Previously I wrote about the rash of women who were killed in Albuquerque in the 1980s. In the same time period, there was a disturbing rash of disappearances and murders of women in Santa Fe, too. The 1980s became known as “The Decade of Fear” in Santa Fe, as twelve women were murdered or went missing. A slew of stalking and sexual assault cases also happened during this time period. Some of the crimes have been solved; most of them are now cold.
You have probably heard about crime in Albuquerque. The city has become pretty infamous, between the West Mesa Bone Collector and Breaking Bad. The wonderful things about Albuquerque sadly don’t get reported to the rest of the world and the city looks like a pretty dark place to those who don’t live there. But many consider Santa Fe to be an artsy and lovely town, the complete antithesis of Albuquerque. They do not know about the bad things that happen there. A lot of it gets swept under the rug to maintain Santa Fe’s image as an idyllic tourist and retirement setting. The truth is that bad things have happened in Santa Fe, too, and the Decade of Fear proves that.
Marie Victoria “Vicky” Griego: July 8, 1978
The Decade of Fear kicked off in 1978 with Marie Griego’s rape and murder. Marie Griego was known as Vicky to her friends. She was last seen at a party on July 8, 1978. After she left, something terrible happened to her. She was found beaten, raped, and strangled with her own belt. Her body was found five days later – July 13 – in a field off of Calle Cielo. Her clothes were scattered around and she was completely nude.
Her murder still hasn’t been solved. But detectives hope that DNA might blow the case wide open. I hope that one day Griego gets justice. Her murderer may very well be dead by now, but at least her remaining family will have answers for her vicious murder.
Beverly Ann Riccio: November 27, 1981
Beverly Ann Riccio was only 33 when she met her foul end. She was from New York and she worked as a waitress in Lamy. She was also a professional masseuse and an apartment manager. Affectionately known as “Ghani,” Riccio was a Sufi and remembered as a generally a peaceful, well-liked person.
After she was missing for a few days, she was found in her apartment on November 27, 1981, stabbed 16 times in the chest and face and raped. There was lots of overturned furniture, suggesting a struggle. She did not appear to have been robbed.
Police claim that they solved the case a decade later. The perpetrator was an unnamed man that Riccio had been arguing with in the days prior to her death. That man is now dead so he will never be charged. However, I think her case sounds an awful lot like Teri Mulvaney’s (mentioned below). Have they been able to completely rule out David Morton, Mulvaney’s killer?
Tamara Britton and Teal Marie Pittington: August, 1984
These two unsolved cases are almost certainly related. They are just too intertwined to be mere coincidence. Tamara Britton first disappeared in August, 1984. But when her former roommate also went missing and was found dead, the case got even weirder.
On August 6, 1984, Tamara Britton vanished from Santa Fe, where she had only been living for eight months. She left her job at West Coast Sound to make a bank deposit. The thousands of dollars in the bank bag were properly deposited at the bank. But Tamara Britton never returned to work. Her car was found at a truck stop in Santa Rosa, the keys still in the ignition, baby diapers in the backseat, and a note in the bank bag instructing someone to return it to West Coast Sound. Brittin has never been located.
Tamara was not known to have been pregnant, yet even more diapers were found in her trailer. Furthermore, Santa Rosa is a good 109 miles from Santa Fe. No one knows how her car got there. But Santa Rosa is a popular stop for trucks off of I40 and it is a Greyhound bus stop, so it would be a good place to go if you’re on the run.
Not much was known about Britton and the description people gave of her was incredibly vague – short with blonde hair was all people knew. This made identifying her body and putting out information for her quite difficult. So police did their due diligence and reached out to the man she had listed as her father on her loan application.
It was at this point that the most troubling thing about her case emerged. The father they called became upset and said that his daughter, Tamara Britton, had died 15 years ago at only four months of age. Vital records confirmed this. This man lived in Wisconsin and had no idea who the missing Santa Fe woman was. It turns out that the woman we know as “Tamara Britton” had actually stolen the identity of the baby girl after her death and used that info to get a social security card. Her real identity has never been unearthed and no one knows where she came from.
