Video captures ex-agent saying he killed women
Melissa Ramirez, 29, injected the drugs that Juan David Ortiz had paid for after picking her up on a busy boulevard in Laredo on Sept. 3, 2018.
Less than two weeks later, when Ortiz, a Border Patrol supervisor, told investigators how he killed her, he said she had passed out in his truck and that he was “angered by that.”
Ortiz was under arrest Sept. 15 when he admitted, during a lengthy interrogation, to killing Ramirez and three other sex workers.
Jurors in his capital murder trial in San Antonio had watched him on video denying and deflecting questions for hours. Late Thursday, they heard him say, “I’m the one who did it.”
Prosecutors say Ortiz killed the women, all of whom frequented a stretch of Laredo’s San Bernardo Avenue, in a two-week span, starting with Ramirez. He left their bodies in a desolate part of northwest Webb County, prosecutors say.
When he drove along San Bernardo, “the monster would come out,” Ortiz told detectives in the video, after he began to open up about the killings.
He wanted to “clean up the streets” of prostitutes, whom he referred to as “trash” and “so dirty” — though a fifth woman who has testified that she escaped from him said he was a regular customer of her and Ramirez. Ortiz
himself told detectives he knew his first three victims.
Ortiz contemplated “dumping” Ramirez at a hospital, but instead drove north on Interstate 35. He said Ramirez regained consciousness and became belligerent. At her insistence, Ortiz said, he stopped “so she could pee” and shot her in the back of the head.
Capt. Federico Calderon of the Webb County Sheriff’s Department previewed for the jury each section of 12 DVDS that were played to a packed courtroom starting Wednesday, attempting to interpret what Ortiz was saying as he switched between English and Spanish.
In the video, Calderon and Texas Ranger E.J. Salinas could be seen taking turns questioning Ortiz and showing him pictures of the bodies of two of the women. Each asked him numerous times whether he knew them or had seen them.
After Ortiz’s clothes and boots were taken from him and he changed into an orange jail outfit, things changed.
With Calderon assuring Ortiz that he would “put in a good word with the DA” if he “did the right thing” and told the truth, Ortiz said, “I’m the one who did it.”
Calderon testified that Ortiz admitted that he knew Erika Peña, who started a police manhunt after frantically telling a state trooper she had escaped from the pickup of a customer she knew only as “David,” who had pulled a gun on her the night of Sept. 14.
Officers who arrested Ortiz early the next morning knew about Ramirez, who was killed Sept. 3, and Claudine Anne Luera, 42, who died in a hospital after being shot Sept. 13.
Even while chasing Ortiz, investigators
learned that a third body had been found — later identified as Guiselda Alicia Hernandez, 35. By the time Ortiz began connecting the dots for them, he revealed something they did not know.
“He volunteered information about a fourth body that nobody knew about,” Calderon told the jury. “If he hadn’t told us, we may never have found her.”
That was Janelle Ortiz, 28, killed, like Hernandez, in the hours before Juan David Ortiz’s arrest.
When he picked up Luera on Sept. 13, also on San Bernardo, he took her to get “a fix,” then headed to the location where Ramirez’s body had been found and told Luera he thought “it would be cool to check it out,” he told Calderon, according to the video.
“She started freaking out,” he said. He shot Luera in the back of the head and left her. She died in a hospital the same day.
Ortiz picked up Hernandez late Sept. 14, after Peña fled his truck. He told Calderon he had never encountered her before. He was agitated — a bulletin had gone out on law enforcement channels about his pickup. He drove to near Mile Marker 22 on I-35, told her to get out and added, “I’m the one who happened to
Melissa and Claudine,” he said.
Ortiz said he planned to “end it” that night and kill himself, and he told the detective that Hernandez replied, “Don’t do it. God loves you.” He said he then shot her in the back of the neck.
It is unclear when Janelle Ortiz died. Juan David Ortiz picked up the transgender woman on San Bernardo, as he did the others, and told Calderon he believed he could “get a fight out of that one.”
He said he drove her to a desolate area off I-35 and fired “one bullet to the head,” leaving her in the grass near the road. Authorities said Ortiz shot Hernandez and Janelle Ortiz within hours of each other and list a date of death as Sept. 15.
State District Judge Oscar J. Hale Jr. of Webb County is presiding over the trial in San Antonio, having granted a change of venue from Laredo because of extensive media coverage.
If convicted, Ortiz, 39, faces life in prison without the possibility of parole. Webb County District Attorney Isidro R. “Chilo” Alaniz initially sought the death penalty but said the victims’ families asked him to remove that option.