Obscure Occurrences : The Disappearance of Tara Calico

 On the 28th of February, 1969, David and Patty Calico birthed their first daughter, Tara Calico, in New Mexico, the land of enchantment in an ordinary world. Tara was an adventurous young girl who grew up exploring the great outdoors, joined by her siblings and friends around the area. During her childhood, Tara bore witness to the divorce of her parents. She remained with her mother, Patty, who remarried John Del and moved to Belen, another regular New Mexican suburb.

 As Tara entered adolescence and young adulthood, she became a beloved member of her high school class, by schoolmates and close friends alike. They described her as an athletic yet highly intelligent individual with an innate kindness not often seen in children of her age. She was admired by her peers and revered by her teachers, who noticed her undying responsibility and knack for extreme organization, a trait that would be highlighted after her disappearance.

 Driven by her fascination for mind and behavioural studies, Tara decided to pursue psychology after completion of high school and she chose the University of New Mexico, Valencia branch, as her destined school of study. It was around this time that Tara also started dating former high school classmate, Jack Cole, a captain of their football team, and well-liked student-athlete. The two met at a social event with mutual friends after they graduated and started a relationship soon after. The couple often talked about travelling the states and country together, and they often stayed active while dating. This was the preferred lifestyle for Tara, who was a religious biker and outdoor enthusiast. But sadly, it would become the first domino to a fateful collapse.

(Source: FBI)

Disappearance

 In the early walking hours of the morning of September 20th, 1988, Tara Calico was jolted out of her slumber by the alarm of her clock. After regular preparation, the teenager had left her home, riding her bicycle along New Mexico state road 47 with her mother, Patty, by her side. 

 Although the bike ride had been a morning routine for the duo, that day had been a little different. Patty had quit riding with her daughter after allegedly being stalked by a motorist. She had urged her daughter to ride with Mace, but Tara had rejected the idea. Before parting ways, Tara had asked her mother to come to pick her up if she failed to return by noon, as she had plans to play tennis with her then-boyfriend at 12:30 pm followed by college classes at 3:30 pm.

 Over the next two hours, Tara biked approximately 17 miles to the southern railroad tracks outside of town, her usual route. After an assumingly normal ride, she turned around to start the ride home. At around 11:30 am, two unidentified ranch hands had seen Tara on her pink bicycle, riding northbound along State Route 47, towards her home. Nearly 15 minutes later, three men driving southbound on the other lane of the 47 had passed by Tara on her bicycle. In line with their statement, Tara had been listening to music on her Walkman with headphones and she had been seemingly ignorant to a white pickup truck that had been tailing her closely. 

 Not long after the second sighting, another driver in the south lane passed by Tara before noticing the white truck following her. The teenager had been just under five miles away from the Rio Communities. Furthermore, the driver claimed that the ominous truck contained multiple occupants and not just a solo driver. This would become the last confirmed sighting of Tara Calico. 

 Staying true to her word, Patty Doel had set out to pick up Tara at five minutes past noon. Driving up and down the railroad tracks both ways along Route 47, she had made no sighting of her daughter or her pink bike. Patty had even crossed the nearby hospital to check if her daughter had an accident, but no one matching her description was accounted for. Eventually, the wearied mother called the Valencia County Sheriff's office, before a police search party commenced. 

Investigation

 The following day, on September 21st, the search team discovered a set of bicycle tracks on the west side of Route 47, four miles from the Rio Communities and close to Tara's last sighting. The bike tracks travelled from the side of the road onto a soft shoulder and towards a location about 100 yards away from the highway. This new location had actual tire tracks, as well as a fresh oil slick. From here, police personnel discovered a trail of footprints that lead them to their biggest find in the case thus far, Tara's cassette tapes, broken pieces of her Walkman device, and empty beer cans.

 Between September 21st and the 23rd, law enforcement doubled their search efforts around State Route 47. On September 24th, investigators discovered the remaining pieces of Tara's broken Walkman around the entrance of John F. Kennedy campground, a remote and unpopulated area situated 20 miles away from the location of initial discovery. Throughout that same weekend, the Ventura County Sheriff's Office dispatched more than 300 air and land searches, but they returned empty-handed.

 Over the days that followed, authorities sought people who had witnessed Tara on her bike on the 20th. They found seven people who claimed to have seen Tara and five of them claimed to have seen a white pickup truck tailing her. Four of these individuals were even hypnotized in an attempt to pull more details, but nothing concrete was learned.

