Victoria Chavez, 24; Monica Candelaria, 21; Veronica Romero, 26; Cinnamon Elks, 31; Julie Nieto, 23; Doreen Marquez, 27; and Michelle Valdez, 22 (4 months pregnant); Syllannia Edwards, 15; 3-4 as yet unidentified victims – bodies discovered buried in the New Mexico desert starting in February, 2009
Albuquerque, NM
Investigator said a serial killer known as the West Mesa Bone Collector is responsible for the murder of an Lawton teen.
Investigators in Nevada found 11 women and one fetus buried in the West Mesa back in February. Seven of the victims were identified early on, but on Friday, the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator identified the eighth victim as a runaway from Lawton, Oklahoma. Albuquerque police spokeswoman Nadine Hamby identified 15-year-old Syllannia Edwards as the victim.
According to the missing person report filed with Lawton police back in August of 2003, Edwards ran away from a girls group home called Parker Pointe in Lawton. The home is geared towards young girls who are victims of neglect and abuse. Edwards was in DHS custody at the time she went missing.
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Investigators said the victim’s family is based in Texas but have been told Edwards entered Oklahoma DHS custody at the age of five after her mother went to jail.
New Mexico investigators said not only is Edwards the youngest victim, but also the first to be from outside New Mexico.
The positive identification came after employees compared a forensic sketch they made of the victim based on a skull with photos of missing children posted online. They then used dental records to secure the identification.
Investigators confirmed Thursday they have identified one more murder victim from among the 11 women buried in a makeshift West Mesa graveyard.
However police said they were not ready to release the latest victim’s name until Friday.
It’s been almost seven months since the last victim was identified. Police have said all along that with every victim they identify they get closer to figuring out how their paths may have crossed and to their killer.
Last month police released a sketch of what the youngest victim may have looked like. The sketch had been done by an investigator at Office of the Medical Investigator who used the unidentified woman’s skull as a guide.
Last week another OMI medical investigator zeroed in on 10 missing women from across the country that she thought could be the victim. Police would not say if the recent work on the woman had resulted in the identification.
The three remaining unidentified bodies are at a Texas laboratory where they are being analyzed by forensic anthropologists who help crack cold cases. They’ve been working on determining a cause of death as well as extracting DNA.
In February a woman walking her dog near a construction site found a bone that turned out to be human. Investigators began digging, and the more they dug the more the mystery deepened.
Eleven women, one of them pregnant, were believed to have been buried sometime between 2001 and 2005.
The latest woman to be identified will join the list of victims. Her family will join the other families who wondered for years where they were.
The body count stands at 12—13 if you include the fetus—all young women heinously murdered and then deep-sixed into the grit of a forlorn desert. Their families claim the local police made no effort to find them after they were reported missing. The women knew each other from Albuquerque’s War Zone—the notorious neighborhood where prostitutes and drug dealers ply their trade. They were young and Hispanic, many were mothers, and all were living what the Albuquerque police euphemistically refer to as a “high-risk lifestyle.”
They disappeared between 2001 and 2006 and were apparently afraid for their lives.
Cinnamon Elks, one of the seven who have been identified so far, told friends shortly before her August 2004 disappearance that “a dirty cop was chopping off the heads of prostitutes and burying them on the West Mesa,” according to Joline Gutierrez-Krueger of the Albuquerque Journal. Police have not revealed the causes of death, so whether the victims were decapitated is unknown. But that has not stopped the rumors flying wildly on the streets of the city. The police have refused to reveal details of the evidence uncovered at the crime scene—an 18-foot-deep pit called “the bowl” on a 92-acre site west of the city. Nor have they speculated about suspects except to assure residents that if the murders were the work of a serial killer, the perpetrator has either died or moved to another city. But despite law enforcement reassurance, the macabre excavation has kept the community on edge for the past 12 weeks and has spotlighted the dark side of the largest city in New Mexico.
The gruesome discovery belied the tranquility of the once-picturesque basaltic plateau, a sacred site for Native Americans that was home to coyotes and eagles, and situated near the most dramatic petroglyphs in the Southwest—carvings created between 3000 B.C. and 500 A.D. by Anasazi farmers, hunter-gatherers, and Spanish sheepherders. Now, the “West Mesa is a dusty escarpment littered with trash dumps and tire tracks, spent slugs and brambly weeds,” as High Country News writer Laura Paskus recently described the crime scene. Like the discarded bones of these forgotten women, the ravaged landscape has come to symbolize the violence against women.
It all began innocently enough, on February 2, 2009, when Christine Ross and her dog Ruca took their regular walk in an area that had been recently leveled for a housing subdivision. On top of the dirt, Ruca found a large femur bone. “It didn’t look normal. Our gut instinct told us it wasn’t supposed to be there,” Ross told a reporter. Suspecting it was human, she photographed it on her cellphone and texted it to her nurse sister who confirmed the suspicion. She called the police who began the three-month-long dig at the country’s largest crime scene—the landscape equivalent to 75 football fields. On April 25, they ended the search, declaring that no more bodies could be found. “We estimate we’ve moved over 40,000 cubic yards of dirt,” Albuquerque Police Chief Ray Schultz told the media. Seven victims have been identified: Monica Candelaria, 21; Veronica Romero, 26; Cinnamon Elks, 31; Julie Nieto, 23; Victoria Chavez, 28; Doreen Marquez, 27; and Michelle Valdez, 22, who was four months’ pregnant.
