and she didn t mind? no.n not at all. not at all. reporter: then came the teen years.me when life started coming at michelle valdez fast and furious. by then dan and michelle s mother were divorced, and dan was raising michelle and camilln alone while working days at the juvenile detention center. and nights and weekends playing steel guitar with his country band, cimarron. dan tried to keep a watchful eye on his girls and even took them to work with him at the juvenile detention center to show them on where careless mistakes can lead. some of it seemed to take. some of it didn t. at 13 michelle became pregnant. i was devastated. but what can you do?te you can t be with them 24/7. all you can do is bring them up, nurture them, show them love, attention, appreciation. and sometimes they make a a mistake. and sometimes they make the i wrong turn or a mistake.ke reporter: shortly after her . 14th birthday michelle valdez gave birth to a baby girl she named angelica.
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 just two women that were missing. there were whole bunches of them. reporter: suddenly families who d once felt isolated in their agony now felt a communal bond. and at the center of it all was dan valdez. and i said, well, let s gather these families together and let s get to know them. let s get to be each other s support system. let s exchange phone numbers. reporter: an impromptu
and now on the cusp of young adulthood michelle looked gaunt. her face bore the kind of sores that suggested she d been hitting the crack pipe.ug when did you notice things were going wrong? i m guessing you noticed before anybody else. yeah. i noticed when she started seeing one of her boyfriends, you know. he opened up the door for all the wrong things. like?wr the drugs. the drugs. definitely. reporter: dan knew about the drugs and twice got her to agree to enter rehab.ug but michelle never showed up.nt increasingly there were run-ins with the law.
but they hadn t made an i.d. yet. reporter: michelle valdez. after years of having only her rap sheet and her father s bittersweet memories to go on, ida lopez was now sure she knew where michelle valdez was. did you know michelle was pregnant when she disappeared? i did. reporter: a few days later lab work confirmed ida s hunch. jane doe number 8 was michelle valdez. and i had to tell dan. the hardest part of this whole thing is having to go to somebody s house and say we
every time he saw her he marked the date down. gave her 20 bucks. maybe he knew where the money was going to go. but he saw his daughter. and that didn t take that part away, that she was still somebody s little girl. i think they re trick candles. reporter: the name, the face, belonged to michelle valdez, one of the first women on ida s list. dan valdez, her father, had reported michelle missing six months before ida got the case.c he was the guy who kept the calendar. the xs indicating no no knowledge of her, disappeared, nothing.ledi no word. reporter: the fact is dan valdez had been recording his