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Monday, June 22, 2009
Women's Spirits Inspire Loving Sister
By Joline Gutierrez Krueger
Journal Staff Writer
Lupe Lopez feels the spirits of the lost women blowing across the mesa where 11 of them were unearthed earlier this year.
She hears them in the sand and stone she carried from that mesa to use in the clay sculptures of angels she makes in their honor.
She sees them in the eyes of the children, the mothers and the fathers and the siblings they left behind when they were lost, never to return.
Lopez has come to know many of those family members. She goes with them to the vigils that advocate remembrance, tolerance and justice for their lost loved ones. She goes to the support group they attend Saturdays in the South Valley.
She adds her voice to theirs, asking the public and the police never to forget the women, no matter what dire paths they chose.
Because among the spirits she feels, hears and sees is her sister's.
"She's pushing me to go with these women," Lopez says. "She is saying that I should not let anyone forget about them."
Lopez knows how easy it is for the world to forget. Most people — save for her family and, now, these families — don't know that her sister, Beatrice Marie Lopez Weekly Cubelos, has been missing since Sept. 25, 1989.
Bea was 39 then. She would be 59 now — if she were alive.
Like many of those women, Bea struggled with addictions and was drawn to the streets and the societal fringe.
"She's a wild girl, man," Lopez says. "As wild as I ever saw them."
Once, she says, their brother found Bea lying in the dirt of Fairview Memorial Park eating garlic from a suitcase and staring at the sun so long that it permanently damaged a retina.
Some of that wildness was the manifestation of her bipolar disorder and her frequent refusal to take the lithium that muted her highs and lows.
"She was fine when she was on lithium," Lopez says. "But when she went off it, she did crazy things. She made bad choices and picked the wrong people."
Had Bea made such a choice that September nearly 20 years ago?
She had been at the Silver Fox Lounge at 1900 Fourth NW late into the night before leaving for a friend's house in the North Valley.
Sometime around 5 a.m., she asked the friend to drive her to her family's home in Barelas. The friend told her she would have to wait until 7 a.m. when he could borrow jumper cables to start his car.
But Bea was restless. She struck out on foot.
She was never seen again.
Lopez, who lived out of state at the time, says she recalls little assistance from police to help find her sister. It hadn't mattered much then because her father, Manuel Lopez, was a longtime private investigator. The search for Bea was his most precious case.
It was one of the few he couldn't solve.
"My father went to his grave without finding my sister," Lupe Lopez says. "It devastated him."
Bea disappeared long before the 2003-2005 period Albuquerque police have pinpointed as the time the lost women were killed and buried on the mesa.
Still, Lopez says she wonders whether there is a connection.
"Who's to say that whatever serial killer that took those women's lives didn't do the same to my sister when he was younger?" she says.
For now, there is no evidence of that.
When she read about the lost women last spring — how for years the families felt they had gotten no help from authorities to find them until the first bones were unearthed on the mesa — Lopez says she felt an instant affinity.
And found a renewed cause.
She wants to be sure the community doesn't forget the women like it forgot her sister.
She wants to be sure police keep looking for the killer. She wants them to keep looking for other lost women.
"I don't want these women's lives to be swept away like garbage," she says, firmly swiping her hand across the table at the restaurant where we have come to talk.
She is not convinced that police should have stopped searching and sifting through the 92 acres of sand and stone on the mesa.
More women are out there, she believes. "Some of the other family members say they do, too."
She says: "If I could, I'd be out there with my bare hands."
It's doubtful that anything or anyone else is out on this particular patch of mesa, given the months police dedicated to searching the city's largest crime scene.
But Lopez doesn't know where else to look or what else to do. She hears the spirits, but they never reveal where they have gone.
"I wonder all the time about what happened to my sister, what happened to all those other women," she says. "I wonder when I will stop wondering."
UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column. You can reach Joline at 823-3603, jkrueger@abqjournal.com or follow her on Twitter @jolinegkg.
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