Toby Jorrin /Tribune

A photograph of Carla Simmons hangs on a tree amid the beads and the baubles left at the site of her Nov. 29, 1999, homicide in the Sandia Mountains. Her friend Margaret Johnson began hanging ornaments, poems and pictures at the site, and said passers-by have added to the collection. "We drive by sometimes and see people reading the poems, leaving jewelry and flowers and sometimes leaving their own letters to Carla and her family," she said. But the one person she hopes who sees Carla's roadside tribute is the killer.

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By Joline Gutierrez Krueger
Tribune reporter

In the painting, she is gossamer, her long dark hair tangling in the autumn breeze, her long white gown swirling about her tiny frame.
      It is 1985, and the ethereal creature is Carla Salinas. Her eyes are closed, her smile soft like she is lost in some sweet dream.
      And this is the dream: She will marry her handsome high school sweetheart a year later. They will have two beautiful children, a boy and a girl. They will live in a three-bedroom home above the orange sunsets in the Sandia foothills. She will be a PTA mom, a Cub Scouts mom, a loving mom. Friends will fawn over her cheesecake, will marvel at how she manages to do it all. Her beauty will remain as glorious as it is in this painting this day.
      But this is the nightmare: All of it will come true, and none of it will be enough to fend off completely the self-doubts that dimmed even the brightest moments of her life.
      "She was such a conscientious person, a loving person," said her brother, Joseph Salinas. "She was so hard on herself. Her torment was that she held herself up to such perfect expectations."
      On a black fall night on the backside of the Sandia Mountains, the darkness and the brightness of Carla Salinas Simmons' life ended in a homicide that remains unsolved nearly a year later.
      The 38-year-old Carnuel woman took her deadly journey on Nov. 29, 1999, to seek the comfort of a childhood friend living on the other side of the Sandias in Placitas.
      Although she had traveled the rugged road between their homes dozens of times, this night she pulled too far to the right and inextricably sunk the front tire of her minivan into the buckle of a crushed culvert.
      Her semi-nude body was found the next morning lying in the dirt road beside her white GMC Safari van and a crumple of clothing. Autopsy results indicated she had been battered about the head and neck, possibly strangled, but not enough to kill her. Instead, she likely froze to death in temperatures that plummeted overnight to 20 degrees, incapacitated by the blows, unable to save herself.
      "There are no words to adequately describe our horror, pain and complete devastation," said Carla's mother, Carmen Salinas. "Two innocent young children have lost their mother whose life was taken from her and them."
      FBI investigators have said little publicly about their investigation.
      "It's a tough case," FBI agent Doug Beldon said.
      Tougher still for the ones Carla left behind.
     
      So she wouldn't blow away
           Their plan was to grow old together, these two women who had been best friends since before they could pronounce each other's names.
     Margaret and Carla. They would outlast them all, their loving spouses, all the others who had skipped in and out of their lives since the two were toddlers living next door to each other in their middle-class Northeast Heights neighborhood.
     Margaret Johnson was always so much bigger, Carla always so tiny. You can see that in the photo Johnson's daddy took of them when Johnson was 5 and Carla was 4 1/2 but so much smaller, more delicate. The flashbulb's light glistens off her dark moon eyes as off glass.
     "She looked," Margaret Johnson said, "like a little china doll."
     A strong wind could scoop up Carla and send her spinning until she could latch onto a stop sign. Or to Johnson.
     "We walked home together hand in hand," Johnson said of a windy day in first grade. "At least then I could protect her and keep her from blowing away."
     From that day on, Johnson became Carla's ballast, her protector, whether it was against the weather or things far more sinister.
     Carla was an energetic girl, sometimes moody, sometimes shy, the kind of girl who would laugh at Johnson's father's jokes and then later secretly admit to Johnson that she had not understood the joke at all.
     Emotions were always near her surface, easy to scratch open. A wrong look might fill Carla's big brown eyes with tears.
     "Carla was a very sensitive person," Johnson said.
     In some ways she was very much like her mother, Carmen Salinas, a hurricane of a woman who imbued her seven children with a passion for life's perfection and the energy of emotion, good or bad.
     Carla's relationship with her father was far more complex, and it would shadow her throughout her life.
     There were other men who troubled Carla. Or worse.
     "We always met the perverts in life for some reason," Johnson said.
     A man followed them home when they were 12, she said, cornering them in a driveway of a neighbor's house where they had attempted to elude him. They banged on the door, but no one answered.
     "I said, 'Stay here, Carla,' and I ran around the back of his car and wrote down his license plate," Johnson said. "And that scared him away."
     The man, she said, turned out to be a suspected child molester.
     "You just didn't mess with Carla," she said. "Not when I was around."
     But it was impossible to always be there for the pretty little girl who only appeared sometimes to be too vulnerable to the worst the world could dole out. And sometimes that's exactly what the world did.
     
