before jarrae s death. her mom is kathy menzes. a very fun loving child, always made you laugh. reporter: just look at her childhood photos, that silly grin. she loved her dog, her little brother, playing softball. and then it started happening, said kathy. eighth grade or so. she was kind of getting, you know, typical teenage, you know, mouthy. and then high school came, getting around the older kids, she kind of got a little worse. how did you cope with that? it was just one day at a time. love her as much as i could was about the only thing. reporter: after high school, kianna went to college about a three-hour drive from home. a year later, she moved to las vegas. but though far from home now, she got closer and closer to her mom. she would call me every day, talk to me every day, you know, text message. just a loving daughter? yeah. i didn t think anything bad was happening.
circuits. prostitute? at first i was like, no, that can t be. reporter: but then the truth came crashing down. undeniable. kianna had missed a scheduled court date in santa ana for a prostitution charge. but wait a minute. you talked to her every day, texted with her all the time. exactly. and you knew nothing of this secret life of hers? no, nothing. what does it feel like as a mother to hear that s been going on all that time and you didn t know it? heartbreaking. reporter: when she heard kathy s story, detective trapp began to think she was on to something. then she discovered just 2 1/2 weeks after kianna had disappeared, there was another one. josephine monique vargas. she had a beautiful personality. they used to call her giggles because she always made people laugh. reporter: josephine s mother, priscilla, had been on the local news searching for answers for months, ever since her daughter left a family barbecue telling them she was walking to buy groceries
mm-hmm. 40 feet down. mm-hmm. what s that like? what does that feel like? it s frustrating. it s frustrating knowing that they re here and we can t bring them home. it s like the one thing that the mothers want, and i get it. and to not be able to do that, it feels it s incomplete. does it drive you crazy? yes, it does. kathy menzys knows logically her daughter, kianna, must be dead. but how to truly accept it without her body? i would go there today and start digging if they would let me. it matters, doesn t it? it does matter. bringing her back? yeah. you give birth to them. you ve got to see them right through to the end. yep, exactly. exactly. reporter: in an attempt to make sense of it all, kathy asked detective trapp and her partner to drive her to the place where the killers had picked up kianna.
it s your fault. i didn t say they let us do a bad thing. i said they let us sleep and hang out at the same spot, and they did. you re going to parse that argument? till the day i die because i know for a fact it s true. what i want to know is because that s on you, what was going on in your head to make you want to do it, to participate in whatever way you participated, to get whatever thrill you what was the thrill? what was it? i don t think there was a thrill. well, if there s no thrill, why did you do it? there s no thrill in watching women die like that. but i m going to go back to it again and again. it was my anger issues that i have from everything that happened while we were on parole and probation. we may never know exactly why jarrae was killed or martha or josephine or kianna. but there s one more mystery hiding somewhere in this mountain. the final mystery.
welcome back. jarrae estepp was just 21 years old when she was found dead on a garbage dump conveyor belt. investigators discovered a fingerprint near the body that led them to a local business. but that s where the leads dried up until the detective working the case got a hunch and one thing became clear. she would need more rosaries. here again is keith morrison. reporter: detective julissa trapp couldn t sleep, kept awake by the puzzle of the girl someone threw away in the trash. that s when something jogged her restless mind. hadn t some young women vanished in the town next door, santa ana? we were like, well, you know, what are the odds that they re related? reporter: so she looked them up and learned about kianna jackson, just 20 years old when she disappeared five months