Latest / Bless This Mess: A Southern True Crime Podcast / A Little Less Mess: The West Mesa Bone Collector [New Mexico]

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A Little Less Mess: The West Mesa Bone Collector [New Mexico] · Bless This Mess: A Southern True Crime Podcast

• 0:20
  Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, welcome to bless us Mess with the Trick
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: Grimp podcast. I'm Kara, Just Kara, Welcome to a Little
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: Less mess. These are our mini episodes that we put
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: out on Mondays. If you're looking for our regular porch
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: banter between me and Stu, you can catch those episodes
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: on Thursdays on our main feed. Also, if you would
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: like to support the pod and get a little extra content,
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: you can join our Patreon. We do our Friday sitting,
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: sipping and bullshitting where we chit chat and talk about
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: our lives and usually cover documentary. You can also come
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: hang out with us on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube,
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: where I share documentary recommendations, as well as our true
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: crime and Dinner Time series where I show you what
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: we're having for dinner and tell you a little two
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: minute true crime story. All right, now, go ahead and
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: pour your morning coffee, pull up a chair, and let's
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: get straight into it. Today we are going to Albuquerque,
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  Speaker 1: New Mexico. Now, if you've been listening to these a
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: Little Less Messes for a while, this might be a
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  Speaker 1: little different for you. We normally I do our regular
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  Speaker 1: case that we did and I just kind of pare
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: it down and just do straight to the facts and
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: tell you the case with no banter or anything like
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: that are conversations that me and Stu have. However, I
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: really want to venture outside the South with our episodes.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: Some of our episodes not our main ones, so this
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: is I feel like a perfect opportunity for that. So
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  Speaker 1: I'm just these will be different from our regular main
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  Speaker 1: episodes and they will be outside of the Southern United States.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: So if you have case recommendations, please send them to me.
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  Speaker 1: All right. When we talk about serial killers, we usually
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: talk about the ones with massive media nicknames, Jack the Ripper,
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: the Zodiac, b t K. We talk about the ones
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  Speaker 1: who got caught or the ones who left taunting letters
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  Speaker 1: for the police who wanted that attention. But there is
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: a terrifying truth in law enforcement. The most successful serial
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: killers are the ones you have never heard of. They
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  Speaker 1: are the ones who know exactly who to target so
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  Speaker 1: that no one comes looking for them. In two thousand
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  Speaker 1: and nine, the city of Albuquerque discovered that one of
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  Speaker 1: those invisible killers had been operating in their back yard
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  Speaker 1: for years, and to this day he has never been caught.
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  Speaker 1: This is the story of the West Messa Bone Collector.
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  Speaker 1: To set the sea, you have to understand the geography
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  Speaker 1: of Albuquerque. The city is split down the middle by
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  Speaker 1: the Rio Grande. To the east you have the Sandia Mountains,
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  Speaker 1: but to the west you have the West Messa. In
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  Speaker 1: the early two thousands, the West Messa was basically a massive,
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  Speaker 1: desolate stretch of high desert. There was a lot of
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: new housing developed planned for the area, but two thousand
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: and eight housing crash brought all that construction to a
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  Speaker 1: dead stop, so you had hundreds of acres of empty,
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  Speaker 1: grated dirt lots isolated from the main city. On February second,
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  Speaker 1: two thousand and nine, a woman named Christine was walking
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  Speaker 1: her dog, a Lab mix named Ruka, across the West Messa.
