Episode 203 - Who Killed Jennifer? - Part 3 of 4 - One Suspect, Two Cases & The West Mesa Link
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The following series is based on extensive research conducted over a two-year period, reviewing various sources, including police reports, interviews, and newspaper articles. Throughout our research, individuals involved in the case were attempted to be contacted in order to share their experiences and perspectives. The opinions expressed in this series do not necessarily reflect those of the Minds of Madness podcast. Listener discretion is advised.

Previously, in parts one and two of our series, Who Killed Jennifer?, we explored the initial investigation into Jennifer Lynn Sherm's murder, the witnesses, the suspects, the rumors, the evidence, and the unforgivable crimes committed against Jennifer as a child by a former sheriff's captain. Circumstances that paved the way for her to begin living a high-risk lifestyle as a young adult.

I feel for my mom. She went through so much. More than what most people could fathom. And she survived as long as she did. Whenever I'm feeling kind of f***ed up, I think about her now. And I'm like, yo bro, you ain't been through s***. You don't really know struggle. I just want to feel like I did something. And that all of this had some sort of meaning to it.

In a case that's gone unsolved for nearly four decades, police believe they'd arrested Jennifer's killer, a man named Gene Autry Hill, back in 1985, after a woman named Benita Godden claimed to have witnessed the murder. But after her statement fell apart,

police found themselves back at square one until a cold case unit in 2000 dusted off Jennifer's case file, discovering two tips that hadn't been followed.

Join me now as we take a look into the cold case of Jennifer Lynn Sherm, a 22-year-old woman who was brutally murdered, leaving her 15-month-old son Andy without a mother, a son who, 39 years later, is still looking for answers. For the longest time, like, I didn't understand what exactly happened to my mom. All I knew is that she was gone and...

The only thing Andy has to remind him of his mother are just a few photos.

There's actually two photos. The one that's always kind of been sacred to my family. It's a picture of me and her and my dad. And I'm just a baby. She has a huge smile. She looked happy. I don't know. Just honestly speaking, it could just be me trying to compensate for something. But every time I look at that picture, I feel loved. I feel like that smile was for me. She was happy.

Learning all this stuff, I think, made us a type of connection that I never would have had.

Before Jennifer was murdered in 1985, Danessa Howard had been found murdered nine months earlier, only 100 feet from where Jennifer's body would be discovered. Then, just two weeks before charges were officially dropped against Jean Autry Hill, there was another unsolved murder along Central. In January 1986, when 23-year-old Kathleen Bindle's body was found, and just like Jennifer,

Her cause of death was blunt force trauma. Although Kathleen had been living in Albuquerque for just a few months, detectives debated whether she'd been a sex worker. After hearing reports, she'd been spotted weeks before her murder in the company of a known pimp. Again, this is where Jennifer's case files became important as our head writer Ryan originally discovered mention of a mysterious white Cadillac again.

In the span of a few years, several unsolved homicides of women off the cruise start turning up. And you start seeing mention of this white Cadillac. With Kathleen Bindle, she had been seen talking with a man in a white Cadillac several times before her murder.

And when we looked into Jennifer's case file, one of the things that really stuck out was the eyewitness statement given by Antonio Valdez. That car is the exact description that Antonio claimed that Jennifer got into on the night she was murdered.

So after Kathleen's murder, over the next two years, there were another four unsolved murders that took place along the cruise. And all the victims kind of ran in the same circles. They were either sex workers or adjacent to them in the same subculture, the same milieu.

Among these cases, there didn't seem to be a consistent M.O., but certainly enough similarities to grab the attention of Mike Gallagher, the journalist Shane Waters interviewed for us in Episode 2. As I was looking over the articles, I had found Mike's expose, and I saw in the early 90s, Mike had compiled a list of seven unsolved homicides, and he featured all of these in his Death on the Cruise article.

In his opinion, just as in mine, they all seem to be linked. They happened between the years of 1984 and 1988. These people were Danessa Howard, Jennifer Sherm, Kathleen Bindle, Firm Strickland, Tyra Perry, Alexis Gurel, and Lisa Ann Fortin. One of the things that he discovered was that all of these victims seemed to be linked to the subculture that was located on Albuquerque's East Central Avenue.

