May 7 2020 rbbm.
What happened to Holly White?
By John Miller
''Another year has passed and Holly White's disappearance in May 2016 remains one of Taos County's most vexing unsolved mysteries.
New Mexico State Police now considers the question of whatever happened to the former office manager for the Taos Center for the Arts to be a cold case, but Elaine Graves, the private investigator who has been looking for White for nearly four years, says she'll "never stop looking for Holly."
It's a job she says she can't do alone. Every year around the anniversary of White's disappearance, she urges the Taos community to send her any new information that might result in a break in the case.
"I know it’s been awhile, but think back to around the time of Cinco de Mayo, around the time of Mother’s Day in 2016," Graves said, "and just try and remember what you were doing and if anything seemed odd or out of place or anything like that. I’ll take anything at this point. Even if you don’t think it’s important, it could be a piece of the puzzle that I’m sitting here waiting for that nobody knows is important but me."
In recent months Graves has been searching through White's phone and computer data, hoping to find something – a telling Google search, perhaps – that might hint at what happened to White. Did she commit suicide? Did she deliberately disappear? Did someone kill White? Graves has considered all possibilities, but like everything else that has seemed like a lead in the past, nothing on White's phone or computer has turned up any clue as to what happened to White four years ago.
Graves, who grew up in Taos and runs her private investigation business out of Santa Fe, was first hired to search for White six months after she was reported missing on May 6, 2016, well after the first 48 hours when professionals consider it at all likely a missing person will be found alive.
At the time, White was a few months from turning 50 and was planning to move to Albuquerque to join her husband, Jeff White, after many years in Taos. She had a new job waiting for her in the city and a farewell party was planned for her at the TCA, where she had worked for 22 years. The morning she went missing, White had been scheduled to go for a walk with her close friend, Cynthia Arvidson, but never made it.
In her home in Taos, law enforcement found many personal belongings. White's purse was in the kitchen. Her dog was also still in the house.
When White's blue Ford Escape was found parked in the Río Grande Gorge Bridge parking lot, her disappearance seemed to have a simple explanation: that she must have jumped to her death at the high bridge, which many other people have done throughout the years. But unlike those other cases, White's body could never be found. Several searches of the canyon and its surroundings – and many river rafting trips since – have turned up no sign of White's remains in the water or on the riverbanks.
Around a half-dozen searches for White have been conducted over the years, including one Graves organized in Taos Canyon with cadaver dogs, but none have been successful.
"I do get really, really frustrated at times," Graves said. "There’s such a roller coaster of emotions and frustration is just what keeps coming up. There’s frustration. There’s disappointment. Sometimes it’s just tough to go forward, especially when you’re working with the families. Their hearts have been ripped out. Unlike law enforcement, [which] can keep at a distance, I’m in the middle of it. To this day, four years later, I talk to Holly’s dad maybe every other day. We’re still close."