In early September 2018, the bodies of women began turning up on lonely ranch roads north of Laredo, Texas, the busy border city on the Rio Grande. Each had been shot in the head or neck. At the first two scenes investigators found the same .40-caliber Federal ammunition. The man responsible was a supervisor in the U.S. Border Patrol's intelligence operation in Laredo, a Navy veteran with a master's degree, a wife and two young children, and the gun he used was his government-issued service pistol. He killed four women in twelve days. He was caught because a fifth woman fought her way out of his truck and ran, half dressed, to a state trooper pumping gas.
Ortiz grew up in Laredo. He joined the U.S. Navy in 2001 and served nearly eight years, until 2009, in medical posts, including about three years attached to the Marines. He deployed to Iraq. A Marine who served with him told Texas Monthly that Ortiz, whom the unit called "Doc," cared about migrants and hoped to use his medical training to help people crossing the desert.
He joined the Border Patrol in 2009 and rose steadily. By 2017 he was an intelligence supervisor at the South Texas Border Intelligence Center in Laredo. While working as an agent he earned a bachelor's degree from American Military University and a master's degree from St. Mary's University in San Antonio. (Texas Monthly describes the master's as international relations; the appeals court described his degrees as in criminal justice and forensics.) His only recorded complaint, from a migrant who said Ortiz had taken a cigarette from him, was dismissed after an internal review. Shortly before the killings, he was told he was being considered for another promotion.
At home he was a family man. He and his wife, Daniella, had two young children and lived in a newly built stucco house in a comfortable Laredo neighborhood; they attended First Assembly of God. According to the Marine friend, Ortiz had once texted that he felt as if he were back in Iraq, and the friend suspected long-buried post-traumatic stress. Ortiz was receiving prescribed medication through a Veterans Affairs clinic.
He was also, by his own later admission, a regular customer of women who sold sex along San Bernardo Avenue in Laredo. He told investigators he had paid for sex with most of the women he killed.
Melissa Ramirez was 29. Her sister-in-law, Gracie Perez, said that Melissa had been raped at 13, that she dropped out of high school, and that she fought depression. Her family said she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder in her early teens and that it had never been properly treated. In time she turned to drugs, lived on the streets and sold sex to pay for her addiction, while her children were raised by others. Her relatives remembered her as the one who was always trying to make everyone laugh. "She wanted to be a better mom, a better person," Perez said. Weeks before she died, Melissa told her family she believed someone was going to kill her.
On September 3, 2018, Ortiz picked her up. By his account in the interrogation, she used drugs in his truck and passed out, and when she came to they argued. He pulled over on a rural road near Jefferies Road in northern Webb County, about 25 miles from downtown Laredo, so she could relieve herself, and shot her twice in the back of the head. Captain Federico Calderon of the Webb County Sheriff's Office, who led the investigation, testified that she was found face down in the dirt with a bag of candy still in her hand.
Calderon brought in U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Texas Rangers. Ortiz, meanwhile, went back to work as usual.
Claudine Anne Luera, 42, was a close friend of Melissa's and the mother of five. Her daughter, Ciara Munguia, said Claudine had been sexually assaulted by a neighbor as a child, fell in with a bad influence as a teenager and became addicted to heroin, which led her into sex work. Her sister, Colette Mireles, said Claudine ached to see her children do better than she had. When the sisters last spoke, two days before Claudine died, she was "over the moon" because one of her sons was doing well in school and was planning to go to prom with his girlfriend.
On the night of September 13, ten days after Ramirez was killed, Ortiz picked up Luera. According to the district attorney, she told him she knew he had been the last person seen with Ramirez. In Ortiz's own telling, she realized they were near the spot where Ramirez had been found and asked him to take her somewhere else. He pulled over near Jefferies Road and shot her. She was found by the roadside about two miles from where Ramirez had been left, still alive. She died at the hospital. Prosecutors later called her a fighter.