     Fixing things
     Rik Simmons had never been the kind of guy to make waves. He had been instilled with an easygoing nature and a love for the simple, solitary pleasures of the country.
     He was tall and blue-eyed and earnest, unattached and in no apparent hurry to change that status.
     "I didn't pursue girls," he said. "I've maybe had three girlfriends in my life."
     Then he met Carla.
     He was 19 and she was 17, the high school friend of a friend.
     Carla, too, had not dated much, preferring to devote her time to her Eldorado High School gymnastics team and to maintaining her name on the honor roll.
     "We didn't spend much time talking about boys," Margaret Johnson said.
     Carla and the friend showed up one day to swim in Simmons' apartment pool. Twenty years later he still smiles at the memory of the brown bikini she wore that day and the way her 93-pound gymnast's body fit into it.
     "That's what did it for me," he said. "I asked her out."
     Perhaps it was because Simmons didn't push too hard, didn't step too quickly into Carla's life, that Carla found him safe and one of the first men she trusted not to harm her.
     Eight years later, they married, on the same day as Simmons' parents had wed 40 years before. Carla wore Simmons' mother's wedding dress, altered to fit her 4-foot-11 frame. Margaret Johnson, herself now engaged, attended the wedding.
     "I planned my wedding for two weeks after hers so that she could be in my wedding as well," Johnson said.
     Volumes of photo albums retrace the early years of Carla and Rik, two beautiful people with their arms around each other, standing in front of their first home, smiling on camping trips and vacations and, later, cradling a son with eyes as big and as brown as his mother's and a daughter with gleams of gold in her hair like her father's.
     The family moved to a home in the small East Mountain community of Carnuel in time for Nick to start school out of Albuquerque. Teachers and other parents there remember her as a dedicated mother who eagerly volunteered in her children's classrooms and on school committees.
     As her children grew and their worlds expanded, Carla's attempts to keep her hand in everything they did threw her into ever-higher gears. That didn't stop her from taking a part-time job as a waitress at Le Cafe Miche, a small French restaurant in Albuquerque's Northeast Heights. It was a way to supplement the income of her husband, a building manager at Sandia National Laboratories, and to start saving for her children's college education.
     Carla also began making many of the pastries and cakes for the restaurant, all by scratch.
     "Her cheesecake was known far and wide," Simmons said.
     But the beautiful world Carla Simmons was trying to maintain was not as sound as it seemed. The standards of perfection that she had set for herself were so high. And not always reaching them was something that pained her more than anybody else.
     "She gave her whole life to her children, and it upset her that she couldn't give more," her brother said.
     Mariepaule Vermersch, a former fellow waitress, said part of the problem was that Carla simply wanted to do so much for so many.
     "She was overwhelmed sometimes," she said. "When she and I were working lunches together I would tell her to shoo. She always felt guilty that I was the last one finishing up, but she would have so much to do, picking up the kids, working at their school library. I would tell her never mind me; family comes first."
     The doubt that had cornered her before was beginning to descend.
     "The last time I saw her was that August. She looked like she had lost a lot of weight," Vermersch said. "She was very stressed. She was not the same person. Something was wrong."
     Vermersch said she asked Carla if she needed someone to talk to; Carla said she did. But it never happened.
     Carla wasn't talking much to anybody. Not even her husband.
     "I always thought I could fix these things," Simmons said. "We had made huge progress. There were indicators in that last year that she was really going to pull out of this."
     On warm night in September, Carla and Margaret Johnson, her childhood friend, spent the evening drinking wine, talking about their lives and their husbands and settling unfinished business from years before.
     It was the only incident that had ever come between them, something in high school that neither one had spoken of and something that night that was at last put to rest.
     "'Well, it looks like one of us is going to die soon,'" Johnson recalled saying afterward. "You know how it is when things are so clear in a relationship, like when people make peace with their parents just before they die. It was like that."
     That Thanksgiving, as Margaret and her husband, Michael Johnson, drove south on I-25 to Albuquerque, they were nearly struck by another motorist who had fallen asleep at the wheel.
     "I called Carla and told her I thought it was going to be me to die just like we had talked about," she said. "It turns out it was her."
     
