The West Mesa Bone Collector has never been caught. It is truly disturbing to think that he could still be out there, preying on other women. I worry that he, or someone like him, might hurt me, my daughter, or any other woman that I care about.
The women that he killed were all daughters, sisters, friends, and some were mothers. They are dearly missed. The West Mesa Bone Collector took many more victims than just his kills.
When the West Mesa mass grave was found in 2009, investigators had about 5 suspects. They narrowed that down to two – Lorenzo Montoya and Joseph Blea. However, in 2015, the list had again expanded to 20. It would appear that they have gotten new information. Here are the suspects that I could find out about.
Ron Erwin and The Weird Photos
In 2010, the police got some new information that caused them to investigate photographer Ron Erwin. Erwin was a photographer with a studio in Joplin, MO. He was known to travel to the state fair in Albuquerque during 2003-2006, the years when the victims disappeared.
After getting a warrant to search his property, police found thousands of photos of women. They released five of these photos in the Albuquerque Journal for identification by the public. While they didn’t give many details, they claimed these photos had to do with the West Mesa Bone Collector case. They didn’t say these photos came from Ron Erwin’s property, but news of the raid on his Joplin property got out and people connected the dots.
People were furious, claiming the newspaper had published disturbing snuff photos. Erwin’s reputation was permanently tainted. But most of the models in the photos were soon identified as being alive or deceased of natural causes after the photos. Only two have remained unidentified.
Disturbingly, some of the women appear unconscious or even dead in the photos. Since they were found to be alive and well later on, I really want to know what the story was behind these photos. Was Erwin just taking candids of sleeping women? Did he drug them and do something to them? Were they pretending to sleep for some type of weird photography series he was doing? I wonder what the living subjects have to say about the whole thing. I couldn’t find any sources where they came forward and explained the bizarre photos.
Erwin cooperated and took a polygraph willingly, which he passed with flying colors. He said he loved to photograph people who had never been photographed before. He also loved New Mexico – as many photographers do. Plus, his travel dates seldom lined up with the West Mesa disappearances. Thus, Erwin was cleared a suspect.
Lorenzo Montoya
Lorenzo Montoya is the most likely suspect in these killings and disappearances. He died on December 17, 2006, and the last sex worker to disappear was on June 13, 2006. The circumstances of his death reveal that he was not a nice guy. You can decide for yourself:
On December 17, 2006, Montoya met a 19-year-old woman named Sherricka Hill in an online chat room. He pulled money out of an ATM and then invited Hill to his trailer for sex. At some point that evening, he strangled her to death with duct tape. He then bound her legs and arms with duct tape and created a leash out of the duct tape around her neck – revealing a methodical and even well-rehearsed killing.
The day before, he had bought a comforter and a few blankets; he used the comforter to wrap up Hill’s body. He was in the process of loading her into a rental car that he was driving while his car was being repaired, when her boyfriend/pimp, Frederick Williams, showed up to check on Hill. Williams then shot Montoya dead.
The shooting was ruled as self-defense and Williams got off with no time. The police were disturbed by how organized the crime scene was, and they began to suspect Montoya had killed before.
When searching his property, police found a trash bag containing Hill’s clothes, wallet, and a condom that hadn’t been opened in the trunk of his rental car. In his trailer, cops found a roll of duct tape in Montoya’s nightstand. They also found various sex tapes of Montoya with different sex workers. They have been trying to identify and locate the women in the sex tapes to see if they are still alive; some of them have been found alive and well but others remain unidentified. Those women could be dead.
In one video, Montoya recorded sex with a woman and then the video camera is placed facing a wall. There are strange sounds in the background, much like tape being ripped from a roll, and then plastic rustling noises, like trash bags being opened. (Here is a good place to note that the West Mesa victims were all nude but some were wrapped in trash bags.) There is also kind of a whimpering sound and he says “Tranquilo.”
