little bit and ida consoled me a little bit and said it s okay, you know, it s okay. and then she says is there anything that we can do? do you need anything? i said no. i said just the information you gave me was plenty. of course there was more dan needed to do that evening. he would have to tell michelle s 12-year-old daughter angelica. and i said angelica, i said, detective lopez just told us that your mother has been positively i.d. as one of the west mesa women. and that s when angelica looked at me and started crying. she said no, don t tell me that, you re lying to me. don t lie to me. i said honey, i m not. i m telling you the truth. it was a scene that no doubt had played out earlier at the family home of victoria chavez,
investigating the bodies. there s nothing to connect him to 11 bodies. just that he committed that kind of crime. it s hard to get over a guy getting shot with a dead prostitute in his arms. it is. but as tempting as it might be to pin the west mesa murders on a dead man, the detectives say there are a few disquieting facts, starting with this one. saphira moore had vanished after lorenzo montoya died and if you close this case and you say we ve decided it was lorenzo montoya and later you find out it was somebody else, a lot harder to prosecute that person. absloutly. as 2009 drew to a close, two more women from ida s list were positively identified. virginia cloeven and evelyn salazar. only one set of nameless remains
but she kept coming up empty. i went to some drug ri hab plac places who were not willing to help me. i sat in many waiting rooms. i said i don t want to know what their sessions were about. all i want to know is a timeline. some of the women had been missing for so long to ida started comparing notes with a detective in the department s cold case unit. eventually they were able to sp persuade the department to let them form an unofficial task force where once a month they met with other agencies including the fbi to discuss leads on missing persons, on cold cases, on sexual predators, and on unidentified remains. so we were able to communicate with each other anything that came up, any trucker initiatives or murderers that the fbi sent us, we posted on the wall. our girls we posted on the wall. are truckers a particular
further plans, you know, my husband s got young kids to take care of. frightening. then about a month and a half after i was diagnosed, then i had my kidney removed. surgeons also removed ida s a dreenal gland because it too had a mass. because they caught the cancer early she required neither chemo nor radiation therapy. nor radiation therapy. her return to work would have bei gradual if at all. for mostly people that woulde the end of police work. right. not for you. no. i wasn t done. and so in july, 2005, after a few months of recuperation as a reserve officer, the department offered ida a 20 hour a week desk job working missing persons. missing persons is kind of a back water in a lot of departments. it s notre exactly the premier detective job.fo right.
explained to the citizens of albuquerque that there weren t just two women that were missing, there were whole bunches of them. finally families once alone in their agony felt a communal bond andality the sent of it all was valdez. i said let s get together, let s get to be each other s support system, exchange phone numbers. an impromptu memorial came to life along side the wall that bordered the desert crime scene and the newly organized families which included everyone with a daughter on ida s list kept holding vigils to keep public attention focussed on all of the women. by now he was emerging as the vid videoographer and defacto spokesperson for the families. some of them chummed around