temporary field headquarters so many young women missing one woman determined to find them there s a story to her too. a young woman lucky to b alive. for a lot of people that would be the end to police work. so she searched the numbers grew the families hurt. she says i have some ba news for you under a desert sky a secret waited. this is not happening missing women forgotten by almost everyone but her. i have always felt they wer going to be together if you find one you ll fin them, all. sometimes ida lopez simpl can t wait for sunday. sometimes in the middle of her work week the albuquerqu detective feels a pressing nee for spiritual solace and divin guidance the fall of 2005 was one o those times. it was a time when a siniste force seemed to be snatching women off the streets of new mexico s largest city. and the devoutly religious detective knew she needed al the help she could get i think it s somebody who s very organized i think he s been preying on
there are, you know, maybe another one here, then another one there, and that sort o thing. soon there were five missin women with eerily simila profiles on ida s list all of them about the same age with a similar look. all were known to hang out in section of albuquerque s notorious that cops call it th 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 o missing women who match that profile. that was the easy part the hard part was that many of them had already been missin for more than a year before id even had a chance to start looking. it s one of those timing issue we told you about earlier. lengthy delays in reportin missing people as missing. it s like being in a race and somebody has a year ahea 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 schoo schedule or work schedule, tha sort of thing.
photos and you see the scarrin on the desert floor, knowing what we know now, it s ver obvious that those look like graves this is what albuquerqu police chief ray schultz say investigators saw when the looked at old pictures of th mesa in this 2002 image of the area where the bones were discovere there s nothing unusual. just desert and sage brush wit a dry stream bed running through it but two years later, in 2004 when most of the women o detective ida lopez s list wer disappearing, the images sho tire tracks leading from thi road to a few bare spots in th vegetation spots that weren t there before this photo, taken the followin year, shows even more bare spots. clustered within 20 yards of each other it s kind of eerie lookin at those satellite photos.
about your sister. and i said, you know, what are you talking about? she said, michelle michelle s michelle and cinnamon were stabbed an buried on the west mesa. did you know who cinnamon was? no. no never heard of her before. did you ask her where she heard that yeah. her aunt ran the streets, knew michelle, knew certain people, and they had heard it from her aunt dan immediately calle detective ida lopez with the tip. but she was unable to find the aunt or to pin down the source of the rumor it was all just unverifiable street talk, the kind ida lope had heard before except for one tantalizing tidbit cinnamon was a name on ida s list
carrying dust bowl refugees an beat generation oddballs wes to california. the mother road s glory days are behind her now in albuquerque, where the ol highway becomes central avenue the city s decidedly down-scaled drug and prostitution trade flourishes. cops call this section of central avenue the war zone. and the women who work its shadows prostitutes. but ever since her early day in uniformed patrol, ida lopez has called them her girls. i got to know a lot of them you know, we could chase the out, but for me there wa always a story to them ida says the stories sh heard back then were heartbreaking tales of abuse and neglect that almost always had drugs at their core. these are hurting women i mean, you ll see some ou here that they need that fix you know, it s not what you se in vegas it s not the call girl it s not the pretty woman. by the end of 2005 ida ha five women on her list who wer roughly the same age wit similar backgrounds. young hispanic women wit arrest reco