Something that all of these victims shared was that they not only were extremely vulnerable, they were also very easy for the press, the public, and also sometimes the police to ignore.

According to Mike's expose, all of the victims were killed by hand, they were beaten, strangled, they were stabbed, or suffocated. In each case, the killer was also extremely careful not to leave behind any physical evidence. Not even a single fingerprint was left behind, except for Jennifer's case where DNA was left.

Because of all these similarities, Mike wondered if all of these murders were committed by the same people or group. And that's also what I wondered as well. Although it was possible the murders were completely unrelated and that the victim's only connection had been their proximity to East Central Avenue's high-risk lifestyle, still, when it comes to crime, when you start noticing a pattern,

Any pattern. Coincidences begin looking like connections. Correlation begins looking like causation. And it becomes awfully difficult to shake the idea that something bigger might be going on. While speaking to Mike, Shane asked him two important questions. The first was, who did he think was responsible for Jennifer's murder?

He said he thought that it was likely pimps from this Memphis group who was trying to recruit her to work for them. Now whether or not it was one of these men that Benita got and talked about, we're not sure.

And then I asked him if he thought that all of these victims, all seven of them, if they were all killed by the same person, and if they were all killed for the same reason. And he said that he thought that they were all murdered for different reasons every time, and it always derived from this drug culture that was alive at that time.

The best evidence to support Mike's theory is the fact that the murders seemed to suddenly stop at the end of 1988, a time period coinciding with Albuquerque police ramping up their efforts to combat violence, drugs, and vice on the crews, which by that point had reached epidemic levels.

One of the ways police began cracking down was by having narcotics agents specifically targeting members of the Memphis group and locking them up. The logic behind Mike's theory was solid. These big members of the Memphis group go to jail and suddenly this string of seemingly linked unsolved murders comes to an end.

And it appears that the police and homicide investigators in Albuquerque must have come to the same conclusion because after the failed case against the Memphis group pimp, Gene Hill, it didn't appear that they ever re-examined Jennifer's case in any meaningful way, at least for a while.

This is when the investigation into Jennifer's murder first seemed to go cold, and how it would stay for well over a decade. In the meantime, the Sherm family grew more and more frustrated with law enforcement. Not only had they started to feel they'd completely stopped investigating Jennifer's homicide, they felt ignored and forgotten.

There was always like a beef with law enforcement because of their attitude. You know, they were getting irritated with my family because we were taking over the investigation pretty much. I never felt respect. They were always so like rude and it always would come back to prostitution no matter what.

Ultimately, they were trying to push this concept, I guess, if you want to call it that. That it was just, you know, a trick gone wrong. But when you're around the type of people that my mom was around, you know, these guys are dangerous. They're the real deal. The police knew that. They knew the circles that she ran.

It's just this constant back and forth. My grandma, she'd wait outside. I think it was the courthouse, the district attorney's office. She'd stand out there and wait for him. So, you know, I'm sure there was this level of frustration on their end, but it just seemed lazy and disrespectful. And the one thing they were just trying to drill is just this prostitution thing. Hey man, it's the oldest profession in the world.

You know what I mean? Like, right, wrong, or indifferent. Like, that doesn't mean someone deserves to die. Andy would experience his own frustration with law enforcement when he tried reaching out to the cold case unit before we got involved, trying to find out the status on his mother's case. I called and I talked to this lady and she kind of did this long and dense thing.

did her best to try and satisfy my appetite temporarily. I don't know, that's the only way I could put it. Like, I call her and we start just discussing the case and, you know, then obviously we ended up getting off the phone and she told me she was going to call me, I think it was either that next day or the day after. I got no calls. And whenever I would try and call her, you know, it's like if a phone rings twice and then goes to voicemail, like they cleared the call.

You know what I'm saying? So she cleared my call and I tried twice. I take it really personal. You know, like I'm going out on a limb because we're just trying to do like the right thing, man. And then to be let down like that, like kind of took the wind out of my sails. Here we go again. That sucked. That sucked. That sucked pretty good, man.

