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. there were other homes across new mexico that night that were filled with a similar stew. of hope. and dread. 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.
on the way back from arizona to here she promised, i m not going to hang out with the same people, i m going to do things different and you re going to be proud of me again, and then she bails two hours after she s home. reporter: the toll of michelle s addiction on her younger sister camille is also evident in dan s videos. as camille becomes a teenager, she no longer seems to want to acknowledge michelle or even have her around. we were always bumping heads. we weren t as close. because of the drugs. she d come over and steal my things or, you know, i would see how upset it would make my dad. so i would tell her, you know, mean things. reporter: before long michelle valdez stopped showing up in her father s videos. sometimes because she avoided the camera. other times because she simply didn t show up. she knew that there was events at the house because she d call and ask if she could
what he saw in his eyes, or his heart. reporter: dan continued to cruise the war zone, willing himself to believe that his daughter was still out there. i thought she was alive and well and doing good but just didn t want to have any contact with the family. maybe i did something wrong. maybe it was me not letting her come back to the house. maybe it was camille saying no or whatever. reporter: but dan s confidence that michelle would turn up alive was suddenly shaken one night when the phone rang at the valdez home. the caller on the other end of the line had heard something shocking. we had gotten a call from a family friend of ours that i grew up with, and you know, i pick up the phone and she s like, oh, my gosh, i m sorry about your sister. and i said, you know, what are you talking about? she said, michelle. michelle s michelle and cinnamon were stabbed and buried on the west mesa. did you know who cinnamon was? no.
growing list of the lost. it s a mystery their families still struggle. to understand. there s a dad who had a calendar. every time had e saw her he argued the date down and gave her 20 bucks. maybe he knew where the money was going to go. but he saw his daughter. that didn t take the part away she was still somebody s little girl. the name. the face. belonged to michelle valdez. one of the first women on the list. dan, her father, had reported michelle missing. six months before ida got the case. he was the guy who kept the calendar. the x indicates no knowledge of her. disappear. nothing. no word. the fact is dan valdez has been recording his daughter s comings and goings for years.
seen, dan went down to the albuquerque police station and formally reported his daughter missing. detective ida lopez, who would later make it her mission to find michelle and the other missing women, was on medical leave at the time. so in ida s absence the valdez family was at the mercy of the police department s bureaucracy. what d the police tell you? she didn t want to be found. and i can understand it. a.p. doesn t just deal with missing. they deal with all kinds. for a long time the news would be full of stories about girls who were missing and everybody s looking for them. and one of the things that those girls all had in common was that they were all attractive and blond and white and didn t have any criminal record. and i guess i just kind of wonder whether police and everybody else would have start of stepped up their game a little bit if that had been the case here. yeah, that did cross my mind numerous times.