Tara Calico (repost)

[TJ]

This was originally posted by moondawgg number of weeks ago, but it was lost due to a database crash so I am reposting it. moondawgg if you are still out there, please re-register.

Was snooping about on the net today and came across an interesting missing persons case from the 80s that was featured on UM.

Tara Leigh Calico disappeared while riding her bike in Belen, New Mexico in 1988. Foul play was suspected.
http://www.nmco.org/gallery/ma/calico.html


In 1989 a photograph was found in the parking lot of a florida convenience
store, depicting a young woman and a boy in the back of a van, bound and
gagged. It was turned over to police and for a time there was speculation
that the girl was Tara Leigh Calico. Apparently the girl had been seen with
the van drivers at the convenience store and had been "ordered" around by
them. The boy in the photo was thought to possibly be Michael Henley, a
younger boy who was lost during a turkey hunt with his father.

From the articles i can find online, both tara's and michael's parents were
brought to florida to look at the pictures. both were sure those were their
kids. The FBI disagreed, apparently.

Tara Calico is apparently still missing, but a search for missing Michael Henley offers no positive matches, leading me to believe that he has been found and could not have been the boy in the photograph, thus making the photograph look even more like a fake. Does anyone have any information as to what happened to Michael Henley in order to have him no longer appear on
missing children websites?




http://www.tabloidbaby.com/Book/Companion/bound.html
http://doenetwork.bravepages.com/257dfnm.html
http://home.earthlink.net/~jenbird/calico.html

[CrushedVelvet]

YOu brought up an interesting point. That is VERY odd about Michael Henley not being on the missing sites???? How can the FBI dispute that the photos are of these kids when their very own families say they are? The whole thing is so bizarre.......

[CrushedVelvet]

http://www.tabloidbaby.com/Book/Companion/bound.html

[CrushedVelvet]

Making it even weirder, in the photo of Tara and Michale, there is a book (visible on left) by V.C. Andrews whom Tara's mother claims is Tara's fav. author BUT why would she have had a book while on a bike ride? Did she have a backpack, purse? AGH! I hate when they leave out details. Its a shame that neither family has set up a website for these kids as some parents of missing kids do b/c they post new info, updates, etc.

[Composite Sketch]

I first heard of this case from the fansite and this message board. That and the Matthew Chase case are among the creepiest, scariest missing persons stories I have ever heard, and I haven't even seen the episodes! (I want to though ) The mystery picture being found in a mall brought back dim memories of a UM case I saw many years ago about a girl who disappeared in 1979 (I'm really good at remembering the years things happened, even when I was little) and weird letters were being found in malls. (Reading this board I found out that the guy who did it got caught - GOOD.)

I too find it odd that there's little info to be found about Michael Henley. I want to see a picture of him to compare it with the polaroid.

[CrushedVelvet]

Hey Composite Sketch, what case are you referring to that happened in 1979 (names, etc.)????

[Composite Sketch]

Micki Jo West, and the only way I know that is from finding this old thread. I'm good with remembering dates, but not names.

[rubber1234]

this is my favourite story (ie the scariest). you suggested that michael henley, jr. has been found: this is very unlikely. although i agree its odd that he doesn't appear on any missing persons sites, i'm 99 per cent sure he's still missing.

[njf520]

one of the best UM cases is this one with the photo of the bound kids.

whenever i see a poloroid in a mall, in a park, in a parking lot, i always pic it up and look at it b/c of this episode. so creepy.


njf

[FanfromES]

Looking for info about this case, thats how i found this site, actually my first post was about it, i wanted to know if those children in the photo were alive and well.

It wasnt good to know that the case remains unsolved until this day, there are so many terrible questions about it: Are Tara and Michael the ones pictured? if not, who they are? are they still alive?

Thinking of them prisoners of a psycho team a la Lucas-Toole caused me nightmares since the first time i saw the story around ‘92

I searched for info about this case across the web without getting much, but when i read Moondawg saying the photo could be a hoax, i realized this could be a possiblity that i never thougth of.

