I’ll bet you have heard of the West Mesa Bone Collector, an uncaught serial killer of sex workers in Albuquerque in the early 2000s. But are you aware that in the 1980s, there was a rash of murders of Albuquerque women who worked Central as well? Yup, the same thing happened in the 1980s as the West Mesa Bone Collector murders. Though the MO of the killer was different from the West Mesa Bone Collector, police have hinted that some of the crimes may be connected.
These women may have led “high-risk lifestyles,” and one was trans and three were African American. They are no less deserving of justice than anyone else, yet they have been treated as less than. Like with many prostitute murders, their cases remain unsolved and largely forgotten.
Newspaper articles seem to brush the murders off as the work of nameless “gorilla pimps” who have walked free and unpunished since. The public is largely unaware of these murders, which is a shame. Increased public awareness may have goaded police to dedicate more effort to solving these crimes. All in all, seven women died between August of 1984 and March of 1988.
The Cruise
There is a stretch of Central Avenue in Albuquerque known as the “War Zone” or “The Cruise.” This area is known for its criminal activity. Even in the 80s, the War Zone was a hotbed of crime, prostitution, and drugs. You could “cruise” along this area and find access to all the illicit pleasures and entertainment you wanted.
In the 1980s, vice agents noticed that the Cruise started to become more deadly. Small diet pills called Preludin, known colloquially as “hides” or “ludes,” started to make their rounds in the drug scene and many prostitutes were able to obtain prescriptions for them. A single bottle of the .75mg pills could fetch $3,500. On top of selling sex, women who obtained these pills helped generate lots of money for the pimps they worked for.
Unfortunately, these pimps seemed to be more brutal than usual and were referred to by law enforcement as “gorilla pimps.” Many of these gorilla pimps were part of the “Memphis Group,” an organized crime syndicate that trafficked women and drugs. The Memphis Group used Albuquerque as a central hub for their activities in the 80s. Gorilla pimps viewed women as property – disposable property. Women were profitable because they could sell sex and get ludes, and pimps weren’t willing to let them go. If a woman tried to escape the grim lifestyle that these pimps created for her, then she was likely to meet a terrible and violent end at their hands.
This is believed to be what happened to many of the victims I write about below. All of these women associated with each other and were on the cops’ radar as prostitutes. Many of them had encounters with men driving a white Cadillac, who would follow them and even break into their motel rooms and threaten them. These victims all died in different ways, but within the same time period. Their deaths may not be linked to the same person, but rather a group of persons, who had the same motive: control the women. Some of them may have met violent ends at the hands of predators, two of whom later came into suspicion for the West Mesa Bone Collector killings.
According to a clipping from the Albuquerque Journal article “Death on the Cruise,” police detective Lt. Patrick Dunworth stated that the victims all existed in a small world that could lead to a myriad of connections – but those connections may not actually help in solving any of the murders. So whether this was the work of single, separate killers or a network of greedy, controlling, abusive men, is unknown. Due to the amount of time that has elapsed and the lack of interest in solving these crimes, they are officially cold. That being said, there is always hope.
As you can see, there are few details on these women. Also, most of them don’t have pictures. I included what I could find on them.
Danessa Lucretia Howard: August 10, 1984
Howard was a beautiful girl born and raised in Mobile, Alabama, who had worked as a cosmetologist. The salon she worked at shut down and she was jobless. She was also bored and she felt stuck. Seeking adventure, she somehow found her way into prostitution and began to travel all over the Southwest in the company of some pimps and other prostitutes. This life didn’t turn out to be what she had envisioned. She experienced beatings, choking, and other abuse from the pimps, according to her fellow prostitute, Johnnie Mae Hall. In Denver, she was arrested for prostitution. Then the pimps trafficked her to Albuquerque, the 1980s hub for Preludin sales. She was worth a lot of money to them, as she had the capability to earn them $3500 for a bottle of Preludin, on top of about three hundred a night for sex work.
Howard started to yearn for the comfort of her family and her old life in Mobile, and maybe even started to talk to a man from Mobile in Albuquerque, though who this man was and how she knew him is unknown. Howard was a “baby” prostitute and therefore the pimps watched her every move, worried she would run away. Johnnie Mae Hall told her pimps that Howard was talking to a man from Mobile and maybe even considering leaving. After that, she never saw Howard alive again. She told the pimps she wanted to look for the baby prostitute when Howard didn’t turn up that night, but the pimps told her to leave the matter alone.
