A decade of fear: Other killings in the 1980s.
Teal Pittington and the woman known as Tamara Britton were far from the only women who were killed or disappeared from Santa Fe in the 1980s. Here’s a list of others:
Beverly Ann “Honi” Riccio, 33, died in November 1981. She was a waitress at the Legal Tender in Lamy as well as a professional masseuse. The native New Yorker was found dead in her apartment at 2378 Camino Capitan the day after Thanksgiving. She’d been stabbed 16 times. Overturned furniture indicated a struggle before the killing. Nearly 10 years later, in August 1991, police and then-District Attorney Chet Walter announced the case had been solved, but the suspect, a man who’d been seen arguing with Riccio several days before, had died. Neither Walter nor police would name the suspect.
Janet Benoit, 22, died in November 1983. Benoit was passing through Santa Fe when she was killed. She’d been living in Colorado but was moving to Arizona, where she had just landed a job managing a shoe store. She checked into a motel, then known as the Comfort Inn, 2900 Cerrillos Road. The next day, motel maids found her body on a bed. She had been raped and stabbed more than 30 times. The case wasn’t solved until 2003, when David Bruce Morton confessed to police that he had killed Benoit as well as his former Santa Fe neighbor, Teri Mulvaney.
Teri Mulvaney, 25, died in June 1984. Mulvaney, a secretary at the Public Service Company of New Mexico, was raped and strangled in her apartment at 2702 Galisteo St. Morton, a neighbor with a prison record, was considered a suspect early on in the investigation. When he was arrested on a drunkendriving charge, a cellmate said he confessed to killing Mulvaney. But local prosecutors said there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him. Mulvaney’s parents gathered enough petition signatures to force a grand jury investigation of Morton. The state Attorney General’s Office took Morton to trial in 1988. During the trial, Walter, the district attorney, testified for the defense, saying there wasn’t enough evidence to bring Morton to court. In October 1988, a jury could not reach a decision. Eleven wanted to acquit Morton while one juror insisted the defendant was guilty. Morton moved to Amarillo, where he was later convicted of raping and murdering another woman. In 2003, he confessed to Santa Fe police that he had killed Mulvaney as well as Benoit.
Susan LaPorte, 25, died in December 1985. She was a Boston native who was in Santa Fe to visit a friend. On Dec. 4, she dropped off her friend at work and took the friend’s car to find a sunny place to read a book. She wasn’t seen until several days later, when a patrol officer found her body beneath a juniper tree in an arroyo behind what is now the Santa Fe Spa and The Lodge at Santa Fe hotel. She was bound with a rope that was knotted around her neck and ran down to her wrists, where it was knotted again. For years, there were no significant breaks in the case. But in 2009, a retired FBI agent working for the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department cold case squad found a DNA match with a semen sample from another case — the rape and murder of Maria Padilla, 29, who in May 1985 was found in the bosque along the Rio Grande in Albuquerque’s South Valley. While the link to the Padilla killing was considered a breakthrough, investigators have not been able to match that DNA with any suspect, Santa Fe police Detective Tony Trujillo said in a recent interview.
Roberta Michelle Montoya, 20, died in July 1986. Montoya moved to Santa Fe in March of that year after losing custody of her son in California. She worked for about a month as a waitress in Clines Corners. She was last seen by friends July 4, when she went to visit a friend in a hospital. Local relatives didn’t report her missing until July 30. The next April, a man walking his dog along Old Las Vegas Highway came across her skeletal remains about a mile south of Bobcat Road. Investigators could never determine how Montoya died. The presumed killing remains unsolved.
Gloria Mares, 25, died in August 1986. Mares, a mother of three boys, was last seen by her family that month, riding on a motorcycle with a man. In July 1987, some of her skeletal remains were found in La Cienega. Medical examiners determined she had been shot in the back of the head. Investigators learned Mares had been to a party and had gotten into an argument with a man. Confidential informants told sheriff’s investigators about a man who admitted shooting Mares. But the suspect, who investigators wouldn’t name, died a violent death in 1989. Two witnesses to Mares’ killing also had died, Sheriff Benjie Montaño said in 1990. Michelle Quintana, 23, disappeared in August 1987. Quintana, who worked for a local real estate company, received a call on her pager Aug. 8, 1987. She didn’t have a phone in her home, so she got in her truck to find a pay phone on Cerrillos Road. She has never been seen again. Her truck was found at the DeVargas Center mall, where two witnesses reportedly saw her get into a red Jeep with two men. Confidential reports obtained by The New Mexican in 1990 showed sheriff’s detectives believe Quintana had been kidnapped and killed by a cocaine dealer from whom she had been buying drugs. The pager Quintana had the day of her disappearance belonged to that dealer. When the dealer was arrested on cocaine charges, a sheriff’s affidavit said, he told arresting officers, “I did not kill Michelle” — even though the officers hadn’t mentioned Quintana. Despite the suspicions, the dealer was never charged with any crime related to Quintana’s disappearance. Her body has never been found.
Annette Gonzales, 19, died in July 1988. Gonzales worked at a local video store. She was last seen about 2 a.m. July 17, 1989, when she dropped her cousin off at the Cerrillos Road restaurant where he worked. Her 1988 Toyota Corolla was found two days later in the parking lot of the state Department of Transportation off Cerrillos Road. Gonzales’ remains weren’t found until January 1989. Search teams found other human remains — near Bobcat Road, not far from where Roberta Michelle Montoya’s bones were found. In March 1989, the remains were identified as Gonzales’. The case remains unsolved.
Tracy Barker, 24, died in May 1989. She was a single mother who managed a Pizza Hut. She went out on a date May 2, 1989, and wasn’t seen again until a passing motorist spotted her body under a tree in a then-undeveloped area off South Richards Avenue. Barker had been raped, hit in the head with a rock and strangled with a rope. Police quickly cleared Barker’s date of any involvement in the killing. But several weeks later, they arrested Barker’s stepfather, Dane Collins, on suspicion of murder. Collins, who lived in the same house as Barker, her son, her mother and a younger brother, would face the death penalty, prosecutors announced. Collins spent five months in jail until his lawyer, Dan Cron, successfully argued that DNA evidence couldn’t link Collins to the crime. The case remained unsolved for almost 15 years when Santa Fe police Detective Trujillo, trying to match the DNA found in Barker’s body to the DNA in the Susan LaPorte killing, found that it matched that of serial rapist Chris McClendon. McClendon, a former Santa Fe ski instructor, pleaded no contest in 2005 to Barker’s kidnapping, rape and murder. He is serving a life sentence for Barker’s killing, plus more time for her rape and kidnapping.