Crime Junkie - SERIAL KILLER: The West Mesa Serial Killer

Episode Date: January 1, 2018

Happy New Year! For our first episode of 2018, we outline the still-unsolved murders of the West Mesa Serial Killer *FYI: We've marked this episode as explicit because there are a couple of f-bombs. Sorry! We'll do better next time, I promise!For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/west-mesa-murders/    

Yeah. Hi Junkies, and hi Britt. Hi. This week, I'm really excited because we are finally going to be tackling a serial killer. Yes. But before we jump in, Britt and I want to tell you about one of our favorite nonprofits. This episode of Crime Junkie is brought to you by Crime Stoppers of Central Indiana. So now that you know a little bit about Crime Stoppers, if you had to guess, where do you think they get their funding?

Since they work so closely with police, I would have to assume that they're either state funded or they get some money back from a police program. No, they actually are 100% a non-profit and they get no money from the police and no money from the state. Wow, and they can still function with that? Yes, so they get actually all their money. Even though Crime Stoppers of Central Indiana works closely with police and is literally responsible for thousands of arrests, they receive no government funding. All of their funding comes from listeners like you. They're a 501c3, so all donations are tax deductible. And as we're rolling into 2018 and you're deciding where you're going to donate your time and money, consider getting involved with your local Crime Stoppers.

And if you want more information on volunteering or donating to Crime Stoppers of Central Indiana, go to Crimetips.org. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Crime Junkie Podcast. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers, here with me. As always, I have Britt. Hi. And this week, we're going to take a step back and do a case. We really hit a famous case the last two episodes. So I want to do a case that I really didn't know anything about, even though it actually was kind of famous. So maybe you guys will learn something new with me. If you already know about it, it's a great case that I'm sure you won't mind hearing again. I am going to be talking about kind of a big case. I'm going to be talking about a serial killer. And I'm talking about the West Mesa murders that happened out in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

And this was, as I've been researching this, like a huge case at the time in like 2009 when all of this came out. And I don't know if I was just like the time in my life, like I was in college and not watching the news or paying attention to anything that didn't have to do with like my Facebook feed. But I mean, I was getting married. And I don't remember this at all. I vividly remember the Long Island serial killer, which was just one year after this in 2010. But this was like totally escaped me. And I did not follow it at all. So all of this research was brand new to me, might be brand new to a lot of you. But at the time it was a huge case. And before I jump into, you know, finding the bodies and how people found out about this, I kind of want to take a step back and talk about one of the girls that actually was one of the first girls to go missing that kind of started this investigation. And her name is Michelle Valdez. And she was a pretty normal girl. She grew up with a mother or father, like a very involved family in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

And it wasn't until her teen years when her parents got divorced that she started really struggling and her parents did the best they could to stay engaged with her. She ended up living with her dad. But by 13, Michelle actually became pregnant. And she had a baby at like shortly after her 14th birthday, which I was like had to pause when I was like watching this documentary to be like, what, what was I doing at 14? I could not like, I couldn't even take care of a dog if someone were to like give me a dog on my own, much less a baby. I couldn't control my own hair. I am damn near pushing 30 and I'm still like think I can't handle a baby. No way 14 year old me was like doing well. So she gives birth to her baby. And she really her family said just started kind of like going downhill. I mean, when you think about it at 14, the whole world is ahead of you. You're thinking about high school and then college and your job and you're going to have all these big dreams for your life.

And she really felt like all of her dreams were dying. And she drops out of school really early. She tries these minimum wage jobs, but like really can't make ends meet. And her daughter ends up going and living with her grandparents. And that's when Michelle just kind of starts jumping like couchsurfing friends. She's staying with them. She's got this new boyfriend who kind of introduces her to a rougher crowd and she starts getting involved in drugs. And through this, she tries to stay involved in her daughter's life and attend all the big events and birthdays and Christmases. But she's not there as a mother on a day to day basis. And she starts to get having run ins with the law as well. She's getting in trouble for drugs. She had an arrest for a car theft and her family is begging her to change. They offer her to pay for rehab and multiple times she agrees to it when her dad would like come save her or come bail her out of jail.