The ammunition tied the two scenes together. Prosecutors would also argue that Luera's death was not a matter of chance. Texas Monthly reported that Luera had claimed to know who was responsible for Ramirez's death and that an investigator had asked the intelligence center, where Ortiz was a supervisor, for help locating her. The next day she was dead. District Attorney Isidro "Chilo" Alaniz asked the jury whether that could be a coincidence. This was the prosecution's argument. What, if anything, Ortiz learned at work has not been made public.
Erika Peña had known Ortiz for five or six months as a regular client she called David. He drove a white Dodge pickup with distinctive disabled veteran license plates. On September 14, Ortiz had planned to drive to San Antonio with his wife and children, he told investigators, but a water leak at the house kept him in Laredo. That afternoon he picked up Peña outside a motel. She was already uneasy; another woman she knew had just been found dead. He took her to buy heroin and then to his house.
When the talk turned to the killings, Peña testified, he seemed unlike himself and very nervous. He said he had been the "next to last person" with Melissa Ramirez and worried that investigators would ask for his DNA. "It made me think that he was the one who might have been murdering," she told the jury. She became frightened and vomited in his yard. When she insisted on leaving, he drove to a Circle K, parked behind a tractor-trailer and picked up a gun. "He pointed it right at my face," she testified. They struggled. She wriggled out of his grip, losing her shirt in the process, and ran in only her bra, leaving her purse behind in the truck.
At the pumps, Texas Department of Public Safety Trooper Francisco Hernandez was fueling his patrol car. He later testified that she was in shock, hyperventilating and frightened, and that she told him a man named David had attacked her. His body camera recorded the conversation. Hernandez took her to a police station, where she gave her account to Calderon. With her information, investigators identified Ortiz and his truck, and Peña showed troopers his house. A lookout notice went out for the white Dodge, and officers set up surveillance on the home. Alaniz would later call her "the key to breaking open this case."
Ortiz believed Peña had gone to the police, and he was right. According to prosecutors, he went home expecting to find officers waiting to ambush him. When none were there, he went back out, and within about two hours he killed two more women.
Guiselda Alicia Cantu was 35. Ortiz said he had never met her before that night. Driving north on Interstate 35 and noticing police in the area, he pulled under an overpass and told her to get out; she could walk north toward San Antonio or south toward Laredo. He said he told her he had killed the other women and was going to kill himself. Cantu told him that God loved him and would forgive him. She walked away, then came back, and he shot her. The medical examiner, Corinne Stern, found a gunshot wound to the neck and attributed her death to blunt force injuries to the head. Her body was found along the road while officers were watching Ortiz's house. Her brother, Joey Cantu, later spoke in court about her deeply empathetic nature.
Janelle Ortiz was 28, a transgender woman who was misgendered and called by her birth name in early official statements and news reports. She was no relation to her killer. She dreamed of being famous and had a gift for talking with almost anyone. She and her younger sister, Rosenda, had a hard childhood, moving from home to home. Rosenda remembered her as strong, with a big heart, always asking what other people needed, and had hoped to buy a house one day and invite her sister to live there. She was, Rosenda said, just a human being like the other victims.
Ortiz picked her up on San Bernardo Avenue. As they drove north on I-35, he told investigators, she said, "It's you, you're the one." He pulled off near mile marker 15, beside a large mound of gravel, and ordered her out. He said he expected her to fight, but she seemed to know she was going to be shot. According to the prosecution, she asked him, "Are you going to kill me?" He left her in the gravel pit. Police did not know she was dead until he told them.
Her funeral, like Claudine Luera's, was held in Laredo on Friday, September 21, 2018. Janelle's was at Holy Redeemer Catholic Church. "We've seen so many families afflicted, hit down, a life too short," the Rev. Edmundo Lopez Jr. said.
That evening, DPS Trooper John Bradshaw spotted the white Dodge parked outside a gas station and called for backup. When Ortiz walked out of the store, two troopers met him with weapons drawn. He confirmed that the truck was his, and they told him it matched a truck connected to the murders. Ordered to turn around, he hesitated, then ran south on foot.
