Some disappearances are unsettling because the person in question is never seen or heard from again. However, some people feel that disappearances that leave a handful of scattered pieces of evidence are even more chilling. That’s the case in the disappearance of Tara Calico, a 19-year-old girl from New Mexico who vanished one morning while riding her bike.
Tara’s case has been called one of the most mysterious and frustrating missing person cases in American history. The bizarre lack of physical evidence from the moment of her disappearance, coupled with the few pieces of troubling evidence that eventually showed up, paints an unsettling picture of her final days.
Tara was an active, ambitious young woman with a bright future ahead of her. Her sudden disappearance in 1988 alarmed her local community and resulted in a massive investigation that, frustratingly, went nowhere. How can a young woman vanish without a trace in broad daylight? What happened to Tara Calico on that September day in 1988?
Tara Calico
Tara Calico was born in Belen, New Mexico, on February 28, 1969. She had two siblings, Michele and Chris, and lived with her parents, David and Patty Doel. Tara attended Belen High School and graduated in 1987. She planned to attend school to become either a psychologist or psychiatrist, having expressed interest in studying the human mind.
Tara was also an active young woman, often borrowing her mother’s bike to ride around her neighborhood in Belen. Patty occasionally accompanied her daughter on these rides along New Mexico State Road 47. However, she eventually grew wary of the route. She warned Tara that she believed the pair were being stalked while out on the bike. Patty warned her daughter to start carrying mace with her on her rides, but Tara considered the suggestion silly and disregarded it.
The day Tara went missing, she told her mom to come and look for her if she wasn’t back at the house by noon. She had plans to meet her boyfriend at half past noon to play tennis. Around noon on September 20, 1988, Patty noticed that Tara hadn’t returned from her bike ride yet. She patrolled down Tara’s usual route on NM 47 to look for her. Instead, she only found evidence of a struggle.
The Disappearance
When Patty went looking for her daughter, she found only pieces of her Walkman tape player, shattered and scattered about the state road. Some investigators later theorized that Tara might have intentionally dropped these pieces to mark her trail, perhaps fearing she was being followed. Others have posited that she might have crashed her bike, breaking her tape player and sending its components all over the side of the road.
No witnesses saw Tara get kidnapped, but investigators quickly surmised that someone had picked her up. Her bike was never recovered, and the police didn’t find any evidence that she ran off the road and into the nearby wilderness. Witnesses did report seeing a light-colored truck riding behind Tara on the morning of her disappearance, but investigators were unable to draw any conclusions from this information. None of the onlookers saw the truck’s license plate.
The investigators searched NM 47 exhaustively, looking for any sign of Tara or, tragically, her remains. Initially, some people speculated that she might have been hit by a car and driven off the road. However, a series of unsettling discoveries soon convinced the world that Tara might have been the victim of a far worse fate than a traffic accident.
Mysterious Polaroid
Months after Tara’s disappearance, the trail had gone completely cold. There was little evidence to help investigators find her, and it seemed likely that this would be the end of her story. However, in June 1985, a passerby noticed a Polaroid picture sitting in the parking lot of a convenience store in Port St. Joe, Florida – hundreds of miles from the town of Belen, where Tara had vanished.
The Polaroid depicted two young subjects, each with their hands bound behind their backs and duct tape over their mouths. The passerby immediately contacted the police and handed over the photo, certain it was evidence of a crime. The police circulated copies of the photo nationwide, hoping to find out who the people in the picture were and to find their abductors.
The passerby who found the photo would later tell police that she found it in the parking spot where a white windowless Toyota cargo van had been parked moments before. She believed the driver appeared to be in his mid-30s and had a mustache. Police in Port St. Joe set up roadblocks and looked for the vehicle, but never apprehended the suspect the passerby described.
Could it be Tara?
As the photo of the abducted pair was circulated, Tara’s friends and family noted the woman bore a striking resemblance to the missing Belen teenager. However, the subject in the photo has her mouth covered, which makes positive identification difficult. However, Tara’s mother, Patty, told reporters that the woman in the photo has a scar on her right leg in the exact same spot that Tara did, making her believe the picture depicted her daughter.
Another element in the photo convinced Patty behind a shadow of a doubt that the photo depicted her daughter, though. One of the few identifiable objects in the frame is a copy of the V.C. Andrews book My Sweet Audrina, which initially seems innocuous. However, Patty told investigators that the book was Tara’s favorite. That, for Patty, was too many coincidences. The man in the white van was Tara’s kidnapper, as far as she was concerned.
Several law enforcement agencies reviewed the photo and came to diverging conclusions. Scotland Yard felt strongly that the woman in the picture was Tara Calico. The Los Alamos National Laboratory conducted a second investigation of the photo and concluded quite the opposite. Meanwhile, the FBI stated that their examination of the image was inconclusive and they couldn’t determine who the subject was.
More Photos Surface
This wasn’t the last break in Tara’s case, either. Several more mysterious Polaroids that could depict the missing young woman have surfaced over the years. One is a blurry image of a woman’s face in front of a striped blue-and-white background. Some investigators have noted that the background resembles the blue-and-white pillow seen behind the female subject in the 1989 van photo.
Another, more unsettling photograph was found years later and depicted a woman wrapped in large amounts of gauze. She’s wearing thick, black-rimmed glasses over gauze that covers her eyes. There’s a man visible next to her in the frame, and the two appear to be on an Amtrak passenger train. These photos have also not been confirmed to be Tara, but her family still notes that these are the only three photos out of thousands they’ve seen that they haven’t ruled out.
These unusual Polaroids have done little to help investigators solve Tara’s disappearance. Indeed, it’s hard to say if they even depict the missing young woman. Still, they’ve painted a grim picture about a possible fate that could have befallen Tara Calico. And it is chilling enough to keep amateur sleuths interested in her case, even years after her unsolved disappearance.
Recent Developments
Tara’s case has been the subject of numerous anonymous tips and ongoing investigations. In 2009, a series of photographs sent to the Port St. Joe police chief, David Barnes, sparked new interest in the case. The photos depict a young boy who looks somewhat similar to the male subject in the 1989 van photo.
In each of the photographs, someone drew over the boy’s mouth with a black pen to create a similar visual effect as the black duct tape over the mouths of the two subjects in the 1989 photo. It’s unclear whether the boy in the pictures is the same one seen in the original photo or if it’s simply a boy who looks similar to him. Still, the subject matter and the New Mexico postmark on the envelope were enough to convince police that the photos were somehow related to Tara’s disappearance.
Bizarrely, the photos were sent around the same time that a “psychic” contacted Port St. John police about a break regarding the case. She told investigators that she believed a runaway she had worked with in a strip club years before could have been Tara. When pressed on how she might know this, the psychic told police that it had been revealed to her in a dream.
Tara’s Legacy
Tara’s case hasn’t been completely closed yet. She was declared legally dead in 1998, but investigators aren’t giving up their quest for the truth and justice. A task force was organized in 2013 to help break open new leads in the case.
As of 2019, the FBI offers 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.”
If you know anything about the case, don’t hesitate to contact the FBI with any tips that could help lead them to the truth.
