Mystery of disturbing Polaroid showing girl & boy gagged in van – but friend believes she has now SOLVED photo riddle
A DISTURBING Polaroid showing a girl and a boy gagged in the back of a van has baffled cops and investigators for decades.
It has long been linked to the vanishing of Tara Calico - a 19-year-old who went missing on a bike ride on September 30, 1988.
The girl in grey in the photo - pictured bound and gagged alongside an unidentified little boy - has been theorised by many to be Tara.
The sinister snap was discovered in a Florida car park in August 1989, sparking an investigation.
And after the harrowing picture was circulated, families came forward to claim they recognised the distressed-looking pair.
The Calico family were certain the girl in the image was Tara, meaning she would have to be alive months after her disappearance.
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Law enforcement had been divided over the photo - with different agencies who studied it turning up inconclusive results.
For decades since the Polaroid was found it was the source of both hope and heartache.
It has been splashed across the media and featured on TV, and yet more than 30 years on the case remains open.
But now a friend of the missing teen, who has spent years investigating her disappearance, has said the girl in the photo is NOT Tara.
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Melinda Esquibel, Tara's former classmate, believes her friend was stalked by a group of local boys after rejecting one of the lads who had asked her out on a date.
And she believes the teen was killed on the same night she disappeared and was buried just 20 miles from where she was killed - rather than being kidnapped by whoever was behind the creepy Polaroid.
But it raises a new set of questions - if Tara is not the girl in the photo, then who is it?
Melinda told The Sun Online: "I know that the family believes it is or could be her, but the data I have gathered shows that it cannot be her.
"None of the data I have leads to that girl being Tara."
I feel like me and my team have solved the case
Melinda Esquibel
Tara Calico never returned after setting out on a bike ride near her home in the city of Belen, New Mexico.
She set off on the 36-mile route at 9.30am - a route she rode most mornings, often with her mum, Patty Doel.
But her mum had stopped cycling with her because she thought she was being stalked by a driver.
Patty encouraged Tara to begin carrying mace to defend herself, but she rejected the idea.
Tara was last seen riding along a highway at 11.45am - with witnesses claiming to have seen her being followed by a light-coloured Ford pickup truck.
She had asked her mother to come and pick her up if she hadn't returned by 12pm that fateful day because she had plans to play tennis with her boyfriend that afternoon.
When she didn't return, Patty went searching along the route and contacted the cops after failing to find her.
The 19-year-old was never seen again with only fragments from her Sony Walkman and cassette tape found along the trail.
She came up with the theory about Tara's death after interviewing hundreds of people and pulling together a case file containing a whopping 25,000 items.
Melinda told The Sun Online: "I feel like me and my team have solved the case, but I am not the authorities and there is not much I can do about making arrests.
"Therefore, I have to leave that up to them. I have no idea if anyone will ever make any arrests in this case."
From her years of detective work, she thinks the group of local boys knocked Tara off her bike before snatching her and killing her.
And Melinda thinks Tara is buried just 20 miles away from where she was brutally murdered.
"I have information that it was a possibility that this boy and his friends were going to grab her four days before the day she was actually taken on September 16, 1988," she said.
"This would mean it was premeditated and thought out.
"Regardless, I believe they knew her route, she was stalked and followed.
"The boys hit her bike and it knocked her off. She took off running and they followed her, grabbed her, assaulted and then murdered her.
"I think her body is buried within 20 miles of where she was hit.
"The details are gruesome of what happened and then what happened in the aftermath.";
'TRAUMATISING'
Melinda became interested in the case after a news article came out on the 20th anniversary of her death - 13 years ago.
She said: "Back in 1988 this entire event was very traumatising to the community.
"I had blocked it out until my mother had cut out the article and mailed it to me in California. When I read it I started crying and the wounds just ripped right open.
"I couldn't believe I had forgotten what had happened all those years ago."
Melinda went home to New Mexico and met a group of old school pals, who told her: "Oh Melinda, the whole town knows who did it!"
"They proceeded to tell me a bunch of stories that were pretty shocking to me," she said.
"It was at that moment that I knew I had to do something."
Melinda started her investigative work by looking into the Sheriff at the time of Tara's death and carried out hundreds of interviews with local people in the community.
"Several years back in 2017 an investigator reached out to me after listening to my podcast," she said.
"He said he could help turn me into a proper investigator so I could actually make data sets that were viable to authorities with all the information I was collecting.
"He spent years training me and in the process, we put together a professional team of investigators that I would hold up over any law enforcement in New Mexico any day, and we put the case together.
"I shared my findings with the FBI. I never shared it with the Sheriff's office because they were not interested in going through it with me.
"They just wanted me to turn it over."
Tara had a bright light around her. She was fun, serious, smart, playful and kind
Melinda Esquibel
Melinda's case file now contains a whopping 25,000 items.
"There are always new leads that come in. I add it to the data sets and link charts, so that is a living and breathing document," she said.
"The thing that is frustrating is that a lot of the information that comes in is rumour, so I have to see how the information fits into what we have as actual reports, timelines, etc."
Paying tribute to her much-loved classmate, Melinda said: "Tara had a bright light around her. She was fun, serious, smart, playful and kind.
"That is how I remember her. She was an upperclassman and we met in the marching band.
"She showed me kindness and I will never forget that. She showed me kindness when she didn't have to.
"It says a lot about a person's character when they do the right thing when nobody's looking.
"She and I had more things in common than I ever realised."
Lieutenant Joseph Rowland, the agent on the Tara Calico case for the Valencia County Sheriff's Office, told The Sun Online the case can be solved.
"But one of the difficulties in this investigation is that there is very little physical evidence,"; he said.
And also Mr Rowland said the FBI have confirmed it is not Tara in the picture.
"A body has yet to be found. No DNA was recovered in the initial investigation. The investigation has been continuous for over thirty years now."
Last year, a fresh tip led to a raid on a house in Belen, New Mexico.
Mr Rowland said: "The search warrant, along with the information obtained to reach the probable cause standard in obtaining the warrant, has been sealed by a District Court judge.
"I cannot discuss the information which led to obtaining the search warrant."
But the detective believes the case "is progressing extremely well and is very much in an active status".
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He said: "My belief that this case is solvable comes from the large amount of people who have talked about it over the years.
"Belen was a much smaller town in 1988 and almost everyone knew each other. I believe that the person or persons, responsible for her disappearance are local."
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