“The Devil Behind the Badge: The Horrifying Twelve Days of the Border Patrol Serial Killer,” by Rick Jervis (2024, 320 pages, Genre: Nonfiction: True Crime)
The Devil Behind the Badge is not an easy book to read, but it’s an important one. Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Rick Jervis, this story is a deep dive into the 2018 serial murders unleashed on the border community of Laredo, Texas by Border Patrol agent Juan David Ortiz. These crimes shocked and terrified Laredo—first because of their brutality, and later because the perpetrator was found to be a well-respected intelligence officer and family man.
A significant recurring theme in this book is How could a person be struggling so deeply, yet go on working in a high-profile government position for so long? If we could crack that code, perhaps tragedies like this could be prevented in the future. While Ortiz’s killing spree spanned an active period of less than two weeks in 2018, this book starts many years earlier, taking us through Ortiz’s slow devolution from a devout young Navy corpsman to a paranoid, misogynistic assassin. He rose to a supervisory role within U.S. Border Patrol, a unit of the Department of Homeland Security that became increasingly militarized in the years following 9/11.
Ortiz joined the Border Patrol hoping to use his skills and education to help migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Unfortunately, dark seeds had already been planted in his psyche. A tour in Iraq as a military medic left him struggling with PTSD, which he treated with a cocktail of prescribed medications combined with heavy alcohol use. For years, Ortiz was somehow able to hide his inner turmoil, maintaining a career in law enforcement and raising three children in the suburbs with his wife, Daniella. By the time his internal struggles boiled over into the uncontrollable, Ortiz fancied himself some kind of vigilante, “cleaning up the streets” of Laredo according to his own personal agenda.
In typical serial killer fashion, Ortiz deliberately targeted vulnerable individuals. The four women that he murdered—plus a fifth victim, who narrowly escaped kidnapping at gunpoint—were living on society’s margins, struggling with drug addiction and scraping out a meager living through sex work. What struck me most about this book is that the author really took the time to give a voice and a personality to each of these victims: Melissa Ramirez, Claudine Luera, Chelly Cantu, Janelle Ortiz, and Erika Peña. While analyzing Ortiz’s background and behavior is essential to understanding what happened (and hopefully preventing similar tragedies), Jervis never lets readers lose sight of the human lives at the true center of this story. These were women who were loved and who had futures ahead of them, and all of their potential was senselessly snuffed out.
This book is impeccably researched, drawing lines of dialogue directly from bodycam footage, police interviews, and years of one-on-one interaction with those closest to the case. It covers important social themes that impact not just the Texas border, but towns and cities all over 21st-century America: mental healthcare, opioid addiction, veterans’ affairs, law enforcement transparency, toxic masculinity, the criminalization of sex work, who wields power and privilege, and who goes unseen at the margins of our communities. Have a Spanish dictionary or a translation app handy while you’re reading; Jervis uses liberal Spanish and Spanglish words and phrases throughout.
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Faithe Miller Lakowicz