Howard was discovered on top of a dryer in the laundry room of a Monte Largo NE apartment complex on August 10, 1984. She had been strangled with an electrical cord. Police told the Albuquerque Tribune that she had been killed elsewhere and dumped in the laundry room. Regardless, her murder is believed to have been committed by the pimps controlling her. They preferred to kill her than to let her go.
Jennifer Lynn Shirm: May 29, 1985
Jennifer Shirm’s life story bothers me. This was a woman who never seemed to have a chance. She had been victimized by men her entire life.
At the tender age of twelve, Shirm was drugged with Quaaludes and raped by Frank Turkal, a Bernalillo County Sheriff’s captain. He was convicted of criminal sexual penetration and distributing drugs. Later he appealed and had the conviction reversed. He attempted to evade prosecution by marrying Shirm in Mexico when she was only 15. That was designed to prevent Shirm from being able to testify against him in court. However, because the crime had occurred before the marriage, Shirm was still able to testify that they had begun relations before she turned 13, the age of consent in New Mexico in that time (it is now 16). Where her parents were, and if they even cared about what was being done to their preteen daughter, is undocumented. At the time of the trial, Shirm had filed for divorce.
In 1983, Shirm was arrested for prostitution. She and Turkal were no longer together at this point. It would appear that Shirm still struggled with drug addiction, namely to crack. Friends said she switched from meth and crack to heroin around 1985 and engaged in prostitution to fund her addiction. Around 1985, she also began to experience more pressure as a freelance prostitute without a pimp to protect her from all the dangers facing women of the street. Two men in a white Cadillac chased her frequently; they broke into her motel room and threatened her. This was their recruiting attempt, using bullying and intimidation to get her to work for them. Shirm held a lot of monetary value to them.
Then, on May 29, 1985, Shirm was found beaten to death. She had been dumped under some brush in the parking lot of the same apartment complex on Monte Largo NE that Danessa Howard had been found in the laundry room of. Apparently the pimps liked using this apartment complex as a dumping ground for women. I wonder if one of them lived there?
Gene Autrey Hill surrendered himself for her murder. He was a meth dealer from whom she had stolen drugs from; he was also involved in some sort of “prison check forgery scheme.” But the jury didn’t have enough evidence to convict him. A man named Alex Eugene Murry was also wanted for questioning in regards to her murder, but he was never charged. It is still unknown who actually killed.
A woman named Lisa Godin stated that she and Shirm were cousins and they had both been taken to a field near the airport and beaten with sticks by two men. This beating led to Shirm’s death. Cops were surprised when Godin described injuries to Shirm’s body that matched the autopsy findings. However, they became disenchanted with her as a witness when they discovered she was not actually cousins with Shirm. It still seems possible that even if she lied about their relation, she really did witness Shirm’s death. Cops showed Godin a photo line-up of pimps implicated in Howard’s death. She picked out a pimp from the photos as one of the two men who killed Shirm. Godin’s statements also match other witness accounts of two men in a white Cadillac terrorizing and chasing Shirm around the city.
A disturbing discovery linked DNA found on or near Shirm’s body to Joseph Blea. Blea was a person of interest in the West Mesa Bone Collector slayings of twelve women and one unborn child in 2003-2004. Blea was never convicted for those killings, but in 2015 he was sentenced to 36 years for the “Middle School Rapes” because he liked to stalk and rape middle school girls in the 80s and 90s. One of the rapes was of a thirteen-year-old girl, whom he traumatized in 1988. Blea wore gloves and a ski mask and hid in the girl’s home until she arrived form school, when he raped her and then trapped her in her bathroom with a telephone cord securing the door. Blea was known for soliciting sex in the War Zone, too, and twenty women came forward claiming he used their services. Blea may have killed Shirm, raped her, or merely used her services before she died; the presence of his DNA on her body does not necessarily mean he killed her but it sure doesn’t look good for him. Regardless, he’s a creep and I’m glad that he has exhausted his appeals and will probably die in prison.