Police are still seeking clues about the remaining Jane Does, and have published the photograph of an acrylic nail with an unusual hot pink design hoping that a local manicurist might recognize it. All of the identified women were on a list of 16 compiled by the department’s missing-persons unit, and all had a history of prostitution. Many were addicted to heroin, some were police informants, and several left small children behind.
“That somebody would do this to my daughter and dump her like she was a piece of trash and leave her lying out there with no dignity. I am devastated and angry,” said Karen Jackson, the mother of Michelle Valdez, capturing the grief and fury that the women’s families feel. After years of frustration with the local police, who rarely returned their phone calls or pursued the investigative tips the families provided, the victims’ relatives are outraged. “Nobody has listened to us for so many years,” said Lori Gallegos, a childhood friend of Doreen Marquez, who was last seen in October 2003 dropping her son off at Calvary Christian Academy. “These girls all had dreams,” said the father of one of the missing. “No girl grows up wanting that.”
Continue reading Who’s Murdering the Prostitutes of Albuquerque?
The ongoing investigation of human remains on the southwest mesa will be the main focus of an entire episode of the television show “America’s Most Wanted” focusing on Albuquerque crime.
Show producers and production staff are taping the episode this week, along with popular host John Walsh.
“We’re going to shoot all day today, and we’re going to shoot tomorrow,” Walsh told KRQE News 13 Wednesday.
The west mesa investigation surrounds the remains of eleven people found buried in a once-remote desert area now being developed for homes. The remains include one woman carrying her unborn fetus.
Police and the Office of the Medical Investigator are trying to determine how the victims died and who may have killed them.
“I say it’s a serial killer,” Walsh said. “He’s dumped 11 women out there, and he’s still at large.”
Albuquerque police have yet to say the deaths are the result of a serial killer. An Albuquerque Police Department spokesperson told News 13 investigators are hoping the hour-long show will generate the kind of leads they need to move the investigation forward.
The show will include interviews with law enforcement and family members of the six victims identified so far.
“There are I think five women that have not been identified,” Walsh said. “Usually when bodies are dumped in the same place, it’s not 11 different perpetrators.
“It’s not usually copycats, sometimes there is, but usually it’s the work of a serial killer.”
Albuquerque police said they are looking into several possible suspects who may be responsible for the bodies buried on the West Mesa.
As searchers discovered the 13th body Friday at the site near Dennis Chavez and 118th Street, investigators said they are still unwilling to say a serial killer is responsible.
However, police also say a single person may have disposed of all the bodies they’ve found on the mesa.
One person police are looking at could be Lorenzo Montoya, a man killed in 2006–the same time prostitutes stopped vanishing from the streets of the Duke City.
Even back then, police said Montoya could be responsible for multiple murders.
Montoya drew the attention of police in December 2006 in what police call one of the most bizarre crimes most of them had seen.
The 39-year-old Montoya had taken a stripper to his West Side mobile home to dance for him. What Montoya didn’t know is that the dancer, 19-year-old Shericka Hill, had her boyfriend waiting outside.
After an hour, the boyfriend, 18-year-old Federick Williams went to check on Hill.
Williams and Montoya then confronted each other with guns and Montoya was shot dead. Williams then found Hill dead inside the mobile home.
Police said Montoya had tied Hill up with a rope made out of duct tape. Investigators said the way the rope was made suggested Montoya had done it before.
Another reason Montoya is getting attention is how close he lived to the dig site–about two miles.
Back in 2006, there were dirt trails that led directly from Montoya’s mobile home park to the dig site.
Police are careful not to say the person responsible for the recovered bodies is dead, but APD is also confident a serial killer is not on the streets of Albuquerque.
The bodies were found by chance, starting with one bone sticking out of the dirt on a desolate plot of land in the mesa west of Albuquerque, N.M.
wo are still unidentified with no names and no clues as to how they died. But a third has a name, an identity and a family.
Victoria Chavez was the first to be identified by New Mexico’s Office of the Medical Investigator, using dental records. It was her skeleton, along with partial remains of another, which touched off a massive search for more human remains in what is slated to become a new housing development.
For two weeks investigators, anthropologists and forensics experts have combed the area using hand tools, cadaver dogs and heavy machinery. Police have no idea how many bodies may be buried in the dirt or who dumped them there.
When she was last seen by her family in 2003, Chavez, 24, lived a hard life, logging arrests for prostitution and drugs. But in the months before her disappearance she had been living at home, working at a local burger joint and thinking about a career as a nurse.
”I was in denial,” her mother, Mary Gutierrez, told ABCNews.com of the day she learned the bones were her daughter’s. ”I said, ‘You must be wrong.”’
With the remains of three bodies found so far and tests pending on a fourth discovery, Albuquerque police aren’t quite sure what they’re dealing with.
The first bit of remains was found Feb. 2 by a woman walking her dog around the vacant lot. ”She just stumbled on one of the bones,” Albuquerque Police Officer Nadine Hamby told ABCNews.com. ”It’s not like everything was intact.”
When police responded to the scene and began digging, they found more bones. And the results surprised police — they came from two different people, including Chavez. About 48 hours later, bones from a third person were found several yards away.
Since then police and forensics experts have been at the site every day, searching the area mostly by hand and using rakes and shovels. The area totals about 92 acres, though the search has been narrowed to a few specific areas.
