God, this is not happening. Missing women, forgotten by almost everyone, but her. Ive just always felt they were going to be together, that if you find one, youre going to find them all. Detectives often hit dead ends that can stop them cold. But for the detective in this story, that ends with just another place to start. She had beaten the odds in her own life and now she was determined to beat them on the job using her head and her heart. Sometimes ida lopez cant wait for sunday. Sometimes in the middle of her workweek the albuquerque detective feels a pressing need for spiritual solace and divine guidance. The fall of 2005 was one of those times. I just thought that was the coolest thing id ever seen. So that curiosity. Then there was the service part, the helping people part of police work. So she learned about the lives of the women on the street and it was here while posing as a decoy during prostitution sting operations that she learned the raw power of their addictions. I just learned the absolute dependence on the drug for the girls. Theres no way in your right mind youre going to get into a car and do what this person told you to do. Theres no way. That gave me an empathy for them on that part. Over the years idas career blossomed. She made detective, married another cop and started a family. Her future seemed assured. But in 2004 doctors discovered a mass in idas right kidney. It was growing. I had kidney cancer. What did doctors tell you . They were shocked. It wasnt common in women and wasnt common in women my age. I thought i need to make further plans. My husbands got young kids to take care of. Frightening. Then about a month and a half after i was diagnosed, i had my kidney removed. Surgeons also removed idas a adrenal gland. Her return to work would have to be gradual if it was going to happen at all. For a lot of people, that would be the end of police work. Right. Not for you . No. I wasnt done. In july 2005, after a few months after recuperation, the department offered ida a 20hour a week desk job working missing persons. Missing persons is kind of a back water in a lot of departments. Right. Its where they needed somebody and it worked out, you know, for me and for them. As you will soon see, timing will play a critical part in the story were about to show you. Within weeks of starting her new job, ida was handed two missing persons files. Those two files would mark the beginning of the biggest case of her career and would turn into one of new mexicos most heinous crime stories. Both of those missing persons were attractive women in their 20s with arrest records for drugs and prostitution. 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 usually do is i go back to see what their arrest history is. So its a matter of time before they go back out. Then a third one comes in. As months go by, research and find there are maybe another one here and another one there and that sort of thing. Soon there were five missing women with similar profiles, all of them about the same age with a similar look. All of them known to hang out in a section of albuquerque so notorious that cops call it the war zone. 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 matched 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. Its one of those timing issues we told you about earlier. Lengthy delays in reporting missing people as missing. Its like being in a race and somebody has a year head start, ready, set, go. I dont have phone records. I dont have a regular address. I dont have a school schedule, a work schedule, that sort of thing. And you dont have anybody who saw them yesterday. Right. And can tell you what they were doing, what their state of mind was. Right. And the family knows them better than i do but they hadnt seen them or they see them once a month or every six months. Add to that fact that most of the missing women had supported their drug habit as street prostitutes who got into cars with strange men as often as 20 to 30 times a day. Its easy to see how another detective, one with a harder heart than the one beating inside ida lopez might have given up. Coming up, a missing daughter and a fathers regrets. I took her to a friends house and dropped her off. I know in my heart i didnt do the right thing, but i knew i had to. Oh theres one. Manatees in novelty ts . Surprising. Whats come at me bro . Its something you say to a friend. Whats not surprising . How much money matt saved by switching to geico. 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Not just because of what happens, but because of what might have been prevented. Missed. Or all together avoided. Such was the mystery of the women on detective ida lopezs growing list of the lost. Its a mystery their families still struggle to understand. Theres a dad who had a calendar. Every time he saw her, he marked the date down. Gave her 20. Maybe he knew where the money was going to go, but he saw his daughter. And that didnt take that part away that she was still somebodys little girl. The name, the face belonged to Michelle Valdez, one of the first women on the list. Her father had reported her missing six months before ida got the case. He was the guy who kept the calendar. The x is indicating no knowledge of her, disappeared, nothing, no word. The fact is dan valdez had been recording his daughters comings and goings for years. This is michelle. I took it upon myself to tape them. Tape every event. Every chance that i had, i had the videotape there. But Michelle Valdez that