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The night in question: who killed Border Patrol agent Jose Gamez Jr. and dumped his body in an irrigation canal thirty years ago? His partner would still like to know. And so would the people who think his partner could have been involved.

Article Excerpt
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On April 21, 1978, Border Patrol agents Frank Lugo and Jose Gamez Jr. drove their truck down a ranch road outside Eagle Pass and settled into their evening shift along the Rio Grande. They planned to lie in wait for illegal immigrants near a check gate in an irrigation canal. Swift and deep, the canal was the first hurdle for crossers after the river, and the gate was like a catwalk across it. Separated by about forty feet in the darkness, agents Lugo and Gamez intended to jump the first group that walked between them. It was a sound plan, but something went wrong. Though stories vary about what exactly happened, while Lugo was chasing a group of immigrants, his partner Gamez vanished.

The gantlet of trails along that stretch is difficult to navigate during the day, let alone in the dark. Agents searched throughout the night, but the grim discovery of Gamez's corpse didn't come until mid-morning, after the irrigation canal was drained several feet. They speculated that he had probably lost his footing while pursuing the immigrants across the narrow canal gate and fallen into the water below. Yet the following week, an autopsy found that Gamez had been struck on the head three times and strangled. Suddenly, supervisors realized that the search party had trampled through a crime scene. Even more unsettling, the last person known to have seen the murder victim alive was his partner, and Lugo's story didn't add up.

In South Texas, Gamez's disappearance made headlines for days, a few of them hinting that the killer could have been Lugo. It didn't help that he seemed to change his story each time he told it. He contradicted himself about the events leading up to the encounter with the immigrants, about the direction they came from and ran, and about the last place he'd seen Gamez alive. But what could Lugo's motive have been? No one knew.

And no one knows. The case, one of many unsolved murders on the border over the years, still gnaws at agents who knew Gamez and Lugo. They can't understand why it was never solved. Though Lugo has never been arrested or indicted in connection with Gamez's death, he was the lead suspect for a number of years in an investigation conducted by the FBI. That case ultimately went cold, with no conclusion. A separate administrative investigation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which at the time maintained jurisdiction over the Border Patrol, sustained an allegation of "inattention to duty" but not an allegation that Lugo's actions had "resulted in or contributed to the death of Gamez."

The INS stopped short of firing Lugo, but the incident still threw the protective bond of the badge into question. Some agents believed that...

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