Maybe Michael was found (alive i hope) so hes not among the hundreds of missing kids websites, maybe somebody discovered that the photo was a hoax and those gagged kids are just faking it, maybe Tara’s sites arent updated so still show the photo.

Maybe i just want to believe in a happy end. Maybe.

[justins5256]

Todd,

I read a Usenet post a number of years back that indicated the body of Michael Henley had been found not far from where he disappeared. He most likely was not the boy in the photo. I'll see if I can dig up the post on Google, and post it here.

Justin

[Awsi Dooger]

My estimation has always been that it was bought by the captors after Tara Calico mentioned her preference for his books, not that she had the book at the time of the abduction. In other cases of extended kidnapping it 's frequently mentioned that the abductors will sometimes do minor good deeds or favors, to help brainwash the person by presenting a semblance of normalcy or at least keep them in line and discourage an escape attempt.

[Allierain]

Originally posted by Composite Sketch
Micki Jo West, and the only way I know that is from finding this old thread. I'm good with remembering dates, but not names.

I remember that case. That was the girl- a nurse, I thought?- who vanished, and mysterious letters started showing up in malls (supposedly from the person responsible) claiming that he needed help, he killed Micki Jo, he wanted to go to the police, and said he might kill himself. I thought there was more than one letter. That's all I remember.

[TJ]

http://www.abqtrib.com/archives/news...ews_tara.shtml

RIO COMMUNITIES - Perhaps Tara Leigh Calico knew how short her time was.

Perhaps that compelled her to keep detailed to-do lists, judiciously apportioning time to brush her hair, time to cram in a tennis game or a bike ride or a run between work and college, time to shop for Mom.

"She didn't have time to fool around," said her stepfather, John Doel. "There was just so much she wanted to fit into a day. She was like a little machine. It was amazing."

Tara was 19 when she made her last list 15 years ago Saturday. Her mother, Patty Doel, doesn't remember what it said, just that she never got to everything on it.

Just that Tara, like the book her name comes from, was gone with the wind.

Long before Elizabeth Smart, Laci Peterson or Chandra Levy, New Mexico lost Tara Calico, a long-legged, freckle-faced young woman from Rio Communities whose heart and resolve were as big as the sage-spiked plains that seemed to swallow her whole Sept. 20, 1988.

Fifteen years since Tara rode off on a pink bike from her family home on Brugg Street, the Doels have endured dozens of dead-end tips, what they see as law enforcement ineptitude and psychics' overzealousness, and their own pain.

They've appeared on "Oprah," "America's Most Wanted," "Unsolved Mysteries," "48 Hours" and "A Current Affair."

They were deputized 12 years ago to access their own information, mailed out 200,000 fliers and photos of Tara, contacted hundreds of law enforcement agencies across the globe, advocated for changes in state laws to prevent other parents from going through their hell.

They've lived with loss. They've lived for the day Tara rides back to Brugg Street on that pink bike.

But after 15 years, they are learning to face the likelihood that the day may never come.

They are leaving.

In a month or so, they will move almost 2,000 miles from Rio Communities, just south of Belen, to their bayside dream home in Port Charlotte, Fla.

It's a move they have thought about for years but could never bring themselves to do . . . just in case.

"Here, there's not anything I can do that doesn't remind me of Tara," said Patty Doel, a gracious, gritty woman who no doubt imbued her daughter with that trademark tenaciousness. "It will be a good change for us."

But it is not an easy one. The Doels might be moving on, but they are not giving up. Not entirely.

They have no time for that.

Gone with the wind

N.M. 47 slices through a vast horizon of high, dry desert between the small enclave of Rio Communities and a separate two-lane highway that traverses west to the Rio Grande and east to the blue-black Manzano Mountains.

New housing developments have nibbled into the southern edge of this arid expanse. Further south, the sparse Tierra Grande subdivision still seems more outpost refuge than viable community.

For the most part, it is still the same swath of emptiness Tara Calico rode through - south 17 miles to the railroad tracks and back - as she did almost daily for exercise.

Tara's only concern that Sept. 20 was to stick to her schedule and avoid another flat tire like one just two weeks before, her mother said.

"She told me, `Mom, if I'm not back by noon come get me,'" she said.

