Wayne Neal II

Alamogordo Daily News

CLOUDCROFT – Twenty-nine years after Margaret Caroline Pointer’s skeletal remains were found near the Sunspot Highway, near Cloudcroft, Alamogordo police Detective Lt. Roger Schoolcraft is still on the case.

The case remains open, and could possibly catch a major break after finding new technology that can recreate the area where Pointer’s body was dumped.

The FARO laser scanner is a 3-D laser imaging device that can recreate areas of a scene using distance and depth measurement points per seconds. It’s usually used for crash scenes, but Schoolcraft felt it could be used for this case as well.

“It beeps out measurement points. Millions and millions of points on top of points and were just going to put it into a three dimensional diagram just how you see it right here today,” Accident Crime Scene Technician David Torres said.

The imaging will give a better description of what happened, Schoolcraft said.

“It’s going to give us a more realistic view of the actual area and see what we can find,” he said. “And it will give us a better picture of how things happened.”

The imaging will be developed and given back to the police department next week.

Torres, who works for Crash New Mexico, is used to working on crash sites but this was a new experience for him. The FARO laser usually has to scan the area eight times to give a good 3-D picture of what happened but for this Torres had to use the device over 12 times.

“We do a lot of car crashes. It’s not as big of an area to scan usually. I’m scanning between a quarter-mile and half-mile in distance,” he said. “We are on the eighth scan and for the process to work it will take between 15 and 20.”

The scans take about 30 minutes to complete one scan. It also has to be leveled out each time. Before the FARO laser begins scanning, it first searches for true north so the images can be accurate.

For example, the FARO can recreate the scene of a home's living room by just taking measurement points of the angles around it.

The accuracy of the FARO laser will put a person almost at the exact location of where they need to be.

“The accuracy of the machine is 1000th of a millimeter. So it’s pretty spot on to what you’re looking for,” Torres said.

From the data colected through the FARO laser Schoolcraft said he could know the exact location of where the suspect was headed and where he dumped Pointer’s body.

“I want to give her family some sense of justice and that these victims are never forgotten,” he said. “I think it’s important that these people are held accountable for their actions.”

Pointer who was known as Margie to her friends, family and coworkers. She was last seen in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn on White Sands Boulevard around 6 a.m. on Nov. 20, 1987. She was 27 years old at the time of her disappearance, married and the mother of a 5-year-old boy. She lived on Lamar Circle with her son and husband at the time of her disappearance.Pointer 's white 1985 Nissan Sentra was found abandoned in a parking lot adjacent to the Holiday Inn, 1401 S. White Sands Blvd.

Pointer 's white 1985 Nissan Sentra was found abandoned in a parking lot adjacent to the Holiday Inn, 1401 S. White Sands Blvd.

Pointer 's husband was on active duty military stationed overseas at the time of her disappearance.

Otero County Sheriff’s deputies recovered human skeletal remains on March 18, 2004 located by a forest-thinning crew near Cloudcroft. The remains were identified as Pointer’s after State of New Mexico Medical Investigators positively identified her on May 27, 2004.

Pointer 's remains were strewn over a five-acre area at nearly 8,000 feet elevation off State Road 6563 – the Sunspot Highway. Some bones displayed animal bite marks.