Missing Taos County woman's children still seeking answers 45 years later

SANTA FE — When he begins Mass each week from behind the pulpit at Santa Maria De La Paz Catholic Community church, Deacon John Cordova’s 25 years with New Mexico State Police seem like a lifetime ago.

Now 76, it’s difficult for him to recall many of the places, dates and names from his law enforcement career — except one: Nancy Craddock, a Ranchos de Taos woman who disappeared from her home on May 28, 1980.

“It still bothers me,” Cordova told the Journal after Thursday Mass. “It’s like, it’s in the back of my mind all the time — all the time.”

Craddock’s case was closed in the early ‘90s, so it came as a surprise to Cordova when the missing woman’s daughters, Patty Renfrow and Molly Renfrow Matthews, left a message for him at Santa Maria De La Paz last fall asking to speak to him about it.

Calling him from an office at the New Mexico State Police Investigations Bureau in Española earlier this year, they said police had reactivated the case last October in response to a four-page petition written by the family.

While they couldn’t discuss many of the details due to the active investigation, Renfrow and Matthews reiterated a theory they’ve long believed: that their mother might never have left Ranchos de Taos.

“We’re not hopeless,” Matthews said, speaking with the Journal. “We’re not helpless 27- and 24-year-olds. We have a small, small chance, which we’ve never had in 45 years. If we can’t find her, then I’ll go to my grave knowing I did the best I could with what I knew in my life.”

Matthews lives full-time in Texas, while Renfrow resides in Australia and visits regularly. On one of her trips to visit her sister last year, they and their brother, David Renfrow, submitted DNA samples through the Plano Police Department in case genetic evidence ever proves relevant to the investigation.

That’s when the family was contacted by Aaron Benzick, a Texas law enforcement officer for 25 years who now works as a detective. He’s also the founder of Solve The Case, a nonprofit organization dedicated to keeping unsolved missing persons cases alive.

Since launching his website, solvethecase.org, in 2023, Benzick has profiled dozens of missing persons cases throughout the U.S. Pages upon pages on his website feature the faces of missing persons young and old, with key details and timelines that Benzick says can sometimes jog something new loose in idle cases.

“There’s nothing worse than looking up some of these old cases, Googling a person’s name and literally nothing comes up,” he said. “That’s terrible when nobody’s talking about these cases. When I talk to families, the most important thing they want, obviously, is they want their family member’s crime solved or they want them found. The second thing they say they want is to let their person never be forgotten.”

After having three children with her first husband, Nancy remarried to Wayne Craddock on May 15, 1973. Five years later, the couple moved from Beaumont, Texas, to a house on Ortiz Road in Ranchos de Taos.

In her new life in Taos County, Nancy Craddock became fascinated with the arts, land and culture of northern New Mexico. She learned Native weaving, busied herself at her local church, Ranchos Presbyterian, and eventually became secretary of the Taos County Republican Party.

Adopted as an infant, Craddock had also been fascinated by genealogy all her life. Not long before her disappearance on May 28, 1980, she had finally tracked down and reconnected with her biological mother and father. In letters she wrote weekly to her loved ones, Craddock’s daughters said their mother was elated at having met her real parents and had become particularly close with her father.

He and his wife were visiting Craddock, then 47, in Ranchos just before her disappearance. Wayne Craddock’s elderly mother and a housekeeper were also living in the Ortiz Road home at the time.

“Her biological father and his wife took their leave, and that was the last, as I say, verified sighting,” Renfrow said. “She was deeply connected to the world around her, and those connections were real. She was interested in people and history. A week prior to her disappearance, she had written us a letter talking about upcoming plans she had in Taos.”

An unidentified member of the Taos County Republican Party was the first person to report Craddock missing to law enforcement on June 4, 1980, explaining that she never appeared for the June 3 presidential primary election.

“When she didn’t show up, they reported her missing because they said there was no way she would not have been there,” Matthews said. “She was passionately involved in politics. When I spoke to Wayne that morning, I said, ‘Have you talked to police?’ He said, ‘No, no, it’s not time for that yet.’”

Decades later, Cordova recalls some inconsistencies and logical leaps during an interview with Wayne Craddock, who said he and his wife had an argument the night of May 28 regarding his elderly mother. Wayne Craddock said his wife had decided to leave Ranchos de Taos right away, so he said he drove her to Amarillo Airport — more than 300 miles east of Taos — in the early hours of May 29, bought her a ticket for Dallas and never saw her again.

“That’s what raised my suspicion,” Cordova said. “Plus the fact that he chose the airport furthest away.”

At the end of the interview, Cordova offered Wayne Craddock a polygraph test, “and he declined it right away,” the retired police officer recalled. Sammy Pacheco, the district attorney at the time, determined that any evidence of foul play was “circumstantial,” Cordova said.

“That was the end of that,” he added. “I tried to get search warrants from the district attorney’s office, but there was not sufficient grounds for a search warrant.”

In 1981, one year after she went missing, Nancy Craddock’s biological father offered a $10,000 reward for information that could lead to locating his daughter, the equivalent of roughly $40,000 today, but no answers came of it.

Wayne Craddock petitioned to have Nancy Craddock declared deceased in 1985, and the order was approved in 1992, officially closing the case. Wayne Craddock died in 2022.

“People say, ‘Gosh, I know what you’re feeling,’ but they don’t,” Matthews said. “You know, just not being able to say goodbye, not knowing … if I could just have a goodbye, I wouldn’t care about where she was or having her body placed in a cemetery. There’s no way to explain to somebody that stoppage.”

Though the cases are separate, Matthews and Renfrow said they were reminded of their mother’s 45-year-old case when they learned of Melissa Casias’ disappearance in Ranchos de Taos this summer. Casias, a Los Alamos National Laboratory employee, was last seen on June 26 walking eastbound on N.M. 518 through Talpa, a neighboring community.

“I hope with Melissa’s case that there’s sufficient attention to it, not just by the police but by the media and her friends to help keep that alive,” Renfrow said.

The New Mexico Department of Public Safety website lists 32 missing persons listed for Taos County. Other women who have gone missing in Taos County in recent years include Melissa Crabtree, last seen in 2020, and Holly White, who disappeared in 2016.

More than 900 people are listed as missing for the entire state, many of whom are non-white women and girls, a demographic often disproportionally represented among missing persons nationally based on population size, according to the Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

Craddock’s daughters say it takes an extraordinary level of emotional stamina to remain hopeful that a lost loved one will one day be returned home. They say they owe it to their mother to keep her case alive as long as they’re able.

Before finding his next calling through the church, Cordova helped run a towing company and worked as a postal service carrier in Santa Fe. It’s been a long time since he wore a police uniform, but he still thinks of Nancy Craddock every day.

“I pray for the family,” he said, “and I pray that this case ends up resolving for the sake of the family.”