And then after they would get home, she would change her mind. So in 2004, she is kind of down on her luck and I don't know if she was just kind of at her lowest point or if she was trying to turn her life around. But she asks her dad if she can move back into the house. And her younger sister, who still lived at home with her father at the time, basically was furious. She was so sick of her sister coming and going and her arrests and her drug use. She's like, she wasn't my sister anymore. And she said to her dad, you either let Michelle back in and I leave or you tell her no and I stay. And so her dad basically says he goes with the tough love approach and he can't. You know, his younger daughter has never done anything wrong. He has tried to help Michelle so many times.

So he picks her up but doesn't take her home. He takes her to go stay with a friend. And that was one of the last times that he saw her. And what he does is her comings and goings are so frequent or infrequent, I guess, that he starts keeping track on his calendar. And every time, every day he goes without seeing or hearing from her, he would make an X and then he would circle the days where he would have contact with her. And after this day in the fall of 2004, when he takes her off to a friend's house, he starts noticing that his calendar is filling up with these Xs. Week after week, month after month. And they really know that something is wrong when her daughter's birthday comes and goes and then Christmas comes and goes. And Michelle doesn't show up. She doesn't call. And in February, five months after he last saw her, her dad finally goes and reports her missing.

Five months? Five months. Oh my God. I know, that's a little crazy but you also have to think like she's living a nomadic lifestyle. Like I don't know what point, he didn't say exactly how long she would go if it would be a month or two months without contact. But it wasn't until she started missing the holidays. But even then, if she missed Christmas, he waited two more months before he really waved the flag. And you know, I don't know if that's good, bad.

Like you don't want to be the family that cries wolf because then if something really bad happens, you know, if they find her every time after you say she's gone for a week, I don't know. I don't know what's right. So the family reports her missing but, you know, she's known to have been a prostitute. She's known to have drug issues. So police put her on the missing person's list but it's really up to her family to pound the pavement and her dad is going around putting up flyers. The area in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that's like the really rough, like drug-ridden area is called the war zone. And her dad would go out at night and just drive up and down the street looking for her, asking people if they know her, just trying to find any kind of lead but he comes up with absolutely nothing. And in July of 2005, he actually gets a call because a new detective has been put on his daughter's case. And this detective really had an interest. She used to work in, her name's Aida, she used to work in Vice and would like work with these girls on the street.

So she kind of has a soft spot for them. And she starts noticing this pattern of young women who are going missing from the streets who are about the same age, who have about the same look. And about this time is when she gets put on the case and so she reaches out to her father just to let him know. She doesn't tell him she thinks that there's this like crazy serial killer going around. She really has no proof of anything other than these similarities but she wants him to know that she's on the case, that she's really taking it seriously and she's going to do everything she can. What Michelle's dad doesn't know at this time is Aida thinks at this point in July of 2005 that there's at least five girls who fit this profile from Albuquerque, New Mexico that she think might be in the same boat or might be in the same place, wherever that is, dead or alive.

So while Aida's thinking that all of these girls are connected, like I said, she didn't share this information with Michelle's father. And Michelle's father doesn't even really think that anything terrible has happened. He thinks that Michelle is just pissed off at him for not letting her come home. But he's really just trying to make contact with her again to let her know that he still loves her and if she wants to come home she can. He thinks that she's just staying away and he's just trying to get that relationship back. And one night, Michelle's family is at home and this has been things kind of changed for them and they start getting these sinister ideas. They get a call from a family friend and Michelle's younger sister answers the phone. And this family friend says, you know, I am so sorry to hear about your sister.

And her sister's like, what are you talking about? Like, we don't know what happened to her. Oh my God, not the call you want to get. And so this family friend says, no, Michelle and I heard that Michelle and Cinnamon were stabbed and buried in the West Mesa. So they have no idea, she's like, you know, where did you get this information? And this family friend had an aunt who ran in the streets and they had gotten this information from the aunt. And they didn't even know who Cinnamon was, but they call this into the police and the police investigate it, but they can't verify it. They can't find this aunt.