appears in these home videos with her little sister system a far cry from the thin drug wasted young woman police would come to know and fingerprint. This michelle, along with her sister camille and half sister kendra was a cutand clown. Showing up for her first communion and showing a budding interest for boys. This michelle according to her was an allamerican girl with a future as bright as the new mexico sun. I looked up to her for many things. I was always the tagalong with her and her friends. She didnt mind . No, not at all. Then came the teen years when life started coming at Michelle Valdez fast and furious. By then dan and michelles mother were divorced and dan was raising michelle and camille alone while working days at the juvenile Detention Center. And nights and weekends playing steel guitar with his country band. 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 where careless mistakes can lead. Some of it seemed to take. Some of it didnt. At 13 michelle became pregnant. I was devastated. What can you do . You cant be with them 24 7. All you do is bring them up, nurture them, show them love, attention, appreciation. And sometimes they make a mistake. Sometimes they make the wrong turn or mistake. Shortly after her 14th birthday, Michelle Valdez gave birth to a baby girl she named angelica. So you were being a father all over again. A father all over again. I was only eight years old and becoming an aunt. It was tough. But once, you know, we had that bond, me and angelica, it was nice. I enjoyed it. At 14 most kids rightfully think their best years are ahead of them. High school. College. Career. That was not the track Michelle Valdez was on. Though dan continued to tape the usual family functions, michelles little girl angelica was the center of attention. On the periphery in offhand moments, dans camera also caught something else. The look and the unspoken despair that signaled the death of a young girls dreams. She struggled to hold it all together, but michelle eventually dropped out of school. For a while she tried to support herself and angelica with a series of minimum wage jobs, but couldnt make ends meet. After three years, angelica was sent to live with dans mother who lived nearby and michelle took to living with a series of people she called friends. But 2002 the wear and tear is written all over her face. That september angelica celebrated her sixth birthday. Michelle had just turned 20, a milestone that was not lost on mother or child. Mommys not a grown up anymore i mean teenager anymore. Never was. No. In a sense, michelle never was a teenager. And now on the cusp of young adult hood, michelle looked gaunt. Her face bore the cut of sores that suggested shed been hitting the crack pipe. When did you notice things were gone wrong . Im guessing you noticed before anybody else. I noticed when she started seeing one of her boyfriends, you know, he opened up the door for all the wrong things. Like . The drugs. The drugs. Definitely. Dan knew about the drugs and twice got her to agree to enter rehab, but michelle never showed up. Increasingly there were runins with the law. Michelle had already been busted for receiving and transporting stolen property, drug possession, and car theft. Dan knew about some of the arrests. Most he didnt. When a stolen car rap in arizona landed michelle in jail dan says he bailed her out and pleaded with her to change her ways. On the way back from arizona to here she promised im not going to hang out with the same people, im going to do things different and youre going to be proud of me again. Then she bails two hours after shes home. The toll of michelles addiction on her younger sister camille is also evident in dans videos. As camille becomes a teenager, she no longer seems to want to acknowledge michelle or even have her around. We were always bumping heads. We werent as close because of the drugs. Shed come over and steal my things or, you know, i would see how upset it would make my dad, so i would tell her, you know, mean things. Before long, Michelle Valdez stopped showing up in her fathers videos, sometimes because she avoided the camera. Other times because she simply didnt show up. She knew that there was events at the house because shed call and ask if she could borrow 25. She was hungry or whatever. She was at a hurting spot. So i gave her the money. Even though you knew even though i knew that it could be going for drugs. It was my gateway to making contact with her and seeing her in person. Dan may have had the patience of jobe, but by 2004 camille, the tagalong little sister, had had enough. When michelle asked dan if she could move back home for a while, camille put her foot down. He was going to let her stay with us. And i remember telling him no. If she comes and stays, im going to leave. I couldnt handle it. I remember that. I didnt even i didnt even want to be around it anymore. I was so tired of it. Tired of seeing him hurt. So you told michelle she couldnt come over . I told michelle that she couldnt come over, that i took her to a friends house and dropped her off there. I know in my heart i didnt do the right thing, but i knew that common sense in my brain said that i had to. I had to take that avenue. They call it tough love. For dan valdez, it was pure t torture. Every night he knew she was out there. And every time the phone rang, his heart stopped hoping that hers had not. im 65 and healthy. Im not at risk. Even healthy adults 65 and older are at increased risk of pneumococcal pneumonia. Isnt it like a bad cold or flu . 