Sketch of youngest mesa victim released

ALBUQUERQUE (KRQE) - Albuquerque police Tuesday released the sketch of what the youngest of the 11 victims in the West Mesa mystery may have looked like when she was alive.

The sketch was done by Dan Wasko, a senior medical investigator at the Office of the Medical Investigator.

Investigators have said all along that the more women they identify the better chance they have of finding the killer. They're hoping someone out there sees something in the sketch that can lead investigators to her true identity.

It's her face that could solve the mystery of who buried the women in what was scrub desert at the time in southwest Albuquerque.

She is described as African-American, mid-teens to early 20s and was found with acrylic nails. Her hair was short and curly, but she wore a hair piece that pinned to the front of her scalp and pinned back. It was light brown and wavy.

The victim also had a bone lesion on her thigh bone, and her nose had been broken at some point in her life.

Police called her Jane Doe No. 7. She was the youngest of 11 women found buried nude after a woman walking her dog in February discovered a human bone at a subdivision construction site.

She is among four still unidentified.

An OMI investigator said they're hopeful they can do another facial reconstructive sketch on one of the women, but they're not so sure about the other two unidentified victims. Their bones were moved and broken by time and the construction of homes out in the west mesa that their skulls may not be complete.

Investigators may have to rely on identifying those victims through DNA.

"We continue to receive leads because of the national exposure of this case," Schultz said.

It's the national exposure like that of the America's Most Wanted television program that investigators hope continues because they believe Jane Doe No. 7 isn't from New Mexico.

The autopsies of the seven identified women determined they were murdered, but investigators couldn't say exactly how.

Albuquerque police said they spoke to prostitutes during the New Mexico State Fair and the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta and that helped generate potential leads. Schultz said they were given street names and first names of women that had been missing for awhile.

"We know that there's still four victims who need to be identified," Schultz said. "One of the things that we said from the very beginning is (when) we continue to identify more and more victims, we can find out where their lives crossed paths.

"Eventually all of those women are going to point to one suspect."