It seems to me that Shirm was a victim from the time she was a kid. It could be argued that she was a junkie – but in my personal experience, people who use drugs and have sex as early as twelve have usually been victimized and sexually groomed from an even younger age. Shirm did not appear to have much parental or family support. It must have been terrible for her – enduring the trauma of being raped, marrying her abuser, and then having to testify against her ex-husband who also happened to be a sheriff’s captain. People probably did not believe her and the cops are notorious for defending their own, so that case must not have been very easy for the fifteen-year-old. It is a small wonder why she chose the course she did, and her death is extremely tragic.
Kathleen Therese Bindel: January 4, 1986
Kathleen Bindel was not from Albuquerque. She had just come from Carlsbad, a small town in Southeastern New Mexico, to stay with or visit some friends. Though she had a clean criminal record, she was reported to have been hanging out with well-known pimps and prostitutes shortly before her murder. Some sources say she was involved in prostitution; others don’t.
The lovely twenty-three-year-old was found on January 4, 1986, beaten to death and dumped in the Tijeras Canyon off I40. She was wearing only panties. Someone driving along I40 saw blood on the road near a lumber yard off the Carnuel Exit. The driver pulled over to search for the source, which was how they discovered her body at the base of an embankment off the road. The Tijeras Canyon is a beautiful mountainous area along I40 leading into Edgewood; it is shrouded in forest. It would be a relatively private place to dump a body. The fact she was at the bottom of an embankment makes me think that her killer threw her body from a car as they drove along.
Not much information is available about Kathleen Bindel as a person. It also isn’t clear why cops think she was involved in prostitution. In 1981, she had a son, Jason Anthony Bindel. In 1978, she lost a brother to a motorcycle accident when he was only 27. In 1964, she was released from the hospital at age 2 after having her foot “mangled in a lawnmower accident.” That made me wonder, was she abused as a child? That seems like a pretty weird accident. It would appear that she had some trauma in her past, which is common for women involved in drugs. It’s not clear if her family was speaking to her at the time of her death, but they were pallbearers at her funeral. She left behind both her parents and six brothers and four sisters, all of whom surely want answers for her death. One of her sisters attempted to help in the investigation into her death.
A link was found between Lisa Saiz and Kathleen Bindel. Lisa Saiz was the unfortunate victim of a man named Richard Eugene Neal. Neal kidnapped Saiz, held her in his apartment for weeks, and then dumped her in a nearby parking lot when she was nearly dead of starvation and dehydration. He called police, claiming to have just found her there, but cops quickly spotted holes in his swiftly changing stories. After Saiz died, Neal was ultimately charged with her murder and kidnapping. This happened on January 16, 1986, just twelve days after Bindel was found beaten to death. Police showed photographs of clothes found in Neal’s apartment to Bindel’s sister, who immediately recognized a tan and peach jacket that Bindel wore. Though Neal hasn’t been charged in Bindel’s death, it appears likely that he may have been involved.
There is also a newspaper article that attempted to link her death with the local deaths of Susan Lapointe, Linda Lee Daniels, Debra Lansdell, and Jena Marie Repp/Powell. Another article ties her death with that of Jennifer Lynn Shirm and Danessa Howard. While the articles don’t provide much evidence to substantiate those links, they do indicate that many women in New Mexico faced the threat of violence and met unfortunate ends during that time period.
Fern Strickland: September 28, 1986
While the next victim, Tyra Perry, was the youngest, Fern was the oldest, at 28. She was a gorgeous black lady with no history of prostitution. However, the night she died, she was hanging out with other prostitutes. She was last seen at a bar with a few other men. Her status as a sex worker is hotly debated by law enforcement.
Her body was found on Grace SE. Her throat had been slit, and her purse contents dumped around her. Police say that someone had dumped her there and tossed her purse after her. It is not clear if she was robbed and/or raped. In her newspaper photo, it looks like she is missing an eye, or it is swelled shut. I am saddened that there is so little information about her case or who she was as a person.
Tyra Perry: January 2, 1988
Tyra Perry was the youngest of the victims – just sixteen years old. Despite just being a child, she was much more mature than she should have been. She was a known prostitute and she was five months pregnant when she was stabbed to death. She also had drug ties to the “Corner,” an infamous area in Albuquerque where people could buy drugs.
