Tara Calico (19) left home for her usual 36-mile bike ride and mysteriously never came back. The only evidence found was her Sony Walkman, a cassette tape and an untraced Polaroid picture that has stumped officials to this day.
Last seen on Highway 47
Tara Leigh Calico was an intelligent young woman with a bright future ahead of her. Before she disappeared, she was living a good life. She studied psychology at the University of New Mexico-Valencia while balancing a job at the First National Bank of Belen.
She was an active cyclist and had a healthy social life. On 20th September 1988, at 9:30 am, Calico left home on her mother’s bicycle. Before leaving, she gave an ominous warning that seemed harmless at the time. “If I’m not home by 11:45 am, come look for me”
Later that afternoon, Calico had plans to play tennis with her boyfriend and then later, she had class at 4 pm that day. After she failed to return by 12:05 pm, her mother, Patty Doel went searching for her on her daily bike route. Unable to find her, she contacted the police.
The next day, Doel went looking for her daughter again. This time, she found a Boston cassette belonging to Calico. It was on the side of the road, three miles away from her home and on the opposite side of the highway – as if Tara had dropped it while riding away.
But that wasn’t the end. The cassette tape was only the first of a series of puzzling clues. The next piece of evidence led straight to the location where she was last seen alive – Highway 47.
Highway 47, a.k.a New Mexico State Road 47, runs through Valencia county. Near Belen, it cuts through wide open farmlands punctuated by pockets of small adobe settlements & cottonwood groves. On the road, it is possible to feel very visible and yet, oddly alone.
This is the road where witnesses last saw Calico alive at 11:45 am. She was riding her mother’s bicycle – A neon pink Huffy mountain bicycle with yellow control cables and sidewalls. But she wasn’t spotted alone.
Witnesses also reportedly saw a dirty white/light gray-colored 1953 Ford pickup truck with a white handmade shell following the girl during her ride. Calico was unaware of the truck’s presence. It isn’t known whether the truck was involved in her disappearance, but it was definitely suspicious.
Before Calico disappeared, she used to be often accompanied by Doel. But one day after feeling like she was stalked by a motorist, Doel stopped cycling and encouraged Calico to carry a mace. But the girl had rejected the idea.
“I knew, my parents knew, immediately that some foul play had happened,” Chris Calico, her older brother, told a news outlet in 2018. “We didn’t have any idea what.”
The next day after she disappeared, a full-fledged search was launched. During that search, a part of Calico’s Sony Walkman was found near the remote John F. Kennedy Campground – 19 miles east of Highway 47. There were some bike tracks nearby and marks indicating a scuffle or a skid.
This discovery widened the search net, because now Calico’s presence wasn’t limited only to the highway. Ten months later, a chilling piece of evidence came up which led the authorities down another dead end.
The chilling Polaroid
On June 15, 1989, a Polaroid was found in a convenience store parking lot in Port St. Joe, Florida. The photograph was found lying on the ground. At the exact same spot where a white Toyota cargo van was once parked.
The Polaroid featured in national news in July 1989 and caught the attention of Calico’s family, who believed she was the girl in the photo. Her stepfather, John Doel, reported the image to the office of the Valencia County Sheriff.
According to the Charley Project page on her case, The picture depicted a a long-legged young woman and a smaller boy lying on some sheets and a blue striped pillow. Their mouths were covered with duct tape and their hands tied behind their backs.
The photograph was taken in the back of a white Toyota cargo van with no windows, manufactured in the late 1980s. Officials said the picture had to have been taken after May 1989, because the type of film used wasn’t available until then.
A copy of the V.C. Andrews novel My Sweet Audrina, a plastic cup & a squirt gun are also seen in the picture. V. C. Andrews was Calico’s favourite author. There is apparently a phone number written on the spine of the book, but some of the digits are unreadable.
Authorities believed that the girl in the picture was seen walking along the beach in Port St. Joe shortly before the Polaroid was found. Witnesses said the girl was accompanied by several white males who looked like they were giving her verbal commands.
People also believed that the boy in the Polaroid was Michael Henley, a nine-year-old who vanished in April 1988 from the same vicinity of New Mexico as Calico. His mother identified the boy in the photograph as her son. Henley’s remains were found in the Zuni Mountains in 1990.
The FBI examined the Polaroid carefully, but couldn’t determine the identities of either the girl or the boy. The girl’s hairline & ears were similar to Calico, and she had a mark on a calf – one similar to the mark Calico had got from a car accident injury.
It wasn’t confirmed whether the photo was staged or the boy & girl were actually being held against their will. The FBI analysed the picture three times but the results were inconclusive.
Over the years, two more mysterious pictures popped up, leading to a maze of unconfirmed theories.
