On the evening of February 2, 2009, a woman named Christine Ross was walking her dog Ruca along a dried-out wash on the West Mesa, on the undeveloped western edge of Albuquerque, when the dog turned up a bone. Ross thought it had come from a cow. She called the police anyway. It was a human femur.
The ground had a history. Satellite images taken between 2003 and 2005 show tire tracks and patches of disturbed soil where the graves were later found, and the last burial appears on them in 2005. By 2006 development had reached the area, and the arroyo bank was graded, filled and platted for housing. The 2008 crash stopped the houses before they were built. When neighbors complained of flooding, the developer put in a retaining wall to send storm water into a retention pond dug roughly where the bodies lay, and the water brought bones to the surface.
The excavation covered around a hundred acres near 118th Street SW and took months. It produced the remains of eleven women and girls and the fetus one of them was carrying, in shallow clustered graves, broken up and scattered by the grading machines.
Identifying them took nearly a year. The remains were skeletal and sun-bleached, and the work was done by forensic anthropologists at the University of New Mexico and by the Center for Human Identification at the University of North Texas, using dental records, DNA and, in one case, a sketch. All eleven were named, and every one had disappeared between May 2003 and September 2004.
Monica Diana Candelaria, twenty-two, disappeared on May 15, 2003. Victoria Ann Chavez, twenty-six, on June 5, 2003. Syllannia Terene Edwards, fifteen, on August 17, 2003. Doreen Marquez, twenty-four, on October 10, 2003. Veronica Romero, twenty-eight, on February 14, 2004. The cousins Jamie Caterina Barela, fifteen, and Evelyn Jesus Maria Salazar, twenty-seven, on March 26, 2004. Virginia Cloven, twenty-four, on April 13, 2004. Julie Cyndie Nieto, twenty-four, on July 15, 2004. Cinnamon Elks, thirty-two, on August 20, 2004. Michelle Gina Valdez, twenty-two, on September 22, 2004. She was four months pregnant.
Ten of them had ties to drugs and prostitution. The Albuquerque Police Department says on its own case page that the eleventh, Jamie Barela, had no known involvement in either. She was last seen leaving a family gathering with her cousin Evelyn Salazar, the two of them walking to a park near San Mateo and Gibson in the southeast of the city; the police page gives April 2004, and the list of disappearance dates gives March 26. They were found buried next to each other.
Syllannia Edwards was the only one of the eleven from outside New Mexico and the only one who was not Hispanic. She was a Black runaway from Lawton, Oklahoma, where police had classified her as endangered and reported her missing in 2003. She was identified in November 2009 from a sketch and dental records.
Several of the women had been reported missing by their families in the years they disappeared. Before the bones were found, a detective named Ida Lopez had drawn up her own list of missing Albuquerque women with ties to drugs and prostitution; ten of the eleven were on it. Albuquerque police have since accepted that the cases were not connected at the time, and that each disappearance was handled as an individual event, often on the assumption that the woman had chosen to leave town.
Nine women with similar backgrounds from Lopez's list are still missing: Darlene Marie Trujillo, twenty, last seen July 4, 2001; Martha Jo Lucher, thirty-two, September 3, 2003; Anna Love Vigil, twenty, January 21, 2005; Felipa Victoria Gonzales, twenty-two, April 27, 2005; Nina Brenda Herron, twenty-one, May 14, 2005; Jillian Elizabeth Henderson-Ortiz, nineteen, January 16, 2006; Shawntell Monique Waites, twenty-nine, March 15, 2006; Leah Rachelle Peebles, twenty-three, May 5, 2006; and Vanessa Reed, twenty-four, June 13, 2006. Police have said there may be a second burial site.
On December 9, 2010 police released six photographs showing seven unidentified women who might be connected. They would not say where the photographs came from. Some of the women appeared to be unconscious. A further photograph released the next day showed a woman whose family identified her and said she had died of natural causes years earlier, and on December 13 police said two of the women had been identified as alive. In June 2018 more bones turned up near the burial site; they were found to be ancient and unrelated.
No one has been charged, and police have never named an official suspect, but several men have drawn their attention. Lorenzo Montoya, a pressman at a local printer, lived less than three miles from the site, and in 2006 dirt trails reportedly ran from his trailer park toward it. He had twice been arrested for violent attacks on sex workers, had threatened to kill his girlfriend and bury her in lime, and had talked at work about killing women and burying them on the West Mesa. In December 2006 he strangled Shericka Hill, nineteen, at his trailer and was shot dead by her boyfriend, Frederick Williams, as he tried to put her body in the trunk of his car. A video from his camera shows him having sex with an unidentified woman who may have been dead. The burials appear to stop about the time he died.
Joseph Blea, known in Albuquerque as the Mid-School Rapist for breaking into the homes of girls aged thirteen to fifteen near McKinley Middle School in the 1980s, was linked to one of those rapes by a retested kit and became a West Mesa suspect in 2014. His DNA was found on the clothing of a sex worker found dead on Central Avenue, a nursery tree tag found at the burial ground was traced to a nursery he used, he kept women's underwear and jewelry that did not belong to his wife or daughter, and he allegedly told a cellmate he had hired the West Mesa victims. He was sentenced in June 2015 for the rape case, to thirty-six years by one account and ninety by another.
Others were looked at and set aside or never pursued: Fred Reynolds, a pimp who knew one of the women and reportedly had photographs of missing sex workers, and who died of natural causes in January 2009; Ron Erwin, a photographer from Joplin, Missouri who went to the state fair in Albuquerque and whose properties were searched in August 2010 before police cleared him; and Scott Lee Kimball, a convicted Colorado serial killer, who said in December 2010 that he was being investigated and denied killing the women. An anonymous tip pointed to a man from El Salvador, and police have also examined the possibility of a sex trafficking ring moving women between Texas, Las Vegas, El Paso, Killeen and Denver around events like the New Mexico State Fair.
On June 27, 2020 the state opened a one-acre Women's Memorial Park on the site. The case is open, and it is known by a press nickname for the killer that many in Albuquerque object to, because it makes a collector of a man who killed eleven women and turns the women into the things collected.