West Mesa Bone Collector

What the record shows

The West Mesa Bone Collector is the unidentified person believed responsible for the deaths of eleven women and teenage girls whose remains were found buried on the West Mesa, an undeveloped area on the west side of Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 2009. According to the Albuquerque Police Department's case page, the victims were last seen between 2003 and 2005; one, Michelle Valdez, was pregnant, and the remains of her unborn child were found with her. No one has been arrested or charged, police have named no official suspect, and the investigation remains open.

The discovery began on February 2, 2009, when, as the APD case page records, a woman walking her dog found a human bone on a trail near 118th Street SW and reported it to police. Wikipedia notes that grading for a housing development had exposed bones in an arroyo bank. The Associated Press reported that the excavation ran around the clock and that identifying the remains through DNA and dental records took nearly a year. According to the APD page, Syllannia Edwards was identified on November 13, 2009, Virginia Cloven and Evelyn Salazar on November 17, 2009, and Jamie Barela on January 26, 2010, completing the identification of all eleven.

The eleven identified victims were Jamie Barela, 15; Monica Candelaria, 22; Victoria Chavez, 26; Virginia Cloven, 24; Syllannia Edwards, 15; Cinnamon Elks, 32; Doreen Marquez, 24; Julie Nieto, 24; Veronica Romero, 28; Evelyn Salazar, 27; and Michelle Valdez, 22. The APD page states that ten of the women had ties to drugs and prostitution and that Barela, Salazar's cousin, had no known involvement. Edwards had been reported missing in 2003 from Lawton, Oklahoma. According to the Associated Press, many of the women knew one another and some were mothers.

The AP and Wikipedia both record that Detective Ida Lopez had noticed women with drug and prostitution arrests disappearing from Albuquerque's streets in the mid-2000s and compiled a list of the missing before the graves were found; every woman found on the mesa was on her list. Other women on the list remain unaccounted for: KUNM reported in 2019 that six were still missing and that police believed the same person was responsible; the AP in 2022 and KOB in 2025 put the number at eight. Searches of the mesa in 2018 and 2021 found no further victims.

The APD runs the investigation through its 118th Street Task Force and, with the FBI and the victims' families, offers a reward of up to $100,000 for information leading to an arrest and conviction. In August 2010 police searched properties in Joplin, Missouri, belonging to a photographer and seized thousands of photographs; Wikipedia records that police later said he had been cleared. In December 2010 police released photographs of unidentified women found during the investigation; several were identified as alive. KUNM reported in February 2019 that Lt. Scott Norris, head of APD's violent crimes section, called it "an active case," with three detectives assigned and more than 1,000 tips a year.

Two men have been widely discussed in connection with the case, though neither was ever charged in it. KSFR, drawing on Albuquerque Journal reporting, named them in 2022 as Lorenzo Montoya, who was shot and killed in December 2006 by the boyfriend of a 19-year-old woman he had strangled at his trailer, and Joseph Blea, who is serving a 90-year sentence imposed in 2015 for sexual assaults unrelated to West Mesa. The AP reported in February 2022 that Liz Thomson, a retired APD homicide sergeant rehired as a contract cold-case investigator, said the number of suspects was "more than the two [people] that are commonly out there," and that detectives were auditing nearly 1,200 tips and had interviewed about 200 women. The Paper (abq.news) reported in 2021 that police had never publicly linked either man to the killings.

The city dedicated a one-acre Women's Memorial Park at the site on June 27, 2020. In February 2025, KOB reported that APD had received nearly 1,500 tips since 2009 and that Lopez, now a cold-case investigator, said detectives had "persons of interest that we're looking into" but no single lead suspect. As of 2026 the case remains unsolved.