other women on ida s list, the waiting and wondering would go on for months. for ida lopez there was the fear that her nightmare prediction was coming true. i just always felt that if you find one you re going to find them all. reporter: and for albuquerque s homicide detectives there was the most pressing question of all. who was responsible for turning the west mesa into an unmarked cemetery? and was he still at work? coming up searching for clues in a crime scene big enough to be seen from space. it s kind of eerie looking at those satellite photos. that really sends a chill up and down your spine. cause energs so many industries, it supports 10 million u.s. jobs.
a third one. a third one. and then as the months go by, we search more and find that there are, you know, maybe another one here, then another one there, and that sort of thing. reporter: soon there were five missing women with eerily similar profiles on ida s list. all of them about the same age, with a similar look. all were known to hang out in a section of albuquerque so notorious that cops call it the war zone. and all but one, a juvenile, had lengthy arrest records for drugs or prostitution. so she did what every good detective does. she started keeping a list of missing women who match that profile. that was the easy part. the hard part was that many of them had already been missing for more than a year before ida even had a chance to start looking. it s one of those timing issues we told you about earlier. lengthy delays in reporting missing people as missing. it s like being in a race and somebody has a year ahead start. ready, set, go. and i don t have phone records.
nowhere. until late in the afternoon on february 2nd, 2009. sit. reporter: when christine ross decided to take her dog ruca for a walk. okay. reporter: they strolled out of her new subdivision, one of many that had recently sprouted up in the desert west of albuquerque, and then over to an abandon construction site, where christine let ruca off the leash to run. she ran up ahead of me, and she was messing with something on the ground. and then she left it. we came upon it, and it appeared to be a bone. didn t look like the normal animal bone you find out here. so i took a picture of the bone. i sent it to my sister, who s a nurse. she confirmed that that looked like a femur bone and i should call the authorities. reporter: finding a bone,
and you say we decide it was lorenzo montoya and then later you find out it was somebody else, a lot harder to prosecute that person. absolutely. absolutely. reporter: as 2009 drew to a close, two more women from ida s list were positively identified. virginia cloven and evelyn salazar. there was only one set of nameless remains left to identify. but by now it seemed likely that whoever she was her name was probably already on ida s list. the new year began with the detectives knowing they needed a break, and they were prepared to follow any tip anywhere if that s what it took to solve the case. albuquerque police and fbi agents are now in joplin, missouri. reporter: then a news flash came from missouri that had everybody in albuquerque glued to their tv screens.
might have actually seen evidence of a murderer moonlighting as a grave digger. it turns out that even though that evidence was long gone by the time those bones were discovered in 2009 a bird s eye view was precisely the perspective investigators needed. to start their search for a killer. when you see those satellite photos and you see the scarring on the desert floor, knowing what we know now, it s very obvious that those look like graves. reporter: this is what albuquerque police chief ray schultz says investigators saw when they looked at old pictures of the mesa. in this 2002 image of the area where the bones were discovered there s nothing unusual. just desert and sagebrush with a dry stream bed running through it. but two years later, in 2004, when most of the women on detective ida lopez s list were disappearing, the images show