Speaker 1: This is Later with Lee Matthews the Lee Matthews Podcast.
Speaker 1: More what you hear Weekday Afternoon is on the Drive.
Speaker 2: Rick Jervis is a prize winning poetry, prize winning journalists
Speaker 2: with more than two decades of experience working with the
Speaker 2: Miami Herald, Wall Street Journal Europe, and Chicago Tribune in
Speaker 2: USA Today and many many more. He's telling the gripping
Speaker 2: story of some murders that rocked the town of Laredo,
Speaker 2: Texas in his new book, The Devil Behind the Bandge
Speaker 2: The Horrifying twelve Days of the Border Patrol serial Killer.
Speaker 2: I bet Rick, not a lot of people have heard
Speaker 2: this story.
Speaker 3: Yeah, probably not. I think it basically grabbed a lot
Speaker 3: of attention early on when it first happened in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 3: and it made like national news briefly, but then it
Speaker 3: came and went and that was you know, that was
Speaker 3: six years ago. So I think people don't really know
Speaker 3: all of the ins and outs and all the detail.
Speaker 3: Was this this actual story?
Speaker 2: Well, there have been so many other things too that
Speaker 2: deal with the border. I'm wondering if there's a lot
Speaker 2: of people just kind of, oh, ever, go another story
Speaker 2: about the border.
Speaker 3: Oh, this is definitely a very different story about the
Speaker 3: border any story. This is unlike any story that I've
Speaker 3: ever covered in my twenty plus years as a journalist,
Speaker 3: and it is it is by far one of the
Speaker 3: one of the most surprising, craziest stories that I've done.
Speaker 2: Well, let's talk about the three I'm sorry that Yeah,
Speaker 2: the three women that are involved, and they are Melissa Ramirez,
Speaker 2: Claudine and Luira Gusell de Hernandez and JANEA Ortiz I'm sorry,
Speaker 2: four women that are involved in this particular story.
Speaker 3: Yeah. These these are all marginalized women. They were all
Speaker 3: sex workers, all of them, all of them, all of
Speaker 3: them US citizens. By the way, I wanted to make
Speaker 3: that clear. These these were migrants coming over. These were
Speaker 3: all women who were born in the US, but they
Speaker 3: had really debilitating drug addictions and to help finance these
Speaker 3: substance abuse disorders, they took to the streets and became
Speaker 3: sex workers. And that's what and that's what kind of
Speaker 3: made them easy prey for someone like this quorterer patrol
Speaker 3: agent to meet them, pick them up, drive them off,
Speaker 3: and ended up killing them.
Speaker 2: About what time did this happen? Was this before things
Speaker 2: really started to heat up? On the border.
Speaker 3: So this happened in September of twenty eighteen, so it
Speaker 3: was right around the same time that there was a
Speaker 3: lot of controversy happening on the border. There were a
Speaker 3: lot of migage coming over at that time. Things were
Speaker 3: like really ramping up, and there were a lot of
Speaker 3: controversial tactics being done also by by Border Patrol, Like
Speaker 3: if you remember the zero Tolerance days and the family separations,
Speaker 3: this is all happening around around that same time.
Speaker 2: The Devil behind the Badge, the horrifying Twelve Days of
Speaker 2: the Border Patrol, serial killer Rick Jervis is with us
Speaker 2: and that is the book what brought this to your attention.
Speaker 3: So in twenty eighteen, I actually covered this story for
Speaker 3: USA Today, I'm based in Austin, Texas. I often cover
Speaker 3: the border, and I got a phone call, like on
Speaker 3: a random Saturday afternoon from one of my editors saying
Speaker 3: that a Border Patrol agent had been arrested for killing
Speaker 3: for women and that I needed to get down to
Speaker 3: Laredo to cover it. So I did. I basically went
Speaker 3: down covered his his actual arrest. I learned about the
Speaker 3: story a little bit, but Lee the one thing which
Speaker 3: really drove me to expand this into a bigger project
Speaker 3: is meeting all of the victims' families. I really started
Speaker 3: to learn about the victims, more realized that they had
Speaker 3: these really incredible stories behind them, that all of them
Speaker 3: were actually beloved by all their families, and that their
Speaker 3: families were really trying hard to get them off the
Speaker 3: streets when all this occurred.
Speaker 2: For those who don't know, Laredo, Texas is right there
Speaker 2: on the border. I mean you can climb up to
Speaker 2: the second store of a two story house and see
Speaker 2: over in New Mexico.
Speaker 3: That's right. So it's right on the border, right across
Speaker 3: the river from Mexico. And for a long time, both
Speaker 3: of those sides interacted quite a bit, and I still
Speaker 3: do obviously, So there's a lot of back and forth there.
