disposable lives in sin city:

trafficking and murder under the desert sun

a forgotten triple homicide

A 1996 unsolved murder case from Las Vegas demonstrates a troubling proposition: three people can be murdered in a major American city with little more than a passing mention in the local press and zero potential suspects.

grisly discovery in the desert

A resident of Las Vegas decided to spend the afternoon of March 25, 1996, off-roading in the desert areas around the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vegas Valley Drive on the southeast edge of the city.  As the daylight dwindled, the off-roader stopped near Las Vegas Wash, a narrow channel running along the east side of the valley and terminating at the Las Vegas Wetlands. He stopped his ATV not far from the giant waste treatment facility across from the wetlands and walked through the dirt, past the empty beer bottles and various dumped debris that dot the desert scenery around the city, eventually stopping to pull out an air pistol once he found an appropriate spot for some plinking.  But after popping off only a few shots, he was overwhelmed by a powerful stench wafting from nearby. 

A journey of a few feet led the off-roader to an unimaginable sight as he made his way to the top of a sloping, brush-covered dune.  Looking down into a dry ravine, he recognized amid a partially dug up mound the clear form of a human torso and a dusty piece of green plastic protruding from the dirt.  He instinctually recoiled at the grisly scene and ran back to where the ATV was parked.  The rider hurried back to town and contacted the police.

three bodies, green garbage bags, and children’s clothing

Police arrived at the crime scene in the desert near the waste water treatment plant late in the afternoon.  Despite being only minutes from the edge of rows of residential neighborhoods, the burial site was notable for its isolation.  

Homicide detectives made their way into the dry ravine to inspect the torso protruding from the mound.  As the dirt was carefully cleared away, the torso was revealed to be the slender nude body of a woman with shoulder-length black hair.  The green plastic noticed by the off-roader when he discovered the body turned out to be the shredded remnants of a 30-gallon garbage bag that the victim had been placed into prior to her burial.  Detectives theorized that wild animals had unearthed the shallow grave and tore through part of the plastic bag.

After the woman’s body was removed from her makeshift grave, Detective Dave Hatch noticed what he thought was clothing buried a beneath the woman’s body.  He did not have to dig for long before making another horrific discovery.

Beneath and slightly to either side of the first woman’s body were two more green 30-gallon garbage bags bound with packing tape.  The bodies of two more thin women were concealed inside each bag – one woman was found nude, just as the first victim, while the other woman was found clad only in panties.  Investigators also discovered various articles of clothing – including some in children’s sizes – stuffed into the oversize garbage bags.  The disposal site was classified as a “beehive grave” covered with about a foot of dirt that at first glance appeared to be just another one of the countless rolling mounds dotting the desert landscape.

A van from the Clark County Coroner’s Office arrived in the lonely desert as night fell, a wake of dust illuminated by the headlights from the gathered police cars.  The bodies of the three unknown women – no identification was located at the burial site – were loaded into the van for transport to the county morgue.

Homicide detectives fanned out in the frigid desert night to search the area surrounding the exhumation for any evidence that might provide some idea as to how three women came to meet their end in a shallow desert grave.  Not far from the burial site investigators located two suitcases containing bloody clothing near a mattress and a smattering of empty beer bottles.  Not too much can be read into the mattresses and scattered beer bottles – these items, along with battered couches, shattered televisions, and old tires, were as much a part of the desert scenery surrounding Las Vegas in 1996 as they are today.

No other clues were found around the cryptic crime scene.  Detectives’ only hope was that the autopsy of the three Jane Doe victims would reveal some information that could lead to the identity of those responsible for the gruesome scene in the desert of east Las Vegas.

the women with no names

The bodies of the three Jane Does were brought from their resting site near the Las Vegas Wash to a plain one-story building on Shadow Lane in the city’s medical district that served as the Clark County Coroner’s Office.  The autopsies on the unidentified women were performed over the course of two days. 

Based on the rate of decomposition and the location where the bodies were recovered, the women had been resting in the beehive burial mound east of the city for as long as five months, though the lead detective on the case believed the bodies had been at the site for somewhere between two weeks to a month. The coroner further determined that all three of the women were Asian.            

The oldest victim was between the ages of 35 and 50, and she wore upper dentures.  The autopsies revealed the other two victims were between the ages of 25 and 35.  Each of the nameless women had builds described as very slender and long dark hair – though one of the younger victims had several strands of gray hair.

For two of the Jane Does, the cause of death was determined to be strangulation.  The other woman died of suffocation coupled with a blunt force injury to her head.  And though the three women were all found either nude or partially clothed, none of the bodies evidenced signs of sexual assault. 

The police ran the fingerprints for the three victims through national databases, but no records were found.  No fingerprint matches meant no arrests, no passports, and no drivers licenses for any of the three unidentified women.

Besides three bodies in the desert, there was nothing investigators could find to prove the Jane Does ever existed at all.

triads, trafficking, and massage parlors

With little to go on, detectives with the LVMPD reached out to the Los Angeles Police Department for assistance. Investigators managed to generate some leads by working in concert with the LAPD Missing Persons Unit and the LAPD Asian Gangs Unit.  The profile of the victims, lack of identifying records, and absence of missing persons reports lead investigators to examine links between organized crime and local massage parlors suspected of engaging in prostitution.      

