If you are a true crime junkie, then you have probably heard the name “Tara Calico” before. This missing Belen lady had her whole life ahead of her when she went for a bike ride on September 20, 1988, along Highway 47 in Valencia County. But then something happened to her and she has never been seen or heard from since. It is not likely she ran away and foul play is suspected.
Tara Leigh Calico just wanted to ride her bike. She was an active person and it was not unusual for her to ride a 36-mile route near Belen. Usually, her mom went with her. However, an aggressive driver had been trying to run them off the road the day before, even driving back and forth by them multiple times, as if targeting them specifically. This driver made Patty Doel so uncomfortable that she refused to go on the 20th and didn’t want Tara to go, either. Tara said her mom was just overreacting and laughed off her concern. Patty lent Tara her neon pink Huffy mountain bike that day, since Tara’s bike had a flat tire, and she also offered Tara some pepper spray, which Tara didn’t take.
Tara probably should have, though, because she never came home that day. Neither she nor her mom’s bike were ever found. Only her cassette player with a Boston tape in it was recovered along the highway, alongside some tire scuffle marks.
Tara was effortlessly beautiful. She was studying psychiatry at UNM in Albuquerque and was only nineteen, with her whole life ahead of her. Not only was she exceptionally bright, but she was known to be genuine and kind. She also enjoyed the outdoors. She had a boyfriend and many friends and was close with her mom, Patty Doel.
The day she disappeared, she had various activities planned, suggesting she did not disappear intentionally. Leaving out the door, she joked to her mom, “Come look for me if I’m not home by noon!” These were her creepy last words because she did not come home at noon.
Highway 47 is notoriously dangerous and I doubt it was better in the 80s. It seems possible that Tara was accidentally hit by a driver who didn’t want to pay for the crime and hid her body instead. But why not just leave her lying there then? Why go through the trouble of moving her body and bike and hiding them somewhere so well that they have never been recovered, nearly forty years later? This suggests something more nefarious went on. Someone may have seen Tara and specifically attacked her – or someone was targeting her.
Multiple people came forward, stating that they had seen Tara riding along Hwy 47 that day and heading back toward her home around 11:45 am with her headphones on. Some witnesses claimed to have seen a beige 1953 Chevy pickup truck with a camper shell driving near her as well. It is unknown if this truck actually had anything to do with her disappearance, but it’s long been a subject of interest in the case. It would be very convenient to seize a woman and her bike and stash them inside a camper shell.
The fact a driver in a truck seemed to be targeting Tara and her mother the day before is very weird. Could this vehicle targeting Tara and Patty have been the same 1953 Chevy truck with the camper shell that supposedly was seen near Tara when she disappeared? I have never found any sources that state what kind of vehicle Tara’s mom described as bullying them. I imagine the cops know this detail as it seems very pertinent.
The Creepy Photos
One development is a photograph found in a parking space in Port St. Joe, Florida, in 1989. Moments before, a windowless Toyota van was parked in the space, driven by a mustachioed man in his thirties. When it pulled away, this photo was left behind, probably accidentally but maybe deliberately. The woman who found the photo understandably flipped out and called authorities. Police set up roadblocks but never located the van.
People thought that the photo might be a clue in the Calico case because the girl resembles Tara Calico, according to her mother. Labs have analyzed it and one says it is Tara while another says it is not. Scotland Yard is the lab that claims this could be Tara due to a scar on her leg that matches one Tara sustained from a car accident and a cowlick on her hairline and the presence of anisocoria (where one pupil is slightly larger than the other). The photo was printed on film that has never been made before June 1989, thus dating it to roughly around the same time it was found.
The photo shows two kids, bound and gagged with duct tape, in the back of a van. The girl supposedly resembles Tara. The boy is unidentified, though people originally thought he was a missing New Mexico boy named Michael Henley. Henley was later found dead from the elements, not too far from the campsite where he had vanished.
The windowless Toyota van has never been located, even though police set up roadblocks immediately after the initial weird photo in Florida; the kids have never been identified, despite the photo circulating online and in newspapers for decades now; and no bodies have ever been linked to the kids in the photo.
I don’t think you can say the girl resembles Tara, given that almost half of her face is hidden by duct tape. The face shape is similar but the eyes and eyebrows are not. The brows are totally different shapes, actually.
When I look at this photo, my gut says, “Hoax.” I think these are two siblings playing a prank. They look alike and have similar skin tones and hair colors, as if they’re brother and sister. They both have nice muscle tone and tans, telling me that they do not spend all of their time tied up in the back of a van, unless of course they were just kidnapped off the beach. The hint of a smirk is visible on their faces under the duct tape; the boy’s expression is of mock terror. There is no redness around the tape on their faces, no irritation on their arms, suggesting that they haven’t been duct taped or tied up for long. You can’t even see how they are tied up, as if they are just holding their arms behind their backs. Their arms seem pretty relaxed and not restrained. If they are restrained, their restraint devices do not leave any sort of depression on the muscles and tendons running up their arms, the way you might expect a rope or tight handcuffs would. The girl’s legs are shaved, which the FBI stated is inconsistent with a kidnapping.
