CHAPTER 14 | As police identify victim, a familiar suspect emerges

A liberal dose

February 26, 2008

This series contains explicit language and graphic descriptions of violence.

Editor's note: To Catch a Killer is the true story of killer Andy James Ortiz, his young victims, and the Fort Worth police and Tarrant County prosecutors who brought him to justice. The 24 chapters will continue through March 9, with a chapter published most days. If you miss a day, go to www.star-telegram.com/killer to catch up. The entire story will be published concurrently online.

The story so far

A female's body was found at Marine Creek Lake in northwest Fort Worth. Detective Curt Brannan was investigating but had not identified the victim. Victoria Curtis in Crowley, sick with worry over her missing niece, realized the horrible possibility.

CHAPTER 14

Beverly Brannan often learned more about her husband's job from co-workers at the Army Corps of Engineers in Fort Worth than from Curt Brannan himself. Someone from her office would read about the detective in the newspaper or see him on television -- up to his elbows again in one case or another -- and mention it to her.

'What did he do now?' she would ask, laughing.

The Brannans had been married for 29 years by the summer of 2000, high school sweethearts who shared a commitment to their two sons, Cole and Jacob; a deep religious faith; and passions that ranged from karate to twin Harley-Davidson motorcycles to rodeo. Those were the things they talked about at home -- not murder -- because Curt didn't bring his work back to the family's 3 acres south of town.

But sometimes homicide intruded, like the day when Beverly found crime scene photos that Curt had mistakenly left in the house and her curiosity got the best of her. The photos were of a young woman who had been shot in the head, her body dumped in a river.

'I picked them up and I thought, 'I don't know how in the world anyone could view something like this on a regular basis and not go crazy,'' she remembered.

And sometimes the cases were so difficult or so painful that they would disrupt Curt's sleep, driving him to get up in the middle of the night to eat a bowl of cereal or turn on the television to distract himself. The murders of children were particularly hard. During those investigations, Beverly would see the hurt in her husband's eyes when he walked through the door. She remembered when Jacob was 6 months old and Curt went to investigate the killing of a baby. He came home and took his infant son in his arms and wouldn't let him go.

'He couldn't make enough love go into Jacob,' Beverly said. 'That really upset him.'

In the summer of 2000, Beverly saw the pain in her husband again, and for one of the few times in their life together, Curt spoke of it. A 13-year-old girl had sneaked out at night and ended up strangled, her body dumped on the shore of Marine Creek Lake.

'It's just a shame,' he said to Beverly. 'If she had just stayed home, I wouldn't be out there trying to find out who killed her.'

A sickening revelation

In the days after the body was found, Curt Brannan believed that the Jane Doe was a young woman, maybe in her 20s, and he combed through missing-persons reports with that in mind. He had talked to Victoria Curtis, who called on a Sunday and said her missing niece's nails were painted bright pink, just like the victim's. But Brannan told Curtis that the victim by the lake was probably much older than 13.

He was wrong.

At 11 a.m. on Tuesday, July 25, Brannan received a call from Dr. Rodney Crow, a pathologist at the Tarrant County medical examiner's office. Crow had used dental records to identify the victim: the teenage Crowley girl named Krystal Minjarez who had sneaked out of her aunt's home in the middle of the night a week before.

The news sickened Brannan and struck too close to home. A few years before, his brother had died of a heart attack, so Brannan had become a father figure to his two nieces. Krystal was about the same age. From that day forward, whether talking to his nieces or to girls in his Fort Worth karate class, Brannan would use Krystal's case as a cautionary tale.

When young girls went out, they needed to let their parents know where and with whom, Brannan would say. A predator was much less likely to strike if a potential victim's friends and relatives knew him, so girls needed to make sure any new boyfriends were introduced around. Too many times, girls had sneaked out for what they thought would be a little fun, a secret fling with a guy who seemed harmless, and ended up dead.

'That's a message that needs to be put out there,' Brannan said recently. 'When they sneak off or don't let anyone know where they're at, they don't understand the potential. They don't understand the possible consequences. They don't

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