middle of the fairway on this, right? yes. and that s still a lot of people. it s a lot of people. and do you use that profile and rule somebody out just because they re not on that profile? you can t. no, you can t. no. reporter: the detectives needed a solid tip. and by the summer of 2009 the fbi and the city of albuquerque were offering $100,000 to anyone who could help them catch and convict the man responsible for killing the west mesa women. for the detective who d long maintained that everybody counts, the existence of that kind of reward was a sign of progress. you re asked to call 1-877- though the police tip line with hundreds of calls from a trail mix of nuts, kooks and the merely misguided detective babcock. reporter: no one who seemed to know something about the five-year missing persons cases was dialing the phone. there were numerous rumors out there that certain
tire tracks leading from this road to a few bare spots in the vegetation. spots that weren t there before. this photo, taken the following year, shows even more bare spots. clustered within 20 yards of each other. it s kind of eerie looking at those satellite photos. that really sends a chill up and down your spine. reporter: the conclusion was inescapable. albuquerque police were looking at the evolving work of a serial killer. this particular individual made sure that he went back each and every time when he was going to dispose of a body and disposed of it in the same area where the other women were. somebody that lives here? we don t know if it s somebody that lives here or somebody that would just come back and frequent albuquerque on a regular basis. whatever the killer s permanent address, those satellite photos were a huge break because they told police when he was active here and, most importantly, when he quit.
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. it s like a little dark evil city out here. reporter: desiree gonzalez says she used to hang out on these streets and says she knew several of the missing women and had also heard those same rumors. i came out here looking for my cousin, and i bumped into cinnamon, and she had told me that that the girls were getting their heads cut off and tooken to the mesa. and that was the last time i seen cinnamon. i got scared. you know, it seems like they knew or something. reporter: ida didn t completely disbelieve what her girls were telling her. but the mesa, a vast expanse of desert west of town where people
frequently dump things they no longer have any use for, was simply too big an area to launch a search based on just a rumor. and so this case was going 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.
reporter: though the detectives spent months combing through all the evidence taken from the photographer s office and home, nothing definitive was found. and most of these boxes were returned. now, more than five years after the discovery of bones on the west mesa, albuquerque police are certain of only one thing. if the serial killer who preyed on their city is still alive, he s probably moved on to another hunting ground. my personal opinion, i believe that that person is still out there. he may be waiting in some other community to start doing the same thing again. and if he is, it may only be a matter of time. today is the day you re going to get motivated.