Former UNM student Lisa Wortman aspired to one day become a lawyer, but that dream ended with her murder nearly eight years ago.
A man walking his dog near the University Arena on June 6, 1994, stumbled upon her dismembered remains beneath a partly open manhole cover.
Wortman's murder is the only unsolved homicide discovered on University property in the past 15 years. Cmdr. James Daniels, spokesperson for the University Police Department, says UNM detectives have spent thousands of hours on the investigation and are still working on the case, though they have no leads or suspects.
"Right now the leads are cold," he said this month. "We worked it for several years, and we still work it; being it's an open homicide, it's never closed."
Albuquerque Police Department personnel conducted the crime scene investigation, and UNM detectives continue the criminal investigation.
Wortman, who was 22, was last seen alive by family members in early May of 1994. She had been missing for a month before her body was discovered 30 feet down a manhole in three feet of sewer water near The Pit.
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Former UNM Police Capt. Jesus Montanez told the Albuquerque Journal in 1994 that UNM police thought Wortman was killed elsewhere and then taken to the manhole.
In the days after the recovery of her remains, reports surfaced in area newspapers about a possible suspect.
Don Grady, the former chief of the UNM Police Department and now the chief of police at the University of Northern Illinois, told the Journal in mid-June of 1994 that the investigation into Wortman's death was going fairly well and that the suspect was clearly a local person. Since that promising start to the investigation, the trail has gone cold.
"Without giving too much away, we had a suspect at one time but that has not panned out," UNM's Daniels said.
Currently, the only member of the UNM Police Department working on the case is Detective Mike McGiness. Daniels denied the Daily Lobo's request to interview McGiness.
"Because it's an active case, we've got to be real careful with it," Daniels said.
The Murder Scene
UNM owns more than100 acres west of The Pit. The tract of land is a wasteland where people discard tires, old couches and beer cans. Occasionally, someone might jog past on the half dozen dirt paths that crisscross the hilly terrain.
Along a dirt frontage road that runs parallel to a canal is a manhole - its base rusting and cracked. From there, the top northwest corner of The Pit, a nearby Motel 6 and Interstate 25 are visible and the steady drone of automobile traffic is audible. In the spring of 1994, someone decided to discard a human body down the manhole.
When discovered, the body was already in an advanced state of decomposition. An APD detective who descended the manhole shaft painstakingly took four hours to retrieve the body in 13 pieces.
A police source says the condition of the body and its discovery in three feet of sewage water led to the then-unknown victim being dubbed the "Soup Woman" by police.
The body was identified as Wortman through dental records. The autopsy report from the Office of the Medical Investigator estimated that death occurred two to four weeks prior to the discovery of the body. The report said the dismemberment presumably occurred after death and had been done with a course-bladed handsaw or cross-cut.
Wortman suffered multiple skull and facial fractures, according to the report, and though it was speculated that the massive head trauma could have resulted from the head being dropped down the manhole, the report said that Wortman could have died from blunt head trauma.
A toxicology report from the Office of the Medical Investigator reported traces of cocaine in Wortman's heart tissue.
Portrait of a killer
The last time Lisa Wortman contacted friends, she was in the area of Broadway Avenue and Avenida CÇsar Ch†vez. Once a promising student, Wortman had dropped out of UNM, succumbed to drug addiction and had been arrested two years earlier for prostitution.
Sgt. Damon Fay of the Albuquerque Police Department says the perpetrator in this case placed the body in the sewer out of both convenience and ritual. Fay says perpetrators of this type of crime will typically cut up bodies, but they will usually put the parts in different places because that delays police identification on the body.
"It is one area that makes it very, very difficult for detection; the body will break down very quickly," Fay says. "Secondarily, it is a symbolic deal about just having a very disposable life around him.
"Sometimes it is a direct connection between the killer and the victim and they do it as a degradation sort of thing."
He says it was likely that Wortman knew her killer and that it could have been someone in her social circle, such as another person involved with drugs. Fay says it might have been a fast, short-lived connection, though he wonders about that.
"It's interesting because I would think that there was much more of a solid connection between her and her killer because of the nature of the death and the violence," he says. "If they had just met, and he was a trick, he could leave her beside the road and no one would make the connection because no one knows any of the history between the two."
A "trick" is a prostitute's client.
UNM psychology professor Samuel Roll, who has taught a forensic psychology class at the University, says the case may have overtones of a particular kind of perversion in which there is a merger of sexual desires and aggressive desires. In this type of perversion, Roll says, the killing provides sexual gratification beyond any sexual act and that the mutilation is also for gratification purposes.
He says the killer "might be one of these people that are primitively determined persons who have a merger or a lack of differentiation between sex and aggression so they get a thrill from the killing and a thrill from the mutilation of the body."
Roll adds that prostitutes, especially, are victims of these people all the time. The other possibility, Roll says, is a psychopath that murdered Wortman for some personal gain or out of vengeance and mutilated her body to conceal the murder.
In either case, Roll says, any guilt the perpetrator might harbor was not necessarily constraining.
Nearly eight years after Wortman's murder, with no new leads or suspects, Daniels of the UNM Police Department concedes that the homicide may never be solved.
"I don't want to believe that but, yeah, there's a time frame that it becomes really tough to solve these cases," Daniels said. He added that it will take the public's input to solve the case.
"If anybody knows anything about it, then they can call us here at the police department," Daniels says. The telephone number is 277-3065. The homicide has been a Crimestoppers case since 1994.
