In February 2009 a woman walking her dog on a construction site on the West Mesa, on the western edge of Albuquerque, picked up what she thought was a cow bone. It was a human femur. The excavation that followed covered around a hundred acres and took months, and recovered the remains of eleven women and the foetus one of them was carrying.
They had been buried between 2001 and 2005. Most were Hispanic, most were in their twenties, most had worked as prostitutes along Central Avenue and had struggled with heroin or crack, and several had been reported missing by their families years earlier without much happening.
Two men have been publicly discussed as suspects. Lorenzo Montoya, who killed a young woman in his trailer in 2006 and was shot dead by her boyfriend, and Joseph Blea, a serial rapist convicted in 2015 of unrelated offences and serving ninety years, whose belongings included women's jewellery. Neither has been charged with any of the eleven.
The case is open. Albuquerque police have periodically renewed appeals, and the families have spent fifteen years arguing that the disappearances were not investigated when they were reported because of who the women were.