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 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.
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. i don t have a normal, you know, regular address. you don t have a school schedule or work schedule, that sort of thing. and you don t have anybody who saw them yesterday. right. and can tell you what they were doing, what their state of mind was, who they were hanging
we re turning to somebody s taug daughter, here again josh mankiewicz. 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 daughter was, saw his most cherished hopes and his most dreaded fears placed on a collision course. when they found the second, third, and fourth sets, i said
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, 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 easily have belonged to one of them. but the police who arrived at the scene shortly after nightfall soon determined that this was no ancient artifact. this bone belonged to someone who had died in the not too distant past. february 2nd is when one of our violent crimes detectives said oh, they found a bone on the mesa, i ll let you know. tonight they say the search is far from over. i saw it on tv on february
35 to 50. your typical profile. lives alone or is away from home for extended periods of time. probably had some brush with law enforcement. probably familiar with the prostitution trade. yes. i m still right down the middle of the fairway on this, right? yes. 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. 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 had long maintained that everybody counts, the existence of that kind of reward was a sign of progress. you re asked to call though the police tip line buzzed with hundreds of calls from a trail mix of nuts, cukes