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Through the Tuition Assistance program, every day mcdonalds helps more people go to college. Its part of our commitment to being americas best first job. Whack to by the fall of 2004, dan valdezs calendar was beginning to fill with xs. Each x marking another day without word from his oldest daughter, michelle. When was the last time you saw her . It was in september of 2004. How did she look . Thin. Wired out. Strung out maybe. Had spots on her face. Did you see her then. Honestly i dont remember the last time i seen her. I dont remember the last words we spoke. You dont remember . No. But it might not have been a nice thing . No. As erratic as michelle had come, shed somehow always shown up for the moments that mattered most to her daughter. That changed when michelle failed to show up for angelicas 7th birthday party. That day it fell to 15yearold camille to fill in for michelle and act as mom. That Christmas Angelica opened her presents alone with no sign of her mother michelle. I thought maybe shed turn up a few days later or a few weeks. It was breaking angelicas heart that day when she wasnt there. In february five months after michelle was last seen dan went down to the Albuquerque Police station and formally reported his daughter missing. Detective ida lopez was on medical leave at the time. The valdez family was at the mercy of the Police Departments bureaucracy. She didnt want to be found. I understand they dont just deal with missing. They deal with all kinds. For a long time the news would be full of stories about girls who were missing and everybody was looking for them. One of the things those girls all had in common was that they were all attractive and blond and white and didnt have any criminal record. I just kind of wonder whether police and everybody else would have sort of stepped up their game a little bit if that had been the case here. Yeah, that did cross my mind numerous times. But, you know, you have to have faith in your Law Enforcement. If you dont have faith in your Law Enforcement to treat everybody equal, then what do you have . What you have in dan valdezs case is a search you do yourself. As spring turned to summer that year, dan, his exwife and his daughters plastered fliers with michelle all over Central Avenue asking anyone who had seen her to call the Albuquerque Police department. At night dan drove through the war zone sometimes into the wee hours of the morning looking for michelle. It was real hard because, you know, id be circling the block or whatever, see somebody that may appear to be the size of michelle, a small person, and go around the block two or three times and me wondering who they were as well as them wondering who i was. It had to be brutally difficult to think of michelle living that kind of life. Definitely. Definitely. It was not the way that her mother and i raised her. Those were long nights filled with bitter sweet memories of michelle and the way she used to be before the drugs took over. And thoughts of rare moments together before she went missing. She came over to the house one day and i had given her a few dollars and she stood up. She said dad, im going to run. I said all right. And she said she went up to put her arms around me and i hugged her. She said no, dad, squeeze me tight. Squeeze me like youve never squeezed me before. And i got her and i gave her the biggest hug a father could ever give his daughter. Remembered moments like that sustained dan and drove him to continue his lonely search for michelle. Then in july, 2005, about five months after dan had first reported michelle missing, he got a call from a detective who had only recently been assigned michelles case. A detective named ida lopez. I thought ida being a Police Officer was awfully small. Shes a short lady. But other than that, it had seemed that she was on the up and up and that she was doing what she could in her power and the time that she had to go out and out to the streets. It would become a close working relationship based on frequent phone calls and mutual admiration. Dan is a strong, quiet man. This is a man who absolutely loved his daughter no matter what. He didnt see her with the track marks. He didnt see her strung out. He had no idea shed been arrested. Well, he did see her that way, but thats not the eye what he saw in his eyes or his heart. Dan continued to cruise the war zone welling himself to believe that his daughter was still out there. I thought she was alive and well and doing good. But just didnt want to have any contact with the family. Maybe i did something wrong. Maybe it was me not letting her come back to the house. Maybe it was camille saying no or whatever. But dans confidence that michelle would turn up alive was suddenly shaken one night when the phone rang at the valdez home. The caller on the other end of the line had heard something shocking. We had gotten a call from a family friend of ours that i grew up with and, you know, i pick up the phone and shes, like, oh my gosh, im sorry about your sister. I said what are you talking about . She said michelle. Michelles michelle and cinnamon were stabbed and buried on the west mesa. Did you know who that was . No. Never heard of her. Did you ask who she was . Yeah. Michelle had ran the streets and knew certain people and they had heard it from her aunt. Dan called detective ida lopez with the tip but she was unable to find the aunt or to pin d