 One month later, on October 25th, lead investigator Lawrence Romero told the public that their main suspects were believed to be two males, based on the report that the white pickup truck was seen with two men inside. The driver was described as thirty-five to forty-five years old, white with red hair, standing at six feet tall and weighing 200 pounds. Most interestingly, he had wrinkles between his eyes and temples.

An Eerie Photograph

 On June 15th, 1989, an unnamed woman in Port St. Joe Florida came to the police with a Polaroid photograph she found in the parking lot of a convenience store. The picture displayed a young female adult and a young boy, duct taped at the mouth, bound at the wrists, and laying in the back of a van. The Polaroid was broadcasted across the country, and relatives of Patty Doel called her to inform her that the girl in the disturbing photograph bore a striking resemblance to Tara. Patty flew to Florida to take a closer look and agreed that the woman in the shot looked like her daughter.

(Source: Unsolved Mysteries Wiki)

 Over the next year, two similar photographs came to the surface, but they featured a different woman than the one in the original Port St. Joe photograph. While all three are believed to potentially involve Tara Calico, none have ever been confirmed to contain her image. Thus, their status has left debates among government agencies and amateur sleuths alike. 

 Despite endless searches around New Mexico by countless investigators and private contractors, little evidence surrounding the case has been uncovered. In September of 2008, 20 years after the fateful morning, the then-sheriff of Ventura County, Rene Rivera, came out with a statement alleging he knew who kidnapped and killed Tara, but without any incriminating evidence or bodies to exhume the conclusion, could only remain a theory. In 2013, a task force was created by six different federal and local agents to reopen the investigation, but nothing new has surfaced regarding Tara Calico. 

 When people familiar with Tara Calico's disappearance think of her cold case, the first image that pops into their head is the suspicious Polaroid photograph found at the Port St. Joe's convenience store in June of 1989. As previously mentioned, the picture appeared to show a young woman and a little boy held against their will, trapped in the back of a van without an identity or story. After the woman turned the Polaroid into the police, she mentioned that the parking spot where it had been found was occupied by a white Toyota van when she arrived at the store, leaving seconds before her return to the parking lot. The woman was able to catch a quick glimpse of the driver and stated he was middle-aged and moustached. Thus, the suspicions about the photo began to click immediately. 

 Upon studying the picture herself, Patty understood that the lady in the photo was in fact her daughter. She stated that Tara had been the victim of a car accident and had battled a leg injury that left her with a scar along her thigh, pointing to a discoloured streak along the bound woman's thigh in the Polaroid. 

 Investigators on Tara's case agreed that there were enough similarities to warrant professional analysis and multiple agencies took a closer look. However, out of three detailed inspections, the results were inconclusive. Scotland Yard said the bound woman was Tara, The Los Alamos National Laboratory said it was not Tara and the FBI could not make an official conclusion. 

 The naysayers had plenty of their own physical traits to emphasize. First and foremost, the bound woman's facial features didn't quite match Tara's. Their eyebrows are of distinctly different shapes, as well as their overall draw lines. That being said, we must consider the drastic changes in settings. The Polaroid could not have been taken any sooner than May of 1989, as that specific stock of film had not been produced and released until the spring of that year. Thus, the photo must be depicting Tara at least seven months after her disappearance, a timespan long enough to induce physical changes. But ultimately, there is too little information in the Polaroid to make an affirmation, regarding Tara. Of course, there is an entirely separate mystery in the Port St. Joe photograph as well. 

(Source: Unsolved Mysteries Wiki)

 The little boy lying next to the bound woman deserves equal attention. When the Polaroid first made waves, many people wondered if the male subject was Michael Henley. A young boy who went missing five months before Tara, in April of 1988, during a hunting trip with his father. He had wandered away from the campsite before vanishing into thin air, with searching crews failing to find a shred of evidence. 

 While he had no personal relationship with Tara or the Doel family, his physical characteristics matched the bound boy. How or why they had been together was cloudy, but if put forth the possibility of a serial kidnapper. It wasn't outside the realm of possibility that they had been secluded together, across the country. However, this theory went mute a year later in June of 1990, when Michael's remains were found buried in the Zuni mountains of New Mexico. 

 Forensic analysis found that Michael had most likely died of exposure in the wilderness after wandering off from the campsite, which was seven miles from the excavation zone. Thus, when Michael's fate was learned, the connection to Tara dissolved and the bound boy in the photograph remains unidentifiable. 