So it kind of stalls out, but not completely. The cops definitely take note of this because even though Michelle's family didn't recognize the name Cinnamon, Cinnamon the police know is another name on Ida's list of missing women who all fit this profile. So it's super weird that this unrelated, you know, this person who supposedly probably doesn't know is calling in, kind of verifying this theory that detective, that the detective has. And shortly before Cinnamon went missing, she was actually going around telling girls on the street that some girls that she had heard of were getting their heads chopped up and buried in the West Mesa. So there are obviously on the street, these rumors going around about what's happening, but there's really not a lot people can do because if they can't find where these rumors are starting, they can't just go around digging in the West Mesa. When I say the West Mesa, it's not like a little park.

We're talking about just vast open desert. So Ida starts to work with cold case detectives and the FBI and they actually all form this unofficial task force. And, you know, years go by and I think it's around the end of 2007 or 2008. They have at least a dozen victims that Ida has on her list that she thinks are all related. And she, at this point, starts going around to all these families and starts collecting DNA and dentals, trying to connect them, A, to Jane Doe's that are maybe already out there, or B, at least have something to compare if they were to find anything. And this is the first time she really gives the family any indication that she's not looking for them and maybe they need to start preparing that something really sinister happened to their family members. Ida really believes that all of these girls are going to be found together and she doesn't know why she has nothing to back this up.

Again, you know, prostitutes or people in high-risk lifestyles go missing all the time, but she just has this gut instinct. And as she continues to work this case, her dozen victims actually ends up, her final list is 18 women that she believes something happened to. But again, nothing happens, she's literally just got her suspicions and she keeps going on the streets and asking questions, doesn't come up with anything. And everything kind of changes on February 2nd of 2009. A woman is walking her dog. She had just moved into a brand new subdivision in the West Mesa Desert and her and her dog are going for a walk. And what her routine is, is she would normally go to this like construction site that had been halted. So it was just kind of this giant open like dug space and she would let her dog off the leash and just let her dog run.

And I know you're asking questions about this dog. His name was Ruka. Yeah, I have, I'm like, oh my God, it's always like, why do dogs have to be involved in terrible things? Oh, his name is Ruka. He's like a brown mutt. I think he has like kind of a Ruka. I know a dog named Ruka. He has kind of a chowey, like wrinkle face.

He looks at about 60 pounds. Absolutely adorable. Cannot for the life of me remember the lady's name who owns Ruka, but Ruka is stuck in my head. So Ruka starts digging around and he's like messing with something. And so his owner goes up and it looks like a bone and it's not super unusual to find a bone out in the desert. But she notices that it's not like the normal kind doesn't look like an animal bone. And so she actually takes a picture of it and sends it to her sister who's a nurse. And her sister says, yeah, that's 100% of femur and you need to call the cops.

So she gets the authorities out there and even initially the authorities aren't super concerned because, you know, out here in the desert, there's always a ton of like native burial sites or any crazy things that could have happened a long, long time ago. But when they come out, they realize that these bones are not ancient. They're actually pretty new. And so they bring their full team out there and start excavating the site and they keep finding more and more and more bones. And as they're putting them together, first it's, you know, it's the first body, then it's three bodies, then it's seven bodies, then it's eight bodies. And finally, after weeks, they have 11 bodies. 11 bodies.

11 bodies within like 30 yards. Complete or just like piles of bones? So some of them are pretty complete. Like as they were going, like they would try and use like sifters, but it is such like a crazy amount of space that eventually they were using like backhoes. And they said that one time as they were like putting their backhoe in and like lifting this like large pile of dirt, like a skull just started falling down. And it was a skull that already belonged to some bones that they had, but it just shows you like it's just kind of everywhere. So it's actually even a miracle that they found these bodies because what had happened is it's like all the stars aligned. So in 2005, there was a huge housing boom.

So that's when these subdivisions started going up, like the one that this lady lived in who was walking her dog. Rukas mom. Rukas mom, obviously. And so that alone like put people there to find the bodies or to make him stop bearing bodies there. We're not 100% sure. But then in 2008, there was the financial crash. And so this new construction site that was going up had to stop. If they would have kept going, they wouldn't have dug enough to actually find the bodies.

