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 is a nurse. she confirmed that that looked like a femur bone and i should call the authorities. finding a bone, even a human bone, is not unusual out here on albuquerque s west mesa. this is storied territory where native american tribes, conquistadors and cowboys once roamed. the bone could have easily
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. 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 doing to dispose of a body and disposed of it in the same area where the other women were. somebody who lives here? we don t know if it was somebody who just lives here or would just come back and
for five years, dan valdez prayed at the end of each day that the next sunrise would bring news of his daughter michelle. police have set up a tip line. then in february 2009 came unsettling news. a thigh bone had been found out on albuquerque s west mesa. within days, evidence of one body had become evidence of two and then three, then four, then five, then six. six sets of remains were found within 20 yards of each other. dan valdez, who had been wondering for years where his
evidence of a murderer moonlighting as a gravedigger. 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 the satellite photos and the scarring on the desert floor, knowing what we know now, it s very obvious that those look like graves. 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
both had seemingly vanished without a word to friends or relatives. sad but common, especially for these dark streets where drug addiction and prostitution literally go hand in hand. ida went by the book. so what i do is go back to see what their arrest history is, what their lifestyle has been with drugs. do my full background on them. then a third one comes in. a third one. then as the months go by, research more and find there are maybe another one here, another one there that sort of thing. soon there were five missing women with eerie 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 known for the high-right crime area, it it was known as the war zone. the easy part is she kept a list of the women with. the hard part is many of them were missing for more than a year before ida had a chance to start looking. it s 1 of those timing issues we talked about earlier. lengthy delays report