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.

The breakthrough in October 2020 came after Rowland’s team received the results of a two-year analysis of the criminal case from the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Information Network, which recommended pursuing half a dozen loose ends. The follow-up spurred the team, including two FBI polygraphers, to travel out-of-state to conduct interviews.

“We went in a different direction never thoroughly explored,” Rowland said. “We were unraveling a thread.”

The information gleaned helped provide the evidence to convince a state district judge six months later to approve a search warrant. What was found in the April 2021 search of a Valencia County residence, along with all other documents related to the new suspects, were sealed by state District Judge Cindy Mercer.

Rowland, in a Journal interview, wouldn’t say where the team went in late 2020. But one of the recommendations from the Rocky Mountain Information Network was to reinterview someone who professed to know nothing about Calico’s disappearance.

It was the only recommendation that was heavily redacted before the report was publicly released by sheriff’s officials — an indication that the person is now a credible suspect.

Asked whether the prolonged review has hurt a potential prosecution, Rowland pointed out that the DA’s office considers whether there’s evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, a higher standard than the probable cause that led law enforcement to send the case to Romo’s office.

“But as time passes we are losing more evidence than we are gaining,” he said.

Several of those interviewed have already died, including a “pivotal” eyewitness who reported seeing two cars and four or five young Hispanic men, and one woman, parked across the road from where Calico was headed on N.M. 47. One man was described as tall, without a shirt, waving his arms. Others appeared to be hiding behind one of the cars.

Rowland said the suspects likely knew who Calico was and seized the opportunity that day. After years of focusing on multiple eyewitness accounts of an older man in a 1953-55 Ford truck slowly following Calico that late morning, investigators want to know more about the group waiting in Calico’s path.

What seems certain, Rowland said, is that a confrontation ensued between Calico and that group of young adults that day, “the result of which Tara Calico did not survive.”

National attention

“This is Tara Calico,” said the woman on the phone, one of thousands of people who have contacted the Valencia County Sheriff’s Office over the decades after learning of Calico’s mysterious disappearance.

Rowland said there have been other callers claiming to be Tara Calico since a disturbing Polaroid photo turned up in a Florida parking lot 10 months after the abduction showing an unidentified dark-haired young woman and boy with duct tape covering their mouths, their hands tied behind their backs.

Calico’s mother, Patty Doel, believed the woman was her daughter, and what had been a local investigation confined to the Valencia County area then went national. (A state district judge in 1998 ruled Calico was deceased and a homicide victim.)

The photo, analyzed by Scotland Yard, the FBI and Los Alamos National Laboratory, was ultimately deemed not to be of Calico nor that of 9-year-old Michael Henley, a missing boy whose body was found in the Zuni Mountains in 1990.

The photo and Calico abduction attracted television coverage on shows such as “Unsolved Mysteries,” “America’s Most Wanted,” “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and “48 Hours.” Crime podcast producers, including one from New York state who contacted Rowland last week, continue to update the mystery.

“We are constantly, almost 37 years now, on the phone with people from around the United States and the world contacting us, attempting to help us in some manner or provide information on this case,” Rowland said.

The photo was important to investigate, he said, but also “pulled resources away from the region onto a national scale and away from who we believe is responsible for the disappearance of Tara Calico. So that was somewhat of a hindrance.”

Investigation hurdles

Though much of the case file has been sealed by court order, the Valencia County Sheriff’s Office recently shared hundreds of pages of law enforcement reports, interview summaries, and other unsealed records with the Journal.

The documents show:

Calico left her home in Rio Communities that morning about 9:30 asking her mother to come get her if she wasn’t home by noon in case her bicycle got a flat. She planned to meet her boyfriend that afternoon, but Doel began to worry when her daughter didn’t return and went to look for her.

The ensuing investigation involved teams of local, state and federal investigators, including the FBI. Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office detective David Littlefield, now retired, had his K9 cadaver dog, Fenix, conduct 20 to 30 searches of the area.

Fenix was well-suited for the searches after finding human remains dating to 1966, Rowland said.

“I think the case was difficult to begin with,” Rowland said.

There was “zero” physical evidence of her abduction, he said. Pieces of a cassette tape and other items recovered by volunteer searchers near the road were analyzed and found to be too old or otherwise not belonging to Calico.

Bicycle tire tracks found on the soft-sand shoulder might have been hers that day but could also have been made by other bicyclists or on her other routine trips along the road, Rowland said.

And there was no crime scene, Rowland said.

Eyewitnesses who last saw her headed north on N.M. 47 on her bicycle that midday morning included motorists, a group of deer hunters, ranch hands and at least one neighbor. But none interviewed so far saw what happened to her.

From those accounts, investigators surmise that she was abducted over a 15-minute period over a 2-mile stretch of highway, just before noon. There were no signs of a scuffle. Her pink Huffy bicycle and items she carried while riding that day have never been found.

A New Mexico State Police crash expert found it improbable to believe she was accidentally or even intentionally hit by a car, given that pieces of a vehicle or her bicycle would be left behind and the debris would have been difficult to quickly clean up. An accident would also have attracted attention from the various people who were outside that day, including several unidentified women who were playing golf on the west side of the road.

The FBI and other investigators ruled out family and her known friends as suspects, including several men who dated or may have had a romantic interest in Calico, who also worked part-time at a local bank. Former Valencia County Sheriff Lawrence Romero, now deceased, and his son, Lawrence Romero Jr., who committed suicide in 1991, are also no longer “persons of interest,” Rowland said.

The driver of the old truck, which had a homemade camper shell, hasn’t been located, but an oil slick discovered where the truck was seen earlier along N.M. 47 could have meant he had been having engine trouble and explain why he was driving behind Calico so slowly.

A suspicious mineshaft

After searching for Calico’s body over the years in a pond, a lagoon, a rock quarry and under concrete slabs at various properties in the area, investigators are now exploring one of four mines leased in the 1950s by the family of David Parker Ray, which once owned a ranch nearby off U.S. 60. The property is about 25 miles south from where Calico was last seen.

Ray died in state prison in 2002 while serving a sentence of more than 223 years in connection with kidnapping and other charges involving two women who said he sexually tortured them at his residence near Elephant Butte Lake. Numerous searches have been conducted over the years based on suspicions Ray may have killed several unidentified victims.

Ray claimed to have abducted about 40 victims from several states, according to the FBI. No bodies have been found.

Ray isn’t a suspect in the Calico disappearance, based in part on the belief that he was living in Phoenix, Arizona, at the time.

In searching for Ray’s victims, a New Mexico State Police investigator asked a New Mexico Tech expert in 1998 to examine the mines. Rowland said the expert found one of the four, which had been 60 feet deep, “didn’t look right.” About 30 feet down, rocks and rubble were clogging the mine.

“He said it looks like someone intentionally collapsed the mineshaft, potentially to cover up evidence,” Rowland said. “But it never got fully investigated because it was not cost-effective.”

It was a potential lead Rowland didn’t want to ignore. It took four years to render the mine safe for further exploration, and a scientific study of its bat population was required. Meanwhile, Rowland consulted with a national nonprofit organization of volunteer specialists who help law enforcement locate clandestine graves and recovery of evidence, including human remains.

The flytraps he set three months ago were an inexpensive way to attract a “certain species of bugs that feed off human remains over different cycles of decomposition,” he said. Investigators are waiting to get the results. Next, core samples may be drilled if funding comes through.

Calico’s parents and stepfather died not knowing what happened to her. But Rowland feels a duty to continue the search for other family members and the community.

“The case won’t be solved until I get Tara Calico home,” Rowland said. “That’s the mission.”