It is not certain what is happening in the video, but given how he killed Hill, it seems he is doing it to the woman in the video. That woman has never been identified. She could be dead. After listening to the weird audio a few times, I think it sounds like he is taping up plastic sheets or trash bags, possibly to create a kill space.
Montoya also raped and strangled a prostitute near the Albuquerque Sunport prior to Hill’s murder. Detectives supposedly witnessed him doing this. The sex worker survived and, for some reason that is entirely beyond me, Montoya walked free. The news claims that it’s because the sex worker didn’t want to press charges. This establishes that Montoya had a history of violence toward sex workers that didn’t start with Sherricka Hill.
Police initially suspected Montoya of doing bad things to sex workers, but they didn’t even know about the West Mesa murders until a femur was found in 2009. Hence, when they combed his trailer after his death in 2006, they didn’t look for evidence matching him to the victims. Apparently after the West Mesa mass grave was discovered, the police checked his trailer for DNA, but didn’t find any that matched the victims. This is often cited as evidence against Montoya being the West Mesa Bone Collector.
But I think there could be an explanation for this. Over several years, Montoya filed various police reports of his car being stolen, set on fire, or vandalized with acid while he attended the movies. Police suspected him of insurance fraud. Now it seems possible that he was destroying forensic evidence after killing women in his car. The time he strangled a sex worker took place in his car.
Police say the timeline of his reports don’t match when West Mesa victims went missing. So? If Montoya was clever – and he looks like a calculating son of a bitch in his photos – then he likely knew to wait a while after he killed a prostitute before destroying the evidence in his car. He wanted to be sure that the interest in a missing person died down and there was no link.
In the video, it sounds like he might be putting up plastic in his trailer. That could also have eliminated DNA evidence.
No belongings from the West Mesa victims were found in his place. However, when he killed Hill, he placed a bag of her belongings in his rental car trunk. It would appear that he had planned to dispose of them somehow. It is possible he did the same thing with the West Mesa Bone Collector victims if he was their murderer.
It is also worth noting that not all serial killers take trophies. Plus, his trophies may have been the sex tapes, so he didn’t see a need to save physical belongings.
Another chilling detail is that his trailer park was located just a few miles from the West Mesa burial site. Tire tracks out to the area seemed to lead from a street by his trailer park, as you can see via satellite. Bear in mind that the burial site was a common dumping place for trash, though, which could explain the tire tracks.
Given all this evidence, it seems like Lorenzo Montoya is the obvious killer. But this evidence is all circumstantial. Forensic evidence has not tied him to the crimes. Besides, he’s now dead, so he can’t stand trial. That means that if he was the killer, then we may never know. Closure in the West Mesa killings may never come. He also can’t ever reveal where the other bodies are. Hopefully, if the second burial site is ever found, there might be some forensic evidence on one of the bodies that will officially tie him – or anyone – to the murders.
I want to point a possible second victim of Montoya’s: Lisa Ann Fortin. Fortin struggled with drugs and prostitution. She had been on her own since 14. But she had recently gone to technical school to became an industrial electrician and she was extremely excited to be three months pregnant. On March 19, 1988, she was with her friend Judith Chavez when she decided to hitchhike (which I suspect is a euphemism for working the streets). Chavez saw Fortin get into a blue Datsun truck. A few days later, Fortin was found murdered with duct tape and stuffed into a trash bag. She was nude and had likely been sexually assaulted. Doesn’t this sound familiar? I looked into it and Montoya was indeed in Albuquerque in 1988. I think Fortin may have been one of the first West Mesa victims, or at least one of Montoya’s victims.
The fact that sex workers stopped going missing after Montoya died has always bothered me. But some think that it is pure coincidence. A few web sleuths have pointed out that the Long Island serial killer became active in 2007 and his MO was quite similar to the West Mesa Bone Collector’s. However, that theory was dashed when the LISK was caught in 2023.
Whether Lorenzo Montoys was the West Mesa Bone Collector or not, Frederick Williams did us all a favor by eliminating this creep. RIP, Sherricka Hill, and any of Montoya’s other possible victims.
