The Vanished Girl: The Disappearance of Tara Calico and the Polaroid That Haunts On a clear September morning in 1988, nineteen-year-old Tara Calico clipped on her pink Walkman, climbed onto her bright Huffy bike, and set off along Highway 47 near Belén, New Mexico. It was a route she knew by heart. She promised her mother she’d be home by noon. She never returned. Ten months later, in a convenience store parking lot over a thousand miles away in Port St. Joe, Florida, a stranger found a crumpled Polaroid lying on the asphalt. In it, a young woman and a boy lay bound and gagged on a rumpled bed, their eyes wide and terrified. When Tara’s mother saw the picture on the evening news, she froze. She was certain: the girl in the photo was her daughter. The Vanished Girl traces Tara Calico’s story from the life she was building—a driven college student with plans and a tight-knit family—to the morning she disappeared, the chaotic early investigation, and the haunting emergence of the Polaroid that would capture the world’s attention. Drawing on contemporaneous reporting, law-enforcement records, broadcast archives, and community accounts, Linda Davidson unpacks: Tara’s final ride and the overlooked clues along Highway 47 - The Florida photograph that turned a local missing-person case into a national mystery - Conflicting investigations, jurisdictional missteps, and decades of dead ends - Theories of accident and cover-up, stranger abduction, and small-town silence - Patty Doel’s relentless fight to keep her daughter’s name alive More than a catalogue of theories, this is a story about a mother’s refusal to surrender, a community haunted by what it may know and won’t say, and a single image that became one of true crime’s most enduring puzzles. For readers of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark and The Fact of a Body , The Vanished Girl is a meticulously researched, deeply human account of a cold case that refuses to fade—and a reminder that sometimes the loudest evidence is the silence left behind.