In 1999, which was 14 years after Jennifer's murder, the Albuquerque Police Department established its first ever dedicated cold case unit. The team was very small. It was retired detectives. They were working part time and it was just their job to comb through unsolved cases. And they came up with 72 different case files that they wanted to take another crack at between 1972 and 1998. And among these was Jennifer's.

The concept of working a cold case wasn't anything new to law enforcement, but until fairly recently, almost all detectives were tasked with working active homicide cases at the same time. That meant old cases were constantly pushed to the back of the pile until modern forensics totally changed the playing field.

Suddenly, assigning manpower to work on previously unsolved cases became justifiable, and by the late 90s, the number of dedicated cold case units across the country exploded.

years ago, the 1974 murder of a Texas woman named Carla Walker. Her case went cold for decades and just like thousands of other murders all across the country, the evidence sat on the shelf. And then in 2019, investigators found this very small stain on her bra strap. It was barely visible to the naked eye, not enough for

a normal DNA test, but from that tiny decades old stain, this lab called Othram in Texas was able to create an entire genetic sequence. Then they cross referenced it with publicly available genealogy databases. Now this new kind of DNA technology is opening up a whole new world to forensic investigators.

Just a year after its creation, in September 2000, this tiny cold case unit of the Albuquerque Police Department, they announced that they believe that they've cracked their first unsolved case on their list. And that was the murder of Jennifer Sherm. But the reason this cold case unit was established in the first place was because they have all this new technology, this new DNA evidence, these new databases, and they've

But ironically, the tip that they got in Jennifer's case didn't come from any of these advanced sciences and new ways of looking at a case. Instead, their tip came from the oldest source in the book, which was a confession. They had two witnesses who had called in a tip to Crime Stoppers years ago, and they claimed that someone had confessed to Jennifer's murder.

The cold case detectives presented these tips to the DA's office, hoping to obtain an arrest warrant for the person who'd become their new prime suspect for a second time. And it's a name you're going to remember. Jennifer's ex-boyfriend, Alex.

I remember my grandmother that was over at her house one day and her phone was blowing up. She had a house line, obviously, it was before cell phones and all that. And I could just tell something was going on, you know, and she was really elated, upset, a thousand different emotions. And then my Aunt Jessie came over and then my Uncle Larry came over and then my Aunt Judy came over and something was going on, but no one was telling me. Grandma wanted to wait till everyone was there.

I don't know who it was that relayed this information to her, but she basically said, "Hey, you know, they finally found Alex. They're bringing him back from North Carolina. And not only that, they're going to officially charge him with the murder of Jenny." And so for me, I was really still. I didn't know how to express how I really felt because I didn't know how I felt when that happened.

I just froze. I didn't know really how to feel. And then finally, like after breathing and probably smoking a pack of cigarettes, the first thing I felt was anger. All I wanted was to see the man in the flesh and I wanted to make sure that he saw me, that he looked in my eyes. I obviously had some crazy thoughts.

I was really mad. I was like, I'm finally going to get to face this son of a bitch. And he's finally going to see me and look at me. And he's going to know like that's Jenny's son. At that time, I didn't know. I didn't find out until much, much later that his brother, I guess, and his ex-wife or something claimed that he had confessed to murdering Jenny.

As far as I knew otherwise, he had never admitted it to anyone. And he was always, you know, very adamant to the police and to people in the streets that he had nothing to do with it. Turned out that one of the tips that was reported to Crime Stoppers was actually from Alex's ex-wife. Now, she claimed that Alex had confessed to her that he'd murdered Jennifer and that he'd done it because he was mad at Jennifer for stealing his drugs and breaking his heart, which was actually the original theory.

Now, this alone wasn't exactly enough to act on. After all, it was a tip from an ex-wife. But they got a second tip, too. A second tip that Alex had made the same confession. And this one came from Alex's own brother. When the cold case team presented what they found to prosecutors, a warrant for Alex's arrest was signed in 2000. So with these tips, they had enough to issue a warrant. But once they issued this warrant, there was a massive problem.