In 1988, though, Tyra Perry seemed to be turning her life around, perhaps for her baby. She lived with her grandparents and her mother, Faye, while she attended New Futures High School, a school founded just for teenage parents in 1970. Her mother reported that she was a very good and sweet girl. She left to go on a date with an unknown person on December 28, 1987, and she wasn’t seen alive again. Her body was found by a man walking his dog at La Cueva campground on January 2, 1988.
She and her baby died from two stab wounds in the back. They were left to die in agony in the freezing cold of the East Mountains of Albuquerque, near an idyllic campground that normally housed happy memories, not terror, trauma, and evil. It is unclear just what happened to Tyra, but there are some clues, including a witness account of Tyra being picked up by an East Central pimp driving a white Cadillac. The witness claimed that Perry was forced into the Cadillac by the pimp and taken to a cocaine party, where she refused a man’s sexual advances and was stabbed as a result. She allegedly knew the pimp through her family, and her family still believes that this theory is the right one. However, the witness failed a polygraph and police dismissed their statement. Police began to think a girl who envied Tyra Perry was the murderer.
There are also witness accounts of Tyra getting into a truck on Central. Who was in this truck is unknown. Was the person driving the truck her date? Did her date kill her, or was it someone else? Was her date really a sex work client? The answers seem to be elusive with the lack of forensic evidence around Perry’s body. They have only become more elusive with the passage of two decades.
In 2014, Laura Thoren of the KOAT Action News wrote an article about how the Albuquerque police put the names and faces of homicide victims on playing cards for prison inmates. They hoped that these cards might help get people talking. Sure enough, there have been many new tips in relation to the cards. Apparently, Perry’s case in particular has been getting lots of tips. There is no news of a conviction yet, though.
Alexis Gurule: February 4, 1988
Alexis Gurule (born Augustine) was called a “transvestite prostitute who was well-known to police” in the Albuquerque Journal. She was actually a transgender woman who went by Alexis. Gurule was friends with Lisa Ann Fortin, who died just a month after her. This connection is not necessarily relevant, though, considering that the criminal underworld of Albuquerque is rather small and people tend to run in the same circles. Gurule apparently had a drug problem and used prostitution to fund her addiction.
Gurule was found dumped on Louisiana and Kathryn SE on February 4, 1988. She had been beaten to death with a rock and her women’s clothing was ripped. Police refuse to talk about her murder, so details are far and few between. All of the information I have transcribed here is from the Albuquerque Journal article “Death on the Cruise.”
A witness claimed that in 1987 or 1988, two men in a white Cadillac broke into Gurule’s motel room and demanded to know where she was because she owed them money. Another woman reported that two men in a blue car chased down Gurule on the street in January 1988, and later they showed up in a white car and broke into her room and ransacked it for money. They said that Gurule owed them money for ludes – Preludin. It would appear that maybe she got into trouble related to a drug debt.
Gurule’s death is actually very possibly a hate crime as opposed to a pimp murder, based on the eye witness accounts that she got into a blue car with four men off of East Central. This was the last time she was seen alive. It is not stated if she was sexually assaulted or not when her body was found. I think this type of murder is not an unusual occurrence, especially since trans people have the highest murder rate of any group in the US and a trans person is murdered approximately every three days.
Disturbingly, a detective on Gurule’s case told the Albuquerque Tribune about how he is shocked that trans prostitutes live as long as they do. He said, “These transvestites are into a very weird trip. They get picked up by the johns and while the deal is being done they let the johns know they’re really males. They get some sort of kick out of the humiliation.” This is just incredibly callous to me. If he made those statements nowadays, he would have been out of a job. It’s sickening how the cops seemed to think transwomen “humiliate” johns willingly and put themselves at risk of violence as part of some “weird trip,” as if they were somehow responsible for the violence against them.
Whether it was a hate crime or a drug-related murder, Gurule’s death was so needlessly brutal. The way she was treated by police and the way she was misgendered and deadnamed in newspaper articles is further infuriating. She deserved better.