Many leads, no clues
The second picture was found on July 19, 1989, near a construction site in Montecito, California. It was a blurry image of a girl’s face with her mouth taped shut by duct tape. The girl had a cowlick on her right temple and had a lazy eye, just like Calico.
That led Doel to believe it was her daughter.
But the third photograph wasn’t as convincing. Found in February 1990, it showed a woman loosely bound in gauze, wearing large black-framed eyeglasses, with her eyes covered in gauze. There is a man sitting next to her on the passenger seat of an Amtrak train.
This time, Doel wasn’t sure it was her daughter and believed it to be a cruel joke someone was playing. The trail went cold for a while, until 3 years later, the family received an anyonymous tip.
In late August 1993, Doel received a call from a ‘sincere & concerned’ woman who refused to name herself. She said they might find the remains of their daughter in a field seven miles south of Belen, west of NM 116 in Bosque.
The area was mostly farmland with some isolated homes. As per a news article from the time, the anonymous woman had heard sounds of digging at the site a day after Calico’s disappearance. The Valencia Country Sheriff’s office was immediately alerted.
With a few employees, the Sheriff got the spot dug up but no body was found. In 1998, a judge deemed Calico deceased and her death was ruled a homicide. In the ten years after that, there were no new developments.
Only more bad news.
In 2002, Calico’s biological father was beaten & mugged by two men in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He died as a result on November 2, 2002, at the age of 64. In 2006, her mother, Patty Doel, died from health complications after a series of strokes.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(739x295:741x297):format(webp)/tara-leigh-calico-missing-parents-091925-a0459dc54a8a4a3bb6a0faa1d2602885.jpg)
Up until her death in 2006, Doel believed that her daughter was the woman in the Polaroid. When she relocated to Florida with her husband, she kept a bedroom ready for Calico and would bring her gifts on her birthday and on Christmas.
In the absence of definitive evidence, it seemed like the search was a lost cause.
But an interview in 2008 changed it all.
The Local Offender Theory
20 years after Tara Calico’s disappearance, the local Valencia County newspaper ran a story about her disappearance. The article included an interview with Rene Rivera, a detective from Valencia County.
The detective claimed two local boys in a truck accidentally ran over Calico, and then two other men, possibly their parents, assisted with helping the men hide Calico’s body. Despite knowing the identities of the allegedly culpable men, Rivera explained that they have made no arrests because Calico’s body remains missing.
The detective wanted the suspects, or at least, the people from the community who had seen something, to come forward and provide information. In the interview, he expressed his hopes for putting this case to rest.
“Enough is enough. At this point, I’d like to recover her body. I wanted to do it before her mother died, but she still has family and they want — they need — answers.”
But despite such a passionate appeal, no one came forward, until a 2017 Reddit thread shed some very shocking light on this theory. One of the documents in the thread included an interview given by a man named Henry Brown to Deputy Frank Methola.
Brown had heard some teen boys talking about hitting Calico with their truck, then sexually assaulting & killing her. The teens hid Calico’s body in the bushes, but when a search party began looking for her, they moved her into a basement before later dumping her body into a pond.
As per Brown’s testimony, one of the suspects was Lawrence Romero Jr., the son of the local sheriff. But since Calico’s body wasn’t found, no arrests could be made.
In June 2013, the case was officially reopened and a six-person task force was established to reinvestigate Calico’s disappearance. The task force included federal Homeland Security agents, as well as several state and local police departments.
The FBI also released a missing person poster with a reward of up to $20,000 for “precise details leading to the identification or location of Tara Leigh Calico and information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for her disappearance.”
In 2023, the Valencia County Sheriff’s Office announced a significant breakthrough in the case. They submitted their findings to the DA’s office, but the identities of persons of interest were sealed to preserve the integrity of the investigation.
The case is still open and no verdict has been announced. Prosecuting the case may be another big battle for four main reasons:
- No body has ever been recovered.
- Key evidence may be decades old.
- Witnesses or suspects may have died or moved away.
- The original investigation occurred before modern forensic tools.
Open ending with no closure
Many of Tara Calico’s closest family members have passed away. Surviving relatives & friends like Melinda Esquibel, are still searching for answers.
Esquibel, a filmmaker, decided to make a documentary about the case, but she came across roadblocks in the process. She claims that many people do not wish to talk to her about the case. She also alleges that some people have threatened her life and that of her family.
Meanwhile, Tara’s stepfather, John Doel and stepsister, Michelle Doel, who is now a mother herself, have reluctantly moved on.
“We have, to an extent, moved on with our lives, but it’s always in the back of my mind. I’ve learned to appreciate people more and things that people normally take for granted.” Michelle said in an interview.
The case still remains unsolved, and is one of the world’s most haunting cases of disappearance. Though hope still remains that someone may come forward with key information and finally Tara Calico & her family will get their much-awaited justice.