At fifty-one years old, Mary Haynes, known as “Big Mary” to the other women and clients for her large stature, was one of the older sex workers on the avenue—and one of its more experienced. She dished out advice to younger girls from her two decades on the avenue, including how to spot an undercover police sting (“Assume any new prostitute on the avenue is an undercover officer”) and how to defuse a violent situation with a client. In her twenty years selling sex on San Bernardo, she had never once been stabbed or shot at. She’d only been arrested four times in two decades. But she knew plenty of girls who had fared far worse. One woman was stabbed in the head by a client; another was stabbed eleven times but lived. Even she was not completely immune: Big Mary was raped once by a potential john. She later led police to the man, a repeat customer, and he was arrested and sent to prison for thirty years.
When she first met Melissa Ramirez, Big Mary thought she was the type of person who could get herself into real trouble on the streets. She was also struck by how youthful she looked. She took an immediate liking to her, and the two became close, partying together and sharing clients.
In the early evening of September 2, 2018, Big Mary called Melissa via Facebook Messenger. She was having a profitable day and offered to rent them a hotel room for the night. She still had a few more “interviews”—what Big Mary called meetings with clients—but they would reconnect later.
“Hey, I’m going to get us a room,” she told Melissa. “Let’s meet up later.”
“Okay, I’ll be ready,” Melissa told her. The two hung up.
A few hours later, Big Mary called Melissa again. Once, twice, three times. No answer. The green dot on Melissa’s Facebook Messenger pro- file indicated she was still logged in. But, still, no answer.
*
Emily Varela was starting to regret taking in Melissa.
In the two weeks since she allowed her good friend to stay with her at the Pan-American Courts on San Bernardo, Melissa hadn’t contributed a dime to rent. She rarely left the small room, taking naps on the only mattress, and seldom showered, cleaning up only when her boyfriend was coming to pick her up. He was an older guy with a pickup truck. For reasons she didn’t fully understand, he creeped Emily out. And as Emily was trying to stay clean, Melissa would routinely arrive home high on crack or amphetamines.
She hadn’t expected Melissa to suddenly turn her life around, but she was hoping she would do . . . something.
Around 2:00 a.m. on Monday, September 3, Emily returned home from a long night of turning tricks, tired and feet throbbing, but with a fistful of crumpled tens and twenties in her bra. She unlocked the door to her room. Melissa, fully dressed, slept on the mattress in the middle of the small room, snoring softly. The familiar burnt-plastic smell of freebased crack rocks wafted through the air. Emily grew enraged.
She loved Melissa. But she couldn’t afford to get kicked out of the Pan-American and she definitely did not want to go back to jail. Melissa had broken the one rule she had imposed: no drugs in the room. She had tried to be patient with her friend. But enough was enough.
She shook Melissa awake.
“I don’t want you here,” Emily told her friend. “Go make some money. Go do something. Just leave.”
Melissa staggered to the bathroom. She patted down her hair with water from the sink and applied some eyeliner. Then she pulled on sandals, grabbed a small pocketknife she always carried with her, and, without muttering a word, shuffled out into the humid Laredo night.
**
San Bernardo Avenue was quiet and wet in the early-morning hours of September 3. Under a light rain, Melissa wandered along the strip, likely trying to puzzle out where to sleep that night or how to score her next crack hit. The sky was black and starless, dawn still five hours away.
Sometime after 2:00 a.m., a white 2015 Dodge Ram 2500 pickup truck pulled over on San Bernardo Avenue. The driver swung open the passenger-side door and Melissa hopped inside. The truck drove off into the night.
Ten hours later, at around noon, a passerby inspecting ranches for sale in a rural stretch of northwest Webb County, twelve miles north of Laredo, spotted something clumped in the grass alongside the gravel road. As he pulled to a stop, he saw the contours of a body. A woman in black shorts and an olive-green tank top, shoeless with black socks on, lay facedown in the brush just off the intersection of Jefferies Road and State Highway 255. Her stockinged toes still touched the gravel path, as if she had fallen face-first into the thornbush. She wasn’t moving. The motorist called police and alerted nearby neighbors, who called John Chamberlain, the owner of the ranch where the body lay.