Tara had plans to play tennis with a boyfriend at 12:30 p.m. She had class at 4 p.m. at the University of New Mexico Valencia campus in Belen.

Tara was in her sophomore year, maintaining a 3.9 grade-point average and studying to become a psychiatrist.

That morning, she laid out what she needed: tennis clothes, racket, balls, schoolbooks, purse. She asked her mother to rewind two cassette tapes, one by the band Boston, so she could listen to it on her yellow sports-model Sony Walkman as she rode.

She left her home at 9:30 a.m., taking her mother's 12-speed Huffy instead of her own because of a damaged derailleur. Doel's mountain bike was neon pink with yellow control cables and sidewalls, likely the most colorful bicycle in Valencia County.

Seven people reported seeing Tara on that bike heading north on the return leg of her trip about 11:45 p.m. Her headphones were on, and she was apparently oblivious to the older-model, light-colored pickup truck with camper shell behind her.

She was two miles from home.

Patty Doel struck out in search of her daughter at 12:05 p.m.

John Doel, just home from the night shift as a conductor for the Santa Fe Railway, was nearly asleep when his wife burst into the bedroom.

Searching

John Doel remembers how the 6-year-old girl everyone called "Teeny Tara" crawled onto a kitchen stool each morning to prepare a pitcher of orange juice, cook an egg and brown her toast, all on her own.

"She was so self-sufficient, even then," he said. "She did everything for herself and for everybody else as well."

The Doels had been married a few months then, five children between them from previous marriages. Tara was Patty's youngest.

Now she was gone.

Rains and wind the night she disappeared washed away obvious signs of what had happened to her.

But the next day, Patty Doel spotted the outline of a Boston cassette tape in an ooze of mud on the south shoulder of N.M. 47 - the opposite side of the highway and from one to three miles south of where she had last been seen, as if she had turned around and was once again heading away from home.

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.

Patty Doel believes 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. John Doel said the marks looked more like skids.

For weeks, friends, family, volunteers and law enforcement agents in airplanes and in helicopters, on horseback and on foot searched for Tara. Bloodhounds sought out her scent. Heat-seeking detectors scanned the terrain. Psychics offered their gloomy visions. Newspapers ran stories on the continuing search for the girl on the bike.

Authorities provided a water witch with a strand of Tara's hair to divine whether her body was submerged in a ditch.

Patty Doel said one of the first Valencia County sheriff's detectives on the case called her nearly every day with new and gruesome scenarios of what he believed had happened to Tara.

The most awful, she said, was that she was abducted by a satanic cult who cut off her hands and planted them in an autumnal equinox fertility ritual. Tara was then tied to a post in the bosque for three days and burned at the stake, his story went.

Days later, the same detective told a reporter that Tara was likely a runaway, she said.

"He said, `We're all upset with her, but we'll give her a big hug when she comes back,'" she said. "I was so mad."

John Doel, a far calmer presence than his wife, was, too.

"There's been many people and law enforcement organizations who have been extremely helpful, and there's been an equal number who have done the opposite," he said.

The detective has not worked for the Sheriff's Department for more than five years, Valencia County Undersheriff William Martinez said.

"If a prior administration and a prior detective behaved as indicated, it was totally uncalled for and not in accordance with modern day police tactics," Martinez said.

As the weeks passed, one thing became clear: The girl who could do everything for herself couldn't save herself. And neither, they feared, could anyone else.

Girl in the photo

Ten months after Tara vanished, an eerie Polaroid was found in the parking lot of a Port St. Joe, Fla., convenience store.

In it, a long-legged young woman and a littler boy lie on a crumple of sheets and a blue-striped pillow, their mouths covered with duct tape and their hands bound behind their backs.

A tattered copy of "My Sweet Audrina" by V.C. Andrews, a plastic cup and a squirt gun are also visible in the photo.

Polaroid officials say the picture was taken with film not available until May 1989.

The Doels are convinced the woman in the photo is Tara.

Another New Mexico couple identified the boy as their 9-year-old son, Michael Henley of Milan, N.M., who disappeared in April 1988 on a hunting trip with his father in the Zuni Mountains south of Grants.