The girl is reading My Sweet Audrina by V.C. Andrews, Tara’s favorite book, and it’s tucked next to her comfortably. The fact that My Sweet Audrina is Tara’s favorite book is not that exciting of a coincidence – in the late 1980s, many people were huge fans of this novel. You can also see a squirt gun and a plastic cup rolled haphazardly under the girl’s leg. A squirt gun could be an instrument of torture I suppose (I’m being facetious), but in my opinion, this just doesn’t jibe with a horrific kidnapping.
Nevertheless, the photo is disconcerting, and I hope this is not evidence of a real kidnapping that has not been solved. I do not think that the girl is Tara, though. For a family desperate for answers, though, it is easy to see clues and possibilities in anything.
The photograph has led to a spur of related tips that have ultimately led nowhere. The police chief in Port St. Joe, FL, David Barnes, received two letters from Albuquerque, NM, postmarked June 10 and August 10, 2009. One was a picture of a little boy with sandy brown hair and black ink scribbled over his mouth; the second one was an original of the boy; both photos were printed on copy paper. His identity was not specified in the packages.
The same photo was also sent to the Port St. Joe paper, The Star. For some reason, this made LE think these photos have to do with the Tara Calico case. I think they assumed it might be the boy in the van photo. This boy has yet to be identified.
There was also a weird, blurry Polaroid photo found at a construction site in Montecito, CA of a girl with tape over her mouth, lying on a blue-striped pillow. It was printed on film manufactured after June 1989. Sound familiar? Yeah, it could very well be the same girl as the Port St. Joe photo. In which case, maybe she was abducted somewhere (maybe she was Tara Calico), driven all over the Southern US in the back of a van with another child, taken to both California and Florida, and maybe even killed and buried in the vicinity of the construction site. Absolutely crazy.
It seems weird the abductor just littered Polaroids of this gagged girl on the blue-striped pillow around the Southern half of the US. If the photos are not a hoax, then it seems like a sick tease for LE, a way of bragging about what he did. And it’s the only evidence this sicko ever allowed LE to find, which means he’s slick if nothing else.
The Calico family feels that another photo that surfaced is a possible hoax. This is a disturbing photo of a woman on an Amtrak train. She is wrapped in gauze and her eyes are covered in gauze. She is wearing large black-framed sunshades. Sitting next to her is an unidentified male. Despite the photo subject’s face being covered in gauze, people see a resemblance between this woman and Tara. The only people I can think of who wear gauze like that are severe burn patients…or plastic surgery patients. Some people think this photo was taken as a gag. I don’t think someone would kill a woman on a train, wrap her up in gauze like a mummy, and ride around with her, taking Polaroids. Then again, I’ve been horrified and outraged by the unspeakable and unimaginable acts of the human race before, so….
The Stripper/Psychic Tip
The poor Doels have been plagued with calls and messages from psychics over the years, claiming to know where Tara is. These people tick me off. While I fully believe that some people have gifts, I think the majority of psychic stuff is bullshit and psychics who claim to find bodies are doing way more harm than good to hopeful, worried families. It is sad that the Doels must deal with this type of harassment.
The FBI also receive tips from these loons and they are a nuisance. One such tip came from a psychic who claimed to have worked with a runaway at a strip club somewhere in California who was later murdered. The psychic realized (I’m assuming through a mystic vision) that this stripper was Tara Calico.
Of course, the FBI immediately dismissed this tip. But they did think it was weird timing that the psychic stripper called right around the same time that the police in Port St. Joe were receiving these strange letters with the photocopies of the young boy with marker scribbles over his mouth. I don’t know if this was a coincidence or if this tipster might have been trying to aid the investigation and thus was the person behind the letters.
It does not seem that Tara had any reason or desire to flee her life in Belen. She had a boyfriend that she had a tennis date with at 12:30 the day she disappeared. She had a bright future ahead of her, and plans to finish school with a degree that would have earned her a lot of money. She was relentlessly meticulous and organized. Eyewitnesses saw her riding home at 11:45. She did not seem like the type to just drop everything and take off to Cali to become a stripper on a whim. People who do that type of thing seem to usually be victims of human trafficking, or else they are on drugs. So unless she was abducted and her abductor made her dance in California, I think this tip can be safely dismissed.