Police also found that Britton had purchased a ton of clothes in Santa Fe and overdrawn her checking account. Were those clothes found in her trailer? If not, then it would indicate she left town of her own accord. A dead baby was found in a dumpster in Albuquerque and police considered that it might be Britton’s child, since she had had baby diapers, but that lead apparently led nowhere. Someone also alerted police that a Tamara Britton applied for a social security card in Minnesota, but the police “did not have the funds to check the tip.” Wow.
Some skeletal remains were unearthed by a construction crew in 1990. They were thought to belong to Britton. But it was found that they were ancient bones, washed up by rain.
To date, Britton hasn’t been found, and I can’t help but wonder if she wants it that way. Police theorize that she staged her own disappearance and is living under an assumed identity elsewhere. Maybe Minnesota.
Things get weirder, though. Tamara Britton had been roommates with a girl named Teal Pittington. Pittington vanished a few days after Britton – on August 19, 1984, to be exact. The two were no longer living together at the time and instead Pittington was living with a man named Mario Owen Jent. She was attending cosmetology school and working at a pizza place. She had made plans to meet a friend at 11:30 on the 19th but never showed up, which wasn’t like her.
Nine months later, her body was found in a culvert near the New Mexico Girls’ Ranch near Lamy. She had been strangled with her own bra. Interestingly, that bra is now missing from evidence, preventing any DNA testing from nabbing her killer.
One chilling detail is that Tamara Britton had also lived with Jent for some time before. Jent was spotted driving Teal Pittington’s car around after she went missing, which he then abandoned at the College Plaza Shopping Center on Cerrillos Road in Santa Fe. He told police that Pittington had gone to New Orleans and lent him her car, a story that investigators could never verify. But Jent passed polygraphs and was let go. He subsequently moved out of state. I find this incredible because polygraphs are notoriously unreliable and slick people know how to beat them. Moving out of state and abandoning the car both make Jent look pretty guilty. Jent has an extensive criminal history in New Mexico. I hope he is questioned again.
There’s another possible suspect: David Morton.
Janet Benoit and Teri Mulvaney: 1983 and 1984
Janet Benoit wasn’t even living in Santa Fe, but she died there. She had just gotten a job at a Lady Footlocker in Phoenix and was moving there from Colorado. She stopped at a motel on Cerrillos Road for the night of November 11, 1983. The next day, a maid found her in the bed, raped and stabbed 36 times. Things were missing from her room, suggesting she had been robbed.
Almost a year later, on June 28, 1984, Teri Mulvaney’s boyfriend found her in her apartment. She had been brutally raped and strangled. The immediate prime suspect was her creepy neighbor, David Morton, who had given Mulvaney trouble before. A grand jury was convened to convict Morton but only one juror found him guilty. So he was allowed to go free.
That’s when he moved to Amarillo and raped and strangled his female neighbor there.
Morton finally confessed to killing Benoit and Mulvaney in 2003. He was convicted in 2004. But detectives think Morton may have killed other women and may have been responsible for some of the Santa Fe victims whose deaths haven’t been solved.
Susan LaPorte and Maria Padilla: 1985
These two cases have always bothered me. The victims were just women going about their lives, doing nothing wrong. They both met similar demises at the hands of an unidentified predator. Their only crime? Being women, in the wrong place at the wrong time.
On May 6, 1985, Maria Padilla decided to go for her daily walk in the Bosque, near her home in Albuquerque’s South Valley. Family became worried when she didn’t return. After a search of the neighborhood, her son spotted her paint-spotted shoe, which led the family to search a nearby arroyo. Her cousin, Yvonne Madrid, found her body, nude and facedown between a tree and the river. She had been raped and strangled. Her jeans hanging in a nearby tree. Her friend’s husband took off his shirt and covered her body with it.
Maria Padilla just wanted to go for a walk and take in the peaceful evening. Why did she have to perish? Her loved ones remember how sweet she was and how she didn’t deserve this kind of death at all. Not much evidence was left behind, but detectives were able to obtain a sperm sample from Padilla’s body.
Susan Laporte was a lovely woman from Boston who was visiting a friend in Santa Fe. She had no idea how dangerous the visit would be. On December 4, 1985, she decided she wanted to go somewhere quiet and pretty and read a book. The place she picked was at a shady arroyo, behind what is now the Lodge in Santa Fe.
