Books like “Beautiful Ruins” or “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” make you long to explore Cinque Terre, Italy or Savannah, Ga. but “The Devil Behind the Badge” might have the opposite impact on tourism: It could make you never want to go anywhere near the Texas/Mexico border.
Officer stalks four sex workers in true crime ‘The Devil Behind the Badge’
NONFICTION: The subtitle says it: “The Horrifying Twelve Days of the Border Patrol Serial Killer.”
The Minnesota Star Tribune
July 31, 2024 at 12:30PM
Like “Midnight,” “Devil” is a work of true crime. In it, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Rick Jervis writes about the murders of four Laredo, Texas, sex workers in a 12-day span in 2018. The cover tells us whodunit — a border patrol officer named Juan David Ortiz — and the abundance of detail included about the killings will alert canny readers that Ortiz must have confessed. So “Devil” is not about the “who” but the “why.”
Jervis intersperses the stories of the women and of Ortiz, a structural decision that initially throws the book off; just when we’re getting to know the victims, Jervis burrows into the background of Ortiz, who served in the Iraq War and, Jervis argues, is still haunted by it. Eventually, the strategy pays off, though, as “Devil” cuts between the vulnerable women, most of whom are survivors of sexual abuse and all of whom have addiction issues, and the man who will target them.
It’s gripping stuff. It’s also moving because Jervis takes care to put the women — Melissa Ramirez, Claudine Luera, “Chelly” Cantu and Janelle Ortiz — at his book’s center. Despite its title, “Devil” is really about the poverty, addiction and racism that put these four in the path of danger.
The Devil Behind the Badge
By: Rick Jervis.
Publisher: Dey Street, 291 pages, $29.99.
St. Paul writer Kao Kalia Yang has won four Minnesota Book Awards and was recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts.
