Welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service.

We're going to tell you about the disturbing story of the disappearance of young women in the Mexican border town of Seward Juarez.

Some of the cases date back to the early 1990s but weren't first discovered until almost 10 years later.

In 2013, Mike Lanchin spoke to two people who were closely involved in those earlier cases. It's late 2001 and forensic scientist Oscar Maines is on his way to work in Suad Juarez, a city

renowned for its violent mixture of drugs and crime.

I believe it was a Thursday morning, I was driving and then I got a call that they found one body in an area inside the city where an old

car on field used to be. Before I got there I got another call that they found another body and then a few minutes there when I arrived they were already three bodies.

All three bodies were of young women in different stages of decomposition.

They'd been dumped in the open on the old cotton field close to the city centre.

It was still a patch of old agriculture field still in the middle of the city, but there was traffic

all over the place.

Cars, buses driving back and forth.

We started processing that area to see if we if there was more bodies there.

And next the next day we found another from another five bodies in another ditch 200 meters from the first one.

However, these bodies were buried.

It wasn't the first time that Oscar had come across such grim scenes in his hometown.

Juarez had been plagued by similar killings of young women since the early 1990s,

but a combination of poor and corrupt policing had meant few cases had been solved.

Oscar and his team set to work gathering clues as to who the latest victims were

and why they'd been killed.

The first three, four days, we spend most of the time there all day,

processing the scene, because you need to uncover the bodies,

...