On the morning of February 2, 2009, a woman walking her dog on the dusty hills of West Mesa — a sprawling stretch of high desert at the edge of Albuquerque, New Mexico — noticed something pale lying in the dirt. She thought it was an animal bone. She brought it home.

Her son, who had medical training, looked at it once and called the police.

It was a human femur. By the time investigators finished excavating the area weeks later, they had recovered the remains of eleven women, all buried in a single grim cluster. Seventeen years on, no one has been charged. The killer responsible is one of the most prolific serial murderers in modern American history — and almost no one outside New Mexico knows his work.

February 2009

The discovery came at the worst possible time for the woman who found it. She had been hiking the West Mesa — an area popular with horseback riders, mountain bikers, and people walking dogs — for years. The bone she found was on land that had recently been graded for a planned subdivision. Construction crews had moved soil across the area, displacing whatever had been buried beneath it.

Albuquerque Police began excavating immediately. Within days, they found more remains. Within weeks, they had a serial murder investigation on their hands.

Forensic anthropologists from the University of New Mexico worked alongside detectives to identify the bones. The condition of the remains — bleached by sun, fragmented by grading equipment — made identification slow and painstaking. But over the following year, all eleven victims were named.

The Eleven Women

The victims of the West Mesa — sometimes called “the Bone Collector” murders by the press, though many in Albuquerque object to that name — were:

• Cinnamon Elks, 32 — last seen 2004
• Jamie Barela, 15 — the youngest victim, last seen 2004
• Monica Candelaria, 22 — last seen 2003
• Victoria Chavez, 26 — last seen 2003
• Virginia Cloven, 24 — last seen 2004
• Syllannia Edwards, 15 — the only Black victim, last seen 2004
• Doreen Marquez, 24 — last seen 2004
• Julie Nieto, 24 — last seen 2004
• Veronica Romero, 28 — last seen 2004
• Evelyn Salazar, 27 — last seen 2004
• Michelle Valdez, 22 (pregnant) — last seen 2005

Most of the women were Hispanic. Most were involved in sex work or struggling with addiction. Most disappeared between 2003 and 2005. Most lived in the same general area of Albuquerque — the West Central corridor — and frequented the same blocks. Many knew each other.

The killer, in other words, hunted within a specific community. He selected victims who he knew the system would not prioritize.

The First Disappearances

Several of the women had been reported missing by their families during the years they disappeared. Albuquerque Police, by their own later admission, did not connect the cases at the time. Each disappearance was treated as an individual event — often, internally, as a person who had simply chosen to leave town.

This was not uncommon practice for missing-person cases involving sex workers in the early 2000s. It was also a catastrophic failure. The pattern — eleven women, same community, same time window, all dead and dumped in the same desert grave — had been visible from the beginning. It just took six years for anyone to look.

The Suspects Who Walked

The West Mesa investigation has identified, at various times, multiple persons of interest. None has been charged with the murders.

Lorenzo Montoya. A man who lived in a trailer not far from the West Mesa grave site and who had been linked through informant testimony to sex workers in the relevant time frame. In December 2006 — before the bones were ever found — Montoya kidnapped a 17-year-old girl. Her boyfriend tracked his trailer down and shot Montoya dead. The case was ruled justifiable. Investigators have since said publicly that Montoya remains a person of interest in the West Mesa murders, but the evidence connecting him is largely circumstantial.

Joseph Blea. A man currently serving a 90-year sentence in New Mexico for a series of sexual assaults against women in the Albuquerque area during the same time period as the West Mesa disappearances. Blea’s DNA matches multiple cases of violence against the West Mesa victims’ demographic. Police have searched his properties. Items recovered include women’s jewelry and identification cards. Blea denies any involvement in the West Mesa murders. He has never been charged.

Scott Lee Kimball. A confessed killer who admitted to murdering women in the western U.S. during the relevant period. Kimball denied any West Mesa connection but his pattern fits.

Why the Investigation Has Failed

Multiple factors have prevented charges in the West Mesa case.

The condition of the remains — severely degraded by sun, soil, and the construction grading that initially disturbed them — has made DNA analysis difficult. Cause of death has not been definitively established for most victims. Even with modern forensic genealogy, much of the biological evidence is too compromised to produce reliable matches.

The primary suspect investigators believe most strongly responsible — based on circumstantial evidence and demographic fit — died before he could be questioned about the West Mesa specifically.

And the historical neglect of the original missing-person cases means investigators are now trying to reconstruct timelines from a decade-plus distance, with witnesses who have moved, died, or stopped cooperating.

The Families’ Fight for Justice

The families of the West Mesa victims have spent the years since 2009 doing something the original investigation did not do: refusing to let the case fade.

They organized vigils. They lobbied the New Mexico legislature. They pressured Albuquerque Police to keep dedicating resources. They appeared in documentaries — including a 2024 Netflix series, The Lost Women of Highway 285, that drew international attention to the case.

The mothers of these women — many of them now in their 60s and 70s — have made it impossible for the case to be forgotten.

New Hope From DNA

In 2023, the Albuquerque Police Department announced the formation of a renewed task force on the West Mesa murders, partly modeled on the multi-agency Gilgo Beach task force that successfully closed in on Rex Heuermann in New York. The task force has obtained funding to re-test the original DNA samples using updated forensic genealogy techniques that did not exist in 2009.

The same technology that broke the Golden State Killer case, the BTK case, and most recently the Gilgo Beach case is now being applied to the West Mesa remains. Albuquerque Police have said publicly that they believe an arrest is, finally, plausible.

For the families of Cinnamon, Jamie, Monica, Victoria, Virginia, Syllannia, Doreen, Julie, Veronica, Evelyn, and Michelle — some of whom have been waiting for an answer for over twenty years — the wait may finally be approaching an end.

And for the women themselves, whose names the city once did not bother to record: their families have made sure their names will never be forgotten again.

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