A Little Less Mess: The West Mesa Bone Collector [New Mexico]

**Cara** (0:20)
Hey, everyone, welcome to Bless This Mess Southern True Crime Podcast. I'm Cara, just Cara. Welcome to A Little Less Mess. These are our mini episodes that we put out on Mondays. If you're looking for our regular porch banter between me and Stu, you can catch those episodes on Thursdays on our main feed. Also, if you would like to support the pod and get a little extra content, you can join our Patreon. We do our Friday sit and sip in and bullshitting, where we chit chat and talk about our lives and usually cover documentary. You can also come hang out with us on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, where I share documentary recommendations, as well as our True Crime and Dinner Time series, where I show you what we're having for dinner and tell you a little two-minute true crime story. All right, now go ahead and pour your morning coffee, pull up a chair, and let's get straight into it. Today we are going to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Now if you've been listening to these A Little Less Messes for a while, this might be a little different for you. We normally, I do our regular case that we did, and I just kind of pare it down and just do straight to the facts and tell you the case with no banter or anything like that, or conversations that me and Stu have. However, I really want to venture outside the South with our episodes, some of our episodes, not our main ones. So this is, I feel like a perfect opportunity for that. So I'm just, these will be different from our regular main episodes, and they will be outside of the Southern United States. So if you have case recommendations, please send them to me.
All right, when we talk about serial killers, we usually talk about the ones with massive media nicknames, Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac, BTK. We talk about the ones who got caught or the ones who left taunting letters for the police who wanted that attention. But there is a terrifying truth in law enforcement. The most successful serial killers are the ones you have never heard of. They're the ones who know exactly who to target, so that no one comes looking for them.
In 2009, the city of Albuquerque discovered that one of those invisible killers had been operating in their backyard for years. And to this day, he has never been caught. This is the story of the West Mesa Bone Collector.
To set the scene, you have to understand the geography of Albuquerque. The city is split down the middle by the Rio Grande. To the east, you have the Sandia Mountains, but to the west, you have the West Mesa. In the early 2000s, the West Mesa was basically a massive, desolate stretch of high desert. There was a lot of new housing developed planned for the area, but the 2008 housing crash brought all that construction to a dead stop. So you had hundreds of acres of empty, grated dirt lots isolated from the main city. On February 2nd, 2009, a woman named Christine was walking her dog, a lab mix named Ruka, across the West Mesa. Ruka was sniffing around a muddy drainage canal when she started intensely digging at something in the dirt. Christine walked over to see what her dog had found. Sticking out of the dry earth was a large white bone. It didn't look like a coyote or a cow. It looked distinctly human. Christine immediately called the Albuquerque Police Department. When investigators arrived, they secured the area and began to carefully dig around the bone. They quickly confirmed that it was a human femur. But as the forensic anthropologists kept digging, they realized this wasn't just a single body dump. Right next to the first set of remains, they found another, and then another. The Albuquerque Police brought in heavy machinery, crime scene technicians, and forensic anthropologists. What started as a single 911 call turned into the largest crime scene in the history of New Mexico.
Over the course of several weeks, investigators painstakingly sifted through the dirt of the West Mesa. They ultimately unearthed the remains of 11 women and one unborn child. The bodies had been buried in shallow makeshift graves. Because of the dry, arid conditions of the desert, the remains were heavily decomposed, making it incredibly difficult to determine the exact cause of death. But the pattern was undeniable. Someone had been using this specific plot of land as a personal graveyard. The immediate question was, who were these women and how did 11 people go missing without the city noticing? To answer that, police had to look back at missing persons reports from almost half a decade earlier.