Joseph Blea
Blea is an absolute creep whose photos give me the heebie jeebies. He is serving a measly 36 years in prison for multiple rapes of middle school girls in the 1980s and 1990s. One of his victims was only 13. Blea hid in her house until she came home from school, raped her, barricaded her in the bathroom with a telephone cord, and then took off. Her rape kit was finally tested in 2010 and that is what got him convicted. Though he was sentenced to only 36 years, he was 58 at the time, so that means he will most likely die in prison.
Blea was arrested in 2003 for exposing himself to a woman which was why police got his DNA when they arrested him. They soon uncovered a long string of sexual assaults in his past. He didn’t become a suspect in the West Mesa murders until after the gravesite was found in 2009, however. A plant tag from a nursery he frequented for his landscaping business was found in one of the graves. Even more disturbingly, he had electrical tape and rope in the trunk of his vehicle when he was arrested in 2003.
Blea had a history of stalking sex workers. Police recorded over 140 run-ins with Blea in bad areas where drugs and prostitutes were common. He also talked to his cellmate about knowing many of the West Mesa victims and attacking one of them in retaliation for her stealing his money. This means he had contact with the victims. His cellmate reported that Blea was obsessed with the case – and many murderers are obsessed with their own cases.
The plant tag was for a Spearmint juniper tree that was found in one of the West Mesa graves, buried eight feet deep. This plant tag came from a nursery where Blea often got trees for his tree-trimming business. Both of his ex-wives said he used the West Mesa area where the bodies were found as an illegal dumping site for his business. It has always bothered me how these graves were dug without detection by a passerby, but owning a landscaping business meant that Blea had access to tools that would have made digging deep graves possible in a fairly short amount of time.
The most damning evidence against Blea is the presence of his DNA on the body of Jennifer Lynn Shirm. Shirm was found beaten to death in 1985; she was one of many sex workers killed in the area in the mid-80s.
Shirm had led a troubled life, all starting with a sheriff captain named Frank Turkal. Turkal had started giving her Quaaludes and raping her when she was only twelve. She married Turkal in Mexico when she was only 15. But later, she filed for divorce and testified against him in court. Her friends say that before she was killed, she was a freelance sex worker and pimps were after her as part of an aggressive recruitment strategy of intimidation and violence. This is believed to have led to her death. Shirm also was addicted to drugs and apparently stole some drugs from her ex-boyfriend, Alex Eugene Murray, who was charged in her death. The DNA on her body was not Murray’s, though, so his charges were dropped in 2006. A man named Gene Autry Hill was also charged with her death but exonerated based on DNA.
In 2010, the DNA was identified as undeniably Blea’s. Many think he killed her. However, it is also possible that he was her client before someone else killed her. We will possibly never know, as Blea has refused to confess to any killings.
However, there are recorded jail calls between Joseph Blea and his wife where he asks her to look up the statute of limitations on murder. His wife informed him that there is no statute. And he responded, “Not now there isn’t, but we’re not talking about now, are we?” Could he have been talking about the 1985 murder of Shirm? What about the murder of Oleta Torbet? Torbet was found dumped and covered in grass and leaf clippings, which could indicate Blea was involved.
In another recorded conversation, his wife told Blea that she had not done laundry in so long that she had to dip into his “thong drawer.” Gross! She also asked if she could wear a gold ring with a strip of triangles on it. He replied that that wasn’t his ring and their daughter must have stolen it. His wife replied that the ring was clearly old and didn’t appear shoplifted from a store.
His wife also told employees of his tree business that she often found jewelry around the house that didn’t belong to her or their daughter. Could these items have been trophies taken from his victims? The West Mesa victims were missing clothing and jewelry, believed to have been taken by the killer as trophies.