Deathbed Confession: Henry Brown
In 2016, there was a deathbed confession by a man named Henry Brown. Brown stated that his teenage neighbors told him they had killed Tara. Apparently, Lawrence liked Tara but she didn’t like him back and she was dating Jeff Abeyta, which made him mad. Furthermore, Lawrence and Jeff both sold drugs, so the killing was drug-related according to Brown, though he never makes it clear how. So on the 20th, Lawrence and his buddies were driving around when they spotted Tara on her neon pink bike and hit her intentionally. They then took her to a gravel pit, where they all took turns raping and sodomizing her. She threatened to go to the police, so Leroy Chavez and Dave Silva held her down while Lawrence Romero, Jr., stabbed her to death to prevent that from ever happening. Then they hid her in some bushes. When the search began for her, they got nervous she would be found and they wrapped her in a blue tarp and stashed her in the basement dug under their trailer, where they hung out smoking pot, drinking margaritas, and eating, apparently not minding the dead body smell. Eventually, they disposed of her body in a pond somewhere near the mountains and there is a pond that investigators think may be the one Brown was referencing.
Rene Rivera was the sheriff’s deputy at the time of Calico’s disappearance in Valencia County and he was Lawrence Romero Jr’s father’s friend. According to Brown, he was “hired” by Romero’s dad to help cover up what really happened. He even destroyed a suicide note that Lawrence Romero, Jr., later wrote, confessing to the crime. Rivera was arrested in 2017 for domestic violence, suggesting he has a temper and a lack of respect for women. Given the many instances of corruption I have learned about in New Mexico law enforcement, I don’t doubt this is possible.
Rene Rivera did become sheriff a year after Calico went missing. He released a statement in 2008, claiming that they have evidence that Calico was killed by two teens in a truck and buried in Valencia County and the parents of the teens helped cover up the crime. Two other teens got involved after the fact. Plus, these young men all knew Tara. This sounds a lot like Brown’s tale.
However, the sheriff’s office doesn’t have enough concrete evidence to take the suspects to trial. This really enraged John Doel, who wonders why the sheriff’s office would even make a statement about potential suspects without any solid evidence for a conviction. This does seem both clumsy and cruel to the victim’s family. If Brown’s deathbed confession holds any water, then maybe Rivera is throwing out a story similar to what really happened but making excuses so that he can continue the cover-up he has been involved in since 1988.
And why wouldn’t Brown’s confession hold any water? It seems weird to me that someone would spend the precious last moments of his life talking about something that didn’t really happen. But it has happened before. The case of Emma Alice Smith comes to mind. In this case, a young woman disappeared and a man named David Wright made a deathbed confession that he had killed her; however, a subsequent investigation revealed that Emma had in fact eloped and was very much alive and Wright had made a fake deathbed confession for no known reason. So maybe the Calico case had made a real impression on Henry Brown, enough so that he spent his last moments talking about being involved in it in some small way, when in reality he had nothing to do with it at all and Tara did not die at the hands of these young men.
Still, it just seems a little too fitting. At some point in the report of Brown’s deathbed confession, which I link just below, it’s mentioned that there are three suspects and one is deceased. Well, that meshes pretty well with Brown’s story of three boys, and Lawrence Romero, Jr., is now deceased from suicide. It seems significantly more plausible to me that Tara was killed by someone local, in a crime of opportunity or even an accident that they then frantically covered up, rather than kidnapped and held in the back of a van with another boy and driven all the way from NM to Florida and then to California. It also seems more plausible to me that she is buried in Valencia County. After all, it’s a big county, with lots of vacant land and open, rural areas where a body could be hidden fairly easily. Bury somebody on private property and they might never be found. Involve a deputy and your odds of never getting caught go up significantly.
The Victims Go Beyond Tara
The family never did recover. I mean, who would recover? They always kept a room for Tara in case she came home and they always bought presents for her daughter for her birthday and Christmas, piling them in Tara’s otherwise-untouched bedroom. They saved the house just as Tara left it, and when they moved to Florida, they packed it up and set it up just as it was in Belen, even organizing their spices alphabetically the way Tara did. Patty Doel would see girls on bikes and call them “Tara” with hope in her voice. She would tear open letters from the FBI to pore over gruesome pictures of murdered young women, because even though those letters made her sick to her stomach, she never gave up hope that she might recognize her daughter in one of them.
Between chain smoking and stress over Tara, Patty Doel eventually succumbed to a stroke in May 2006. Tara’s sister and father live on, still strong, never giving into hysterical emotions. They still work on the case and talk to the FBI while trying to move on. It’s nearly impossible to move on from something so horrible without ever getting any sort of answers.
In 1998, Tara’s case was declared a homicide and she was ruled legally dead. The family may have never given up hope, but hope does get bleaker as the years go on. The Valencia County sheriff claims that there are hopes of solving the case, however, and I hope they do one day. It is just really sad that Patty Doel never got to see justice served.
Read More: https://www.grunge.com/633939/the-biggest-tara-calico-theories-what-really-happened/?utm_campaign=clip
https://www.abqjournal.com/265671/tara-calico-has-been-missing-for-25-years.html
https://people.com/crime/tara-calico-polaroid-photo-true-story/
https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/kidnap/tara-leigh-calico