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  Speaker 1: Ruca was sniffing around a muddy drainage canal when she
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  Speaker 1: started intensely digging at something in the dirt. Christine walked
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  Speaker 1: over to see what her dog had found. Sticking out
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  Speaker 1: of the dry earth was a large white bone. It
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: didn't look like a coyote or a cow. It looked
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: distinctly human. Christine immediately called the Albuquerque Police Department. When
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: investigators arrived, they secured the area and began to carefully
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: dig around the bone. They quickly confirmed that it was
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: a human femur. But as the forensic anthropologist kept digging,
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  Speaker 1: they realized this wasn't just a single body dump. Right
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  Speaker 1: next to the first set of remains, they found another,
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: and then another. The Albuquerque Police brought in heavy machinery,
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  Speaker 1: crime scene technicians, and forensic anthropologists. Was started as a
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  Speaker 1: single nine one one call turned into the largest crime
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  Speaker 1: scene in the history of New Mexico. Over the course
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  Speaker 1: of several weeks, investigators painstakingly sifted through the dirt of
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  Speaker 1: the West Mesa. They ultimately unearthed the remains of eleven
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  Speaker 1: women and one unborn child. The bodies had been buried
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  Speaker 1: in shallow, makeshift graves. Because of the dry, arid conditions
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  Speaker 1: of the desert, The remains were heavily decomposed, making it
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  Speaker 1: incredibly difficult to determine the exact cause of death, but
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  Speaker 1: the pattern was undeniable. Someone had been using this specific
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  Speaker 1: plot of land as a personal graveyard. The immediate question
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: was who were these women and how did eleven people
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  Speaker 1: go missing without the city noticing. To answer that, police
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: had to look back at missing persons reports from almost
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: half a decade earlier. Through dental records and DNA testing,
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  Speaker 1: investigators finally began putting names to the remains found on
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  Speaker 1: the Messa. They were women like Michelle Valdez, who was
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  Speaker 1: twenty two and pregnant at the time she disappeared. There
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  Speaker 1: was fifteen year old Selina Henderson, a runaway who was
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  Speaker 1: the youngest of the victims. There was twenty seven year
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  Speaker 1: old Jamie Burrella, twenty four year old Victorious Chavez, and
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  Speaker 1: thirty two year old Doreen Marquez. As the identities rolled
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  Speaker 1: in a tragic, chilling pattern emerged. Almost all of these
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  Speaker 1: women had gone missing between two thousand and three and
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  Speaker 1: two thousand and five, and almost all of them lived
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  Speaker 1: on the margins of society. The majority of the victims
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  Speaker 1: were involved in sex work and had histories of severe
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  Speaker 1: drug addiction. They worked the strolls, as they called it,
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  Speaker 1: along Central Avenue known low as Route sixty six. This
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: is why the killer was able to operate for so
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  Speaker 1: long without being stopped. He specifically targeted women who he
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  Speaker 1: knew would be dismissed by society and by the police.
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  Speaker 1: When these women vanished in two thousand and four, their
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  Speaker 1: families did try to report the missing, but the police
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  Speaker 1: often wrote them off as transient adults who had simply
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  Speaker 1: moved on to a new city, or assumed they were
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  Speaker 1: just on a long drug bender because their disappearances were
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  Speaker 1: never connected or treated as a serial case. Back in
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  Speaker 1: two thousand and four, the killer had free reign to hunt, murder,
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  Speaker 1: and bury his victims in the West Messa without anyone
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  Speaker 1: looking for him. It wasn't until the dog dug up
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  Speaker 1: that bone five years later that the city realized what
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: had actually happened. Once police realized they were dealing with
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: a serial killer, they had to figure out when the
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  Speaker 1: bodies were buried. Investigators pulled historical set light imagery of
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  Speaker 1: the West Messil lot from Google Earth. They looked at
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  Speaker 1: images from two thousand and three, two thousand and four,
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  Speaker 1: two thousand and five, and two thousand and six. The
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  Speaker 1: satellite photo showed something terrifying. In the images from two
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  Speaker 1: thousand and four, you can clearly see fresh tire tracks
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  Speaker 1: driving off the main road and straight into the empty
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  Speaker 1: dirt lot. Right next to the tire tracks, there were
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  Speaker 1: visible rectangular patches of disturbed earth. The exact size and
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  Speaker 1: shape of the graves. The images proved that the killer
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  Speaker 1: was literally driving his victims out to the Messa, bearing them,
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: and then driving away, leaving physical scars on the landscape
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: that were visible from space. But by two thousand and
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  Speaker 1: six the housing developers had come in. They had grated
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  Speaker 1: the land, moving thousands of tons of dirt around to
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: prepare for construction. This grating process actually covered the graves
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  Speaker 1: with several extra feet a dirt, unintentionally hiding the bodies
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  Speaker 1: even deeper. If the two thousand and eight housing crash
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: hadn't happened and the houses had actually been built, those
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: women might have been paved over and never found. The
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  Speaker 1: media quickly dubbed the unknown killer the West Messa bone collector.