Rivera's Theory

 While the Polaroid controversy spawned thousands of theories on its own, law enforcement proposed an interesting theory in 2008. After years of stale leads and a spiralling investigation, Rene Rivera, the then Valencia County sheriff, said that he actually knew what happened to Tara. The Valencia County news bulletin reported on the 19th anniversary of the disappearance that Rivera, "Received information over the years that two men, who were teenagers at the time of Tara's disappearance, found her riding her bike on the rural road that day and had help afterwards disposing of her body." 

 In line with his theory, two men on a pickup truck were taunting Tara before hitting her bike, kidnapping her and then killing her. The lack of concrete evidence had prevented Rivera from acting on the tips or arresting those responsible. Rivera wouldn't even release the names he had in relation to the theory, making many citizens, including stepfather, John Doel, curious why he would make the claim in the first place. Rivera counted and said that he made the announcement in hopes it would persuade the perpetrators or anyone with information about Tara's resting place to come forward and bring legal closure to the Calico and Doel families. Yet, no matter how much the sheriff pleaded, no one came forward and his desperate conclusion, ended up causing more pain than it relieved.

Henry Brown's Confession

 With this in mind, Sheriff Rivera's theory does match, a recorded incident left behind in Tara Calico's case documents, now available in the public record. Inside of the document, a section contains an interview with Henry Brown, a New Mexico citizen who had succumbed to failing health. The interview, which some call a confession, had been held by Sheriff Deputy Frank Methola, who had been specifically requested by Brown when he had been asked to share his side of the Tara Calico story. 

 While there is no date connected to these events, it is believed to have taken place years after the disappearance. In the interview, Brown recounted hanging around fellow Valencia County teenagers, led by troublemaker Lawrence Romero, Jr., The son of the old sheriff Lawrence Romero, Sr. He said Lawrence Jr. was a drug peddler and interested in dating Tara Calico, while she had been dating a man named Jeff Abita. 

 While attending a party with his mischievous friends, Lawrence allegedly confessed to having raped and murdered Tara. They had originally just tossed the body in some nearby bushes before transferring it to a nondescript pond. Furthermore, Henry Brown was not the only person to tell this story to authorities. Another man, named Donald Dutcher, also informed police in 2013, that a suspect had confessed their heinous crime to him, but he had not revealed the exact location of the body. 

 Unfortunately, neither Brown’s nor Dutcher’s stories could be confirmed by Lawrence Jr or his friends themselves, because they had all met their demise by the time of the interviews. 

Theories

 Many believe Tara may have fled on her own, explaining the added vanishing of her bike and the breadcrumb trail to nowhere made up by her broken Walkman. Yet, the theory loses its footing when considering her healthy home life, relationships and drive to finish school. There were absolutely no warning signs of abandonment and Tara had plans in place to make sure she wouldn't get lost, a far cry from a scheme to dissolve into the faraway world. 

 Another prominent theory put Tara's fate in the hands of a kidnapper, a serial criminal with a twisted mind and a knack for public attention. This idea was born not just from the one Polaroid found in Port St. Joe's, but from a series of photos found by outsiders and received by Florida police. In addition to the first picture, another Polaroid image was discovered out of construction sites in California, depicting a young woman gagged and seemingly in distress. While the picture was up close and blurry, the woman on it bore a few similarities to Tara. Furthermore, the fabric in the background matched the fabric seen in the Port St. Joe's Polaroid. 

Conclusion

 Handled by the FBI and the New Mexico State Police, the case still remains open. In September 2021, the New Mexico State Police claimed that they had a new lead in the case, but no updates have been made ever since.

(Source: FBI)

Unfortunately, considering the fact that over four decades have passed since Tara’s disappearance, the chances of discovering what happened to her only seem to dwindle down the years. To add on, the only proposed suspect, Lawrence Jr., had already met his demise, eliminating the possibility of interrogation. Also, the expanse of New Mexico's wastelands is vast and funds to carry out complex searches are at a low point, ruling out the possibility of discovering her body if she was indeed murdered and buried. These factors suggest that Tara Calico’s case would remain trapped in a cloud of mystery.

References

• "Will Tara Calico Ever Be Found?" Investigation Discovery
• "Tara Calico" Unsolved Mysteries Wiki
• "Missing Tara Calico" Uncovered
• "Inside The Disappearance Of Tara Calico And The Frightening Photos Left Behind" All That Is Interesting