Alex was nowhere to be found. It appears that Alex had skipped town sometime way back in the 90s. And the reason he'd skipped town, it looks like, is because he was trying to avoid other warrants on drug charges. Now, Crime Stoppers had actually even listed Alex as one of its Fugitives of the Week in 1999. That's before the arrest warrant for Jennifer.

But after Jennifer's arrest warrant was issued, Alex actually remained a fugitive for five whole years and nobody knew where he was. Until September 2005, when police in North Carolina contacted Albuquerque police to let them know that they had Alex in custody. I believe it was myself, my Aunt Jessie, and my grandmother, we all went to this court hearing.

And I remember my Aunt Jessie was to my left, my grandmother was to my right, and we were off to the left. And he came in, and right as that door opened, the very first thing, it's like the universe made him unconsciously look right at me. That was the first thing he saw when I reopened that door.

It was kind of a blank stare. And to be honest, I don't know if he even realized who I was or anything like that, you know? But I remember I got exactly what I wanted. I got to look him right in his fucking eyes. I remember I clenched my fists so hard, my nails broke skin in my palm. I don't think I've ever even told anyone that.

He said very little. If my mind serves me right, I think it was my Aunt Jessie. She got to say something. I can't remember what it was that she said, but I know it wasn't very nice. There were certainly profanities layered therein. And I mean, that was that. That day, like a lot changed for me. I got to see this boogeyman. He was a dude.

The minute we locked eyes, all that fear just dissipated. It was gone. It was a very profound top 10 in my whole life. I lived moments that had a huge impact on me. 20-some years of fear and anger and desperation and wonder and every emotion you could think of. I'd gone through it with this guy in my head.

20 some years of this vision of this dude in my head and these panic attacks and these bad dreams and these hallucinations. One second, I finally got the chance to face like my ultimate fear and it was over like that. It was done.

I can't even really describe how I felt except for a weight was lifted off me and all that trauma for all those years was gone and that's great. But a new trauma was created because after over 20 years of suffering this endless waiting finally it looks like my mother might get some justice. But as usual with life

After Alex is arrested, police spent the entire next year trying to build a case against him.

But all they really had were these two eyewitnesses claiming that Alex had confessed to murdering Jennifer. And that's not enough for a conviction. Even confessions need to be corroborated by some sort of evidence. So then police are forced to go back and try to find any evidence that proves this confession that Alex made. And so they go back and attempt to use the most modern weapon in their arsenal, which was DNA.

You might remember how we mentioned that back in 1985, investigators were careful to gather all the trace evidence found on Jennifer's body, even though there was very little they could do with it at the time. Well, that time had come to finally analyze the hairs, fibers, and debris they'd carefully stored away into evidence, and one of those samples was sent off to a lab.

They took a sample of DNA from Jennifer's body and they sent it off to be tested to try to get this first potential glimpse at a forensic profile of the person responsible for murdering Jennifer. But when the results came back, the DNA sample did not match Alex's.

Now, without this DNA match, the murder charges against Alex were officially dismissed in 2006. Without that DNA match, they literally had nothing except these two witnesses claiming that Alex confessed. And this was not enough for a conviction. The charges were dismissed.

So this was the second time that the Albuquerque Police Department were convinced that they'd caught their man. They'd arrested and brought charges and attempted to take him to trial, only to have the charges all dropped due to a lack of evidence. So once again, Jennifer's case went cold.

But the DNA samples they analyzed trying to convict Alex weren't filed away on a shelf like the olden days. Instead, the DNA went into a database, a place where it could sit, waiting patiently until the day someone uploaded a match.

In 1990, when Mike Gallagher wrote his expose, Death on the Cruise, he concluded his investigation by saying, essentially, what he still believes today as the most plausible theory, not just for Jennifer's murder, but for all seven of the unsolved cruise murders. He wrote, "...the pimps claimed it was actually narcotic agents who stopped the killings by making cases against key members of the Memphis group and their local connections."

