there were still seven missing women who fit the profile on ida lopez's list. esa, where were they? with the investigation now focused on finding a serial killer, ida thought back to her late-night chats with the women of the war zone. >> when you ask them how many bad dates have you had? oh, i've had 17. i've been choked. i've been beat. i've been -- you know, i've been raped a number of times. so you get a lot of that. and then i'm thinking, okay, is it somebody that's nice at picking them up? >> reporter: investigators had plenty of leads but none that had gotten them closer to answering two questions -- who was he? and where was he now? to find out commander mike geyer, head of the albuquerque p.d.'s criminal investigations unit, says the department chased leads all over the country, from texas, where a woman with profile similar to those of the west mesa women-v also gone missing. to states as far away as pennsylvania and florida, where the backgrounds and travel patterns of certain types of men seem to warrant close attention. >> there's probably people th

but ever since her early days in uniformed patrol, ida lopez has called them her girls. >> i got to knowem. we could chase them out, but for me there was always a story to them. >> ida says the story she heard back then were heart breaking tales of abuse and neglect this almost always had drugs at their core. >> these are hurting women. you'll see some out there that they need that fix. you know, it's not what you see in vegas. it's not the call girl. it's not the pretty woman. >> by the end of 2005 ida had five women on her list who were roughly the same age with similar backgrounds. young hispanic women with arrest records for drugs or prostitution. >> i start going out there and talking to the girls. at first some of them were hesitant. i said i'm not running you. when is the last time you saw her, did you know her, what you tell me. >> how much of your time is this taking? >> it's taking all my time. >> working alone, the detective distributed fliers with the womens pictures at truck stops, convenient stores, even the new mexico state fair. but she kept coming up empty. >> i went to