This is Later with Lee Matthews the Lee Matthews Podcast. More what you hear Weekday Afternoon is on the Drive.
Rick Jervis is a prize winning poetry, prize winning journalists with more than two decades of experience working with the Miami Herald, Wall Street Journal Europe, and Chicago Tribune in USA Today and many many more. He's telling the gripping story of some murders that rocked the town of Laredo, Texas in his new book, The Devil Behind the Bandge The Horrifying twelve Days of the Border Patrol serial Killer. I bet Rick, not a lot of people have heard this story.
Yeah, probably not. I think it basically grabbed a lot of attention early on when it first happened in twenty eighteen, and it made like national news briefly, but then it came and went and that was you know, that was six years ago. So I think people don't really know all of the ins and outs and all the detail. Was this this actual story?
Well, there have been so many other things too that deal with the border. I'm wondering if there's a lot of people just kind of, oh, ever, go another story about the border.
Oh, this is definitely a very different story about the border any story. This is unlike any story that I've ever covered in my twenty plus years as a journalist, and it is it is by far one of the one of the most surprising, craziest stories that I've done.
Well, let's talk about the three I'm sorry that Yeah, the three women that are involved, and they are Melissa Ramirez, Claudine and Luira Gusell de Hernandez and JANEA Ortiz I'm sorry, four women that are involved in this particular story.
Yeah. These these are all marginalized women. They were all sex workers, all of them, all of them, all of them US citizens. By the way, I wanted to make that clear. These these were migrants coming over. These were all women who were born in the US, but they had really debilitating drug addictions and to help finance these substance abuse disorders, they took to the streets and became
sex workers. And that's what and that's what kind of made them easy prey for someone like this quorterer patrol agent to meet them, pick them up, drive them off, and ended up killing them.
About what time did this happen? Was this before things really started to heat up? On the border.
So this happened in September of twenty eighteen, so it was right around the same time that there was a lot of controversy happening on the border. There were a lot of migage coming over at that time. Things were like really ramping up, and there were a lot of controversial tactics being done also by by Border Patrol, Like if you remember the zero Tolerance days and the family separations, this is all happening around around that same time.
The Devil behind the Badge, the horrifying Twelve Days of the Border Patrol, serial killer Rick Jervis is with us and that is the book what brought this to your attention.
So in twenty eighteen, I actually covered this story for USA Today, I'm based in Austin, Texas. I often cover the border, and I got a phone call, like on a random Saturday afternoon from one of my editors saying that a Border Patrol agent had been arrested for killing for women and that I needed to get down to Laredo to cover it. So I did. I basically went
down covered his his actual arrest. I learned about the story a little bit, but Lee the one thing which really drove me to expand this into a bigger project is meeting all of the victims' families. I really started to learn about the victims, more realized that they had these really incredible stories behind them, that all of them were actually beloved by all their families, and that their families were really trying hard to get them off the streets when all this occurred.
For those who don't know, Laredo, Texas is right there on the border. I mean you can climb up to the second store of a two story house and see over in New Mexico.
That's right. So it's right on the border, right across the river from Mexico. And for a long time, both of those sides interacted quite a bit, and I still do obviously, So there's a lot of back and forth there. People coming over into Laredo to work every day, folks going back. It's a really interesting place, excellent.
I'm not ben, but I've read a lot about how interesting it is. Now. Where the girls doing most of their work on the other side of the border, or were they doing it on the United States side?
Now they were all on the US side of the actual border. There's this one street in central Laredo called San Bernardo Avenue Andando is like their sort of red light district, and that's where a lot of this activity occurs. And so this is where where they would apply their trade. This is where they would get a lot of their their drugs. Most of them were was was black tar heroin, which which a lot of them were strongly addicted to,
and so a lot of this occurred there. And on David Ortiz, this Poto patrol agent would would would just cruise down this avenue, pick them up, drive them off and to meet his crimes.
Was he in a regular was he a regular john to these women? I mean did they know him?
So two of them he actually did know well, so he knew his first victim, elis A Lamides, and there was a would be fifth victim, which is how they caught him, called Ericapana, And he actually pulled the gun on Ericapana and looked and looked about to shoot her also, but she managed to basically escape his clutches, kick out of his truck and run off alert police, and that's how they finally got him. And he actually did have a sort of repeat relationship with eric Opania.
And Rick Jervis is with this Pulletry Prize winning journalist and author the book is the Devil behind the Badge of the horrifying Twelve Days of the Border Patrol serial Killer. Would he then take them across the border? Was there any was there any desire to try to make this look like it was happening only in Mexico or was it all only in the United States?
It was all only like in the US. He would he would pick them up and drive them off to like rural areas in h Webb County, in different areas, and so there was never any tension to go across the border. In fact, Ladedo is is actually a pretty dangerous place right now. Laredo, It's so Laredo, Texas is
actually pretty safe. It's like extremely safe, actually, But once you crossed the border into like Meldedo, there are there are cartel operatives working there, and so people tend to stay away from from that side of the border.
That's what my next question was, Was he involved with one of these at all or he was strictly working on his own.
As far as I can tell, he was not involved with any with any cartel activity. There was nothing in the in the sort of investigative files, pointing to that there's nothing that I found during my research talking to people who actually knew him growing up and then and then later, there was nothing at all, like there was no real connection at all to any cartel activities that I could find.
Many municipalities have red light districts and prostitution areas, and it's not that it's legal, but it's just that the authorities look the other way or have so many other more important things to deal with. Is Laredo like that, and it's sort of like.
That, you know, somebody other avenue has been active for decades really, and I kind of detail in my book how it has this sort of history of like being where some of the prostitutes used to hang out, even getting back to like the nineteenth century, so it has this history of kind of being the sort of red
light district. Loreda does what it can, but you know, it's it's kind of like whack them all, like you'll you'll pick up sex workers, you'll put them in jail, you'll you'll try to get them off the streets, and then a couple of days later they're they're back at it, and it's just really challenging for them to do much about it.
And the rest of the story is being told in The Devil Behind the Badge, The horrifying twelve days of Border Patrol serial killer written by Rick Jervis. I look forward to reading it and thank you for joining us today.
Thank you appreciate it.
Thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews, the Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive Live weekday afternoons from five to seven and Iheartsmedia Presentation