temporary field headquarters so many young women missing one woman determined to find them there s a story to her too. a young woman lucky to b alive. for a lot of people that would be the end to police work. so she searched the numbers grew the families hurt. she says i have some ba news for you under a desert sky a secret waited. this is not happening missing women forgotten by almost everyone but her. i have always felt they wer going to be together if you find one you ll fin them, all. sometimes ida lopez simpl can t wait for sunday. sometimes in the middle of her work week the albuquerqu detective feels a pressing nee for spiritual solace and divin guidance the fall of 2005 was one o those times. it was a time when a siniste force seemed to be snatching women off the streets of new mexico s largest city. and the devoutly religious detective knew she needed al the help she could get i think it s somebody who s very organized i think he s been preying on
photos and you see the scarrin on the desert floor, knowing what we know now, it s ver obvious that those look like graves this is what albuquerqu police chief ray schultz say investigators saw when the looked at old pictures of th mesa in this 2002 image of the area where the bones were discovere there s nothing unusual. just desert and sage brush wit a dry stream bed running through it but two years later, in 2004 when most of the women o detective ida lopez s list wer disappearing, the images sho tire tracks leading from thi road to a few bare spots in th vegetation spots that weren t there before this photo, taken the followin year, shows even more bare spots. clustered within 20 yards of each other it s kind of eerie lookin at those satellite photos.
it had to be someone local, investigators assumed. a meticulous man whose gri will had brought him back to the mesa again and again t bury his victims everything was in a pretty contained area all the bones. all the remains. yes because this guy ha complete freedom or he thought nobody s going to come out here? probably because he fel safe out here. for detectives like tod babcock it all seemed to add up except for one thing the crime lab had determined that one of the unidentified sets of remains, jane do number 7, was a young blac female when they told us that they had a young black girl, thought, i didn t have a young black girl on my list. for medical investigato wendy honeyfield the bones o jane doe number 7 and he pink-tipped acrylic nails were a beguiling puzzle she s like a lot of other cases that we had skeletal remains that come in and there s so much work that always done behind the scene to get them identified that nobody really ever sees for the detectiv
if that same individual wa here in albuquerque, the media wouldn t even have known about him. fbi agents also searche this home. was the man whose house you served a search warrant on, is he a suspect no. i wouldn t say he s a suspect. he s just an individual that came to our attention that w had to follow through. so this guy takes photographs of the part of tow that you re sort of looking at is that what we re looking a here, is you re interested i seeing what photos this ma took and whether he foun anything in them we really can t say why though the detectives spent months combing through all the evidence taken from th photographer s office and home nothing definitive was found and most of these boxes were returned now, more than five years afte the discovery of bones on th west mesa, albuquerque polic
summer heat begins to ease hot air balloons rise like sprin flowers over albuquerque and the surrounding desert it s the city s annual balloon fiesta a money-making spectacle tha draws tourists from all over the world to albuquerque for one week in october. it s unlikely that any of th balloonists who float out over the west mesa area spend muc time studying the details of the sandy desert floor below but if one of them had durin the 2003 or 2004 festivals they might have actually see evidence of a murderer moonlighting as a grave digger it turns out that even thoug that evidence was long gone by the time those bones wer discovered in 2009 a bird s ey view was precisely the perspective investigator needed to start their search for killer when you see those satellit