missing and exploited children s website and was able to search through as many african-american females that matched the possible stature, where they might have been when they went missing. from a pool of hundreds, wendy first narrowed the field to 30, then to 10 and then to 1. one girl whose face, age and biography seemed to match what she saw in the sketch. her name was syllania edwards. according to the web site, she had been a 13 year old runaway from a group home in lawton, oklahoma, in 2003. it was her ear, her ear that was exposed in the photo, and it was her eyes. that was what kept me bringing me back to her. dental records from oklahoma confirmed that jane doe number 7 was, in fact, syllania edwards. one answer found.
university of north texas i d fieded jamie barela through dna. though 15 year old jamie barela was not a prostitute. she was last seen with one, her cousin evelyn salazar, whose remains were with also found on the mesa. there were seven missing women who fit the profile on ida lopez s list. and if they weren t on the mesa, where were they? with the investigation now focused on finding a serial killer, ida thought back to her late-night chats with the women of the war zone. had there been anything she d overlooked, anything specific about a car, a smell, a tattoo, or an accent? something that might be significant. then you ask them, how many bad dates have you had? oh, i ve had 17. i ve been choked, beat. i ve been raped a number of times. so you get a lot of that. then i m thinking, okay, is it somebody that s nice and picking
recuperation as a reserve officer, the department offered ida a 20-hour-a-week desk job working missing persons. missing persons is kind of a backwater in a lot of departments. i mean, that s not exactly, you know, the premier detective job. right. right. it s where they needed somebody, and it worked out, you know, for me. and for them. missing persons, you know, was busy. the position was there. and it was i thought perfect timing. reporter: as you will soon see, timing, both perfect and not so perfect, will play a critical part in the story we re 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 in her career and would turn into one of new mexico s most heinous crime stories. but at the time it was routine low priority policework.
around with. right. and the family knows them better than i do. but they hadn t seen them. or they see them once a month or every six months. reporter: 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. and it s 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 father s regret. i took her to her friends house and dropped her off. knowing in my heart i didn t do the right thing but i had to.
reporter: ida didn t completely disbelieve what her girls were telling her. but the mesa, a vast expanse of desert west of town where people frequently dump things they no longer have any use for, was simply too big an area to launch a search based on just a rumor. and so this case was going nowhere. until late in the afternoon on february 2nd, 2009. sit. reporter: when christine ross decided to take her dog ruca for a walk. okay. reporter: they strolled out of her new subdivision, one of many that had recently sprouted up in the desert west of albuquerque, and then over to an abandon construction site, where christine let ruca off the leash to run. 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.