Exclusive: How borderland detectives first discovered Juan David Ortiz's serial killings

EXCLUSIVE: This story is adapted from "The Devil Behind the Badge: The Horrifying Twelve Days of the Border Patrol Serial Killer." (Aug. 6, Dey Street Books/HarperCollins.) Author Rick Jervis, a national correspondent for USA TODAY, spent five years interviewing law enforcement officials and victims' families and securing more than 1,000 documents to piece together the 2018 serial murders in Laredo by U.S. Border Patrol agent Juan David Ortiz. Ortiz was convicted in 2022 of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison.

At daybreak on Sept. 13, 2018, a truck driver cruising along State Highway 255, just east of Highway 83 north of Laredo, Texas, noticed what appeared to be a person lying on the side of the road.

The driver turned around, parked, and approached the female body. The woman was splayed on the ground, surrounded by streaks of blood, but still breathing. The driver called 911, then knelt next to her to wait for help to arrive. He offered her a towel and a bottled water, but she pushed him away. “I’m thirsty. Leave me alone,” she muttered in her haze.

The emergency call went through the Webb County 911 dispatch center and pinged to Rey Veliz, a paramedic with the contract ambulance company Angel Care. He had answered that type of call in that corner of the county at that hour of the day many times before. It usually meant an oil field worker or migrant laborer had wandered onto a highway and was hit by a passing truck. The ambulance with Veliz sped toward its destination just as dawn leaked into the Laredo sky.

Texas Department of Public Safety state troopers were already at the scene, looking at tire marks, and asked Veliz and his partner not to bring a stretcher to the victim, so as not to disturb any evidence. Two cell phones, pages from a notebook and sneakers were strewn near the victim, a woman in her mid-forties, who was crumpled in the grass, groaning.

Veliz reached behind her head and felt a sticky mass of blood there. He didn’t notice any other injuries and assumed she had been hit by a truck in the twilight. Suddenly, the woman began flailing her arms, fighting off the paramedics. Veliz held her down as his partner strapped her onto a backboard and slid on a cervical collar, and together they carried her to the ambulance. Fighting off paramedics was not unheard-of with trauma victims. Veliz had seen it many times before, where accident victims suddenly, subconsciously, started fighting off the people there to assist them. This female victim, however, was being particularly combative, struggling to free her arms from the straps and mumbling incoherently.

“Just calm down,” Veliz told her as the ambulance sped toward Doctors Hospital of Laredo, nineteen miles away. “You’re in good hands. We’re getting you some help.”

The ambulance pulled into the hospital’s emergency bay, sirens blaring, and Veliz handed the patient over to a team of waiting doctors, who wheeled her inside, strapping IVs and pulling an oxygen mask over her face. As they worked to find and patch her wounds, they wheeled her straight to radiology for X-rays. Outside, Veliz filled out paperwork and cleaned up the rear of the ambulance, wiping the victim’s brain matter off his backboard. Sheriff’s deputies arrived and asked him a series of standard questions about the patient. Did she say anything during the ride? Did she talk about anything specific? No, Veliz said. She was mumbling but incoherent.

As Veliz and the detectives chatted, a doctor emerged from the X-ray room. The victim had died, he said. X-rays had shown a scorched, dime-sized wound in the back of her head. A metal projectile was still lodged in her brain. It wasn’t a traffic accident, the doctor told them. It was a gunshot wound.

From the author:I spent years covering a serial killer. There's one answer I still want to find.

***

Captain Federico Calderon, head of the Webb County Sheriff's Office Criminal Investigation Division, drove into the sheriff’s substation early on the morning of Sept. 13 and parked around the back. Another long day lay ahead.

Nine days earlier, Melissa Ramirez had been found dead on the side of a gravel road 12 miles northwest of Laredo. Melissa, a sex worker, had been shot in the head and neck. The wound on her wrist showed she had raised it in defense, trying to shield her face from the bullets.

But since then, the case had gone frustratingly cold. Dozens of leads and interviews he and Texas Ranger E. J. Salinas had pursued over the past nine days had yielded not much of anything. No clear suspect. No motive. No witnesses. Nothing other than some .40-caliber casings found sprinkled in the thornbush near Ramirez's body.

Calderon’s cell phone buzzed. A sheriff’s deputy, Sgt. Felix Nuñez, who had arrived at the scene on State Highway 255, was calling to advise him that a woman had been found just east of Highway 83 in northwest Webb County. Investigators and paramedics believed it to be an “auto-ped” — sheriff’s office lingo for “auto-pedestrian,” or someone struck by one of the thousands of trucks rumbling through that area each day. Calderon thanked him and said to keep him posted.

The details tumbled in Calderon’s mind for a few moments. He mentally calculated spots on a map and distances. The area where the auto-ped occurred was just a few miles from where Melissa’s body was found. But auto-peds happened there all the time, especially with border crossers who wandered out of the brush disoriented and into the path of a speeding semitruck. The Patrol Division handled auto-peds. They’d deal with it.

He had just closed the driver’s-side door to his truck and was headed around the vehicle when a second call came in. Again, it was Nuñez.

“Correction: not an auto-ped,” the deputy told Calderon. “Gunshot victim. Female.”

Calderon climbed back into his truck and sped off to the crime scene.

***

By the time Calderon reached the scene, detectives had cordoned off the area and were combing the grass for clues. He surveyed the scene. The tall grass was littered with plastic bags, a black purse, a Bic lighter, a pair of low-cut black Nike sneakers, pens, hairspray, two pink spiral notebooks filled with cursive writing and doodling, and two cell phones. The purse contained condoms, makeup, and a cigarette box filled with syringes. The items were spread about haphazardly, as if flung abruptly. Clumps of flattened grass and dirt were stained with the woman's blood. Streaks of dark blood ran from deep in the brush to the shoulder of the highway. Shot in the head but still alive, she had dragged herself about 10 feet to the road, where she would more likely be rescued.

Calderon jotted down details in his notebook, as deputies around him tagged the items — each a potential clue — with yellow numbered markers and took pictures. Salinas arrived and snapped his own pictures of the site, adding to his burgeoning case file.

As they scoured the field, one of the deputies picked up a Texas ID nestled in the grass near the purse. He read it: Claudine Luera, 42 years old. The detective recognized the name as one of the people they had been trying to locate for clues in Melissa's murder. She was a sex worker and a friend of Melissa's. Another deputy recovered two casings from the scene: federal-brand .40-caliber shells.

The realization hit Calderon like a spray of ice water to the face. The bullet casings, the wounds, the victims’ professions, and the proximity of the murder scenes were all too similar to be coincidental. This was no longer a routine homicide, he thought.

Laredo had a serial killer on the loose.

Follow Jervis on X: @MrRJervis, or contact him at: rjervis@usatoday.com.