Every day, the sun's rays beat down on the West Mesa, bleaching every bone they touch.
It's not uncommon to find skeletons of cows, dogs and the occasional antelope among patches of dead grass and tumbleweeds on the mesa, just a 30-minute drive from campus. But there are also the less natural bits of trash: car parts and shotgun shells scattered over the fields bordered by a few residential areas. And now, human bones have been added to the mix.
The mesa has long been known as the weekend refuge of tipsy teenagers, dedicated runners, and mountain bikers, but it is now a site for excavators and police investigators on horseback.
In the past month, 11 bodies have been found on the mesa in a 100-acre area next to neighborhoods near 118th and Dennis Chavez.
Sergeant Jim Collins and a team of police officers have been scavenging the mesa on horseback for clues.
Collins said the team of officers has taken on the dirt-laden task of searching for evidence in order to verify that the murder site did not expand beyond the original plot of land where the first body was discovered Feb. 2.
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"The criminalistics commander looked up in this area and wanted to rule this area out," Collins said. "This area proves to be obviously too difficult for humans to take care of on foot, and some of their four-wheel-drive vehicles wouldn't be able to go over some of the terrain that the horses can handle, so they asked us to come out and take a look in this area and try to either locate anything or rule out certain areas."
John Walsh, spokesman for the Albuquerque Police Department, said that so far 11 bodies have been unearthed at the site - 10 adults and one fetus - but only two have been identified.
Walsh said Victoria Chavez and Michelle Valdez were reported missing about eight years ago. The women were in their 20s, and police have now determined they were buried on the mesa between 2000 and 2005.
Walsh said Valdez was identified through police records, which also showed she was involved with drugs and prostitution - a history that matches Chavez's.
Walsh said Chavez was identified using dental records.
He said the FBI has stepped in to aid in the search for more bodies.
"They've been assisting us in the investigation with several aspects," Walsh said. "One of them is to help identify the skeletal remains. Two, they've been providing us with high-definition aerial photographs and satellite imaging. They may be able to assist us out at the scene as well. We'll see how that progresses."
Collins said that he and his crew have been checking potential burial sites but are hopeful they won't find more remains.
"We've been going over some of the stuff on (the) Google Earth site, and we've been keying on to some of the areas that are similar to what they were keying on inside the primary dig site," Collins said. "We've been locating those sites, marking them and then coming back and actually digging around to see if there was something that would bear further scrutiny from the ballistics people."
Collins said he can't rule out the possibility that more bodies could be buried beneath nearby residential units.
"It's really kind of hard to say at this point, but anything is possible," he said.
Richard Burleson, owner of Hammerstone Archaeological Services, said most residential development contractors need to have the land inspected by an archaeologist before they can build on it. Federal lands mandate that an archaeology service survey the land so that no historical items or graves are built over, but nonfederal lands are often subject to the inspections, he said.
"Even on private land holdings, cultural resource surveys often take place if there is state or federal money involved or a federal action," Burleson said. "For example, if someone is putting in a subdivision, they have to install drainage features that are part of that subdivision infrastructure, and that requires a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permit.."
Burleson said archaeological deposits are similar to landfills. Dirt is shifted over items and they become stratified in the ground so that they are no longer visible from the surface, he said.
"There could be additional materials below that in a strata graphic sequence, but without seeing something on the surface, you would likely walk right over any potential remains like that," Burleson said.
Walsh said investigators are looking below the surface in their search for bodies and that the excavations will continue until the department is satisfied that all possibilities have been exhausted.
"We are just continuing the work until we feel we have done the very best in trying to locate any shallow graves," Walsh said. "What I want to stress is that although the graves may have been shallow, from the onset that you went out there and saw the extensive excavation work that has been done in the past two years, and one of the graves was underneath 15 feet of fill."
