west mesa investigators' good fortune began thousands of miles to the east, in the fall of 2008. that's when crumbling financial markets on wall street caused home construction on the west mesa to grind to a halt. >> the company kind of left town and just kind of left the land the way it was. >> if those houses had been built, they would have been built right on top of that graveyard. >> correct. >> and nobody would be the wiser. >> correct. then august 2008 we have -- we had a really bad rainstorm. >> reporter: and the rain runoff from the deserted construction site flooded the new neighborhoods that surrounded it. it was when the company returned to the site to fix the runoff problem that they inadvertently brought some bones to the surface, where five months later those bones were discovered by christine ross and her dog ruca. >> you look at how many things had to have happened for these victims to be located. the development at first, the