While she was trying to enjoy her book, someone wearing size 11 boots watched her from behind some juniper trees. Laporte appeared to have noticed him and took off running. When she hesitated at the edge of the arroyo which had a four-foot drop, he caught her and strangled her with a rope, as evidenced by the blood and human feces found at the spot. (Involuntary defecation is common in strangulation). The piece of shit then drug her under a juniper tree and raped her and killed her. Her bloody nose indicates that she put up a good fight, but she sadly lost. The killer then tried to dust away the drag marks from her body with a branch, but he didn’t bother to cover up his footprints.
Laporte was found a few days later by a patrol officer, with a rope looped around her throat and then knotted around her wrists. The man who killed her clearly was familiar with knots and this made detectives theorize that he may have been a cowboy. The only evidence left behind was a sperm stain on her shirt and size 11 footprints leading down the arroyo to the Santa Fe National Cemetery, which then doubled back toward the Rio Vista subdivision. From there, the trail was lost.
I wonder if the killer may have lived in this subdivision. Detectives also wonder if the killer may have met Laporte somewhere and suggested that the arroyo was a private place to read a book in peace, then followed her there.
There was the semen stain on her shirt, so detectives thought the killer had masturbated over her body instead of raping her. However, a later swab from her vagina found DNA that wasn’t hers and this DNA matched that on the shirt. Years later, Tony Trujillo ran the DNA again to try to match her case to David Morton. Surprise, surprise, her rape kit revealed a match to Maria Padilla’s rape kit instead.
An FBI profiler suggested that the predator was a serial rapist who has committed other rapes, probably in New Mexico, and who was familiar with both Albuquerque and Santa Fe. The rapist didn’t mean to kill the women, which is why other murders haven’t been traced to him. Instead, the violent way he raped these women unintentionally led to their deaths. Detectives are now keeping their eyes peeled for other murdered and missing women who might have also become this man’s victims. Due to the backlog of rape kits, it is possible other rapes and homicides can be tied to him eventually.
Gloria Jean Mares: August, 1986
Gloria Mares had three boys. She got on a motorcycle with a man and was never seen again sometime in August, 1986. Later, her body was found in a dump near La Cienega, 18 miles from Santa Fe. She had been shot once in the back of the head.
Police identified the man driving the motorcycle. But by then, he had already been killed in a violent dispute in 1989. They also found two other men who may have been witnesses and that have also passed on by this point. It seems these three men may have taken the secret of Mares’s last moments to the grave.
Michelle Quintana: August 8, 1987
Michelle Quintana was a real estate agent. She looked like a model, with her coiffed blonde hair and bright blue eyes. On August 8, 1987, Quintana got a page on her pager. She immediately got in her truck and sped down Cerrillos Road to use a payphone, since she didn’t have a phone in her home. She was never seen again. Her truck was found at the De Vargas Shopping Center. Witnesses said she had parked there and gotten into a red Jeep with two other men.
No one knows who killed Quintana. But a cocaine dealer is the prime suspect. Quintana’s pager actually belonged to that dealer and she often purchased drugs from him. Later, this man was arrested on cocaine-related charges and he blurted out, “I did not kill Michelle!” But detectives hadn’t even asked him about Michelle Quintana. This definitely raised some red flags.
Her body has never been found but she is presumed dead.
Roberta Michelle Montoya: July, 1988
Roberta Michelle Montoya was a waitress at Cline’s Corners, a desolate spot on I-40 about an hour south of Santa Fe. She was from Irvine, California, but her heart was broken after she lost custody of her son there. She decided to move near family in Santa Fe for a fresh start. After she didn’t turn up to her shift, her family reported her missing on July 30, 1988.
A man walking his dog near Old Las Vegas Highway found her skeleton on April 20, 1987. She was positively identified as Montoya. There have been no arrests in her case.
