that christmas angelica opened her presents alone, with no sign of her mother michelle. i thought maybe she d turn up a few days later, a few weeks, or we d you know, she d call us. it was breaking angelica s heart that day when she wasn t there. reporter: in february, five months after michelle was last 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.
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 in august 2010 a news flash from missouri that had everyone in albuquerque glued to their tv screens. that s a long ways away from albuquerque, new mexico. reporter: is the answer to the mystery blowing in the wind? he s in the area where the prostitutes frequent. he s a photographer. so he s going to have close contact with these people.
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
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, you know, maybe we ought to run that list. maybe we ought to, you know, be a little more proactive. and the editor didn t say a whole lot. and i thought, well, i ll write it and we ll see what happens. reporter: the resulting column, which for the first time publicly connected the missing women on ida s list with the west mesa bone field, hit the front page one month after the first bone was found. the response was amazing. i think because for the first time we had started to put faces on these women and we had explained to the citizens of albuquerque that there weren t
the 2003 or 2004 festivals, they 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 sage brush 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