Eleven women disappeared. Years later, the desert began giving them back.In February 2009, a woman walking her dog across Albuquerque's West Mesa noticed what appeared to be a bone protruding from the ground. The discovery opened one of the darkest investigations in New Mexico history.Beneath the desert soil, investigators uncovered the remains of eleven women and one unborn child, buried across an undeveloped stretch of land near 118th Street. Many of the women had vanished years earlier, their disappearances attracting limited public attention until the graves forced Albuquerque to confront the possibility that someone had been targeting vulnerable women and using the West Mesa as a hidden cemetery.Buried on the West Mesa reconstructs the disappearances, the painstaking excavation, the difficult process of identifying the victims, and the investigation that followed. It examines the work of detectives who had noticed women disappearing even before the burial ground was discovered, the thousands of tips that flooded police, and the evidence that led investigators toward several disturbing persons of interest.Among them was Lorenzo Montoya, a man whose history, proximity to the burial site, and violent death created one of the case's most persistent theories. Joseph Blea and other individuals also drew investigative attention, while developments in DNA technology have continued to offer new possibilities decades after some of the women first disappeared.Yet suspicion is not proof.No person has been convicted of the West Mesa murders, investigators have never established publicly that one offender alone was responsible, and additional women connected to the wider investigation remain missing.Victim-centered, carefully researched, and written without turning theory into fact, Buried on the West Mesa explores how eleven women disappeared into the margins of a city, how their names were finally restored, and why one of America's most disturbing unsolved murder investigations remains unfinished.