Lisa Ann Fortin: March 19, 1988
Lisa Ann Fortin was friends with both Alexis Gurule and Jennifer Lynn Shirm. She ran away at 14 and slung drugs, ran scams, and sold her body on the street. She especially struggled with meth addiction. But she made numerous attempts to get her life together, even completing an industrial electrician program at the Albuquerque Technical Vocational Institute. When she couldn’t find a job in that field, however, she started to sell her body again.
Then, her friend Jennifer Shirm was found murdered, and Fortin knew it was time to get off the streets. She moved to Las Vegas for a fresh start – and fell into crack addiction and was arrested for possession, prostitution, and resisting arrest there.
When she got out of jail for those charges, she learned she was pregnant and she was “ecstatic,” according to her family. She really, really wanted to do better, so she moved to Albuquerque again and got some roommates and seemed to get clean. One day, she called her family to report that she had refused an offer of drugs for her baby’s sake. A few days later, she called, crying and saying that she had “slipped up.” Her family assumed she meant she had relapsed on drugs.
Friends of hers reported that she was back on crack at the time of her death. They said she bought crack from a man who was involved in the Memphis Group. He lived on San Pablo SE and that’s where Fortin would pick up. This dealer warned her to avoid the spot where he manufactured cocaine into crack. He and other pimps evidently pressured Fortin to prostitute for them, but she always vehemently refused. She was only interested in selling her body when it meant survival, according to her mom, Carol Koch/DeMello.
On March 18, Fortin called family and said she had just heard her baby’s heartbeat. Her voice was full of wonder for the little life growing inside her. She was eager to become a mom. That same night, she was walking along East Central when she got into a blue older-model pickup. That may have been the worst decision she ever made. She was never seen alive again.
A woman named Judith Chavez reported Fortin missing on March 19. Chavez claimed to be her sister; in reality, Chavez was her roommate. Sort of like Shirm’s friend Godin, who said they were cousins. In reading about sex worker murders in Albuquerque, this appeared to be a common theme – women report fellow sex workers missing while claiming to be family members. I think sex workers did this to be taken more seriously and to avoid police detection of their illicit activities. Unfortunately, this only made cops take their reports even less seriously.
Chavez claimed that the two had been walking to the grocery store. Fortin then randomly decided to start hitchhiking. She caught a ride in a blue older-model truck and hadn’t been seen since. Chavez walked home and became concerned when Fortin didn’t turn up. I think this story makes no sense. It is more likely that Fortin was working the street. Later newspaper reports also claim that Fortin was working the street when she vanished.
The same day she was reported missing, Fortin was found nude and stuffed in a trash bag on the Southeast Heights. She and her three-month-old unborn baby had been asphyxiated to death by duct tape. Fortin’s legs and wrists had marks from being bound. Fortin’s mother, Carole Koch/DeMello, positively identified her daughter in the morgue.
If you have read up on Lorenzo Montoya, then you can immediately recognize his MO like I did. Montoya has never been mentioned in the newspapers as a suspect in Fortin’s death, at least not that I could find; but the similarities between this murder and the murder of Sherricka Hill, Montoya’s victim in 2006, are unsettling. For instance, both were bound with duct tape.
Per one newspaper article, DNA evidence from Fortin was submitted in an attempt to tie her death to a serial killer, with no subsequent updates. Could this potential serial killer have been Montoya? Was Fortin his first victim? Or one of many victims, some of whom have never been found? Even if Montoya was not the West Mesa Bone Collector, he may have been a separate serial killer of his own right. The definition of a serial killer varies a little bit, but it usually entails at least 3 victims with a “cooling off” period between murders. If Montoya did kill Lisa Fortin, then that makes two victims that we know of, spaced 18 years apart. Given the high number of women missing from Albuquerque to this day, many of whom were sex workers, it is possible that he had a third victim or even more that he hid really well over the years.
Fortin was only twenty-four when she was murdered. Her unborn baby was only 15 weeks old. She and her fetus were dumped like trash and it is so sad. This is a woman who never found happiness until she got pregnant – and then she never got to hold her baby or enjoy motherhood.
At her funeral, a teddy bear that she had bought for her baby was placed with flowers on her coffin. Tears fill my eyes thinking about that.