For hours he hid. Bodycam video later shown to the jury captured a team that included SWAT officers finding him in the bed of a pickup on the fourth floor of a hotel parking garage in the early hours of September 15. Before they found him, he called his wife and told her to take care of the children and not to come back to Laredo. He was taken into custody without a struggle. In the transport vehicle, when officers discussed where his gun might be, he volunteered that it was in a door panel of his truck. He told Noel Gonzales, an investigator assisting Calderon, to "take your trophy shot," the phrase a hunter uses for a picture with his kill. Gonzales testified that he replied, "we don't do that."
Ortiz reached the Webb County Sheriff's Office substation at about 2:50 a.m. At about 3:20, Calderon and Texas Ranger E.J. Salinas began questioning him. They read him his rights. He refused to sign the written waiver but kept answering. For hours he denied everything. He said Peña's name was a blur and that he would have remembered something like murder. Asked about the rounds missing from his service weapon, he said he had fired them into the sky. Shown a photograph of one of the women, he said he had never seen her and crumpled the picture. At one point he told them to just take him to jail.
The questioning stopped three times for long breaks while investigators processed the scene where Cantu had been found. Then Ortiz asked the officers to remove his handcuffs. Calderon did, and Ortiz began to talk. "I'm the one who did it," he said, according to Calderon's testimony. He described each killing in order and told them about a fourth woman they had not yet found. "If he hadn't told us, we may have never found her," Calderon said.
He gave a motive in his own words: "I just wanted to clean up the streets if nobody is going to do it." He called the women "trash" and "so dirty." He said that something came over him when he drove down San Bernardo Avenue. He also said he suffered from post-traumatic stress, took medication for depression and anxiety, and had blacked out after mixing it with alcohol, implying that the killings happened in those blackouts. He told investigators he would have kept killing until he was caught, and that once Peña escaped he knew they would find him and he sped up. Alaniz offered a different reading of the motive: that Ortiz felt threatened as the women came too close to his family and his job, starting with Ramirez.
The interview ran until about noon, nearly ten hours with more than four hours of breaks. He was given chips and water, and after confessing, a Whataburger meal.
Meanwhile, the Dodge had been towed to a secure Sheriff's Office lot, and an investigator searched it without a warrant while the interview was going on. Photographs taken at the gas station showed two women's purses in plain view on the floorboard. Inside the driver's door pocket, investigators found a Heckler & Koch .40-caliber pistol and magazines of live rounds. Tire tracks from the truck matched those at the crime scenes. A warrant for the truck was issued nine days later.
Ortiz was first charged with four counts of murder, along with unlawful restraint, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and evading arrest. Customs and Border Protection suspended him without pay. Three days after his arrest, dozens of relatives gathered for a candlelight vigil in a park near San Agustin Cathedral in downtown Laredo. Ramirez's family wore pink and carried signs reading "We want justice for all victims." "She was loved," Colette Mireles said of her sister. "Just like these other victims, they had families. They are much more than what's being told about them."
On December 5, 2018, a Webb County grand jury heard the case for about two hours and returned an indictment in about twenty minutes, replacing the four murder counts with a single charge of capital murder of multiple persons. His bond stood at 2.5 million dollars. Alaniz announced that he would seek the death penalty, describing Ortiz as a family man and supervisor by day who became someone else at night, a vigilante who had betrayed his oath, and said he saw no mitigating circumstances.
In June 2020, the trial court held a hearing on defense motions to suppress the confession and the truck evidence and denied both, finding that Ortiz had been properly warned, had waived his rights and had spoken voluntarily, and that the truck search was lawful because he had abandoned the vehicle when he ran and because officers had probable cause. A later hearing on whether the search also qualified as an inventory search ended the same way. In the summer of 2022, the court granted a defense request to move the trial out of Laredo because of heavy local coverage. The state dropped its pursuit of death, with the backing of the victims' families, and sought life without parole instead.
The trial opened in Bexar County, in San Antonio, about 150 miles north of Laredo, before Judge Oscar Hale, in late November 2022. Ortiz, now 39, was defended by Joel Perez and Raymond Fuchs. Relatives of the four women filled the courtroom wearing T-shirts printed with the women's faces and the words "They are Loved."
