A Border Patrol agent has been convicted of killing four sex workers after telling investigators he was trying to "clean up the streets".
Juan David Ortiz, 39, confessed to the killings and will receive an automatic sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole because prosecutors decided not to seek the death penalty.
At the time of his arrest Ortiz was a Border Patrol intel supervisor and admitted to killing Melissa Ramirez, 29, Claudine Anne Luera, 42, Guiselda Alicia Cantu, 35, and Janelle Ortiz, 28.
Their bodies were found along roads on the outskirts of the Texan town of Laredo in September 2018.
Ortiz told investigators he had been a customer of most of the women, but he also expressed disdain for sex workers, referring to them as “trash” and “so dirty” and insisting he wanted to “clean up the streets.”
He said “the monster would come out” as he drove along a stretch of street in Laredo frequented by the women.
After the verdict had been handed down family members of the murdered women faced their killer to give statements.
Ramirez’s sister-in-law, Gracie Perez, described her as “a loving, kind and funny person.” She told Ortiz that the hearts of Ramirez’s children are now broken.
“Do you know how much pain you have caused this family?” Perez said. “My heart is torn apart knowing that I won’t be able to see her but to visit her in the cemetery,” she said.
Ortiz' defence attorneys said the confession was improperly induced and attempted to have it barred from the evidence.
Defense attorney Joel Perez also argued that Ortiz, a Navy veteran who had been deployed to Iraq, was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, had been suffering from insomnia, nightmares and headaches, and was medicated and had been drinking the night of the slayings.
During the trial a witness testified that Ortiz picked her up on the evening of September 14, 2018, and that she got a bad feeling when he told her he was the “next to last person” to have sex with Ramirez, whose body had been found a week earlier.
She testified that he told her he was worried investigators would find his DNA on the body.
“It made me think that he was the one who might have been murdering,” the 31-year-old told the jury.
Pena fled from his truck at a petrol station after he pointed a gun at her, and she ran straight to a state trooper who was refuelling his vehicle. Ortiz fled.
Authorities tracked Ortiz to a hotel parking garage in the early hours of September 15, 2018, and he was arrested.
Capt. Federico Calderon of the Webb County Sheriff’s Department testified that officers who arrested Ortiz knew about the slayings of Ramirez and Luera, and while chasing him after Pena’s escape learned that a third body — later identified as Cantu’s — had been found.
But Calderon said it wasn’t until Ortiz’s confession that they learned Janelle Ortiz had been killed.
Webb County Medical Examiner Corinne Stern testified that Ramirez, Luera and Janelle Ortiz were fatally shot while Cantu, who was shot in the neck, died of blunt force trauma to the head.
The bullets collected from the crime scenes came from the same gun, and matched the weapon found in Juan David Ortiz’s pickup, a ballistics expert testified.
