temporary field headquarters so many young women missing one woman determined to find them there s a story to her too. a young woman lucky to b alive. for a lot of people that would be the end to police work. so she searched the numbers grew the families hurt. she says i have some ba news for you under a desert sky a secret waited. this is not happening missing women forgotten by almost everyone but her. i have always felt they wer going to be together if you find one you ll fin them, all. sometimes ida lopez simpl can t wait for sunday. sometimes in the middle of her work week the albuquerqu detective feels a pressing nee for spiritual solace and divin guidance the fall of 2005 was one o those times. it was a time when a siniste force seemed to be snatching women off the streets of new mexico s largest city. and the devoutly religious detective knew she needed al the help she could get i think it s somebody who s very organized i think he s been preying on
it had to be someone local, investigators assumed. a meticulous man whose gri will had brought him back to the mesa again and again t bury his victims everything was in a pretty contained area all the bones. all the remains. yes because this guy ha complete freedom or he thought nobody s going to come out here? probably because he fel safe out here. for detectives like tod babcock it all seemed to add up except for one thing the crime lab had determined that one of the unidentified sets of remains, jane do number 7, was a young blac female when they told us that they had a young black girl, thought, i didn t have a young black girl on my list. for medical investigato wendy honeyfield the bones o jane doe number 7 and he pink-tipped acrylic nails were a beguiling puzzle she s like a lot of other cases that we had skeletal remains that come in and there s so much work that always done behind the scene to get them identified that nobody really ever sees for the detectiv
you re finding this, an you re just going, i wonder if it s going to be the rest of the girls. and i carried this little flye in my pocket and in my car, yo know, for the last, you know four years and within weeks ida s earl work of collecting denta records of the missing women and dna samples from their families began to pay off. bones started to get names the only body that has been identified so far, victori chavez she was on your list. she was on my list. and you thought, this is it i thought this could be it, yeah but there was more. something that surprised eve veteran crime scen investigators. in the grave of jane doe numbe 8 investigators found a tiny second set of bones. it was a fetus jane doe number 8 had been fou months pregnant at the time of her death. they would say we found a skull that had a lot of hair and she s pregnant i said it s michelle valdez. but they hadn t made an i.d. yet. michelle valdez after years of having only her rap sheet and her f
third, and fourth sets i sai to myself i have t realistically look at this that michelle i m sure probabl is out there at times detective ida lope was out there too. along with practically every other member of the albuquerqu police department and forensic experts from the fbi digging, scraping, sifting the reality, it was kind of like this is not happening you know, it s stuff you rea about. then came seven eight. nine ten. 11 it turned out all were women and all with the same name jane doe and ida lopez couldn t help bu wonder if these dry bones were the women she d been looking for. you know, i just didn t know it was so much going through m mind over the years ida s list o the lost had grown to includ close to two dozen women who fit the same basic profile - young drug-addicted hispanic women who were known to wander the gritty streets o albuquerque s war zone for ida walking through this bone yard felt as if she wer watching a horror movie unfold in real time
missing and exploite children s website and was abl to search through as man african-american females tha matched the possible stature where they might have been whe 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, an biography seemed to match what she saw in the sketch. her name was syllania edwards. according to the website, she been a 13-year-old runaway fro a group home in lawton oklahoma in 2003 it was her ear. her ear that was exposed in th photo. and it was her eyes. that was what kept me kep bringing me back to her. dental records from oklahom confirmed that jane doe number 7 was in fact syllania edwards one answer found but that only generated more questions, like when did the oklahoma teenager get to new mexico, and who brought her? i don t know. and that s what we re trying t figure out