Tara Leigh Calico

Tara Leigh Calico, a 19-year-old University of New Mexico-Valencia student, disappeared on the morning of September 20, 1988, while on her daily bicycle ride along New Mexico State Road 47 near her home in Belen, in Valencia County, New Mexico. She had left home at roughly 9:30 a.m. and reportedly told her mother to come looking for her if she was not back by noon, as she planned to play tennis that afternoon. When Tara failed to return, her mother drove the route but found no sign of her. Searchers later recovered pieces of Tara's Sony Walkman and a cassette tape scattered along the roadside; her bicycle was never found. Several witnesses reported seeing a light-colored pickup truck with a camper shell following closely behind a cyclist that morning, and investigators came to believe she had been abducted.

The case drew national attention in 1989 after a Polaroid photograph surfaced roughly 1,500 miles away. On June 15, 1989, a woman found the photo in the parking lot of a convenience store in Port St. Joe, Florida; it showed a young woman and a boy who appeared bound and gagged, lying on bedding. Family and friends believed the woman resembled Tara, and her mother, Patty Doel, pointed to what she felt was a matching scar. Expert analyses of the image were contradictory and never resolved the question: Scotland Yard reportedly concluded the woman could be Tara, analysts at Los Alamos National Laboratory concluded it was not, and an FBI examination was deemed inconclusive. The connection between the Polaroid and Tara Calico has never been confirmed, and the identities of the people in the photograph remain officially unknown.

Over the following decades the investigation passed through multiple sheriff administrations without resolution. A judge declared Tara legally dead and ruled the case a homicide in 1998. In 2008, then-Valencia County Sheriff Rene Rivera publicly stated that he believed two local young men, who knew Tara, had struck her with a vehicle in an accident, panicked, and killed her, and that her body was then concealed. Rivera said he believed he knew who was involved but that without a body he could not build a prosecutable case; these remarks were his stated theory and were never proven in court or tested at trial. A six-agency task force reexamined the case beginning in October 2013.

The inquiry intensified in later years. The FBI publicized a reward for information, and in the fall of 2021 the Valencia County Sheriff's Office, under Sheriff Denise Vigil, executed a sealed search warrant at a Valencia County residence, drawing on renewed review of old tips, witness accounts, and advances in forensic and DNA analysis. On June 13, 2023, Sheriff Vigil announced that investigators believed there was sufficient evidence to submit the case to the district attorney's office for review of potential charges, while stressing that the identities of persons of interest remained sealed by court order. No one has been charged.

As of 2026 the case remains open and unsolved. Reporting in 2025 indicated that District Attorney Barbara Romo's office had neither filed charges nor formally declined the case, citing a high evidentiary bar given that only offenses such as first-degree murder fall outside the statute of limitations. Investigators, including Lt. Joseph Rowland, have continued physical searches, including examination of an abandoned mine shaft north of Belen thought to have been deliberately collapsed, and have focused on a group of local young adults said to have been seen near the route that morning. Several key witnesses have since died. No remains have been recovered, no one has been convicted, and the disappearance of Tara Calico is officially unsolved.