Extensive analysis performed by experts from Arizona to Los Alamos National Laboratory indicated that the woman's hairline and ear were consistent with Tara's, the Doels said. They are sure a wispy mark on the woman's right calf is the scar Tara received in a car crash.

The photo was taken in the windowless back of a white Toyota cargo van manufactured in the late 1980s, they said.

And, they said, a phone number, some of its digits indecipherable, is scratched on the spine of the novel.

Because some numbers are missing, Patty Doel said more than 300 listings are possible. Of those, only 57 are valid numbers, she said.

None has led to Tara.

In August 1989, the FBI concluded it was unable to say for sure that the people in the photo were Tara and Henley.

Patty Doel, whose disdain for the FBI is as obvious as the cigarettes she chain smokes, said an agent told her the woman's legs were shaved, thus she could not be a kidnapping victim.

A spokesman for the FBI in Albuquerque was unavailable for comment.

In June 1990, remains found in the Zuni Mountains were identified as those of Henley.

The Doels even have doubts about that.

Two other photos have surfaced over the years.

The first was found near a residential construction site in Montecito, Calif. The haunting Polaroid, taken on film not available until June 1989, shows the blurry image of a girl's face, her mouth again covered with tape, her hairline exhibiting that same cowlick at the right temple.

Behind her is light-blue striped fabric similar to that on the pillow in the Toyota van photo.

Patty Doel said she believes it is a photo of Tara.

She points to the eyes in the photo, how one lazy pupil is asymmetrical to the other, just like Tara's.

Another Polaroid, this one taken on film not available until February 1990, shows a woman loosely bound in gauze, her eyes covered with more gauze and large black-framed glasses. A man is sitting next to her on a passenger seat of an Amtrak train.

Patty Doel is not certain the woman is Tara or whether the photo is a gag. Still, the man's face is included with two other suspect composites.

Law enforcement agencies occasionally send her grisly photos of dead young women for her to identify. So far, none of them has been Tara.

The heart they leave behind

Boxes and tools clutter the Doels' rambling five-bedroom house on Brugg Street, but it's clear that any moving-out activity is slow in coming.

"It's really hard to move," said Patty Doel, who like her husband is retired now from the Santa Fe Railway. "If she were to come home I could not ever tell her we gave up on her."

Photo collages of the children and grandchildren remain on the dining room walls. Tara is among the smiling faces.

There is Tara as a cheerleader, Tara in Little League, Tara in the family portraits she arranged.

Handmade birthday cards and her old art projects are still within easy reach. Here's one with a smiling bee and a flower for her mother's 39th birthday. "Now remember," it admonishes, "you're starting a new wacky year with us!"

The spices in the kitchen cabinets are still unpacked, still as Tara arranged them - in alphabetical order.

"She was so organized it was disgusting," her mother joked.

Tara's room is mostly untouched, the gifts Patty Doel has bought for her each Christmas and birthday still piled on the bed.

They will be shipped to Florida along with Tara's bed and belongings.

"They will be the last things I pack," she said.

The Doels say they still get the occasional call from police agencies across the country, from psychics and from people who still wonder whatever happened to that girl on the bike.

"We really refuse to believe she's gone, but in all probability she may be," John Doel said, his voice still steady as strong. Hysterical emotions, the Doels say, are a waste of time and something Tara would not wish.

But if she is dead, Patty Doel said she hopes it came fast.

"I don't want her to have suffered at all," she said. "I don't want her to have been humiliated."


***
CAN YOU SOLVE THIS CASE?

If you have information on the unsolved disappearance of Tara Calico, please call Valencia County sheriff's Detective Rene Rivera at 866-2405. You may remain anonymous.

For information on missing children, contact the Vanished Children's Alliance at www.vca.org.

[Composite Sketch]

Well, that explains why Michael Henley wasn't on any missing children websites. I'm really curious as to whether they were able to determine how long Michael's body lay there in those mountains.

UM should really do another segment on this case. And not just an update, an entire new segment using old footage from the 1989 airing as well as the new evidence, including the two other Polaroid pictures.