Annette Gonzales: July 17, 1988
Annette Gonzales was only 19 when she was murdered. She was starting life by attending UNM in Albuquerque and working at a video store. At 2 am on July 17, 1988, she left the Club West nightclub and dropped her cousin off at the Mr. Steak restaurant on Cerrillos Road for his night shift. She drove off, saying she was headed home, and then she was never seen again.
Two days later, her 1988 Toyota Corolla was found in the parking lot of the State Department of Transportation on Cerrillos Road. Her body wouldn’t be found for another eight months. In January 1989, her remains were located off of Bobcat Road, very close to where Roberta Michelle Montoya had been dumped. It’s not known if the deaths were related but it does seem weird that a killer chose the same spot to dump a body.
Her murder is still unsolved. Santa Fe detectives even enlisted the help of a few psychics to try to find her. They pursued various leads, such as one that claimed she had taken off to Colorado Springs to attend a heavy metal concert. But nothing has led to any convictions.
Tracy Barker: May 2, 1989
Tracy Barker was only 24. She was a single mom who managed a Pizza Hut in Santa Fe. On May 2, 1989, she went on a date. No one ever saw or heard from her again.
But a person soon found her body under a tree off South Richards Avenue, which was largely undeveloped at the time. She had been raped and killed with a rock and a rope hung loose from around her wrist.
Her date was cleared but her stepfather, Dane Collins, was held for five months in suspicion of her death. Barker had lived with him and her family at the time of her death. He was exonerated when his DNA didn’t match the DNA in her body.
Fifteen years later, Barker’s death was linked via DNA to serial rapist Chris McClendon. McClendon was a ski instructor who was in Santa Fe at the time. He committed many other heinous crimes against women. Fortunately, he got a life sentence for Barker’s murder and rape in 2005, but life sentences in NM are only 30 years. Hopefully he dies in prison before he is released to hurt other women.
Similar Albuquerque Cases
A few of the unsolved Santa Fe cases bear similarities to each other and may have been committed by the same person. We know that Susan Laporte and Maria Padilla were killed by the same person, and that predator probably has other victims we don’t know of yet. We also know that David Morton claimed the lives of both Teri Mulvaney and Janet Benoit, and he may have killed other women, too.
A forensic pathologist named Dr. Kris Sperry noted similarities between a few of the Santa Fe murders and the strangulation murders of several Albuquerque women during the same time period. These murders are still unsolved, so the possibility of a connection is still there. I did not include these murders in my post about the prostitute murders in Albuquerque in the 1980s because the victims did not share the same victimology, but a possible connection with those cases may exist as well.
Sherry Enz – Sherry was only 23 when she failed to report to her probation officer in April of 1982. Her worried mother reported her missing on April 29, 1982. On May 6, a passerby found her in a dry riverbed off of I25 near Bernardo. She had been strangled and had been dead at least a week. Dental records were used to identify her. Her death has never been solved.
Gail Wickstrom – Wickstrom was 78 when she was found strangled on May 30, 1982, the same time period as Sherry Enz. She was from Odessa and was a transient living off social security, who occasionally returned to her stepdaughter’s house in Odessa to get her mail. She was last seen by a cashier at an Allsup’s near the South Valley. Later, her body was found in her car trunk, just a few hundred yards from the same Allsup’s. The trunk lid had been left up, making little effort to hide her body. She had been beaten in the head, and there was a gash above her right eye; she had died due to strangulation with a cord or wire. She had been dead for about 12 hours. Her death has never been solved.
Rio Arriba County Jane Doe – This Jane Doe was found strangled in the desert in September, 1982, the same year that Wickstrom and Enz were murdered by strangulation. Not many details are available about her.
Peggy Vigil – Peggy Vigil was 24 when a neighbor found her strangled and raped in her apartment in Albuquerque on May 11, 1984. There had been a struggle before she died. The night she died, she had had a party; detectives noticed that her house was full of beer cans and bottles. After most of the partygoers had left, four Mexican nationals stayed behind with Vigil. They were sought in connection to her death and three were arrested but it is unclear if they were actually convicted.
Deren Wyn Graham – Wynn was 28 when she died on November 2, 1985. She had been strangled in her home. Not many details are available about her case. Newspapers don’t report on it, only on her graduation and her mother’s wedding.