Several organized crime syndicates with links to China were prevalent in the Los Angeles area at the time of the murders. Two such groups affiliated with Chinese Triads – the 14K and the Four Seas – were known to lure women from China and Thailand to the United States where they were then forced into prostitution at massage parlors in cities across the country.  Federal officials at the time estimated Triad-linked gangs in the U.S. brought in $3 billion a year through human trafficking and prostitution.   

The ruses used by these gangs to entice their victims were varied – sometimes ads in foreign newspapers would attract women with the prospect of lucrative employment opportunities in the United States, while others would claim to facilitate marriages to American men.  The transnational operation then secured temporary visas for the women and coordinated their travel from China and Thailand, though some trafficking victims were smuggled into the United States outside of normal ports of entry.  But once in the United States, the women had their passports and other identifying documents confiscated to be held by the gang until the women had paid off the “debt” they owed for their travel to the United States, with the amount owing sometimes totaling $60,000.00 or more. 

From there, the women were funneled through a vast network of massage parlors operated by the gang throughout the U.S., from cites ranging from Seattle, to Denver, to Las Vegas. The women did not stay for long at any one massage parlor.  Sometimes 60 – 80 different women would be rotated through just one establishment in a given year.  This frequent rotation served multiple purposes – it prevented women from forming lasting bonds with their fellow captives, left victims disoriented, and provided the parlors’ clientele with a steady supply of new faces.

Victims trafficked by Triad-linked gangs and other organized crime operations were usually forced to live on-site in the cramped backrooms of massage parlors.  At one California parlor raided by the police, six women shared a room where they slept on the floor with shreds of foil serving as blankets.  These massage establishments served as the sites of modern-day slavery that operated openly within communities across the country.  Parlor operators retained the money paid by clients for sessions with the captive women, with any “tip” paid for sexual services going toward paying off the trafficking victim’s debt.  Also taken from these “tips” by the operators were costs related to room and board for the victims’ squalid conditions.  Another mechanism of control over trafficking victims was the common practice by massage parlor owners of holding any money earned by the women in their establishment “for their benefit” in a bank account under the parlor operator’s name.

Threats and intimidation were ever-present in the lives of trafficking victims. Non-compliance with a massage parlor operator’s demands would be met with beatings, the withholding of food, and sleep deprivation. Traffickers also often had direct contact with members in Thailand or China and would threaten to harm their victims’ relatives if they failed to comply. Operators of massage establishments also used their victims’ unlawful immigration status as leverage, with disruptive women often finding themselves turned into immigration authorities for deportation.

In an underground industry marked by cold cruelty, women that managed to pay off their “debt” found themselves locked out of the massage parlors that had been their only home in the United States without a penny to their name.

regulation battles: prostitution front or legitimate industry?

A year-and-a-half before the three unidentified bodies were found in the Vegas desert, a political fight took place over cross-gender massage ordinances in Clark County.  The ban had been put in place in the early-80’s to crack down on massage parlors serving as fronts for prostitution and, along with them, the organized crime networks that often backed such enterprises.  But a coalition of massage therapists argued the restrictions were a burdensome barrier to doing business and that greater regulation of the massage industry had reduced past problems with illicit prostitution.

The ban on cross-gender massages was eliminated in a narrow vote before the Clark County Commission in 1994.  New regulations passed around the time the ban was lifted increased the fees the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department could charge to perform background checks on prospective masseuses to ensure they had no prior arrests for prostitution, though the background check requirement had already been in place since 1992.

The 1994 fight over regulation of massage establishments was a continuation of an ongoing decades-long battle between the massage industry and elected officials dating to the 1970’s.  In 1973, the Las Vegas City Council passed an ordinance limiting the number of massage establishments in the city to 1 per 75,000 residents.  With Vegas having a population of around 200,000 people at the time, this capped the number of massage businesses at three within the city limits.  The owners of several proposed parlors denied licenses under the ordinance – including establishments like Pandora’s Massage and the Mustang Massage – filed a lawsuit, and, in January of 1975, District Court Judge Paul Goldman ruled the city ordinance an unconstitutional restriction on the right of the massage parlor owners to earn an honest living. 

The judge was sympathetic to the argument made by the attorney for the massage establishments, who noted that tourists often left his clients’ businesses disappointed and embarrassed after learning they were not houses of prostitution.  Judge Goldman commented on that argument, “Las Vegas is a unique city, and a lot of people come here to gamble and they don’t get what they think they are going to get in the casino, either.”

The 70’s and 1980’s saw continued police raids on massage establishments serving as fronts for prostitution.  But most of these busts involved “wild cat” operations run out of private homes.  For example, a 1987 raid by the Metro Vice Squad targeted several apartments after following up on ads in the personal section of the local newspapers offering “relaxing central body massages.”