Erika Peña testified on November 28. Under cross-examination she acknowledged that she sold sex mainly to pay for a heroin and crack habit costing 300 to 400 dollars a day, that a relative was raising her child, and that she had been high the night she escaped. "I was high but I knew what was going on," she said. Perez pointed out that at a pretrial hearing she had said Ortiz pointed the gun at her chest rather than her face, and asked whether she was lying. "Never," she said. Trooper Hernandez's body camera footage was played.
Over the following days the jury saw Bradshaw's dash camera video and the arrest footage, heard Sergeant Roberto Castillo describe opening the evidence box containing the pistol, and saw crime scene and autopsy photographs. One juror fainted during the autopsy photographs and was dismissed. On December 1, one of the Webb County prosecutors, Joshua Davila, resigned in the middle of the trial and posted a criticism of the office on Facebook; Alaniz's office said the resignation was an administrative matter unrelated to the case. That day and the next, the jury watched the nearly ten-hour interrogation, released publicly for the first time. Under cross-examination, Perez pressed Calderon on whether investigators had implied they would help Ortiz's wife collect his retirement savings if he confessed. "That was not my intention," Calderon said. Asked whether he coerced Ortiz, he answered, "At no time, no sir."
Sean Daniel, a former DPS firearms examiner, testified that the four bullets and two fragments recovered from the women had all been fired from the Heckler & Koch pistol, Ortiz's service weapon, loaded with the jacketed hollow-point rounds standard in law enforcement. Corinne Stern testified that Ramirez, Luera and Janelle Ortiz died of gunshot wounds and Cantu of blunt force injuries after being shot in the neck. The prosecution called sixteen witnesses and rested on December 6. The defense called none.
In closing on December 7, Assistant District Attorney Karina Rios told jurors to study the confession. "He will tell you in there why he did this," she said. "We are standing atop the Mount Everest of evidence." Alaniz called the confession "the best evidence," argued that Ortiz never exercised his right to end the interview, and described him as "cold, callous, calculated." "The science doesn't lie," he said. In rebuttal he turned to Ortiz: "Mr. Ortiz was a serial killer then and he is a serial killer now."
Perez asked jurors to set the video aside as the product of an improper bargain and argued that the truck should never have been searched without a warrant. "Use your common sense," he said. "No means no." He asked whether Ortiz was really a serial killer, describing a broken veteran with post-traumatic stress, insomnia, bad dreams and headaches who had been medicated and drinking.
The jury deliberated a little more than five hours. On the evening of December 7, almost four years to the day after the indictment, it found Ortiz guilty of capital murder. Perez asked that the jurors be polled, and all twelve said guilty. Ortiz showed little emotion. Because the state had not sought death, the sentence was automatic: life in prison without parole.
Relatives gave nine victim impact statements that night. Gracie Perez remembered Melissa Ramirez as "a loving, kind and funny person" and told Ortiz that Melissa's children's hearts were broken. "Do you know how much pain you have caused this family?" she asked. "My heart is torn apart knowing that I won't be able to see her but to visit her in the cemetery." Claudine Luera's daughter told him, "You will be long forgotten in our memories and locked up until you die."
Joey Cantu, Guiselda's brother, spoke to Ortiz directly. "She was all that I had," he said. "You took the last living member of my family." He told the court, "It hurt. I have had my mother murdered, my father was murdered and now my sister is murdered." Cantu had himself been convicted of murder years earlier and said he had been forgiven, and he offered Ortiz the same. "Maybe it will do him good to know he is forgiven," he said. Not everyone could. A member of Ramirez's family told Ortiz she could never forgive him and that he deserved to suffer in prison. Janelle Ortiz's mother, Elva Enriquez, said the verdict brought the closure the families had been waiting for.
On December 19, 2022, Ortiz was moved from the Webb County jail to the Texas prison system. His appeal was transferred from San Antonio's Fourth Court of Appeals to the Eighth Court of Appeals in El Paso under the Texas Supreme Court's docket equalization program; the El Paso court applied the Fourth Court's precedents. Ortiz argued that his confession and the warrantless search of his truck should have been suppressed.
