Tara Calico

On June 15, 1989, a woman walking through the parking lot of a convenience store in Port St. Joe, a small town on the Gulf Coast of the Florida Panhandle, noticed something lying on the ground where a white cargo van had been parked a few minutes earlier.

It was a Polaroid photograph.

It showed a young woman and a young boy lying side by side on what looked like a pillow, in a dimly lit space that seemed to be the back of a van. Their mouths were covered with black tape. Their hands appeared to be bound behind their backs. The young woman was looking directly at the camera. The boy’s eyes were open. Next to the young woman’s head was a paperback book.

The woman who found it called the police. The photograph was shown on television, on national programs like A Current Affair. And in New Mexico, more than a thousand miles away, a mother watching television saw the image and believed she was looking at her missing daughter.

The Bike Ride

Tara Calico was nineteen years old in 1988. She lived with her mother, Patty Doel, and her stepfather, John Doel, in Belen, New Mexico, a small town on the Rio Grande about thirty-five miles south of Albuquerque. She was a sophomore at the University of New Mexico’s campus in Valencia County and worked at a bank. She was a good student, a gifted athlete, and friendly and outgoing.

Almost every day, she took the same bike ride: a roughly thirty-six-mile round trip along State Road 47, a rural highway running south from Belen through the desert.

On the morning of September 20, 1988, she set off at about 9:30 a.m. on her mother’s neon pink Huffy mountain bike. Her own bike had a flat tire. She was wearing a white T-shirt, white shorts and white athletic shoes, and carried a Sony Walkman. She told her mother that if she wasn’t back by noon, her mother should come looking for her, because she had a tennis date that afternoon.

She didn’t come back by noon. Her mother drove the route, looking for her. There was no sign of Tara or the bike.

The Witnesses

Several people who were driving on State Road 47 that morning said they saw Tara riding her bike. Some of them said they noticed a light-colored pickup truck with a camper shell following closely behind her.

Searchers later found pieces of a Walkman along the road, scattered as if dropped or broken. Tara’s mother believed the pieces had been left deliberately, a trail of clues. Investigators also reported finding marks along the shoulder of the road that suggested a bicycle had been dragged or that there had been a struggle.

The bike was never found.

The Photograph

When Patty Doel saw the Polaroid from Florida on television in 1989, she was convinced the young woman in it was Tara. The face, the hair, the scar on the leg that Tara had gotten in a car accident. The book next to her head appeared to be a V.C. Andrews novel, My Sweet Audrina. V.C. Andrews was Tara’s favorite author.

Investigators had the photo analyzed. The results were mixed. Experts at Scotland Yard concluded that the woman in the photograph was Tara. Analysts at the FBI found the results inconclusive. Investigators at Los Alamos National Laboratory said it was not her.

The family of a missing boy named Michael Henley, a nine-year-old who had disappeared during a hunting trip with his father in New Mexico in April 1988, came forward to say they believed the boy in the photo was Michael. But in 1990, Michael Henley’s remains were found in the Zuni Mountains, not far from where he had gone missing. Investigators concluded he had died of exposure.

Neither the young woman nor the boy in the Polaroid has ever been definitively identified. Other photos, which some believe may also show Tara, surfaced in later years. None have been confirmed.

The Suspects

For years, rumors swirled in Belen about who might have taken Tara. Some local residents believed she had been accidentally struck by a vehicle driven by young men from town, and then killed to cover it up. In 2008, the then-sheriff of Valencia County said publicly that he believed he knew what had happened and who was responsible, but that without a body he couldn’t bring charges.

In 1998, a judge declared Tara legally dead.

In June 2023, the Valencia County Sheriff’s Office announced that investigators had identified persons of interest in the case and that they believed they had enough evidence to submit the case to the district attorney’s office for possible charges. The names of the persons of interest were sealed by the court. As of this writing, I am not aware of any charges being publicly filed.

The Mother Who Waited

Patty Doel never gave up hope of learning what happened to her daughter. She and her husband moved to Florida, and kept working on the case for years. Patty died in 2006, after suffering a series of strokes. Before she died, her husband said, she asked him to keep looking.