But in the very last line of his article, he ends the piece with an incredibly haunting line. The sex workers on the cruise have a different theory. They say the killers just started dumping the bodies where no one will ever find them. This last line may turn out to be more prophetic than Mike could have ever predicted at that time.

Since the beginning of this series, we've said Jennifer was surrounded by danger on a daily basis. But over the course of 20 years after Jennifer's murder, police had never really considered a John as a possible suspect.

That all changed in 2009, when the DNA sample taken from Jennifer's body in an attempt to convict Alex finally struck a match in the database. A match with someone who'd never been on the investigator's radar in Jennifer's case. A man who was not only a convicted serial rapist,

but a man who's been a person of interest in what is undoubtedly the most notorious unsolved crime in the history of New Mexico. The last death on the cruise murder happened in March 1988, and this is when the killing spree really seems to stop, and it stops abruptly out of nowhere. All of a sudden, there's no more unsolved homicides of sex workers off the cruise, even though there had been a rash of them over the last several years.

But that very same fall, just after these killings stop, another disturbing pattern emerges in a nearby area. In November 1988, a 13-year-old girl was raped in her home by a masked man wielding a knife.

The young girl had come home from school to an empty house, or so she thought, when a man suddenly came out from behind a bookshelf wearing a mask and holding a knife before brutally attacking her. At first, this was seen as a one-off incident until it happened again and again and again.

Over the course of several years, between the late 80s and 1993, there were a shocking number of school-aged children who were assaulted or raped in a very similar fashion. But police had no idea who this masked, knife-wielding rapist was. The attacks occurred mostly in the area surrounding McKinley Middle School, in the city's northeast heights of Albuquerque.

Eventually, police would come to believe that at least a dozen young girls became the victims of this serial predator that they began calling the mid-school rapist. And police believed that it was the same perpetrator because there was such a recognizable pattern to these attacks.

But what happens when a perpetrator goes against their pattern? This would happen on October 7th, 1990, when the mid-school rapist struck again. This time, the victim was not a teenager. She was not a school-aged girl. This victim was a 29-year-old part-time university student.

25 years after her attack, this victim actually wrote a letter.

She described the lingering, enduring, just psychological trauma of that moment, saying that after that moment, she never felt safe in the world. She didn't know who'd attacked her. He was wearing a mask. She could be walking down the street and the man who'd attacked her could just walk past her and she wouldn't even have a clue that that was the man. It could literally be anybody.

But the thing about this particular attack was that it didn't fit the known, established pattern from what they knew about the mid-school rapist. Because of her age, she wasn't a teenage girl. In the end, the mid-school rapist turned out to be just as elusive as who'd ever been murdering the women on East Central Avenue. They were not able to find out who this was for many years. With no fingerprints and no clues, suddenly the perpetrators seemed to stop. And then came another pattern.

When it comes to law enforcement, police and detectives often speak about following their instincts or trusting their gut. Well, in 2005, an Albuquerque detective named Ida Lopez started to get that feeling. At the time, Ida was a promising young detective rising through the ranks in 2004 until a battle with cancer forced her to step away from her job temporarily.

When she returned in 2005, she was given a part-time desk job, allowing her to ease back into her role.

The new role established Ida as the only detective in the APD, assigned exclusively to investigating missing person cases. And she dove in headfirst, as if it were the most important job on the force. Because to her, it was. Very quickly, Ida began noticing a pattern. A pattern no one else had seen.

So Ida Lopez has hundreds of missing persons cases coming across her desk. And as she's looking through them, she realized that many of them fit kind of a unique profile. Looking into these girls' backgrounds, she saw that there were a number of missing young women that were Latino and that their lives had really become intertwined with this drug culture and the sex industry on East Central Avenue.

Over these years, Ida actually starts putting together a separate list of all these girls that fit this very similar profile, thinking that maybe they were all related somehow, and she actually began referring to these victims as "her girls". By the end of 2007, this list of "her girls" contained the names of 16 missing women who all fit this very similar profile, who'd gone missing between 2001 and 2008.