On May 15, 2024, a panel of Chief Justice Jeff Alley and Justices Palafox and Soto affirmed in a memorandum opinion written by Alley. On the confession, the court noted that Ortiz held bachelor's and master's degrees and was an experienced federal supervisor; he had refused to sign the waiver form but went on answering questions and never asked for a lawyer or to stop. A long interview with breaks, food and water was not coercive in itself, and his lack of sleep did not make his statements involuntary. Telling him that the district attorney was present and that cooperation could help was not a promise of leniency, and his requests about his wife, a family photograph and his retirement benefits were not inducements that would make an innocent man confess. His claims about medication and intoxication had not been raised at trial. On the truck, the court upheld the search under the automobile exception: Peña's account, the confirmed address, his flight, the empty holster and purses in plain view, and his own statement about the gun gave officers probable cause, and the record also supported a finding that he had abandoned the truck when he ran. Both issues were overruled.
Ortiz is serving life without parole in the Texas prison system. No later change in his status was found as of October 2026.
The case drew national attention because of who the killer was: a federal law enforcement supervisor who used his issued weapon and, prosecutors argued, perhaps his position as well. It was examined in Dateline: Secrets Uncovered, with correspondent Josh Mankiewicz, and San Antonio station KSAT streamed the trial in full after airing a pretrial special, "Open Court: The Trial of Juan David Ortiz." Ciara Munguia, Claudine Luera's daughter, later took a job with the Webb County Sheriff's Office.
Several points remain unproven or contested:
Motive. Ortiz said he wanted to "clean up the streets." Prosecutors suggested he was protecting his double life as the women came close to his family and work. His blackout account, offered in the interrogation and echoed by the defense, was not supported by any expert testimony at trial, since the defense called no witnesses.
The intelligence center. The prosecution argued that Luera died the day after investigators asked the intelligence center for help finding her. That link was argued, not proven.
Peña's account. She told a pretrial hearing the gun was pointed at her chest and the jury at her face; the defense used the discrepancy and her drug use to attack her credibility, and the jury believed her.
Details of the evidence differ between reports. One trial report says the pistol held 13 rounds and had 9 left; another quotes a sergeant describing a 12-round magazine. Reports also differ on how many shots struck Cantu.
What is not disputed is the record of the women themselves. Their families pushed back from the start against the way they were described. "They had families," Colette Mireles said. "They were loved. They were someone. They were human."
2001 to 2009: Ortiz serves in the U.S. Navy in medical posts, including service with the Marines and a deployment to Iraq.
2009: Joins the U.S. Border Patrol.
By 2017: Intelligence supervisor at the South Texas Border Intelligence Center in Laredo.
September 3, 2018: Melissa Ramirez, 29, is shot and left near Jefferies Road in northern Webb County.
September 13, 2018: Claudine Anne Luera, 42, is shot about two miles away and dies at the hospital.
September 14, 2018: Erika Peña escapes from Ortiz's truck at a Circle K and alerts DPS Trooper Francisco Hernandez. That night Ortiz kills Guiselda Alicia Cantu, 35, and Janelle Ortiz, 28.
September 15, 2018: Ortiz is found hiding in a hotel parking garage; interrogated from about 3:20 a.m. to about noon, he confesses and leads police to Janelle Ortiz.
September 18, 2018: Families hold a vigil in downtown Laredo.
September 21, 2018: Funerals for Janelle Ortiz and Claudine Luera.
December 5, 2018: Indicted for capital murder; the state announces it will seek death.
June 2020: Suppression motions denied.
Summer 2022: Venue moved to Bexar County; the state later drops the death penalty.
November 28, 2022: Peña testifies in San Antonio.
December 1 to 2, 2022: Jury watches the interrogation video.
December 7, 2022: Guilty of capital murder; automatic life without parole; nine impact statements.
December 19, 2022: Moved to state prison.
May 15, 2024: Eighth Court of Appeals affirms the conviction.