Lack of Manpower Leaves the Decade of Fear Unsolved
Why are there so many unsolved cases from the 1980s in Santa Fe? The answer is that police did not have good investigative tools back then. Since then, they have become buried in more recent cases and have not been able to dedicate the resources needed to crack these old cases. But some of them have been cracked in the twenty-first century, giving hope for the remaining cold cases.
Detective Chief Pete Kassetas found a huge box of unsolved cases from Santa Fe when he assumed office in the State Police. He realized that something needed to be done to get justice for these women. So he began to work on organizing the case files, which were in disarray, and soon he assembled a Cold Case Unit to solve 100 cases. Teal Pittington’s case is one of the top four priorities. Unfortunately, this task force was started in 2018 – and these crimes still haven’t been solved.
One thing Kassetas kept running into during his work was missing evidence and records. Many records in these cases had been destroyed due to expired statutes of limitations. Another issue is the lack of staff, manpower, and money available for extensive DNA testing. For example, in Laporte’s case, Kassetas wants to obtain DNA from each of the 64 rapists who had been released from prison shortly before her death. But there is just no time to track down all these men and get DNA, and some of them are now dead. Furthermore, the cost of DNA testing is often unreachable with the present budget. Kassetas said that in 2018, there were six new homicides in Santa Fe, and each one created a year of work for an investigator. This severely limits the amount of time that can be dedicated to these cold cases.
It is easy to get frustrated with cops for not doing their jobs. But the reality is that they don’t often have the tools, the time, or the training to get their jobs done properly. The issue runs much deeper than the police. The issue really lies with social policy that prevents police from having the tools necessary to bring justice to victims. The justice system in New Mexico also tends to release men who are known for hurting women, sometimes after less than half of their sentences, thus endangering many more women every day. I have read many cases where women (and children) were raped and/or killed by men who had previously served time for violent assaults or homicides. It’s time New Mexico judges start imposing harsher sentences, and parole boards start declining early release applications from offenders who like to hurt women and children. How many more deaths and ruined lives will it take for them to learn that many of these offenders can’t be rehabilitated?
Santa Fe’s Decade of Fear
The victims above all met bad ends or disappeared without a trace in the 1980s. But there were many other crimes against women in the same decade that weren’t deadly. Many women called police for being raped, stalked, abducted at knifepoint, tailed in their cars, or harassed by men, usually strangers. One woman who went by “Eilene” said that she was harassed by a naked man who waited for her outside her home.
While crimes against women happen all the time, the huge uptick in crimes during this decade led many to worry that there was a serial killer on the loose in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. The fact that some of the crimes went unsolved for two decades, such as the killings of Teri Mulvaney and Janet Benoit, left room for speculation that their deaths were connected to the others that remain unsolved.
All of these murders and rapes created a lot of fear in Santa Fe. Hence, this time has been dubbed the “Decade of Fear.” A newspaper article from 1989 discussed how women feared for their lives and wanted to move. A black belt named Vicky Lujan discussed how her training would be useless against several men or a man with a weapon, so she was still afraid for her life.
It is horrible that so many people had to live in fear in this gorgeous historical town. It is also horrible that many of the cases still haven’t been solved, leaving the perpetrators free to commit more crimes against women.
I’m not sure why so much crime against women happened during the Santa Fe Decade of Fear. Some of the cases are unrelated, yet something made that time period particularly dangerous to women. Theories purport that the 1970s and 1980s were so violent due to social trends, like children raised by WWII veterans, the impact of the Vietnam War, and the rise of feminism that ticked many misogynistic men off. But the truth is, we really don’t know much about the human mind, or why some people’s brains seem to snap and allow them to become heinous sexual predators.
Sources
https://www.pressreader.com/usa/santa-fe-new-mexican/20171231/281535111369222
https://www.sfreporter.com/news/coverstories/2018/05/14/colder-than-cold/
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/116171849/santa-fe-victims-and-a-few-cases-from/
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/116134216/tamara-britton-sighting/
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/116135252/remains-found-near-santa-fe-may-be/
https://www.abqjournal.com/505650/santa-fe-cold-case-from-29-years-ago-not-forgotten.html
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/116170503/maria-padilla/