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Border Patrol Agent Murders 4 Sex Workers in Texas While Living Double Life As Family Man
Juan David Ortiz's killing spree only came to an end after one of his victims escaped, but not before he murdered Melissa Ramirez, Claudine Anne Luera, Guiselda Cantu, and Janelle Ortiz.
Just weeks before she was killed, Melissa Ramirez made a chilling prediction.
“We were at the kitchen table,” her sister-in-law Gracie Ramirez recalled to Dateline. “She said, ‘I need to say something.’ We just stopped what we were doing and she said, ‘I’m not going to be here for long, someone’s going to kill me.’”
Ramirez, a 29-year-old mom who fell into a world of drugs and sex work on the streets of Laredo, Texas, never said who she was afraid of, but she told her family that she believed she was going to be shot to death, according to “The Streets of Laredo” episode of Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.
Her dark premonition came true just a few weeks later. Ramirez’s body was discovered on a desolate roadway on September 3, 2018, about 25 miles from Downtown Laredo. She had been shot in the head.
It was the first in a string of murders targeting sex workers in the area. As investigators tirelessly tried to track down the ruthless serial killer, another woman managed to escape the murderer's clutches, finally giving law enforcement officers the clues they needed to find the shocking culprit.
Who was Melissa Ramirez?
Ramirez was 29 when she was shot twice in the head, execution style, and left to die on the side of the road.
Her loved ones described her as a happy mother, who was once a dedicated student.
“Every time we would hang out with each other, we would just laugh. It was very fun to be around with her,” her sister-in-law Gracie said. “We were like sisters. We were super close to each other.”
But Ramirez’s life began to unravel in her early teens, when a bipolar diagnosis went untreated. Her family had no idea that in the years that followed, she had turned to drugs and then sex work to make ends meet.
“She was very private,” Gracie said.
When law enforcement officers found Ramirez's body on September 3, 2018, they also discovered 40-caliber shell casings left behind at the scene from the brand Federal, an ammunition supplier often used by law enforcement agencies.
Federico Calderon, a captain with the Webb County Sheriff’s Office who worked on the case, knew the department would need some support and called in help from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, as well as the Texas Rangers, a division of the Texas Department of Public Safety.
A second victim is discovered
As investigators crossed off one lead after another, they learned that Ramirez had been close with another woman working on the streets, Claudine Anne Luera. They believed she may have had some information that could help with the investigation and set out to find her, but there was no sign of her.
Then, on September 13, 10 days after Ramirez’s murder, authorities finally found Luera, but not in the way that they’d hoped. She’d been shot along a road, about two miles from where Ramirez’s body was found. She was rushed to the hospital, where she died.
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Just like in Ramirez’s case, authorities found 40-caliber Federal ammunition at the scene.
“It’s starting to smell like it’s the same guy and we have a strong inclination after processing that crime scene that we’re probably dealing with the same person,” Calderon said.
Who was Claudine Anne Luera?
Luera’s daughter Ciara Munguia told Dateline correspondent Josh Mankiewicz that her mother had a difficult childhood and was assaulted by a neighbor when she was young. Although the incident left her “very damaged,” Luera later became a dedicated mom.
When Munguia was a teenager, however, her mom began dating a man who was a bad influence and got her into heroin.
“I was like 15 and things, you know, she just changed. She would only wear like long sleeves,” she remembered.
To support her addiction, Luera soon turned to sex work.
“She was just heavily addicted to a drug and it took over,” Munguia said.
A Near-Deadly Encounter
Now with two homicides on their hands, authorities continued to try to track down every lead. They got the break they needed just two days after Luera was killed when a half-dressed woman raced up to a Department of Public Safety officer pumping gas and said she had just been attacked by a man in the parking lot.
The victim, Erika Peña, who was also a sex worker, frantically told the officer that she had been out with a regular client she knew as “David” when their conversation turned to the two recent murders and his demeanor suddenly changed.
The man took out a gun and pointed it at her head, Peña said. She was able to slip out of her blouse and escape his grasp, before leaping out of the passenger side of the truck and running to safety at the gas station.
“He was trying to grab me,” she told the officer, as seen in body camera footage of the exchange. “I’m afraid, sir.”
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Back at the station, Peña provided investigators with more information about the terrifying encounter. She said David had picked her up earlier in the day and taken her to his house, where she’d been several times before.
When their conversation turned to the recent murders, David told her he was “scared” because he had been “one of the last ones” to see one of the victims, and he seemed to be concerned about DNA.
“She starts getting a bad feeling like she’s going to die, so she wants to leave,” Calderon told Dateline.
David somehow convinced Peña to go to the gas station with him to get some food and that’s when he attacked her, she said.
Victim who escaped leads authorities to Juan David Ortiz
Peña was not only able to provide a description of the man who pointed a gun at her, but also led authorities back to his home in a nice neighborhood of Laredo. They discovered the home was owned by a man named Juan David Ortiz and his wife.
Ortiz wasn’t home, but investigators staked out the property. As they were waiting, they learned there had been another victim dumped along a road. The body was identified as Guiselda Cantu.
The race was on to find Ortiz, a man they learned was leading a dangerous double life. From the outside, Ortiz, a supervisory agent with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, appeared to be the perfect family man to his wife and kids while hiding a dark side.
When his white truck was spotted at a nearby gas station, officers confronted him as he left the convenience store. Ortiz put his hands up and initially seemed to cooperate, until he suddenly made a run for it.
After Ortiz was found hiding in the bed of a truck in a hotel parking garage, he was taken into custody and brought back to the station.
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Ortiz initially denied knowing any of the victims or having anything to do with the murders, but eventually confessed to the crimes, even telling authorities about a fourth victim, Janelle Ortiz, whom he'd killed and left in a gravel pit on September 15 just before authorities tracked him down at the gas station.
He said he knew that after Peña escaped, it was only a matter of time before investigators tracked him down, so he accelerated his killing.
“He told us he was going to keep going until he was caught,” Calderon said.
Ortiz confessed that Ramirez had been “a friend of mine.” He said that he got angry after she got high and passed out in his car.
“After a while, I’m like, ‘Ok, I’m just driving around like a dumbass. What the [expletive],'” he told investigators.
When Ramirez came to and asked to get out of the truck, he shot her with his service weapon.
Ortiz claimed the killings had been motivated by a desire to “clean up the streets.”
“I was continuing driving on San Ber (San Bernardo Ave.), and then this is where the monster came out,” he said in his interrogation. “And uh, I was driving, and I was like ‘Ah, (expletive) people’. They’re — they don’t have jobs. They’re all [expletive] pieces of [expletive].’”
But Webb County District Attorney Isidro R. Alaniz had a different take on why Ortiz killed, telling Dateline he believed that Ortiz felt the women were getting too close.
“I think what ended up happening, I think there was a power shift here and starting with Ramirez. I think she crossed over you know from her world into his world,” he said. “Because she becomes now a threat to his livelihood, to his family, to his children, to his job.”
Where is Juan David Ortiz today?
Ortiz was charged with four counts of murder, one count of unlawful restraint, one count of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and two counts of evading arrest. A jury found him guilty in 2022 and Ortiz was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The victims’ families continue to honor their loved ones. For Munguia, Luera’s daughter, that meant helping others by taking a job with the Webb County Sheriff’s Office.
“I love it,” she said. “I think I am in the right place and I know my mom would be so proud of me. I know she’s proud of me.”