She believed that these victims were all most likely linked in some fashion. And she did the legwork, all the shoe leather detective work into doing anything she could to get as much information about these girls as possible to prepare for the day that one of them might be hopefully found. She collected dental records, she collected familial DNA from as many of the missing young women's families as she could.

And one of the purposes for doing all this was so that maybe one day if an unidentified body was found, that it would be able to be cross-checked with the DNA and information she'd gathered on her girls to see if it was potentially a match.

But, as long as there wasn't any matches, and there wasn't, it left the door open for the possibility that one or all of these women might still be alive. As the years went on, and it got longer and longer and further and further away from their disappearances, the likelihood that these girls were okay got less and less every year.

While covering a case like Jennifer Sherm's that's been nearly four decades, it's impossible to overstate how revolutionary DNA technology has become for law enforcement.

You heard how Jennifer's ex-boyfriend was arrested for her murder in 2005 only for the charges to be dropped when the DNA in the case failed to match his. But three years later, in 2008, two significant DNA-related events unfolded almost simultaneously, creating a remarkable coincidence in timing.

In 2008, more than 20 years after her attack, the victim, who at the time was a 13-year-old girl who'd been raped by the mid-school rapist, she's now a grown woman, and she starts wondering if the rape kit that had been taken after her attack had ever been tested or analyzed or put through the system. So she actually reached out to a friend of hers that worked in Albuquerque's sex crimes unit, and this friend was able to find out that her rape kit had never been tested.

But probably because of this connection, it finally was. So after 20 years of wondering who attacked her, she was now going to hopefully, maybe, get an answer. And this turned out to be miraculous timing, really. Because at the exact same time that her DNA results from this rape kit were being developed, there was another significant event happening at the exact same time.

On August 13th, 2008, a domestic violence call led to the arrest of 51-year-old landscaper Joseph Blea, charged with aggravated assault and battery against his wife Cheryl.

After his arrest, Joseph's DNA was collected as required by New Mexico's Katie's Law, which mandates DNA collection from people arrested for specific violent felonies. Eventually, Joseph was released from jail, but before that could happen, his DNA had already been sent away to be processed, analyzed and uploaded into the database.

And on January 13th, 2009, police got ahead. A big one. And then another. Joseph's DNA came back as a match for the 13-year-old victim of the mid-school rapist case back in 1998. So this is the victim who, as an adult woman, had gone to police and asked that a rape kit be tested.

So after waiting for 20 years, more than 20 years, she was finally about to find out the name of the masked man who'd attacked her as a child. And his name was Joseph Blea. That wasn't all, because Joseph's DNA, now that it was in the system, was also a match for another sample that had been collected. And this was the sample collected from Jennifer Sherm's body when they were trying to convict Alex back in 2005.

It seemed crazy to think that one man's DNA could be linked to so many unsolved crimes. But just like that, two incredibly cold cases suddenly saw the light of day again. And this time, there was actual physical evidence.

So police begin seriously investigating Joseph, trying to make a case against him for all of these other unsolved mid-school rapes. And they're trying to make a case against him for Jennifer's murder. And this is actually really heating up.

But just a couple weeks after this investigation into Joseph starts ramping up, the entire Albuquerque Police Department, the entire city of Albuquerque, was basically interrupted by the biggest news story of the year. And it was the most disturbing news story in the history of New Mexico crime.

This is where Detective Ida Lopez comes back in because suddenly the pattern that Ida had been seeing this whole time started to make a lot more sense. It was a shocking story that a local TV news station in Albuquerque would heavily cover over the next 15 years.

On February 2nd, 2009, a woman walking her dog in southwest Albuquerque discovered a bone. When we went out there the first time, we thought it was, though tragic, it was a regular call. After police determined it was from a human, scenes like this went on for weeks and weeks.

what looked more like an archaeological dig than a crime scene, eventually turned up the remains of 11 women and a fetus. The movie-like plot unfolded in the months and years that followed. Police say one person targeted and killed the young women in their teens and twenties, sometime between 2001 and 2006.

Directly to the west of Albuquerque lies a vast, desolate expanse called the West Mesa, a desert wilderness that begins as soon as the city's pavement ends. But in the 2000s, a mini-boom of new housing developments built out on the West Mesa began extending the city farther and farther into the desert.

