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.