They would have built houses right over them. And right after the economic downturn, there was a huge rainstorm in this area that caused all of the dirt to kind of upturn. And the people from the construction company had to come back out and like re level. And that's kind of what brought the bones to the surface. So it's like a freaking miracle that they even found them anyways. And at this point, this is when I does all the collection she did of DNA and dental work like actually pays off because they slowly start to match these girls to the people on her list. And Jane Doe number eight was actually four months pregnant. And Jane Doe number eight they find out was Michelle who had gone missing initially.

There is no evidence on the ground. But the craziest fucking thing I've ever seen happens in this case. And I've never seen anything like it in my whole life. I don't know what gives them the idea or if this was something that you just stumbled across, but they actually pull the satellite footage from that area. And in 2002, they pull a picture and it's just completely vast open desert like just sagebrush. I think I've seen this picture. Oh my God, it's like so it is like a famous picture. So it's just absolutely nothing desert.

There's like this dried up stream. Then in two years later, they pull satellite footage from 2004. And it is so creepy because you literally see there's like a road that comes off and like you can see tire tracks from the road to the burial site. And then there's I know. And then there's these three like bear spots where you can tell like the ground had been disturbed and like nothing was growing in these areas. And those are exactly where they found some of the bodies. And then if they pull the satellite from 2005, then all of a sudden there's 11 fucking bear spots with more tire tracks. Can we put these pictures on our website?

110 percent. Yes, you have to see them because it is so chilling and like I don't even know what to compare it to. It's like you know the killer was right there, but you're just you didn't get the pictures at the right time. Like can you imagine if they would have gotten a picture of like a car or somebody actually out there? Chilling. Around this time, the newspapers, I mean media is crawling all over the West Mesa to the point where the actual lead detective would only go and do digging at night. Because he didn't want the the it's like such a wide open area. They couldn't really hide anything they were doing and he didn't want the media to know everything. And the newspapers start releasing actually all 18 pictures of these missing women.

And this is the first time that they're all publicly connected because really the public kind of wasn't giving a shit. It was like a couple of missing prostitutes and then they found some bones. But this actually really started to scare the public and kind of put like real faces to these women's names. And six weeks after they started digging, more women on Ida's list start showing up. And it actually comes to the point where out of the 11 women, 10 of them were on Ida's list. So that girl was spot on. She knew. Wow.

That's incredible. I know. I love me some lady detectives because she knew that they were all going to be found together. And sure enough, they did. They stopped digging by mid April. And so their total body count, they had 11 adults and one fetus. And like I said, 10 of them were from Ida's list, but they had this one wild card. It was Jane Doe number seven.

And all of the women, like I said, that were on Ida's list had like a very similar similar profile. They were all from Albuquerque. They were all about the same age. They all were white or Hispanic. They all had a very similar look. But this Jane Doe number seven was a very young African American girl. And they do a sketch of her. And there's a detective who's just super on the cold case unit who's just super invested in this.

And she's literally going through like hundreds of missing persons reports online. And she knows that this girl is probably between 14 and 15 because her wisdom teeth haven't come in. So she kind of can narrow it down. But she starts at hundreds, gets to about 30, then narrows it down to 10. And then finally gets to one girl. Her name's Selena Edwards. And she was 13 years old when she ran away from Oklahoma in 2003. And she, the ladies like, you know, it wasn't a perfect match like visually, but she's like her ears and her nose.

Like it was her. And sure enough, her dental records actually confirmed it. But like knowing who she was didn't help at all because it almost gave them more questions. Because she doesn't fit the profile. She doesn't fit the profile. She wasn't as far as they knew in Albuquerque. She's from Oklahoma. And what they found out is so she was a 13 year old runaway.

And they didn't know how she got there. But they start looking, apparently there's like this prostitution circuit. So when a lot of people go missing, they'll move them around from town to town. And it's pretty common to do it out West where they hit like Albuquerque, Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas. So they start checking those places first for arrest records. And they actually find something from July of 2004. They find an arrest record in Denver. She was arrested for prostitution.

