Brannan led Ortiz into a garage elevator at police headquarters, then up to the third-floor homicide unit, where he sat the suspect down at his desk. Ortiz was shackled at the ankles, but the handcuffs were removed.

"You need to use the bathroom or a water fountain?" Brannan asked.

"No, sir," Ortiz said.

Anderson was standing nearby.

"You want a Coca-Cola or a Dr Pepper?" Anderson asked.

"Dr Pepper," Ortiz said.

Brannan led him into the interrogation room. A small two-way mirror was located on one wall. Anderson set the soft drink down on the small table in front of Ortiz, then left. Brannan, still wearing his cowboy hat, stood over the suspect. "A couple of things I want to make clear," Brannan said. "I'm the senior homicide detective up here. I've been doing this for 20 years and have heard every kind of lie that possibly can be told. I'm a master at discerning truth from fiction. You start telling me lies and I'll know it in a heartbeat. You understand that, son?"

Ortiz took a sip from the soda but didn't respond.

Brannan took the card from his pocket and read the Miranda rights again.

"You have any problem talking to me without an attorney?"

"I want to know what's going on and I'll talk to you," Ortiz said.

"That's good," Brannan said.

The detective went down the list, talking about the three dead girls, one by one. He implied that investigators could now prove that Ortiz killed not only Krystal Minjarez and Armida Garcia but also Brenda Salazar. This time, there were fingerprints and DNA, but Brannan did not say in which case. If Ortiz wanted to think the police had physical evidence in all three, that would be just fine by him.

"Son, we know how you met Krystal and Armida," Brannan said. "We've got that all figured out. But how did you meet Brenda?"

Ortiz stared at the table and did not answer.

"Do you know why your fingerprint might have been found on Brenda's car?"

No answer.

"Do you know why your semen might have been found in Brenda's mouth?"

Ortiz remained silent.

Brannan removed his hat and tossed it on the table. The detective stood over his suspect, their faces a few inches apart.

"Andy, I'm giving you a chance to tell your side of the story," Brannan said. "I'm giving you the opportunity to tell me why these things happened. Maybe there's something I don't understand. Maybe you need psychological help. I can get that for you."

When there was still no answer, Brannan backed off and sat down. He described for Ortiz what detectives had found while searching his bedroom and detailed their suspicion that he had killed other girls. If there were others, Brannan said, he needed to know about them. Their families deserved that much.

"You're a Christian, aren't you?" Brannan asked.

That brought Ortiz's chin to his chest, and he briefly nodded.

"Then you don't want these families to suffer more than they have already," Brannan said. "You need to tell me about these other girls."

But Ortiz remained quiet, a silence that stretched from minutes to hours. Close to 9 p.m., another officer took Ortiz to the Tarrant County Jail, where he was fingerprinted. He was returned to the interrogation room a few minutes later, dressed in jailhouse coveralls.

"At this point, I didn't have anything to lose," Brannan remembered. "I'm hitting him with, 'What kind of person are you? What kind of animal would do something like this? Or am I wrong about you? Do you have some kind of personality disorder? There's got to be a reason you would do something like this. Where are these other girls?'"

But Brannan had no real leverage, nothing he could offer Ortiz, nothing he could appeal to but Ortiz's conscience, which the detective believed probably did not exist.

"A lot of times, when I'm talking to people, I'll see a tear in their eye, or they'll start shifting around and positioning themselves in a more open manner to where I think they're getting ready to talk," Brannan said. "This guy was showing none of that. To the contrary, he was getting more and more closed. It was like he wasn't even hearing me, at some point.

"He must have thought he could beat it again. He was just a hard-core criminal who knew better," Brannan said. "He wasn't going to talk if we sat there for a week."

Driving home around midnight, Brannan wrestled with conflicting emotions. The detective believed that the long criminal rampage of Andy Ortiz was finally over. But if other victims were lying dead somewhere, the psychopath would be no help in finding them. That job, investigators would have to do on their own.

Tomorrow: Ortiz is charged with murder in one case, but what more will he face?

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 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.

Early 1997: Ortiz meets a 15-year-old 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 does not 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 corresponds with 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 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: Ortiz agrees to talk with Brannan and implicates a friend, Michael Olguin, in the Minjarez killing.

Aug. 10, 2000: Brannan acts on a hunch, reviewing evidence to connect Ortiz to the Salazar killing.

Aug. 11, 2000: Brannan finds out that a fingerprint on Salazar's car belongs to Ortiz; the print apparently was never run through the system in 1997.

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

Aug. 15, 2000: Brannan finds out that DNA evidence from Salazar's body matches Ortiz's DNA.

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