Then, in 2007, all the construction came to a sudden halt during the subprime mortgage crisis, leaving large swaths of land already excavated completely undeveloped. If the construction had never stopped, it's highly likely this would have been a story that stayed buried forever.

Over the following weeks, the crime scene became an excavation on a truly massive scale, with heavy equipment, ground-penetrating radar, and satellite imagery brought in date in the search.

Despite the massive size of the excavation, about 75 football fields, the bodies were all discovered in an area roughly the size of a tennis court, or as Christine Barber would comment, the size of a CVS. So he buried these 11 women in this area the size of CVS and kept going out there and out there. So much so, you can see the tire tracks. He made a road going out there.

In the West Mesa case,

The women who were found buried on the West Mesa, the 11 women, went missing in 2003 and 2004. However, there's a group of women who went missing in 2005-2006. They match women who were found in West Mesa as far as their statute, that they were out on the street, that they were doing dates, which again is the terminology we use and what's used on the street to refer to the sale of sex. To us, it's clear that the serial killer

didn't stop at 2005. So even though the West Mesa victims were 2003-2004, he kept killing. What we do is we look at the type of crime scene that he had. And the only crime scene we have, which is the burial site. First of all, a serial killer who is killing quote-unquote prostitutes, it's very uncommon for them to actually bury. It's less than 2% of serial killers who kill prostitutes will bury them.

And the FBI, in their 2015 report, say the most likely reason for burial is that you are trying to conceal that these people went missing because you have a connection with them or that you're afraid you're going to be discovered. You can also, on the aerial photos, see where the burials are. You can see the dirt differentiation of where they were buried. And so you get an idea of how they're spaced out from each other in this area.

So what you have from just the site is that he visited this place a lot. So I personally think of him as like a gardener. This is a site that doesn't necessarily mean something to him, but what's there means something to him. And he keeps going over and over. He buried them, finally went back to the same site and buried the next person close to them and closer to them and closer to them.

So knowing all that, people might assume that this woman who went missing between 2003 and 2004, the last woman in 2004 in September, she was the last victim. Because otherwise he would have kept using this site. We don't believe that is true. Because another group of women went missing in 2005 and 2006. So we believe he changed sites.

If this were true, was it possible this also hadn't been the only time the killer had changed the location of where he disposed of his victims? Was it also possible this same person could also be connected to the murders on the cruise? Someone specifically targeting women just like Jennifer Sherm. Vulnerable women. Sex workers whose disappearances wouldn't be noticed.

But here's the problem with the skeletal remains that were discovered in 2009. None of them reveal any clues about the manner of death.

For instance, there's no bullet wounds that can be found on the skeletal remains. Now, this means that the victims were most likely killed by hand or by some other non-obvious means. And this starts to sound a little bit familiar to other unsolved cases we've been looking at. But due to the extreme decomposition of the bodies found at West Mesa, the exact cause of death of these victims will probably never be known.

Christine Barber referred to this serial killer as a gardener. Other people in Albuquerque started calling this unknown predator, this unknown serial killer, by another name. They call him the West Mesa Bone Collector.

With nothing else to go on except the bones themselves, identifying all of the victims was an incredibly daunting task. But this is where the extensive legwork already done by Detective Ida Lopez proved to be invaluable.

Just days after the first bone was found, a set of teeth was able to be matched to dental records already on file. The victim was Victoria Chavez, a woman reported missing in March 2005 when she would have been 25 years old. One of the women on Ida's list, one of her girls,

Victoria Chavez will finally be given a proper burial by her family. Her remains were the first to be discovered back on February 2nd. All along, Ida believed if they could find one of the missing women, they'd find them all. And as it turned out, she wasn't far off. Over the course of the next year, the identities of all 11 women would eventually be confirmed, many of them by using the records already collected.

Nine of the 11 women had been on Ida Lopez's list. These nine were Monica Candelaria, Victoria Chavez, Virginia Cloven, Cinnamon Elks, Doreen Marquez, Julie Nieto, Veronica Romero, Michelle Valdez, and Evelyn Salazar. But of the remaining two victims that weren't on her list...