In the 1980s, Blea entered a guilty plea for burglarizing homes and stealing women’s panties. One prostitute remembers Blea taking her to his home and offering to buy her panties. This could explain why he had women’s items in his possession – they weren’t murder trophies but rather things he bought and stole from women to satiate his creepy sex appetite. Either way, this is a deeply troubling sign of a deeply disturbed creep.
Both of his ex-wives don’t seem to remember Blea too fondly. They both claim that he was abusive. They also say that he was openly vehement about prostitutes, calling them filthy whores and using their first names. Both remember Blea leaving the house late at night and returning with women’s clothing and jewelry. Wouldn’t you get a little suspicious at that point? I mean, I would have.
Blea is an absolute creep and I’m glad that he will likely die in prison. That said, I’m not sure he is the West Mesa Bone Collector. He seemed to be sloppy in his criminal activity, often having run-ins with the cops and legal troubles. The West Mesa Bone Collector, on the other hand, was calculating and efficient, able to kill and bury many women for years without getting caught. There is also no forensic evidence tying Blea to the victims. His known victims were very young girls, not grown sex workers. But he is the second prime suspect in the case, and he does seem like a viable possibility. Police hope that he eventually breaks down and confesses.
The Sex Trafficking Ring
Some believe that the sex workers killed or missing were victims of a human sex trafficking ring. This ring is believed to have far-reaching influences on many US cities. The prostitutes killed were involved in this ring, probably not of their own accord. They may have been killed by pimps in the ring for sharing information with cops or for wanting to leave the lifestyle they felt trapped in.
This wouldn’t be the first time that a ring of pimps started killing Albuquerque sex workers. A rash of such killings also occurred in the mid-1980s and I wrote about it here. Shirm and Fortin were just some of the many victims during this period. The women who were killed were found in varying spots around the city, killed in different brutal ways, but they shared a lot in common with the West Mesa Bone Collector victims in their victimology.
I don’t believe that the sex trafficking ring is the most likely theory, though. The women went missing every few months over a four-year period. To me, that seems like someone hunting, not an organized crime syndicate. An organized crime syndicate would consider these women investments and would only kill ones who posed threats to their enterprise. Thus, they would probably kill one here or there or chase down a couple women over a period of a few days to months. They wouldn’t systematically pick off a woman every few months for 4 years and then suddenly cease.
“Cota”
A Crimestoppers tip identified a potential suspect: a trucker from El Salvador. While his full name hasn’t been released, his last name is apparently Cota and he goes by “El Tigiere.” He hates women, he is involved in drug trafficking, and he admitted to the tipster that he paid some of the West Mesa victims for sex. He also lived in Oakland, CA and Albuquerque, though when is unclear. He served on the Special Forces in El Salvador before coming to the States to work as a long-haul trucker. Cota is described as slim, tall, with reddish hair, and driving a light burgundy van.
This tip was included in the appeal of a death row inmate named David Leonard Wood. The tip alleged that Cota was the one responsible for the crimes that Wood has been convicted for. The investigator following the lead felt it was strong enough that he prepared a grand jury to probe for more information and possibly an indictment. However, the grand jury never happened for some reason.
David Leonard Wood is on death row in Texas for the murders of six women, found in 1987 and 1988. These women were found in shallow graves near the Painted Dunes Golf Course in El Paso. Their names are Karen Baker, Ivy Williams, Desiree Wheatley, Rosa Casio, Angelica Frausto, and Dawn Smith. Marjorie Knox, Melissa Alaniz, and Cheryl Lynn Vasquez-Dismukes also went missing from El Paso in this time period under similar circumstances, but their bodies have never been found. These women and girls ranged between 13 and 20 and some of them were strippers or sex workers. Casio’s body bore signs of strangulation. Williams had been stabbed many times in the face.
Wood has always denied killing these girls. Furthermore, he flunked out of three grades in school and has attempted to be declared incompetent due to mental retardation. Though he was scheduled for execution in 2009, he was granted a stay to appeal his death sentence. His attorney has pulled many legal maneuvers to keep Wood from being put to death.
