turning up on the mesa. a few years before the first body was found a colleague of mine and i had heard about a list of women that were missing. reporter: and as it turns out, jolene gutierrez krueger, a columnist for the albuquerque journal, had gotten a copy of that list a few years earlier, when she worked the police beat. now that two women from ida s list had been identified, jolene had an idea. i said to one of my editors,
they had literally spent weeks in the trenches looking for bones at that abandoned construction site. it is a lot of shovel and pick work. it s a lot of sifting and actually in the dirt. reporter: two women on ida lopez s list had already been identified among the 11 sets of remains. now between the bulldozers and ida s prayers the department was moving heaven and earth to find out if there were more women from ida s list out there. commander feist knew every scrap of evidence recovered from that gigantic crime scene would have to be cataloged and stored until it came time to prosecute the west mesa grave digger. febreze finds odors trapped in fabrics (bubbles popping) and cleans them away as it dries. use febreze every time you tidy up to keep your whole house smelling fresh air clean. fabric refresher even works for clothes you want to wear another day. make febreze part of your clean routine for whole home freshness. la la la la la. before discovering nexium 24hr to treat her f
detectives thought they knew about that killer. when they told us that they had a young black girl, i thought, i didn t have a black girl on my list. was it possible ida lopez s list was just the tip of the iceberg? maybe there are women out there who aren t on any list.
you think she came here on her own? it s i know she had been to albuquerque at least one prior time. to her ending up out here. possibly two prior times. reporter: nine months after the discovery of the first bone on the west mesa the detectives were back to square one. the odds were good that syllania edwards, like the others, had simply strolled out into the war zone and climbed into the wrong car. but her presence in the west mesa bone yard raised a troubling prospect. there are other girls from out of state in the same you know, are we going to find another repeat? we don t know. reporter: now investigators feared the serial killer they were hunting may have buried other bodies elsewhere in the vast desert west of town. it s desert. there could be very realistically a lot of bodies. this in a way suggests that maybe there are women out there who aren t on any list. that s a possibility. could be others. there could be others. a suspect caught in the act. we
but i get to say this is where she s at. reporter: the families of the 18 women now on ida s list prayed for happy endings like that one. but most of the women who worked albuquerque s war zone, fellow travelers who might have helped ida find the missing, were too drug addled to provide useful leads. some passed on grisly rumors to ida, that the missing women were dead and had been dumped in the desert west of town.