Family gets closure in case of man who went missing in Taos
Authorities: Remains found in ravine likely those of Arroyo Hondo man
TAOS — When Frankie Martin went missing on a spring day in 2016, his family came together to search for answers. They gathered again late last month when they believed authorities had found one.
Following a tip, Taos County Sheriff Jerry Hogrefe and Undersheriff Steve Miera made their way to a makeshift campground just north of the John Dunn Recreation Area, where they discovered human remains at the bottom of a jagged, 110-foot-deep ravine.
They believe the body is that of Martin, a 26-year-old Arroyo Hondo man who had worked as a wildland firefighter and dishwasher. He went missing in April 2016, leaving authorities and loved ones stumped.
Hogrefe said in a statement that the body appeared to have been lying in the ravine for quite some time. “Clothing was also found on the
remains as well as a cellphone in the pants pocket,” he said.
After an initial assessment, Hogrefe said, investigators were certain the cellphone was Martin’s. They also matched the clothing on the body with descriptions of what Martin had been last seen wearing — a black baseball cap, a green hoodie, a black T-shirt and Converse tennis shoes.
Martin’s family hopes the search for him has come to an end.
Tamie Benally, one of his six sisters, said, “We are just so glad to have some type of closure.”
The remains have been turned over to the state Office of the Medical Investigator, which will perform DNA testing to positively identify the body and determine the cause of death. An identification could take up to six months, Hogrefe speculated, though a cause of death could come in as little as a few weeks.
Martin was last seen walking out the door of a corner store in Arroyo Hondo, a community about 10 miles north of Taos, where he had lived with his girlfriend, Cedar Mortenson. Video footage shows him buying a few items the afternoon of April 18, 2016, and leaving on foot. His car, wallet and keys were all left at his home.
Investigators would later discover that a white pickup driven by someone who knew Martin had pulled up to the corner shop around the same time of day. Authorities are not yet commenting on how the driver might be tied to the case.
Mortenson and one of Martin’s sisters, Arlene Pearson, became concerned when Martin never returned home. Calls made to his cellphone went unanswered. They searched for Martin around Arroyo Hondo before reporting him missing April 21.
While Mortenson said at the time that Martin had talked about suicide and described the idea of jumping from the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, she was unaware of Martin having any specific plans to kill himself.
Two weeks after Martin’s disappearance, a well-known Taos woman went missing — the second Taos County woman to go missing in less than six months.
Holly White, the then 49-yearold office manager of the Taos Center for the Arts, went missing May 6, 2016, just four months after Naomi Chaney, a 36-yearold mother who lived in the Carson area, also disappeared. Chaney was later identified as the victim of a grisly murder in the Carson area, but her body was never found.
White’s disappearance remains a mystery.
Elaine Graves, a private investigator from Santa Fe assigned to both the Martin and White cases, said identifying the body of a victim in any missing persons case is a major and rare victory — even if the outcome is not what a victim’s family desires.
“His family is just so happy to know where he is,” she said of Martin, “to not have to be looking anymore.”
After Martin went missing, Benally said, she and their other siblings gathered at her home in Albuquerque and at their mother’s house in Gallup. They shared stories about Martin and prayed for his safe return.
“We kept his memory alive by sharing the good things that we went through,” Benally said.
Now that she believes they found her brother, she had a message for other families in Taos County whose loved ones remain missing:
“We felt lost without our brother, too,” she said. “The pain is overwhelming and heartbreaking. There is someone out there that knows. I would just let them know to not give up hope.”
A version of this story first appeared in The Taos News ,a sister publication of The Santa Fe New Mexican.