In September 2018, the border town of Laredo was rocked by a series of grisly murders.
Juan David Ortiz, a 10-year veteran of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection service, was eventually arrested for killing four sex workers over the span of 12 days. Ortiz confessed he lured his victims into his white Dodge truck and drove them to the outskirts of town, where he violently executed them, leaving them dead or dying on the sides of dark, rural roads.
Texas-based author Rick Jervis explores the gruesome story in his new book, “The Devil Behind the Badge,” which comes out Tuesday. He joined the Standard with more.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity:
Texas Standard: What drew you to the story in the first place?
Rick Jervis: So I was sitting at home on a Saturday back in 2018 when I got a call from one of my editors at USA Today telling me that a Border Patrol agent had actually been arrested down in Laredo for killing four women, and that I needed to go down there and cover it.
So that’s what I did. I hurried down there and started digging into the story from there.
What were you able to glean about Ortiz’s motives? I mean, he confessed to doing this, right?
So motive has been one of the most elusive parts of this book. It’s not entirely clear why he did it specifically.
The only hints that we basically get is when Ortiz gives this nine-hour interview to investigators after his arrest, and in the course of that interview states that he wanted to “rid the streets of prostitutes.”
This book deals with solving a crime in the internet age, especially with the popularity of true crime as a genre online. Can you tell us about how that dynamic played out in this case?
So the investigation toward him lasted 12 days, but investigators were mostly stymied. They didn’t have any really good leads. They didn’t have anything pointing them to Juan David Ortiz.
And the only reason that he was arrested is because he actually pulled his gun out on a would-be fifth victim who managed to escape from his truck and happened to be at a gas station where a Texas state trooper was also pumping gas, so she ran toward him. And that’s how the manhunt for him basically began.
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A big part of this book hinges on what happens when law enforcement has to police their own. What sort of conclusions could you draw based on this situation?
Well, that’s a really big question, and that’s something which I bring up in the book: What were some of the signs that David Ortiz was showing while he was in Border Patrol?
We know after the fact – after he was arrested, after these crimes were actually committed – investigators spoke with some of his colleagues there and inside Border Patrol, and some of his colleagues basically told investigators that they were noticing very erratic behavior from him.
He was talking about knowing some of the known sex workers there in downtown Laredo, that he had picked up a few of them previously. That he was complaining about over drinking and taking a lot of psychotropic pills.
So, like, there were signs. The question is why or why not the Border Patrol officials ever pick up on them?
What have you concluded about that?
That they didn’t. There were a lot of red flags, it seems like, both from colleagues, from friends that I’ve talked to, from family members who noticed this very steep sort of decline in his personality. And Border Patrol officials didn’t pick up on it.
In fact, just like a couple of days before the first murder occurred, he was promoted. He went through an interview and was granted the sort of exclusive access to work on more sensitive cases.
Did you pick up on any broader lessons about what happened in Laredo that speaks more broadly to this issue of internal policing and law enforcement?
Border Patrol officials are very adamant to point out that this is an anomalous case, that there are more than 20,000 Border Patrol agents in the agency, and not all of them are murderers or serial murderers. And that’s obviously a very true statement, but it does raise the question of how they are actually policing their own ranks.
Border Patrol specifically has had a lot of criticisms toward transparency, towards how they discipline their agents. They’ve had a lot of criticism from immigrant advocates about a culture of impunity that agents there feel like they could get away with things.
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You were called to cover this story back in 2018 by USA Today. Since that time, what’s happened to Ortiz?
He had a trial in December of 2022, and he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. About 18, 19 months later, he appealed, and an appeals court in El Paso ruled in favor of his verdict. So he lost his appeal. And now he seems to be set to spend the rest of his life in a Texas prison.
You mentioned the Border Patrol’s response here. I’m curious are there any signs of any change in the culture in the Laredo sector or in Border Patrol more broadly?
Border Patrol is a really hard agency to cover. They haven’t been overly transparent. There have been positive steps which have happened since 2018.
They have actually started rolling out body cams. They published their use of force handbook, which details when and how agents draw guns on suspects. They have taken steps.
You talk to immigrant advocates, though, and they basically say that there still exists a concerning lack of transparency when it comes to discipline, and that this culture of impunity still exists.
