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Border Patrol Supervisor Juan David Ortiz Arrested in Killings of Four Women in Laredo

Found hiding in a truck in a hotel parking lot, Ortiz was charged with four murders after a woman escaped from his truck and ran to a state trooper.

Published

Illustration of police cars with flashing lights and officers in silhouette around a pickup truck in a motel parking lot at night. Not the actual scene.

He went to work every day. For ten days in September 2018, while detectives in Laredo, Texas, hunted whoever was leaving women shot in the head on the roads of rural Webb County, a U.S. Border Patrol intelligence supervisor kept reporting for duty as though nothing had happened. At about 2 a.m. on Saturday, September 15, officers found him hiding in a truck in a Laredo hotel parking lot and took him into custody. His name was Juan David Ortiz. He was 35 and had worked for the Border Patrol for ten years.

By Sunday he was in the Webb County jail on four counts of murder, with further charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and unlawful restraint, and his bond had been set at $2.5 million. "As law enforcement was looking for the killer," District Attorney Isidro Alaniz said, "he would be reporting to work every day like normal." Alaniz said investigators considered the case the work of a serial killer.

The string began with Melissa Ramirez, 29, a mother of two, whose body was found on September 4. According to a police affidavit, Ortiz told investigators he had killed her the day before. The next victim, Claudine Anne Luera, 42, a mother of five, was found shot and left in the road on the morning of Thursday, September 13, badly hurt but alive. She died in a hospital later that day.

What broke the case was an escape. On Friday, the affidavit said, Ortiz picked up a woman who later told police she struggled with him inside his truck as he pointed a pistol at her, and that she got away. She ran to a gas station, found a state trooper and asked for help. After she fled, Ortiz told investigators, he picked up two more women. They were the last of the four he was charged with killing, and the authorities had not yet released their names.

Alaniz said the dead were believed to have been sex workers and that one was a transgender woman. At least two were U.S. citizens; the nationalities of the others were not yet known, and investigators were still working on a motive. Ortiz was believed to have acted alone. The Texas Rangers were investigating with the Webb County Sheriff's Office, and the federal agency offered its condolences to the families and said it did not tolerate criminal activity by its employees.

What this story covers. It reports the arrest and the first charges as CBS News and the Associated Press described them the day after, drawing on Webb County jail records and the police affidavit; the affidavit itself was not opened. Ortiz was accused, not convicted, when this was reported. The two women killed on September 15 are not named here because no source opened for this story named them, and the woman who escaped is not named here either.

Sources