The 1980s sex worker killings seemed to end with her, though many people think that there are additional victims whose bodies were hidden somewhere in the desert. Though the West Mesa killings happened in the early aughts, they indicate that these people were at least partly right.
The White Cadillac
The white Cadillac seems to pop up multiple times in these stories. Shirm, Gurule, and Perry all had connections to the person or persons driving it. It is said that this Cadillac was driven by a pimp and crack dealer who belonged to the Memphis Group. This pimp apparently used force to get women to work for him. He also ruthlessly collected on drug debts.
I think that finding the white Cadillac would be a great start to solving at least some of these murders. In the 80s, there could not have been an infinite number of white Cadillacs in Albuquerque. Law enforcement could have looked up white Cadillacs registered in the city and then looked into the owners. One of them would have surely turned up as a character known to law enforcement as associating with crime and prostitutes. Vice agents are pretty familiar with people on the street and probably knew the owner of the white Cadillac, anyway. The fact that this man was never apprehended makes me think that cops know who was behind some of these killings and either couldn’t arrest him based on lack of evidence, or else they didn’t want to due to something even more nefarious.
Sick Society
Was there a serial killer active in Albuquerque in the 1980s? Could he be related somehow to the deaths of the West Mesa victims nearly 20 years later, or the deaths and disappearances in Santa Fe and Belen that occurred the same time period? Or were these women victims of vicious “gorilla pimps”? It would appear that there is a mixture of both.
While the killings have never been solved, it may be that Kathleen Bindel was a victim of Richard Neal, who also imprisoned and killed Lisa Saiz in 1986. Lisa Fortin may have been killed by Lorenzo Montoya, later suspected for the West Mesa killings, or she may have been killed by someone involved in the crack trade. Tyra Perry, Jennifer Shirm, Danessa Howard, and Alexis Gurule may have all been victims of Memphis Group members, killed over drug debts or their desire to leave sex work behind. Alternatively, Shirm may have been killed by Joseph Blea, who was later suspected of the West Mesa killings. Fern Strickland may have been killed by one of the men she was with the night she died, or a member of the Memphis Group. She may have also been targeted by the same person who killed Tyra Perry, based on the fact both women were black and tied to the Albuquerque underworld. It’s hard to separate coincidences and connections when all of these people associated with the same crowd, and so many years have passed, allowing witness memory and forensic evidence to become lost to time.
Either way, it doesn’t matter in the ultimate scheme of things. Prostitution and its associated crime is a symptom of a sick society, not a cause of it. Prostitution would not exist if there were no men paying for it. Prostitutes also would not die horrific deaths if there were no men killing them. And yet prostitutes are often subtly blamed for their lifestyles, their abuse, and their violent deaths. Their murders and disappearances are not sufficiently investigated. They – and their unborn fetuses – are often treated like trash and thrown away by both their killers and the society that lets them down.
I feel that all of these women were let down by society and by police. Now, they seem to be forgotten, swept under the rug. I wish I could do more for them. All I can do is be their voice and try to keep their memories alive. With modern day advances in technology, maybe one day they can get their much-deserved justice.
More Sources
Jennifer Lynn Shirm:
https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/1zr3dia7l/new-mexico-supreme-court/state-v-turkal/
http://nmsoh.org/shirm_jennifer_lynn_us.htm
https://www.maryhallbergmedia.com/post/the-west-mesa-murders-unsolved-serial-killer-case
https://www.abqjournal.com/599369/blea-also-has-been-investigated-in-the-west-mesa-slayings.html
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/25053640/albuquerque-journal/
Lisa Fortin:
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/115948276/lisa-fortin-last-moments/
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/115948409/beginning-of-mourn-a2-lisa-fortin/
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/115948122/lisa-fortin/
https://www.abqjournal.com/860097/police-looking-for-women-in-old-sex-tapes.html
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/115948205/lisa-fortin/
Tyra Perry:
https://www.koat.com/article/deck-of-cards-heats-up-cold-cases/5054726
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/115934401/tyra-perry/
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/115948003/death-on-the-cruise-article/
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/116117562/death-on-the-cruise-part-2/
Fern Strickland:
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/115949179/fern-strickland/
Kathleen Bindel:
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/69448432/kathleen-therese-bindel
Danessa Howard: