The Devil Behind the Badge: The Horrifying Twelve Days of the Border Patrol Serial Killer

(Hardback)

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The shocking true-crime story of a Texas border patrol agent turned serial killer, the four sex workers whom he mercilessly killed, and the upended border town of Laredo where his heinous crimes occurred.

Twelve days is all it took.

Melissa Ramirez, Claudine Ann Luera, Griselda Hernandez, and Janelle Ortiz were four marginalized women striving to make ends meet as sex workers. They looked out for one another. But they would soon share a connection that none of them could have imagined. When Melissa was found dead, the other three women were on edge but assumed they were safe. Twelve days later, they too were dead and police had detained an unlikely suspectJuan David Ortiz, a ten-year veteran of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency, where he carried a badge, a service revolver, and was entrusted to protect the community in which he eventually killed. From September 3 through September 15, 2018, Ortiz, a husband and doting father to three children, 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.

In this fast-paced, electrifying tick-tock, Pulitzer Prizewinning USA Today journalist Rick Jervis tells the gripping story of the four murders that shook the small border town of Laredo, and the quest to unmask a cold, calculated killer who was hiding in plain sight.The Devil Behind the Badgeis also a deeply human portrait of the four lives lost and an attempt to uncover what motivated Ortizs descent into darkness. Along the way, it raises serious questions about the border crisis, the abuse of law enforcement, and the challenges of a federal agency to police its own ranks.

Author Bio

Rick Jervisis a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist with more than two decades of experience working at theMiami Herald, theWall Street Journal Europe, theChicago Tribune, andUSA TODAY, where he has worked since 2005, covering everything from the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein to New Orleans and the Gulf Coasts recovery from Hurricane Katrinaand family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border. He lives in Austin, Texas.The Devil Behind the Badge is his first book.