Wood doesn’t seem innocent, though. He was convicted of raping two teenage girls before the murders and served six years before being paroled out in 1987. That’s when the disappearances began.
A sex worker named Judith Kelling Brown reported a man who abducted her, tied her to his truck, raped her twice, and dug a shallow grave for her in the desert. She identified Wood from a line-up of photos. For this reason, he was sentenced to 50 years in prison, where he bragged to other inmates that he had killed the nine victims.
When police executed a search warrant on Wood’s home, they found that he had pieces of Desiree Wheatley’s hair. He also had a bloody knife that may have the murder weapon for Ivy Williams. Lint in a vacuum cleaner he used to clean out his car contained fibers from clothing of some of the victims.
He had dated Karen Baker before she vanished and she was last seen getting into a beige truck which matched the vehicle he drove. Cheyrl Lynn Vasquez-Dismukes also was seen talking to a man in a beige pickup before she disappeared from a Circle K.
Plus, Wood had many tattoos, and some of the victims had been seen with a heavily tattooed man before going missing. Wood spent a lot of time in strip clubs and frequented sex workers, giving him a personal connection to many of the victims.
However, DNA tests of male DNA on some of the victims’ clothes were inconclusive and therefore did not affirmatively tie Wood to the crimes. I’m not sure what the results were for the blood on the knife. Though Wood was charged with the killings, there is just enough doubt to enable him to evade the death sentence. Wood had two creepy friends who are considered possible suspects in these killings as well but Texas won’t unseal their crimes for a proper investigation.
The anonymous tipster claimed that Wood didn’t actually do these crimes. Instead, it was all Cota, and Cota may have committed additional murders in Milwaukee and Albuquerque. Cota would use drugs to lure sex workers into his clutches. The tipster also claimed that Cota killed a girl named “Mimi” or “Chocolate.” These were the known aliases of Syllania Edwards, who was one of the West Mesa victims.
This seems like a pretty intriguing tip, but not enough to clear Wood of his crimes. Nevertheless, Cota could still be responsible for the West Mesa murders. Wood was in prison when the West Mesa murders happened, but Cota apparently was at large.
This tip could have some legitimacy. Cota was a long-haul trucker who spent time in Albuquerque and used prostitutes. Cota had lived in Albuquerque enough to become familiar with desolate areas to dump his victims. Due to the nature of his job, it is possible the Unfound listed in this article were also his victims, whom he took far away from Albuquerque.
Fred Reynolds
Fred Reynolds was a pimp in Albuquerque with ties to these women. He had hundreds of photos of women in his possession, including some of the West Mesa Bone Collector victims. But he died of natural causes in 2009, months before the gravesite was found, and therefore he has never been fully investigated.
Some of the photos of women he had were released to the public and then the subjects were identified. Most of the women were found alive and well. Christina Leyba was reported by family to have died of natural causes. But a few of the photos he had were of women who are confirmed or suspected West Mesa Bone Collector victims: Doreen Marquez, Vanessa Reed, and Victoria Chavez.
When sex workers first started going missing, Reynolds tried to track some of them down. He told their families that he was worried about them. Family members remember him being helpful and seeming to genuinely care about the women. He was a former heroin addict who ran Have Mercy Escort Services, which employed the missing women. He told their families that he wanted the women to have better lives due to his own personal history.
Reynolds does not seem like a strong suspect. As the owner of the escort service, it is not surprising that he had photos of these women. He probably used the photos to promote women working for him. However, I wish this lead could be investigated more. Pimps are known to be violent, especially when sex workers try to leave the lifestyle.
It is also possible that Reynolds knew something. This serial killer would have significantly cut into his profit margin, so Reynolds would have had an interest in the case and access to information on the streets. With so many rumors going around about women being beheaded and buried on the West Mesa long before the gravesite was discovered, it is likely that he heard something. (Read more about that in my post Something Fishy about the West Mesa Bone Collector Murders.) He could have been a useful witness. If he really did care about the women, as he said he did, then maybe he could have helped crack the case.
