she confirmed that that looked like a femur bone and i should call the authorities. reporter: finding a bone, even a human bone, is not unusual out here on albuquerque s west mesa. this is storied territory, where native american tribes, conquistadors, and cowboys once roamed. the bone could easily have belonged to one of them. but the police who arrived at the scene shortly after nightfall soon determined that this was no ancient artifact. this bone belonged to someone who had died in the not too distant past. february 2nd is when one of our violent crimes detectives said oh, they found a bone on the mesa, i ll let you know. tonight they say the search is far from over. i saw it on tv on february 2nd, when christina ross and her dog ruca was reported on the local station as finding a femur bone.
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
frequently dump things they no longer have any use for, was simply too big an area to launch a search based on just a rumor. and so this case was going nowhere. until late in the afternoon on february 2nd, 2009. sit. reporter: when christine ross decided to take her dog ruca for a walk. okay. reporter: they strolled out of her new subdivision, one of many that had recently sprouted up in the desert west of albuquerque, and then over to an abandon construction site, where christine let ruca off the leash to run. she ran up ahead of me, and she was messing with something on the ground. and then she left it. we came upon it, and it appeared to be a bone. didn t look like the normal animal bone you find out here. so i took a picture of the bone. i sent it to my sister, who s a nurse.
you know, it seems like they knew or something. reporter: ida didn t completely disbelieve what her girls were telling her. but the mesa, a vast expanse of desert west of town where people frequently dump things they no longer have any use for, was simply too big an area to launch a search based on just a rumor. and so this case was going nowhere. until late in the afternoon on february 2nd, 2009. sit. reporter: when christine ross decided to take her dog ruca for a walk. okay. reporter: they strolled out of her new subdivision, one of many that had recently sprouted up in the desert west of albuquerque, and then over to an abandon construction site, where christine let ruca off the leash to run. she ran up ahead of me, and she was messing with something on the ground. and then she left it. we came upon it, and it appeared to be a bone.
2nd, when christina ross and her dog ruca was reported on the local station as finding a femur bone. i was on a ski trip. and when i came home, i had seen it on the news, and i told my boyfriend. i said, you know, what if that s michelle? when you heard it, what did you think? hoping again. the old parental parental feeling is hoping that it wasn t. reporter: over the next few days investigators would find more bones scattered over a 30-yard swath of that abandoned construction site. one mystery was ending. another was just beginning.