Speaker 3: People coming over into Laredo to work every day, folks
Speaker 3: going back. It's a really interesting place, excellent.
Speaker 2: I'm not ben, but I've read a lot about how
Speaker 2: interesting it is. Now. Where the girls doing most of
Speaker 2: their work on the other side of the border, or
Speaker 2: were they doing it on the United States side?
Speaker 3: Now they were all on the US side of the
Speaker 3: actual border. There's this one street in central Laredo called
Speaker 3: San Bernardo Avenue Andando is like their sort of red
Speaker 3: light district, and that's where a lot of this activity occurs.
Speaker 3: And so this is where where they would apply their trade.
Speaker 3: This is where they would get a lot of their
Speaker 3: their drugs. Most of them were was was black tar heroin,
Speaker 3: which which a lot of them were strongly addicted to,
Speaker 3: and so a lot of this occurred there. And on
Speaker 3: David Ortiz, this Poto patrol agent would would would just
Speaker 3: cruise down this avenue, pick them up, drive them off
Speaker 3: and to meet his crimes.
Speaker 2: Was he in a regular was he a regular john
Speaker 2: to these women? I mean did they know him?
Speaker 3: So two of them he actually did know well, so
Speaker 3: he knew his first victim, elis A Lamides, and there
Speaker 3: was a would be fifth victim, which is how they
Speaker 3: caught him, called Ericapana, And he actually pulled the gun
Speaker 3: on Ericapana and looked and looked about to shoot her also,
Speaker 3: but she managed to basically escape his clutches, kick out
Speaker 3: of his truck and run off alert police, and that's
Speaker 3: how they finally got him. And he actually did have
Speaker 3: a sort of repeat relationship with eric Opania.
Speaker 2: And Rick Jervis is with this Pulletry Prize winning journalist
Speaker 2: and author the book is the Devil behind the Badge
Speaker 2: of the horrifying Twelve Days of the Border Patrol serial Killer.
Speaker 2: Would he then take them across the border? Was there
Speaker 2: any was there any desire to try to make this
Speaker 2: look like it was happening only in Mexico or was
Speaker 2: it all only in the United States?
Speaker 3: It was all only like in the US. He would
Speaker 3: he would pick them up and drive them off to
Speaker 3: like rural areas in h Webb County, in different areas,
Speaker 3: and so there was never any tension to go across
Speaker 3: the border. In fact, Ladedo is is actually a pretty
Speaker 3: dangerous place right now. Laredo, It's so Laredo, Texas is
Speaker 3: actually pretty safe. It's like extremely safe, actually, But once
Speaker 3: you crossed the border into like Meldedo, there are there
Speaker 3: are cartel operatives working there, and so people tend to
Speaker 3: stay away from from that side of the border.
Speaker 2: That's what my next question was, Was he involved with
Speaker 2: one of these at all or he was strictly working
Speaker 2: on his own.
Speaker 3: As far as I can tell, he was not involved
Speaker 3: with any with any cartel activity. There was nothing in
Speaker 3: the in the sort of investigative files, pointing to that
Speaker 3: there's nothing that I found during my research talking to
Speaker 3: people who actually knew him growing up and then and
Speaker 3: then later, there was nothing at all, like there was
Speaker 3: no real connection at all to any cartel activities that
Speaker 3: I could find.
Speaker 2: Many municipalities have red light districts and prostitution areas, and
Speaker 2: it's not that it's legal, but it's just that the
Speaker 2: authorities look the other way or have so many other
Speaker 2: more important things to deal with. Is Laredo like that,
Speaker 2: and it's sort of like.
Speaker 3: That, you know, somebody other avenue has been active for
Speaker 3: decades really, and I kind of detail in my book
Speaker 3: how it has this sort of history of like being
Speaker 3: where some of the prostitutes used to hang out, even
Speaker 3: getting back to like the nineteenth century, so it has
Speaker 3: this history of kind of being the sort of red
Speaker 3: light district. Loreda does what it can, but you know,
Speaker 3: it's it's kind of like whack them all, like you'll
Speaker 3: you'll pick up sex workers, you'll put them in jail,
Speaker 3: you'll you'll try to get them off the streets, and
Speaker 3: then a couple of days later they're they're back at it,
Speaker 3: and it's just really challenging for them to do much
Speaker 3: about it.
Speaker 2: And the rest of the story is being told in
Speaker 2: The Devil Behind the Badge, The horrifying twelve days of
Speaker 2: Border Patrol serial killer written by Rick Jervis. I look
Speaker 2: forward to reading it and thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 3: Thank you appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews, the Lee
Speaker 1: Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive Live
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