And she was released in July of 2004. And that's the last time that they can really find anyone who had contact with her. And 2004 is the same year that almost all of the girls go missing. And she's not local to Albuquerque. And since she was last seen in Denver, I mean, what we're left with though is like, okay, did she make her way to Albuquerque? Or did she pick somebody up in Denver who happened to be the same guy who was traveling? Or maybe he lives in Denver and does his killing in Albuquerque? We don't know, but it's so weird.

They can't really piece together how she got to Albuquerque. They do know that at some point in her life, she had spent at least one time or maybe twice in Albuquerque. So I guess it's not super crazy to think that maybe she would come back. Right. I would just like to take a moment to say these rad lady detectives are giving me so much life right now. I know, I should have been a detective. I'm so sad with my life. You could have been probably cold case.

I could have been the one who's like, I think all these are connected and we could have done this together. Like let's take a moment to appreciate like what might have been. Yeah, but it never would have been because the whole reason I didn't become a detective is because I would be the worst cop of all time. And you can't skip over being a cop. So that's true. I'm just going to talk about murders instead of solving them. Fair enough, but go rad lady detectives who piece this all together. Girl power.

So the FBI at this time puts a profile together and it's like the most vanilla profile I've ever seen. Like this guy's 35 to 50. He lives alone or he like travels a lot. He's familiar with prostitution trade. He's had a couple of brushes with the law. And that's it. Like, okay, thanks for narrowing it down to like, I'm glad we have a mind hunter to tell us that. Yeah, right. So in summer of 2009, they up the ante and they try and offer $100,000 reward.

And like the case we first did, I think Nikki McCallan, they did the same thing and everyone thinks the $100,000 reward is going to solve all the problems. But sure enough, like nothing happens with it. And detectives start going over old arrest to see, okay, so we think this guy's had run into the law before. He probably has had interactions with prostitutes before and had brushes with the law involving prostitutes. So let's start there. And actually one of the detectives on the West Mesa case used to work in vice and he remembered a guy that he arrested in 1999. He was following a prostitute in a john. And after the prostitute, the john had like parked, he goes to like bust it up.

And when he opens the car door, the prostitute is freaking out and she keeps saying that the guy was trying to kill her and she has marks around her neck. And it was some kind of attack. They take the guy in and they book him and his name is Lorenzo Montoya. He had records with prostitutes. We frequented them before he had record for being really aggressive. But again, charges were dropped because the girl wouldn't testify. So the guy gets less let loose. He draws attention again in 2006.

And in 2006, he gets a prostitute. He lures her to his home in the West Mesa. By the way, dude lived like real close to the burial ground. Of course he does. And he actually killed this prostitute and he had wrapped her body in a blanket and was putting her in his trunk when her boyfriend shows up and shoots him. So the police like again, this was in 2006. So they didn't know that all of these prostitutes were buried near his home. They just had him for this one.

No, he killed this one girl. But now looking back on it, they're like, whoa, like this is very similar. Now, the one thing we don't have is the police will not release how all of the women in the West Mesa were murdered. So I don't know if it's the same way this other girl was murdered or if they can rule him out. They've never officially ruled him out, but they've never officially said he didn't closed it either because they say that if something were to come up in the future, it would make it really hard for them to prosecute. Which makes sense, but still. Right.

So they've got nothing on him. They don't get the chance to ever question him. And so he is just constantly going to be this big question mark. And the police decide like they can't stop looking. Again, they're not going to rule off or rule everything as closed because of him. So they have to keep looking. And in fact, in Texas, there's like actually a lot of similarities to a group of women that were going missing in Texas. Then they are following some men that were in Florida and Pennsylvania that kind of fit the profile.

But the next like really big thing that happens is in August of 2010 in Joplin, Missouri, FBI go to this man's house who is a photographer and they just swarm and do a full sweep of his house and start collecting evidence. Like the media is all over it. And apparently this guy had frequent in New Mexico. He would always go to the state fair, which is very close to the West Mesa. And in 2004, he was in the West Mesa area apparently taking pictures of like a balloon festival. And they confiscated a boatload of photographs and they still have yet to release why they even got on to him in the first place. I was going to ask that because the way he made it sound was they just like swarmed his house for fun. Right. And we still have no idea.

