before february 2009 victoria chavez and michelle valdez had been virtually invisible to everyone in albuquerque. except their families. their customers. and detective ida lopez, who d had their names on her list of missing women. but for the most part the public didn t even know there was a list. the news media had shown little interest in the story when desperate family members had come to them asking for help. they wouldn t even put her picture on the news or nothing. that s all we really wanted, just to flash her picture real quick. reporter: of course all that changed once bones started turning up on the mesa. a few years before the first body was found a colleague of mine and i had heard about a
it was my gateway to making contact with her and seeing her in person. reporter: dan may have had the patience of job. but by 2004 camille, the tag-along little sister, had had enough. when michelle asked dan if she could move back home for a while, camille put her foot down. he was going to let her stay with us. and i remember telling him no. if she comes and stays, i m going to leave. i couldn t handle it. i remember that. i didn t even i didn t even want to be around it anymore. i was so tired of it. tired of seeing him hurt. so you told michelle she couldn t come over? i told michelle she couldn t come over. i took her to a friend s house and dropped her off there. i know in my heart i didn t do the right thing, but i knew that the common sense of my brain said that i had to. i had to take that avenue.
alone while working days at the juvenile detention center. and nights and weekends playing steel guitar with his country band, cimarron. dan tried to keep a watchful eye on his girls and even took them to work with him at the juvenile detention center to show them where careless mistakes can lead. some of it seemed to take. some of it didn t. at 13 michelle became pregnant. i was devastated. but what can you do? you can t be with them 24/7. all you can do is bring them up, nurture them, show them love, attention, appreciation. and sometimes they make a mistake. and sometimes they make the wrong turn or a mistake. reporter: shortly after her 14th birthday michelle valdez gave birth to a baby girl she named angelica. so you were being a father all over again. father all over again.
i said it s michelle valdez. but they hadn t made an i.d. yet. reporter: michelle valdez. after years of having only her rap sheet and her father s bittersweet memories to go on, ida lopez was now sure she knew where michelle valdez was. did you know michelle was pregnant when she disappeared? i did. reporter: a few days later lab work confirmed ida s hunch. jane doe number 8 was michelle valdez. and i had to tell dan. the hardest part of this whole thing is having to go to somebody s house and say we found her and she s not alive. i see her pull up out front, and i go out and stand on the sidewalk. she gets out of her car and comes up to me. and ida says, dan. she says, i have some bad news for you. dan, she was i.d. d, and it was her, and they found, you
hugged her. and she said no, dad. squeeze me tight. squeeze me like you ve never squeezed me before. and i got her and i gave her the biggest hug a father could ever give his daughter. reporter: remembered moments like that sustained dan and drove him to continue his lonely search for michelle. then in july 2005, about five months after dan had first reported michelle missing, he got a call from a detective who had only recently been assigned michelle s case. a detective named ida lopez. i thought ida being a police officer was awfully small. short lady. but other than that it seemed that, you know, that she was on the up and up and that she was doing doing what she could, in her power, and the time that she had to go out and out to the streets. reporter: it would become a close working relationship based