NM TARA CALICO: Missing from Belen, NM - 20 Sept 1988 - Age 19

[Romulus]

The Doe Network:
Case File 257DFNM



Right: Age-progression to 34 years (circa 2003) by Wesley Neville

Tara Leigh Calico
Missing since September 20, 1988 from Belen, Valencia County, New Mexico.
Classification: Endangered Missing

Vital Statistics
Date Of Birth: February 28, 1969
Age at Time of Disappearance: 19 years old
Height and Weight at Time of Disappearance: 5'7; 120 pounds
Distinguishing Characteristics: White female. Brown hair; green or hazel eyes. Lazy eye.
Marks, Scars: Calico has a large scar on the back of her right shoulder, and a cowlick on her right temple. She also has a dime-sized brown-colored birthmark on the back of her leg.
Dentals: Available. Sealants on most posterior teeth. Post orthodontic status.
DNA: Available

Circumstances of Disappearance
Calico left her house on Brugg Street in Belen, New Mexico to go on a bike ride at 09:30 on the morning of September 20, 1988. She took her mother's bike because her own was damaged. She was last seen riding her mother's neon pink Huffy mountain bicycle with yellow control cables and sidewalls on Highway 47 in Valencia County, at approximately 11:45 a.m. Calico biked the route daily during her routine 36-mile ride.
Around 11:45, witnesses observed a 1953 Ford pickup truck, dirty white or light gray -in color, with a white homemade shell, following Tara, who was wearing headphones, down the unpopulated stretch of highway where she was riding, but no one saw the abduction. The bike, a pink Huffy, has never been found. She was 2 miles from home at the time of the sighting. The small, cracked plastic window of the Sony Walkman was recovered 19 miles east of N.M. 47 near the remote John F. Kennedy campground.
Calico's mother believes that her daughter deliberately discarded the items as a way to mark her trail. Detectives also identified bike tracks on the north side of the shoulder of N.M. 47, near the place the cassette tape was found, where a scuffle might have taken place.

Investigators
If you have any information concerning Calico's whereabouts, please contact:
Valencia County Sheriff's Department
505-865-9604
Email
--
Belen Police Department
505-864-4403
--
The New Mexico Department of Public Safety
505-827-9297
Email
All information may be submitted on an anonymous basis.

NCIC Number: M-461117833
Please refer to this number when contacting any agency with information regarding this case.

Source Information:
NCMA
AMW
Albuquerque Tribune
NamUs

257DFNM - Tara Leigh Calico

edited by staff to add media link

TARA CALICO: Missing from Belen, NM since 20 Sep 1988 - Age 19

Tara disappeared near her home in Belen, New Mexico, on September 20, 1988. She is widely believed to have been kidnapped.

www.crimewatchers.net

*CLICK THE REPORT BUTTON IF YOU'D LIKE THIS CASE MOVED TO THE GENERAL DISCUSSION AREA TO BE OPENED FOR COMMENTING.

 

[Romulus]

I'm not an American and I don't live in the USA, but this is one of the cases that struck me; I really can't get an idea of what happened to Tara, it's terrible.

 

[SheWhoMustNotBeNamed]

The Missing on ID searches for teenagers Tara Calico and Desirea Ferris

Tara Calico and Desirea Ferris were two teenagers who went missing nearly 30 years apart, but neither family have given up hope.

www.monstersandcritics.com

The Missing on ID searches for teenagers Tara Calico and Desirea Ferris​

The Missing is exploring the cases of two missing teenagers, who both vanished without a trace or reason leaving their families grasping for answers.

Tara Calico was 19-years-old when she failed to return home from a bike ride. She has now been missing for over 30 years, and there have been no arrests or leads in the case.


On September 20, 1988, Tara Calico borrowed her mom’s neon pink Huffy bicycle to go for a ride, but she never returned to her home in Belen, NM. She was last seen at approximately 11:45 am riding along Highway 47 in Valencia County. She has not been seen since.

A year after her disappearance, a mysterious polaroid was discovered in a parking lot in Florida, which showed two teenagers, bound and gagged, in the back of a van.

Tara’s family thought that the girl in the image could be her. Numerous law enforcement agencies analyzed the photo, but a consensus could not be agreed upon.

Scotland Yard concluded that the girl in the image was Tara, but the Los Alamos National Laboratory stated that it wasn’t her. The FBI’s technician couldn’t reach a definite conclusion. The boy in the image was not identified either. A white windowless van was spotted near where the photo was found, but otherwise, detectives had no leads.

A later theory has posited that Tara had been killed in a hit and run incident by two teenagers who then panicked and disposed of the body. However, as of October 2020, no arrests have been made.

Tara was 5 foot 5 to 5 foot 7 and approximately 115 to 120 pounds when she disappeared. She had hazel eyes and brown hair with a cowlick over her right temple. She has a large scar on the back of her right shoulder and a dime-sized brown-colored birthmark on the back of one of her legs.

The FBI is offering a reward of $20,000 for any information that leads to an arrest of someone involved in her disappearance.

 

[SheWhoMustNotBeNamed]

43 unsolved missing cases the FBI needs fresh leads on

While the search for Gabby Petito is over, thousands more cases need the same attention. Here's an FBI list of 43 unsolved missing persons cases.

www.usatoday.com

43 unsolved missing cases the FBI needs fresh leads on
Amid the disappearance of Gabby Petito that has captured the nation's attention, FBI officials say hundreds of thousands of people go missing every year. In May, the FBI conducted an internal audit and compiled a list of 43 unsolved cases of people under the age of 21 that the agency says need fresh leads. Some date back decades. Here's the list.