So I don't know if it was a tip. I don't know if he is one of those people who had interactions with prostitutes and arrests in the past and they figured out he was there at about the right time. There's literally they give us no clues to how they got to him. And then they don't tell us obviously they didn't find anything super conclusive because he's never arrested. They end up returning his pictures and stuff to him, but he's still listed as a person of interest. And his name keeps getting brought up like as people continue to talk about this case. They really only talk about him and then they talk about Lorenzo Montoya. And there's a lot of people in between that have like records for prostitution, but police really believe.

I mean, if it's not Lorenzo Montoya, they seem to think that this guy is still out there. And I kind of agree with them. I mean, the when you think about it, the economic downturn was in 2008, the housing complexes started to move in in 2005. And there weren't any bodies found there that had of any girls that had gone missing after 2005. So I almost think there's no way like he was killing like a madman in 2004. There's 11 bodies. There's no way. So say it was Lorenzo Montoya.

Why would he not kill anyone till 2006? And then is there a year and a half long drive spell? Right. Or even if it is him, what I think is there's another burial site. Like after all of these complexes moved in. That's what I was going to suggest. He had to pick up and move and they say that's why there are so many serial killers out there who haven't gotten caught. And the number one reason is because they pick up and move.

I don't know if they if they all move because they have to something forces them out or if they're just getting smart enough and realizing you can only stay in one place for so long. So again, the West Mesa is like a vast ocean. You look out and it just goes on forever. And so it's not like they can just go around digging up holes in the West Mesa thinking they're going to come across something. I'm the only way they're going to find more bodies is if there's as things continue to develop. And he could still be out there. He could still be killing. He could be Lorenzo Montoya and he's not killing anymore.

But I definitely think that there is a burial ground that we just haven't found yet. And the last thing that happened with this case was in October of 2016, the police did this like very mysterious move. They released like still frames from a video that were really grainy and you could barely make them out. We'll also post pictures of these online. But they're pictures of two women and they asked for the public's help identifying these two women because they said that they believe the women in these videos might have some answers about the West Mesa murders. But that was October of 2016. Legitimately, nothing since then.

Wow. That's incredible. Yeah. So I don't know if they ever found these women. I don't know. They never said like, are they other victims? Are they women who might have gotten away? I mean, are these pictures from videos they took from this photographer guy and they're like trying to find these women who could implicate him? Are they the same kind of thing from someone else? I have a thousand questions, no answers.

But this case is just, I honestly like one of my favorites now because I have so many questions and I'll definitely put a Google alert out because I'm going to be following this forever. Yeah. I mean, it's an incredible story. I have so many questions like you do and I'm kind of mad because you didn't give me any answers. That area is so big. There's just absolutely no way for them. I mean, there's no like infrared or ground penetrating radar they could do for an area that big to even find out if there is something buried out there. So they're never going to find another burial ground unless they put up like another complex like that. And there's a perfect rainstorm and like all the stars align again.

You know, I do have an idea. Hmm. Let's bring Ruka back. Yeah. Because I feel like we have a crime fighting dog in our midst. Oh my God, help us out better. What if we can we get Chuck and Niles and Roz? Do you think that they're like deep inside?

They have any kind of like crime fighting dog in them? Um, maybe Chuck, but I have kind of low hopes for my dogs. If I let Charlie off the leash, I'm never going to see him again. He doesn't know not going to have it. Thank you guys for tuning in for another week of crime junkie. If you want to learn more about us, you can visit our website at crime junkie podcast.com. And if they want to get in touch with us on social media, Brett, can you tell everyone how to do that? You can follow us on Twitter at crime junkie pod or on Instagram at crime junkie podcast.

And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and please leave us a rating and review. It really helps the show and it's the only way we can keep going and bringing you new crime stories for your fix every single week. Crime junkie is written and hosted by me. All of our sound production and editing comes from Brett Prewott. And all of our music, including our theme, comes from Justin Daniel. Crime junkie is an audio Chuck production. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?