ida went by the book. so what i usually do is i go back to see what their arrest history is. their lifestyle has been with drugs. so it s a matter of time before they go back out. so i keep them, do my full background on them. then a third one comes in. 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.
it s been nine years since that summer night when ida lopez first took to the streets of albuquerque s war zone alone, searching for a couple of missing women. the majority of our girls were street-level prostitutes. reporter: in that time the case has gone from a nightmare for a few flawed souls to a nationwide search for a serial killer, an unidentified man who police believe may not have succeeded in killing every woman he coaxed into his car. he may be waiting in some other community to start doing the same thing again. and what we hope to happen is that someone that s had an encounter with this killer will make that phone call to us and we can link that individual to these crimes that have occurred here in albuquerque. if these women had been
what if jane doe number 7 was just the first of many victims the grave digger brought to the west mesa from somewhere else? who was she? where did she come from? how did she get to albuquerque? not all those questions have been answered as of yet. reporter: it would take more than diligent detective work to find those answers. but within a few months of receiving those remains the lab-coated sleuths at the office of the medical investigator began unraveling the riddle of jane doe number 7. since her skull was pretty much intact, one of our senior investigators who is able to do forensic sketching started doing a profile for her. reporter: based on photographs of the skull and a partial hair weave that was recovered from her grave, the sketch artist imagined that jane doe number 7 must have looked something like this. he was able to define out her ears.
in late january 2010, nearly a year after the first bones were discovered on albuquerque s west mesa, the last set of remains was matched to another name on ida s list. university of north texas identified jamie barela through dna. reporter: although 15-year-old jamie barela was not a prostitute, she was last seen with one, her cousin evelyn salazar, whose remains were also found on the mesa. there were still seven missing women who fit the profile on ida lopez s list. and if they weren t on the mesa, where were they? with the investigation now focused on finding a serial killer, ida thought back to her late-night chats with the women of the war zone. when you ask them how many
her to police work years ago, when she was a kid, growing up in albuquerque. i was about 9 years old. actually, it was my grandfather raised me. he was outside. he was about in his 80s. and i m in the porch area. and there s a foot chase. and the guy goes toward him, and he s tackled by police. i just thought that was the coolest thing i d ever seen. and so that curiosity. and then there was the service part, the helping people part of police work. reporter: after college ida graduated from the police academy and joined the force as a uniformed officer. most of my areas that i worked, especially patrol, i was assigned working the prostitutes in the area. reporter: and so she learned about the lives of the women on the street. and it was here while posing as a decoy during prostitution sting operations that she learned the raw power of their addictions.