Just then, Rene Arce, an off-duty seven-year veteran of the Laredo Police Department, drove his thirteen-year-old stepdaughter and three-year-old son in his black Dodge Ram on Jefferies Road. The three were enjoying a lazy Labor Day drive, while his wife, Tanya Arce, ran errands in town. Arce was scouting for land on which to build a home for his growing family and enjoying some rare downtime with his kids. The drive took him north on Jefferies Road and past State Highway 255. When he saw Chamberlain’s truck blocking the road up ahead, he turned the truck around and decided to loop back on Jefferies Road, stopping briefly to let his stepdaughter and son enjoy a few horses neighing and grazing at the fence line of the Chamberlain Ranch. When his wife called them back for lunch, he drove off.
It was an innocuous Laredo outing. But to the neighbors and Chamberlain—the image of a stiffening body still fresh in their mind—it was suspicious. They hopped in their car and circled around Jefferies Road, drove up behind the black truck on State Highway 255, and snapped pictures of the license plate with their cell phones. A short time later, a Webb County sheriff’s deputy arrived at the scene. The body was stretched out prone in a tangle of blue-green thornbush. Her left arm was folded under her, her left hand clutching a yellow bag of peanut M&M’s. Her right arm was bent next to her. Blood congealed in a small, round hole on the right side of her jaw, and two small, circular dark red wounds punctured her neck, just under her right ear. Dark blood thickened in a leech-sized hole in her right wrist, just below the base of her palm. A large puddle of crimson blood bloomed near her head and seeped into the dirt around her. Her face was streaked with dried blood. Near the body, there was a small plastic baggie containing several crack cocaine rocks. Her eyes were half open. She had been shot three times at close range. Her face swelled from the trauma it had recently received. Shell casings were found nearby in the thornbush. As Webb County sheriff’s deputies arrived, Chamberlain told them about the suspicious truck that had U-turned and sped off. He showed them the license plate number.
This wasn’t a hit-and-run or a border crosser dying of exposure. This had much darker undertones. The deputies radioed in the body and plate number.
***
Captain Federico Calderon, head of the Webb County Sheriff’s Office Criminal Investigation Division, was home enjoying Labor Day off when he received a call from a deputy about a body on Jefferies Road. As supervisor of investigators, Calderon often fielded calls from detectives asking for advice or help planning out next steps.
But as the deputy described the victim and the scene, Calderon realized this one was different.
Tall and heavyset, with small, smiling eyes set in a round, boyish face, the soft-spoken Calderon was unique within the sheriff’s office in that he was popular among both the rank-and-file and top brass. His father was a business owner from Nuevo Laredo, and his mom, a government worker from Laredo; Calderon embodied the Nuevo Laredo–Laredo symbiosis, easily fluent in both English and Spanish. He had studied technology at Texas A&M International University and thought he would pursue a career in that field. But after college, he landed a job with the district attorney’s office, and the county prosecutor offered to send him to the police academy. He graduated and started working for the Webb County Sheriff’s Office, rising from sergeant to lieutenant to captain. He supervised the cybercrime division and became president of the Webb County Deputy Sheriffs Association, the local union. Smart and persuasive, wielding respect he had garnered over the years from Sheriff Martin Cuellar, Calderon negotiated contracts for higher salaries and better working conditions for his coworkers. “You have to have a special kind of character to bring both those sides together,” coworker Lieutenant Joe Peña said. “He did it very well.”
Assigned to lead the Criminal Investigation Division in 2015, Calderon oversaw everything from home robberies and sexual assaults to gang-related violence and safe houses used by smugglers. Deaths of- ten included migrants hit by passing trucks or dying in Laredo’s triple- digit heat and suicides. Murders were less common.
As the deputy described the scene on Jefferies Road—the victim’s wounds, the shell casings, the suspicious truck—Calderon realized he should see this one for himself. He grabbed his gear and drove out to the scene. When he arrived, Sheriff Cuellar and other deputy sheriffs were already there. Calderon examined the body and jotted down notes from the investigators. Cuellar pulled him aside: something about this one felt strange. He wanted him personally leading the case. Calderon agreed.
