In early September 2018, the bodies of women began turning up on lonely roads outside Laredo, Texas, on the border with Mexico. Each had been shot. At the scenes investigators found the same .40-caliber Federal ammunition. The man responsible was a supervisor in the U.S. Border Patrol's intelligence unit, and the gun he used was his service weapon. He was caught because a woman got away from him.
Ortiz had grown up in Laredo. He served nearly eight years in the U.S. Navy, until 2009, in medical posts, including three years attached to the Marines, and was deployed to Iraq. He then joined the Border Patrol, where by 2018 he was an intelligence supervisor. He was married with children and lived in a comfortable Laredo neighborhood. He was 39 at the time of his trial in 2022.
He also paid women in Laredo for sex. He later told investigators that he had paid for sex with most of the women he killed.
Melissa Ramirez, 29, was a mother. Her family said she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder in her early teens, that it had gone untreated, and that she had turned to drugs and then to sex work. Weeks before her death she told her family she believed someone would kill her. Her body was found on a deserted road about 25 miles from downtown Laredo in the first days of September 2018; she had been killed on September 3. Ortiz later called her "a friend of mine." He said he shot her with his service weapon after she got high, passed out in his truck and then asked to get out. Her sister-in-law, Gracie Perez, remembered her as "a loving, kind and funny person."
Claudine Anne Luera, 42, was Ramirez's close friend and the mother of five. Her daughter, Ciara Munguia, said Luera had been assaulted by a neighbor as a child and later became addicted to heroin. On September 13, ten days after Ramirez's death, Luera was found shot at the side of a road about two miles from where Ramirez had been found. She was alive. Prosecutors later called her a fighter. She died at the hospital that day.
"She was loved," her sister, Colette Mireles, said at a vigil. "Just like these other victims, they had families. They are much more than what's being told about them."
On the night of September 14, a woman named Erika Peña got into the truck of a regular client she knew as David. As they drove, the talk turned to the recent killings. According to her testimony, he remarked that he had been the "next to last person" with Melissa Ramirez and said he was worried about his DNA being found. Then he pointed a gun at her face. She slipped out of her blouse as he held it, got out of the truck and ran to a gas station, where a Texas Department of Public Safety trooper was pumping gas. His body camera recorded her telling him what had happened. She described the man and led investigators to his house.
Ortiz was not at home when police arrived, and officers watched the house. According to prosecutors, he went home that night expecting police to be waiting for him. When they were not, he went out again, and within about two hours he killed two more women.
Guiselda Alicia Cantu, 35, was shot in the neck; the medical examiner attributed her death to blunt force injuries to the head. Her body was found along a road while officers were watching Ortiz's home. Her brother, Joey Cantu, later told the court that she had a deeply empathetic nature and that to him she "will always be the six-year-old girl."
Janelle Ortiz, 28, was a transgender woman, and was misgendered in early official statements and news reports. She dreamed of becoming famous and could talk to almost anyone. Her younger sister, Rosenda Ortiz, said the two had a hard childhood, moving from home to home, and that Janelle was "strong and had a big heart, always asking what others needed." She was not related to her killer. According to testimony at trial, she asked him shortly before he shot her, "Are you going to kill me?" He left her body in a gravel pit. Police did not know she was dead until he told them.
Early on September 15, officers spotted Ortiz's white truck at a gas station. When they confronted him outside the convenience store he raised his hands, then ran. He was found hiding in the bed of a pickup in a hotel parking garage and taken into custody. He was charged with four counts of murder, along with unlawful restraint, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and evading arrest,.
In the interrogation that followed he first denied knowing the women, then described each killing. He said he knew investigators would find him once Peña escaped and that he had sped up. "He told us he was going to keep going until he was caught," said Captain Federico Calderon of the Webb County Sheriff's Office. Ortiz told investigators he had been trying to "clean up the streets" of his hometown, and he called sex workers "trash." Webb County District Attorney Isidro Alaniz offered a different reading: that Ortiz felt the women were getting too close to his life, beginning with Ramirez.
The case was moved from Laredo to San Antonio because of heavy local news coverage, with Judge Oscar Hale presiding. The state at first sought the death penalty and later decided to seek life without parole instead. Trial began in late November 2022.
Jurors watched the recorded interrogation and heard calls Ortiz made from jail to his wife. Erika Peña testified, and the trooper's body-camera video was shown. A Department of Public Safety firearms examiner testified that bullets from all four women matched the Heckler & Koch .40-caliber pistol found in Ortiz's truck, his government-issued service weapon. It held 13 rounds; prosecutors said 9 were left, which accounted for the shots that killed Cantu and Janelle Ortiz.
His lawyer, Joel Perez, argued that the confession was coerced, that police should have stopped questioning Ortiz when he said he did not want to talk, and that the search of his truck was illegal. He said Ortiz suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, insomnia, bad dreams and headaches and had been medicated and drinking. The defense called no witnesses. Alaniz called Ortiz "cold, callous, calculated."
On December 7, 2022, the jury found him guilty of capital murder. Each of the twelve jurors confirmed the verdict when polled. With death off the table, the sentence was automatically life in prison without parole.
Families gave nine victim impact statements. Some said they forgave him. Joey Cantu, who had himself been convicted of murder years before, told Ortiz that he was forgiven. Janelle Ortiz's mother, Elva Enriquez, said the verdict brought the closure the families had waited for. "It hurt," she said.
Ortiz was moved from the Webb County jail to a state prison on December 19, 2022. He appealed, arguing that his confession and the search of his truck should have been suppressed. On May 15, 2024, the Eighth Court of Appeals in El Paso found no error and affirmed the conviction. He is serving life without parole in the Texas prison system. No later change in his status was found as of October 2026.