Tara Leigh Calico was 19 when she went missing from Valencia County, New Mexico, on Sept. 20, 1988. More information and age-progressed photos here.
PROVIDED BY THE FBI

 

[SheWhoMustNotBeNamed]

After 34 years, a woman’s disappearance haunts loved ones

Investigators believe the case can still be solved.

www.newsnationnow.com

After 34 years, a woman’s disappearance haunts loved ones​

One mystery has perplexed the state of New Mexico for more than three decades: The case of a college student who went on a bike ride and never came home.

Calico left her house in Belen, New Mexico, at around 9:30 a.m., wearing a white tee shirt, gold hoop earrings and white shorts with green stripes. She was riding a neon pink Huffy mountain bike. Calico was last seen on Highway 47 in Valencia County, where a witness saw a pickup truck following closely behind her at a slow speed.

Calico told her mother to come pick her up if she wasn’t home by noon and her mom sounded the alarm when she couldn’t find Calico on her bike route.

Melinda Esquibel is one of Calico’s high school friends. She’s spent years investigating the case on her own time.

“My team and I have already solved it,” Esquibel told NewsNation.


Now, Esquibel is working on a docuseries and has a podcast on what she’s dug up on Calico’s case.

She says the Valencia County Sheriff’s Office gave her the chance to go through Calico’s case files, which she says she organized and digitized, working with professional private investigators and offering up her own findings to police.


He also declined to say if he believed the case was solvable or if the perpetrators were still alive, in contrast to local law enforcement and Calico’s loved ones, who believe the case can still be closed.

One thing Rowland and Esquibel agree on is that the perpetrators are still alive and are likely local.

“This case is solvable,” Rowland said. “Here we are 34 years later, I do not suspect that this case or Tara’s disappearance will go unanswered for 36 years.”


Esquibel believes she knows what happened.

“She was being stalked, that she had turned someone down for a date and they were not happy about it,” Esquibel said. “They started messing with her, asking her to go to a party, getting real close to her. You know the boys were drunk and high, and they hit her, and knocked her off her bike. We believe she took off running to the east.”

After that, Esquibel said she thinks the boys sexually assaulted Calico, then killed her to prevent her from speaking out.

Esquibel said she herself has been threatened for speaking out.

“It started to put my life in danger, I started having threats, people were showing up at my mother’s house. My niece came to me and told me that the guys that did it, were really angry. And then if I didn’t stop, someone would get hurt. And if I didn’t stop, because if I still continued, someone would get killed,” she said.

Despite that, Esquibel wants to keep shining a light on her friend’s case.

Rowland said he still gets tips every couple of months and new people have recently come forward, leading to new witnesses in the case.

“The number one mission has always been in this investigation to bring Tara Calico home. That remains the number one mission today,” he said. “A close second would be prosecuting those responsible for her disappearance. But foremost, we want to bring her home to her family, which is long overdue.”

MORE AT LINK

Actual video starts around 6:50

 

[Romulus]

New details on Tara Calico case to be revealed Tuesday

“Substantial progress has been made in this investigation and it is time for the public to be made aware of this new information and its impact on the community,” is

news-bulletin.com

Sheriff: Sufficient evidence in Tara Calico disappearance to submit to DA for possible charges

"In the coming months, the Valencia County Sherriff's Office looks forward to working with prosecutors to obtain justice for Tara and her family," Sheriff Denise Vigil said.

www.koat.com

 

[SheWhoMustNotBeNamed]

Thank you @noZme for the link!

After 37 years, Tara Calico mystery focuses on mine shaft

Driving back from a state sheriffs’ association conference last month, Valencia County Sheriff’s Lt. Joseph Rowland stopped off at an abandoned mine north of Belen to retrieve a set of

www.abqjournal.com

After 37 years, Tara Calico mystery focuses on mine shaft​

Driving back from a state sheriffs’ association conference last month, Valencia County Sheriff’s Lt. Joseph Rowland stopped off at an abandoned mine north of Belen to retrieve a set of $12 fly traps inside.

There’s been no end to the search for Tara Calico, the 19-year-old college student who was abducted 37 years ago while bicycling on N.M. 47, north of the old copper mine.

So the traps have become yet another investigative tool to find the young woman who’d vanished without a trace in broad daylight, in the span of 15 minutes, on a well-traveled road, only 2 miles from home on Sept. 20, 1988. There’s hope the traps will catch insects known to feed off human remains.

More than two years ago Valencia County and FBI investigators declared they had enough probable cause to arrest a group of suspects they believe kidnapped and killed Calico. But a potential criminal prosecution remains in limbo at the 13th Judicial District Attorney’s Office.

Yet for Rowland, “bringing Tara Calico home” has always been the top priority.

“It pulls at the human heart strings, you know?” said Rowland, who took over the high-profile Calico investigation in 2016 from a multi-agency task force that had already interviewed more than 100 potential witnesses and conducted numerous excavations in the Valencia County area before disbanding.

In an unusual news conference in June 2023, Valencia County Sheriff Denise Vigil declared there had been a break in the cold case investigation that warranted sending the entire case file to District Attorney Barbara Romo for potential prosecution. A top DA deputy told the Journal the findings would be subject to an independent review.

Since then, no charges have been filed. But neither has the case been declined for prosecution, Rowland said. “Predominantly, they have declined our help,” he added.

Romo didn’t respond to a recent Journal request for an interview.

“We’re not ready to disclose any information on that right now. We’re still reviewing it,” said Jessica Martinez, a spokeswoman for the office.

The latest theory? A group of locals, perhaps as young as Calico, abducted her as the college student was returning from her near-daily 38-mile bicycle trek to her home in Rio Communities. For a prosecution to be viable now, only a charge of first-degree murder and certain sex offenses can be filed because the statute of limitations has run on all other lesser offenses. And that’s a high hurdle.


MORE AT LINK!