The loosening of restrictions on cross-gender massages in the early 90’s was met with another backlash a few years later against the perceived susceptibility of the massage industry to prostitution.  In 2002, Clark County and municipalities in the Vegas Valley implemented a moratorium on the opening of new massage establishments.  The decades-long tug-of-war between the massage industry and government regulators has continued into recent years, with Clark County implementing ordinances restricting the ability of massage establishments to remain open past 10:00 p.m., a regulation that massage industry representatives argued limited their ability to provide massage services to employees getting off from a late shift or tourists weary from walking the Strip.

Amidst the ongoing fight over regulation of the massage industry, human trafficking and forced prostitution remain a chronic problem across Nevada even today.  Of an estimated 1,000 massage establishments operating across Nevada in 2019, about 250 were estimated to be involved in illicit prostitution.  And traffickers today have moved from luring victims with newspaper ads to social media posts targeting women across China.

a link to other bodies in the desert?

The body of Melanie White was found not far from Frenchman Mountain in August of 1994. She had been struck in the head with a blunt object and strangled to death. White was known to work as a prostitute in the downtown area of Las Vegas.

The bodies of three more women were discovered in the desert between the east edge of Las Vegas and Lake Mead. Most of these victims were unidentified, with some having decomposed to skeletal remains. Then, on January 4, 1997, the nude body of Margaret Hicks, a 23-year-old prostitute that arrived to Las Vegas by way of Minnesota, was located not far from the beehive burial site of the three Jane Does discovered on March 25, 1996. Hicks had been employed by one of Nevada’s legal brothels prior to her death. Police determined that Hicks had died of strangulation.

The Hicks murder is the most intriguing when examining potential links between the murder of the three Jane Does and other homicides in the Vegas area at that time. The murders of the Jane Does and Hicks occurred within about one year of each other, and the burial sites were less than a mile apart. And the victims were all murdered via strangulation and left nude in the desert.

But the potential links must be considered in light of the differences between the murder cases of the Jane Does and Margaret Hicks. For one, Hicks was left unburied in the desert while the Jane Does were laid to rest in a shallow beehive grave. And there is the obvious distinction between the crimes in that the murder of the Jane Does involved multiple victims - it would not be unheard of, though highly unusual for a serial killer to switch up his modus operandi by varying the number of victims targeted.

There will always remain open questions as to whether the killers of the three Jane Does was responsible for the untimely end of other women in the Vegas Valley.

who murdered the women in the desert?

The question still remains: who was behind the brutal murders of the three women left in the Vegas desert?

The best theory from detectives working the triple murder case is that the three women were foreign nationals trafficked to the United States via Los Angeles.  The lack of any records related to the victims’ fingerprints means they were most likely smuggled into the country outside of a regular port of entry for foreign travelers. Once they were brought into the U.S., the women’s captors transported them to the Las Vegas area and attempted to force the women to work as prostitutes in a local massage parlor, likely under the control of an organized crime syndicate.

It is pure speculation as to the events that lead to the women’s murders.  Perhaps the trio had attempted to escape the cruel life into which they had been forced.  Maybe the damage to the elder woman’s skull was the result of her captor using a nearby object to halt her escape.  Then came the methodical strangulation of the other two, possibly to eliminate witnesses to the murder or maybe as punishment for participating in an attempted escape.  Their murderers – and it seems certain that several individuals took part in the crime given the number of victims and effort needed to dispose of the bodies – engaged in a hasty burial of the three women under only a foot of dirt, with evidence of the crime left strewn nearby.

For his part, lead detective on the case Sergeant Bill Keeton commented, “It’s very difficult, especially when the victims have no family that we know of and no one came forward to claim them. It’s purely speculation, but they were probably smuggled into the country, they balked at becoming prostitutes, and they were killed.”

So many loose ends remain.  What to make of the children’s clothes found in the buried garbage bags alongside the victims? The bloody clothes found in the nearby suitcase present a similarly intriguing unanswered question about the crime. One wonders if there were additional murder victims killed at the same time as the three women buried at some other unknown spot in the desert.

And while it appears most probable that an organized crime group was responsible for the murder and burial of the three women, a different murderer cannot be completely ruled out. The bodies of several women were found in the desert on the east side of Las Vegas around the time of the unsolved triple homicide, and detectives at the time speculated a serial killer could be responsible for those deaths. Whether the murders of the three women found in the beehive grave have any connection to the murders of other women found in the same area will likely never be known. 

In a city that feeds consumption of many varieties, certain people are more disposable than others. That fact is displayed when a tale containing tragedy upon tragedy registers only a passing mention in the local community. Few things are more tragic than suffering a brutal death in a strange place, far from family and friends, and remaining an unknown name in death. The community did not mourn the deaths of three people that likely ended up in Las Vegas only to serve as another item to be consumed by a voracious flow of tourists from across the globe. And while the detectives working the triple homicide case followed available leads, LVMPD did not expend significant resources on efforts to identify those responsible for the slayings.

Sergeant Keeton described the unsolved triple murder as one of the most gruesome cases among the hundreds of homicides he had investigated.  “Human beings in green garbage bags, thrown on top of each other -- it seemed like they were being thrown away like garbage,” he said of the crime.  “It was a disgusting scene.”