A few minutes later, Texas Ranger Ernesto “E. J.” Salinas arrived
44 — C H A PTER 3
at the scene. Medium height and clean-shaven, Salinas, 49, was barrel- chested and had a military crew cut that ran high to a small patch of silvery dark hair, which was perpetually covered by a white Stetson hat. He was in his usual uniform of starched white shirt and beige tie, pressed beige slacks and ostrich skin cowboy boots. His eyes creased down at the outer edges, and his face was framed by a hard chin and perma-wrinkled brow, weighed down by years of investigating bullet- ripped bodies and miscreants along the border. He spoke in measured, low tones weighted with authority with a hint of a Spanish accent, like a Latino drill sergeant. As a Texas Ranger, he was elite among the borderlands’ criminal investigators.
Though there are more than 80,000 law enforcement officers across Texas, only about 160 of them call themselves Texas Rangers. Each year more than a thousand applicants try to land one of the handful of coveted slots, if or when one becomes available, and become rangers, who have been defending lives and property in Texas since 1823. Today, the Texas Ranger unit is a division of the Texas Department of Public Safety, alongside state troopers and driver’s license officials, and focuses almost entirely on major criminal investigations and border intelligence. Rangers need to have eight years of experience with a law enforcement agency and be employed by DPS before even applying. If chosen, after a thorough criminal and personal background check, the ranger is as- signed to one of six “companies” across the state. Salinas was a criminal investigator in Company D, a twenty-six-county region stretching 425 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border from Texas’s southernmost city, Brownsville, northwest to Val Verde County. When taking over a case, the ranger brought not just expertise and specialized training but the substantial resources of the State of Texas, including the nearly $2 bil- lion annual budget of the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Salinas grew up on a ranch near Oilton, Texas, a town of 170 souls thirty miles east of Laredo. His father, Ernesto Juvenito Salinas, was the county’s elected justice of the peace and Salinas grew accustomed to residents rapping on their ranch house door any hour of the day and night to ask for help with a disabled truck or report a dead body. That rural sense of public service and law enforcement permeated young Salinas. At age six, he’d survey the cars parked outside his father’s grocery store/gas station and jot down their license plate numbers. If someone robbed his daddy’s store, he told customers, he’d know where to find them.
After high school, Salinas worked for a few years as a roughneck on oil rigs in South Texas before going to college and getting a job with the Webb County Sheriff’s Office. It took him four tries to finally, in 1997, land a position as a state trooper with DPS, then another fourteen years before being promoted to ranger in 2011. He worked first in the Laredo Joint Operations Intelligence Center in charge of border security issues, then transferred to the Texas Ranger field office as a criminal investigator. Better trained, with deeper pockets and access to myriad state databases, rangers are routinely called out to help on murder investigations, especially along the border, bringing more resources and expertise to smaller jurisdictions and sheriff’s departments.
Calderon had worked with Salinas on past cases, including sexual assaults and a number of child abuse cases. The two greeted each other, and Calderon filled him in on what they’d found so far. Nearby, county CID investigators photographed the body and the scene and bagged evidence. Three shell casings, all from a .40-caliber handgun, were collected and deposited into clear plastic evidence bags.
Calderon recognized the .40-caliber shell casings. They were for jacketed hollow points—the bullet of choice among law enforcement departments—which mushroomed on impact, causing a larger diameter of damage. Police departments favored them because they didn’t pass through bodies and injure anyone beyond the intended target. And they caused maximum damage as they expanded and tore through bones and organs.
Detectives also collected the small plastic baggie filled with crack rocks and the M&M’s bag, dropped them into evidence bags, and labeled them. Salinas squatted next to the victim and studied the wounds. The one on the woman’s right wrist, he noted, was a defensive scar from trying to shield her face from the bullets. In her final moments, she had tried to deflect her death. Something else caught his eye: the victim had on black socks and no shoes. Salinas knew that area well and had grown up on similar ranches. Anyone living out there wore cowboy boots. The victim was not from around there—nor, he assumed, was the gunman. He also noticed the victim had scrawled a phone number in pen on her left thigh, and took note of the number.
Salinas took his own photos of the scene. He spray-painted circles around evidence in the field, alerting technicians to their location. Then he and Calderon left to investigate their first lead: the mysterious black truck.