Scott Lee Kimball
Soctt Lee Kimball is a Colorado serial killer who was initially questioned for the crimes. He was sexually abused as a kid and thus he attempted suicide. When that failed, he turned to a life of crime. He liked to forge checks and documents to make a living and even stole identities and trucks. His organic beef company and house flipping businesses were only fronts for what he was really doing.
He also had a tendency for violence. He raped his wife but police dismissed the charges because the couple continued to have sex consensually after the rape. (Like that matters – spousal rape is a terrible thing that should be taken seriously. I can’t get over how poorly women are treated in our justice system.) Then Kimball kidnapped and raped his wife and again a year later after they had divorced.
The FBI offered Kimball leniency on fraud charges if he became an informant. Thus, Kimball played them for fools and fed them lots of false information that never led to any arrests. When it emerged that he had killed four people, that caused a bit of a scandal. He was dismissed as an informant when it was discovered he had a warrant in Spokane.
In 2002, Kimball was released from prison on fraud charges and moved to Colorado to stay with his mom. He sometimes pretended to be his brother. This is when his killings began.
First, he killed LeeAnn Emry, the girlfriend of a cellmate from prison. Next he killed Jennifer Marcum, the girlfriend of another inmate, whose body has never been located. His third victim was Kaysi McLeod, the daughter of his girlfriend, Lori McLeod. Kimball married Lori McLeod after that, even though she had been told he was the last person seen with Kaysi.
In 2004, he attempted to murder his son, Justin, by pushing him out of a moving car. He likely did this to collect on his life insurance. His mom, Barb Kimball, changed Justin’s life insurance beneficiary to herself as she began to suspect Scott Kimball of some nefarious things. Justin Kimball woke up from a coma asking why his dad had done this to him. That is so heartbreaking. Still, Kimball remained free on the streets.
Finally, Kimball killed his uncle, who was staying with him and Lori McLeod. While this appears to be his final victim, there are believed to be other victims – possibly 21. He got away with his crimes for a long time but was finally apprehended in 2006 and sentenced to 70 years in prison.
For a time, Kimball was explored as a suspect in the West Mesa killings. He had lived in Denver at the time of the murders. He also seemed to like hurting and killing victims who had drug dependency, like Kayci. He appeared to be smooth and cruel in his killings, making it appear that this wasn’t his first rodeo. However, he hasn’t been confirmed in the West Mesa crimes. He’s currently in prison in Florida and is married to a woman in prison in Kansas on child abuse charges. Match made in Heaven.
Conclusion
Lorenzo Montoya seems like the strongest suspect. But he carried his secrets to the grave with him. Unless there is a break in DNA evidence, we may never know who committed the serial murders. That leaves the unpleasant revelation that the killer may still be at large. It may be someone not even on this list – someone police haven’t even thought of or become aware of.
All I can say is…I hope he’s not still out there. Yet either way, there are always more violent and disturbed men out there, poised to take his place. It can be very scary to be a woman – where you’re prey for unhinged men.
The victims of this killer died horrible deaths and they were not investigated properly or expediently. The missing and murdered women are more than trash or prey, more than sex workers with drug problems. They deserved better. The world is a dark place and I can only hope there is a lighter place where we go when we die to make up for the despair and evil here.
The West Mesa Killings Sources
https://allthatsinteresting.com/west-mesa-murders
https://www.abqjournal.com/community-data/west-mesa-murders
https://www.abqjournal.com/860097/police-looking-for-women-in-old-sex-tapes.html
https://www.tributes.com/obituary/show/Shericka-F.-Hill-79676255
https://www.abqjournal.com/597107/is-joseph-blea-tied-to-west-mesa-killings.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Leonard_Wood
https://thecinemaholic.com/where-is-serial-killer-david-leonard-wood-now
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/115948409/beginning-of-mourn-a2-lisa-fortin/
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