Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/30780
Eleven women were murdered and dumped on an Albuquerque, N.M., borderland. Why did it take so long to discover their bodies? Why haven’t the crimes been solved? And can’t we do better for the most vulnerable women in society? BY LAURA PASKUS IN MAY 2003, Isabel Candelaria learned of a rumor circulating at the barbershop: that her 21-year-old daughter, Monica, then missing for three weeks, had been killed and dumped on Albuquerque’s West Mesa, a borderland between the desert and the city’s encroachment upon it. When Candelaria sought help from the Albuquerque Police Department (APD), officers said she had gone missing outside city limits. So she contacted the County Sheriff’s Department, and a detective checked motels and interviewed people who knew Monica—one of whom said she had been killed during a drug deal gone bad. No other evidence was found. Within five months, investigators la- beled her case “inactive,” and less than a year after her dis- appearance, officers requested her name be removed from the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, a database that helps officers locate missing persons. Almost six years later—on Feb. 2, 2009—the mesa re- vealed a horrifying secret: the femur of VictoriaChavez, re- ported missing four years earlier, at age 25. Once investigators started looking further, they found a mass grave containing the bones of 10 more women and teenage girls—including those of Monica Candelaria. It took forensic investigators almost a year to name all the victims, as their remains had been splintered and cracked by equipment clearing a 92-acre site for a new housing development. Among them were two teenagers— Jamie Barela, 15, and Syllannia Edwards, a 15-year-old African American girl who had been reported missing from Lawton, Okla. The killer or killers also left 16 chil- dren motherless. Even when only two victims had been identified, offi- cials announced that the remains were those of drug abusers and prostitutes. It did turn out to be true, based on criminal and court records, that each of the nine adult women had, at some point, grappled with drug addiction or sexual exploitation. But by leaping to this conclusion and focusing attention on victims’ police records rather www.msmagazine.com than on the crimes committed against them, officials im- plied that the women were responsible for their fate—a conclusion with which many take umbrage. “This wasn’t about being a victim of your choices,” says Jessica Aranda, who was working with Albuquerque’s Southwest Women’s Law Center when the bodies were found. “Those women were rounded up and murdered.” Instead of blaming the women for their own deaths, Aranda suggests people should understand how vulnerable they were and how easy it is for criminals to prey upon women—particularly poor women of color who struggle with drug addiction. The murders hit home for Aranda, who grew up with victim Victoria Chavez. “I went to the same failing schools on the west side of Albuquerque; most of the people I started school with when I was a little girl didn’t make it to graduation from high school,” she says. “That literally could have been me. That no one cares, that really kind of hits me, that really is kind of sobering.” the border town of Juárez, Mexico—where some 1,000 women have been murdered since the 1990s—what hap- pened in Albuquerque isn’t unique within U.S. borders. According to the FBI, 70 percent of all known serial- W murder victims are women. Last year, a reporter from the Scripps Howard News Service sifted through FBI and local-police files on more than 500,000 homicides commit- ted between 1980 and 2008 and found 161 clusters of women’s murders nationwide, encompassing 1,247 victims. In each cluster, women of similar age were killed through similar means, which suggests serial murders, and at least 75 percent of those murders had not been solved. To point out just one cluster beyond Albuquerque, in Lawton—hometown of 15-year-old Edwards—five women were murdered between 1999 and 2003, their bodies dumped in remote areas surrounding the city. The crimes remain unsolved. And in South Los Angeles, a 22-year string of more than 10 linked murders of Even when only two victims had been identified, officials announced that the remains were those of drug abusers and prostitutes. SPRING 2011 | 37 HILE THE DISCOVERY OF THE WOMEN’S BODIES may have seemed something more likely to occur in