****
Arce had returned home with his children when he received a call from a buddy at Laredo PD: his truck was being sought in connection to the body found on Jefferies Road. Alarm and confusion billowed in his mind. He remembered driving up to the police cars earlier that day. He picked up his phone and called the watch commander on duty at the Laredo Police Department, explained what had happened, and asked what he should do. The commander told him he would get back to him and that he should “stand by.” A few minutes later, Arce’s stepdaughter received a call from a neighborhood friend: their street was lined with armed police officers, who were circling the Arce home. Tanya Arce, her three-year-old son on her hip, opened the garage door to flag down a police officer and clear up the misunderstanding.
Outside, Webb County sheriff’s deputies and Laredo police officers, dressed in body armor and Kevlar helmets, assault rifles at the ready, closed in on the couple. They ordered them to kneel and cuffed Rene and Tanya Arce on their front lawn. The pair was driven to a sheriff’s substation on Highway 59 for questioning. They were told they were being questioned for a case being investigated by the FBI and Texas Rangers. There was no search warrant. They were never read their Miranda rights.
Rene Arce, a law enforcement officer with a clean record, agreed to cooperate. Calderon and Salinas questioned Rene and Tanya. Rene explained how he had driven his stepdaughter and son down Jefferies Road earlier that day, how he had turned around when he saw the road blocked. He allowed them to check his phone. The investigators wanted to know if he was having an affair with any women and why he had not called in the discovery of the body. No, he was not having any affairs, he told them. And he never saw the body; he hadn’t gotten close enough.
After nearly five hours of questioning, the couple was released and deputies drove them back to their home. Rene Arce’s personal guns were confiscated, and he was placed on administrative leave until further notice.
Arce wasn’t completely ruled out, but by the end of the day, investigators realized they had the wrong person. Arce was not a suspect. News of the raid on his home nonetheless leaked out into the city via La Gordiloca, a rogue local muckraker. La Gordiloca—or “crazy, fat woman” in Spanish, whose real name is Priscilla Villarreal—had heard of the raid through a Laredo police source and shared it with her more than eighty thousand Facebook followers. La Gordiloca had created a loyal online following by cruising Laredo streets in her 1998 Dodge pickup and reporting on car crashes, drug raids, homicides, and other nocturnal crimes via Facebook live streams laced with Spanish profanity and street lingo. “¿Qué rollo?” she often asked at the start of a nighttime shift, prompting streams of heart emojis from audience members watch- ing live. Villarreal, a tenth grade dropout with a shaved head and spackled with tattoos, rolled up to crime scenes or reported on tips fed to her from sources within Laredo PD, often beating out local media to stories. In one of those scoops, she reported on a former Laredo police investigator who resigned after he was caught skimming gambling proceeds from raids on slot machine casinos. Her posts appeared days before any other media had the story.
But her quick-to-report style and loose sourcing tactics drew trouble. In 2017, she posted allegations of abuse at a local childcare center (“Teenagers having babies!”) that proved unfounded. The center sued for defamation and won a $300,000 judgment after she failed to appear in court; Villarreal appealed that ruling. Later that year, Laredo police arrested her and charged her with misuse of information after she reported on the suicide of a U.S. Customs and Border Protection supervisor, whose name she published. That case was dismissed, and Villarreal sued the police department in a case that reached the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.*
The raid on the Arce home was prime Gordiloca fodder: salacious, dramatic, and involving a law enforcement official. Villarreal went live, informing followers, “It is being said but NOT CONFIRMED that a Laredo Police department officer has been or will be detained at any moment. Authorities are at a home located inside La Cuesta Subdivision this is in the North Side of Laredo.” The next day, she posted an update with more details on the raid: “Authorities surrounded a home yesterday that is said to be of a Laredo Police Officer by the last name ARCE In north Laredo at La Cuesta Subdivision. It is being said the officer was taken in for questioning a [sic] released hours later.” Pictures of the Arces’ home and their vehicles also circulated on social media.
Calderon reminded himself of the bad information that could often circulate in Laredo involving crimes. Running down leads like Arce, which proved baseless, was a necessary though less than pleasant part of the job.
Later that day, a Webb County sheriff’s deputy who had worked at the county jail recognized the face of the victim from a photo taken at the crime scene. The medical examiner also ran the victim’s fingerprints through a Webb County police database and confirmed that the young woman found slain on the side of Jefferies Road was Melissa Ramirez.
___________________________________
* In a narrow decision in January 2024, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Villarreal, saying the city and county officials she was suing have “qualified immunity.” In a Facebook post shortly after the ruling, Villarreal vowed to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
