Tara Leigh Calico was 19, a college student and a keen cyclist who covered roughly 36 miles most mornings on the two-lane highway that runs south from Belen toward Rio Communities. On Tuesday, September 20, 1988 she set out from the family home on Brugg Street at about 9:30 am on her mother’s neon-pink Huffy mountain bike, because her own had a flat. She had a tennis date at 12:30 and told her mother, Patty Doel, to come looking for her if she was not back by noon. She was never seen again.
What happened
Several drivers saw her pedaling along New Mexico State Road 47 that morning, the last of them at around 11:45 am, about two miles from home. Some of them also noticed an old, light-colored Ford pickup with a homemade camper shell traveling slowly just behind her. Its driver was later sketched as a light-skinned man in his late thirties or forties, but neither the truck nor the man has ever been found, and investigators have never been able to say whether either had anything to do with her.
Patty Doel began driving the route a few minutes after noon and found nothing. The next day she came across a Boston cassette tape lying beside the road some three miles from the house, and pieces of a Sony Walkman later turned up well to the east, near a remote campground. She believed her daughter had dropped them on purpose to mark a trail. The bicycle has never been recovered, and in later years the sheriff’s office concluded that the tape, the Walkman fragments and other early finds could not be tied to the case.
The Polaroid
On June 15, 1989, almost nine months later and half a continent away, a shopper leaving a convenience store on US 98 in Port St. Joe, Florida, picked up a Polaroid lying face down in a space just vacated by a white Toyota cargo van with no side windows. She told police the driver was a mustached man who looked to be in his thirties. Roadblocks failed to stop the van. The picture showed a dark-haired young woman and a younger boy lying on mismatched bedding in a cramped space, both with black tape across their mouths and their hands apparently tied behind them. Polaroid said the film stock had only gone on sale in May 1989.
When the image aired on the television program A Current Affair that July, friends of the family called Patty Doel. She studied the print and became convinced the woman was Tara, pointing to a mark on the calf that matched a scar from a car accident and to a paperback of V. C. Andrews’s My Sweet Audrina, Tara’s favorite author, lying beside her. The family of Michael Henley, a nine-year-old who had gone missing on a hunting trip in New Mexico’s Zuni Mountains in April 1988, thought the boy could be theirs.
The experts split. Doel said Scotland Yard gave her a positive identification; an analysis at Los Alamos National Laboratory concluded the woman was not Tara; and the FBI laboratory’s comparison of facial proportions could neither confirm nor exclude her. The boy question was settled in June 1990, when a rancher found Michael Henley’s remains a few miles from his family’s campsite and the death was ruled accidental. Two more Polaroids surfaced later, one of a gagged girl near a building site in Montecito, California, and one of a bound, blindfolded woman beside a man on an Amtrak train. In 2009 the police chief in Port St. Joe received photocopied pictures of a boy with ink drawn over his mouth, mailed from Albuquerque. None of these images has ever been identified.
The investigation
Back in Valencia County, rumors outran evidence. In 2008 the sheriff at the time, Rene Rivera, said publicly that he believed two local teenagers had struck Calico with their truck while harassing her and then killed her to keep her quiet, and that others had helped hide what happened. He said he knew who they were but could not charge anyone without a body. A state judge had declared her dead, and a homicide victim, in 1998.
A renewed inquiry with the FBI and the Rocky Mountain Information Network led to a sealed search warrant for a home in the county in 2021. On June 13, 2023 Sheriff Denise Vigil announced that investigators believed they had enough evidence to send the file to the district attorney for review of possible charges; the identities of the persons of interest remain sealed by the court. Lieutenant Joseph Rowland, the lead investigator, has said the suspects were people from the community who likely knew her, and that the Polaroid, for all its national fame, mainly pulled attention away from the local search.
Where it stands
By September 2025, more than two years after the referral, the Albuquerque Journal reported that no charges had been filed and that the 13th Judicial District Attorney’s Office was still reviewing the case. Because the statute of limitations has expired on lesser crimes, only first-degree murder and certain sex offenses remain chargeable. Investigators were also examining an old mine shaft south of Belen as a possible burial site. Calico’s mother, father and stepfather all died without learning what became of her, and the young woman in the Polaroid has never been named.