One was Jamie Barella. Now, she was a 15-year-old cousin of Evelyn Salazar, who was on the list. Both victims had last been seen heading to a park together in April 2004. But there was one victim discovered that wasn't on Ida's radar at all. And the reason this victim wasn't on Ida's radar is because she did not fit the pattern that Ida had established. And her name was Solania Edwards-Murray.

Like Jamie Barella, Solania was only 15 years old, while the rest of the victims were in their 20s and one in her early 30s. Solania was also the only victim from out of state, reported missing in 2003 after running away from foster care in Oklahoma, making it difficult to identify her.

Selenia Edwards, that's the name of the eighth West Mesa murder victim to be identified. And she is the youngest of the 11 women found buried nude in a mass grave. News 13's Maria Medina is live in the Newsplex with who Edwards was. Well, Kim, investigators say Edwards was only 15 when she ran away from her foster home in Lawton, Oklahoma.

After running away, it's believed that Solania became involved with sex work, probably traveling from state to state.

But the diversion from the known pattern of the other victims at the burial site on the West Mesa was that Solania was not Latino. Solania was African American. And this was a diversion from the pattern that Ida had been keeping track of. And this meant that it was possible that race was not actually a factor at all in the pattern of the serial killer.

In an interview with Duke City Case Files, Ida Lopez expressed her belief that the killer's selection of victims hadn't been primarily based on their appearance or race. In fact, it may not have been a factor at all. Instead, she chalked it up to one word, opportunity.

The first monumental step for the Albuquerque police was identifying all of the victims that were found on the West Mesa. But identifying who the bone collector was has been something that police have been trying to figure out for the last 15 years now.

And over these years, there's actually been many, many, many possible leads and possible suspects. Some were absolutely crazy and coincidental, and it's a really deep rabbit hole that I went down while investigating this story. But over the years, most of these suspects have been able to be crossed off the list entirely for one reason or another.

The Kirky Police have eliminated one of the people they were looking at in the West Mesa murders. Ron Irwin, a Missouri photographer whose home and business were raided by FBI agents and APD detectives last year, is no longer a person of interest. Fox 31 News out of Denver is reporting that Scott Lee Kimball says he is being investigated for the murders of 11 women whose bodies were found buried on the West Mesa in February of 2009.

Almost as soon as the investigation on the West Mesa began, there was one name that shot to the top of APD's persons of interest list, and for good reason. Lorenzo Montoya, a man with a history of soliciting sex workers, domestic violence, and weapons charges.

In 1999, police observed a sex worker getting into Lorenzo's car. And after she did, he began to choke her and he began to rape her. Police ran over immediately and arrested him and stopped the attack. And it was also reported that Lorenzo actually only had $2 in his wallet when he was arrested, which means that he clearly had no intention of even paying the woman. And this is something that Cynthia Vigil from Street Safe actually mentioned in the first episode.

Now, although Lorenzo was charged after this for kidnapping and for rape, these charges were actually completely dropped later because the victim refused to testify against him for whatever reason. But the biggest reason police believed Lorenzo might be the man they were looking for was because of what happened in the early hours of December 17th, 2006, the night he died.

In our final episode of Who Killed Jennifer, we'll explore how a series of patterns and coincidences all seem to converge at the same time. We'll delve further into Joseph Blaya's past and criminal history, uncovering the reasons why he became a prime person of interest in both the West Mesa murders and Jennifer Lynn Sherm's case.

Could the DNA found on Jennifer's body hold the key to unraveling one of the most unsettling unsolved crimes of the century? Tune in next week for our concluding episode, where we'll reveal even more information to Jennifer Lynn Sherm's son. Kind of knocked the wind out of me a little bit, because...

I can tell this means something to you. And this obviously means a whole hell of a lot to me. I keep calling you bloodhounds because you get that scent. You guys put in the work and you get the result. I have so much respect for that. Regardless of how this turns out, I get to get oriented with someone that I never had a chance to.

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