Barbara Holik was a 33-year-old German-born woman who lived in Taos. She made jewelry and pottery and worked at an art gallery called Spruce’s Taos Pueblo Gallery. Described as shy and quiet, she still had a healthy social life and a big smile. She was also very artistic and fit right in with the local eclectic Taos art scene. Her employer at Spruce’s let her sell her own creations there, alongside the Native American art featured by the gallery.
Holik had been in the US for five years, and her visa status was iffy by 1995. Nevertheless, she loved the desert Southwest and Native American art, and she did not want to go back to Germany.
Holik had last been seen enjoying some drinks with her friends on June 23, 1995, at El Patio Bar on the Taos Plaza. She often met with these friends at this location. She enjoyed a few glasses of Scotch with water before leaving around 11:00 pm to walk home, as she regularly did. She did not appear to be very inebriated. She was never heard from again. Her friends became concerned when they didn’t hear from her for a few days; it wasn’t like her to just disappear.
When she didn’t show up to work at the art gallery on June 26, her employer went by her Rosarita Road apartment and found the door unlocked. Inside, everything was intact, fastidiously clean, and undisturbed. There were large bank rolls of cash in a black bag on the floor in her bedroom. Her purse sat on the counter, containing her keys, passport, ID, and other belongings. Her Ford Fiesta sat in the driveway, undisturbed as well. He knew something was wrong and he promptly contacted police.
Police went by her apartment to check on her on the 27th. They, too, noticed that her apartment appeared neat and orderly, with her belongings and cash located where they were supposed to be. But they also noticed something out of place: a pair of work gloves lying on the floor, one by the door and one by her fridge. Her bed was also unmade, indicating she had slept in it shortly before vanishing, because she was not the type to leave her bed unmade.
On June 30, police received a startling tip from a maid who had performed a move-out cleaning on the apartment next door to Holik’s. The apartment had been rented short-term by four men from Albuquerque. They moved out on the 23, the last night Holik was seen alive. While cleaning, the maid discovered a pair of black lady’s shoes lying on the couch. They were determined to be Holik’s shoes.
The maid also noted that a chair had been placed in the center of the room, and the mattress cover and bedding was missing from the bed. Most disturbingly of all, the phone cord had been severed between the handset and the receiver. Holik had a key to that apartment and would go inside to turn outside lights to the building on and off. The maid had already performed move-out cleaning by the time cops spoke to her, so there was no forensic evidence to be found.
The four tenants were questioned and they all claimed they didn’t know Holik at all. They weren’t questioned about their activities the night of the 23, nor were witnesses and alibis sought for them. They seem like key suspects, or at least people of interest. Yet they were allowed to slip through the cracks after an underwhelming interview.
Was someone hiding out in that apartment, perhaps even lying in wait for Holik to enter? Did Holik go to bed, then slip out of bed because she heard something next door? Did she forget the lights, so she slipped out of bed and entered next door to turn them off, only to meet her killer there? Was she abducted from her apartment? It almost seems like someone was waiting for her or even lured her into that apartment.
Police followed many leads over the years to no avail. They were called to a grave near Tres Piedras but it contained dog bones. They investigated a man whose library card had been found in the back of Holik’s car. That man had been arrested for smuggling hashhish in a boat off of Canada two decades before. Due to the large amounts of cash in Holik’s apartment and her association with the man, some think she was involved in drug smuggling and may have entered witness protection or disappeared of her own accord as a result. Police even searched the waste treatment plant near Taos after a psychic claimed Holik had been buried alive near a place with a foul odor.
Nothing turned up her body. It didn’t help that police were not trying very hard to find her. From day one, they believed she had simply gotten tired of her life in the US and had returned to Germany of her own volition, perhaps to sort out her shaky immigration status. Given the evidence at the adjacent apartment and the nature of Holik’s character, I don’t think that seems likely. Plus, Holik’s friend from Germany was due to visit just a few days after Holik went missing, and Holik had purchased tickets for the pair to go rafting. She also seemed content with her life and was not the type to just disappear without telling anyone. All of this makes her disappearance appear very involuntary.
Then there was the issue of her passport. Holik’s brother, Hans Holik, came in from Germany on August 19-21, 1995. Hans Holik was a policeman in Germany. He collected his sister’s belongings and put them in storage. He felt that because her passport was with her things in her apartment, she could not have left back to Germany. How could she possibly have done so? She would have needed that passport to get a ticket back to Germany and also to renew her passport once there.
I think something bad happened to Holik and she has remained unfound due to police incompetence. A more thorough search of the cleaned-out apartment by a forensics team might have turned some DNA up, even after the maid cleaned it. The former tenants should have been questioned more thoroughly about their whereabouts on the night of the 23 and their stories should have been confirmed. I also wonder how well the police looked into Holik’s ex-husband. In January of 1994, Holik divorced Thomas Killebrew on grounds of incompatibility. Some say she had married him for her immigration status. But could there have been some ill will there?
In 2003, a man called in a bloodstained women’s shirt that he found near Tres Piedras, hanging in a pinon tree. Holik had been wearing a lavender blouse the night she was last seen and it is unclear if the blouse was ever found in her apartment. The man immediately suspected the blouse belonged to Holik. The man had apparently first noticed the blouse in 1995, about a month after Holik went missing. He called the sheriff about it twice, but they never retrieved it. He dropped the matter until he read a newspaper article about Holik in 2003. That’s when he decided to get it down himself and bring it into the sheriff’s office. The shirt was thoroughly deteriorated by wind and sun by that time. Police sent it to the New Mexico State Crime Lab to see if it could yield DNA. Apparently, it has not been successfully linked to Holik. I don’t know if the shirt belonged to Holik, but I do think that it might be linked to something terrible that happened to a woman in the area.
There have been no suspects. Holik was not known to be romantically involved with anyone. She lived alone but had many friends. She didn’t have any known enemies.
What the heck happened to her? And why?
One response
[…] Barbara Holik, Toni Padilla is one such case. She vanished without a trace from her Silver City home on July 3, […]