The serial murderer who’d still be killing if he’d been in Albuquerque

Erika Peña is a hero. She was doing a car date in Laredo, Texas, on September 14, 2018 when the man pointed a gun at her and grabbed her blouse. She was able to slip out of her shirt, escape the car then run until she found a state trooper. The man who attacked her,...

Life on the street = additive trauma

On the street, everything is present tense. You need rent money now. You need to find a safe place to sleep now. You need to get away from the man attacking you now. There is no planning for things that might happen in two hours or two days or two months. It's all action, all...

Crafting a shield of empty questions

The woman in front of me can’t stop crying. I don’t know her well enough to put an arm around her shoulders for comfort. I don’t know how to comfort her at all. Because there’s nothing to say that will erase what happened to her over the last 24 hours. She was knocked unconscious and...

The rules of street survival

Women who sell sex on the street have a list of survival rules. These rules aren’t written down anywhere. And they can’t be rattled off like the alphabet. But they are known. They are an amalgamation of lessons learned by instinct and experience. A woman who is new to the street is easy to spot...

Three billboards in Albuquerque, New Mexico

It doesn't seem to make much sense. Why rent billboards about a decade-old serial killer case? Yes, the murders of 11 women whose bodies were later found buried on the West Mesa continue to haunt Albuquerque. But how would putting up billboards now help anything? The truth is, they likely won't inspire a new witness...

The victory of three serial rapists

On the surface, the three most recent serial rapists added to the Bad Guy List have few similarities. One is a white man in his 60s with salt-and-pepper hair. One is a tall African-American man in his 40s. And one is short, fat African-American man in 20s. Yet they do have several key things in...

A room of her own

Bella is happy. She has a lock on her door. For the past few years, she had been sleeping in abandoned houses, under bushes or occasionally in a hotel room — all with groups of people. She had moved from place to place, never able to stay anywhere for too long before she and her...

Please say yes to the dress

Holly likes to wear ball gowns. Most women who do street dates in Albuquerque wear jeans, sneakers and tank tops. Because they are practical. They walk about 10 miles a day so the stereotypical look you see on cop shows — of women in tight micro-skirts and high heels — is illogical and painful. But while Holly...

Things that are not okay

I’m standing on a street corner, asking a group of 20-somethings if they’ve seen a woman from San Felipe Pueblo. Her family is worried. They haven’t heard from her in two months and last week a cousin saw her in a pink-hued drug house in the War Zone. Her grandmother had called Street Safe, asking...

The deaths of three women

Within 10 days over the holidays, three of our women died. All were under age 35. Audra was murdered and dismembered. Crystal overdosed on Christmas Eve. Nicole was shot. We knew all three. Audra had only been on the streets a short while, so we hadn’t had the time to get to know her well....