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  Speaker 1: The Albuquerque Police formed a massive task force to find him.
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  Speaker 1: They interviewed hundreds of people, followed up on thousands of tips,
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  Speaker 1: and narrowed their focus down to a few key suspects,
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  Speaker 1: but two men in particular stood out. The first suspect
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  Speaker 1: was a man named Lorenzo Montoya. He lived in a
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  Speaker 1: trailer park only three miles away from the West Messa
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  Speaker 1: burial site. In two thousand and six, Montoya was accused
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: of strangling a nineteen year old sex worker at his trailer. However,
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: before the police could arrest him, the teenage girl's boyfriend
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  Speaker 1: actually tracked Montoya down and shot him to death. Because
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  Speaker 1: Montoya was killed in two two thousand and six, the
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: timeline fit perfectly. The West Messa murders stopped right around
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  Speaker 1: that time, but there was never any physical DNA evidence
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  Speaker 1: tying him to the West Messa graves, and because he
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: was dead, they couldn't interrogate him. The second major suspect
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: was a man named Joseph Blee. Blee had a long
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: history of violent offenses and was known to frequent the
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  Speaker 1: areas where the victims worked. He was known for impersonating
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  Speaker 1: police officers to gain the trust of vulnerable women. Blee
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  Speaker 1: is currently serving a decades long prison sentence for the
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  Speaker 1: horrific rapes of young girls. In the nineteen eighties, investigators
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  Speaker 1: searched his home and seized a massive amount of evidence
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: looking for any link to the West mess of victims,
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  Speaker 1: but again without a confession or a concrete DNA match
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  Speaker 1: to the specific remains in the desert, the police did
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  Speaker 1: not have enough to definitively charge him with the murders.
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  Speaker 1: To this day, almost two decades after the women vanished.
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  Speaker 1: The West Messa Bone Collector has never been officially identified
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  Speaker 1: or charged. The case remains one of the largest unsolved
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  Speaker 1: serial killer investigations in the United States. A reward of
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: up to one hundred thousand dollars remains active for any
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: information leading to an arrest and a conviction. There are
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: still at least eight other missing women from that exact
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  Speaker 1: same time period in Albuquerque who have never been found,
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: leading many investigators to believe that there might be another
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  Speaker 1: burial side out there in the desert waiting to be discovered.
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  Speaker 1: The tragedy of the West Messa Bone Collector isn't just
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  Speaker 1: that the killer got away. It's the fact that system
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  Speaker 1: filled these women twice. It felt them when they disappeared
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  Speaker 1: in two thousand and four, when their families pleas for
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: help were met with indifference because of the victims struggles
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  Speaker 1: with addiction and sex work, and it feled them again
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  Speaker 1: when the trail was left to go soap cold that
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: finding justice became nearly impossible. Women like Michelle, Selina, Jamie,
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  Speaker 1: and Victoria were sisters, daughters, and friends. They deserve protection,
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  Speaker 1: and they deserved to be looked for. Their story is
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  Speaker 1: a brutal reminder that a society is only as safe
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  Speaker 1: as it treats its most vulnerable people. All right, Well
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: that's our case for today. If you want a deeper
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: dive or just some porch side company, join stewing Me
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: this Thursday for our full length episodes where we head
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: back down to the South. Now make sure you're subscribed
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: on Apple podcast or Spotify or wherever you get your
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: podcasts so you don't ever miss an episode. Until then, remember,
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: stay safe, lock your doors, and keep that porch light on.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: Buy everyone tell you know it's badline to be Supersta
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: checks with mind mapping els, it's working on, it's bring
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: and learning and a sicko, it's worrying. Boul I can
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  Speaker 1: beg