     The dead of night
     Rik Simmons talked to Carla for the last time about 6:30 p.m. Nov. 29, 1999, when he called her from work to tell her he was on his way home.
     She probably wouldn't be home when he arrived, she said. She was going shopping.
     Simmons arrived home around 7 p.m., saw the look on the subdued faces of Rachel, 8, and Nick, 11, and knew something had exploded.
     "The night she left she felt stress over not being able to get along with her kids better. She always had doubts about not being a good enough mother," Vermersch said. "Stress often creates damages that are not meant to be."
     Simmons had become familiar with these nights of turmoil and the need for Carla to simply disappear and regroup.
     "I thought I would just wait it out like before," Simmons said. "I knew she probably wouldn't be home for a while."
     At 9:57 p.m., the phone rang at Margaret Johnson's home in Placitas.
     It rang again. Then again.
     The answering machine in the living room picked up the calls. From her bedroom, she shivered as she heard the machine utter a gurgling, crackling sound.
     "I got so weirded out that I disconnected my phone," she said.
     Back in Carnuel, Simmons was sending his children to bed. He watched television until about 11 p.m. and dozed off. Around midnight, he tried to call Carla on her cell phone.
     "We had just gotten it for emergencies," he said. "She never used it."
     He tried to call her several times, he said. Each time he thought the phone connected.
     "Somebody pushed 'send,'" he said.
     About 4:30 the next morning, Simmons awoke and drove off into the darkness in search of his troubled wife.
     "I didn't want my kids to worry that their mother hadn't come home all night," he said.
     About two hours later, he returned home to get the kids off to school. He told them that their mother had gone shopping.
     Simmons already had the day off to undergo some medical tests. Instead he spent the day looking for Carla.
     He called Albuquerque police to ask what he could do about his missing wife. Nothing, they said. Not yet. They suggested that he call hospitals to look for her. They also suggested that he call the jail.
     Carla was in neither place.
     Up on N.M. 165 on the rocky back ridge of the Sandia Mountains in the Las Huertas Canyon below the Sandia Man Cave, an archaeological site frequented by school kids on field trips and teens on Budweiser, a physician out jogging located a partly clad woman's body and called the Sandoval County Sheriff's Department.
     Because the body was found on national forest land, the sheriff called in the FBI.
     Simmons, meanwhile, was finding nothing but more worry.
     "I spent the whole day looking until I knew the kids would be coming home," he said. When the kids arrived around 3:30 p.m., Simmons was sitting in one of their bedrooms.
     "I was kind of upset but I was trying not to show it," he said.
     He doesn't remember what he told the kids about their mother this time.
     An hour later, FBI agents arrived.
     "They told me she was dead," he said. "I said, 'OK, where?'"
     But the agents wouldn't say. In the early hours of the investigation into Carla Simmons' death, her husband was the leading suspect.
     Rik Simmons followed the detectives to the FBI office Downtown. He asked a neighbor to watch the children until his sister could arrive.
     "I remember driving," he said. "I don't think the news had quite hit me yet. My lips were numb. My face was numb."
     In the weeks and months that followed, Simmons was cleared of suspicion, FBI officials said. So far, no other suspects have surfaced.
     Johnson said she thinks Carla was on her way over to surprise her with a casserole of homemade piñon lasagne and a bottle of red wine that the two had spoken of a week before. That she would have taken such a treacherous road at night was no surprise, she said.
     "She loved mountains, and that road was the most scenic way to my house," she said.
     Normally, though, Carla would have called her friend to tell her she was on her way and to ask her to meet her halfway. That night, she did neither. Nor had she mentioned anything of Placitas or Johnson to her husband.
     "I never even thought to look there," Simmons said. "I thought she would have just gone off on her own."
     Afterward he learned from his children that Carla had made that trip around the backside of the mountain many times.
     "Margaret was where Carla went when she was in desperate need to have a friend," he said.
     Months later when the FBI relinquished Carla Simmons' November cell phone bill, Rik Simmons confirmed that his calls to her that night had connected.
     He also learned she had not tried to call him for help that night.
     "She would have felt like I would really ostracize her," Simmons said. "That was what was so frustrating with her. She would always think the worst was about to come, but it was never me who made her feel that way."
     Instead, Carla's calls for help went to Margaret Johnson. Carla had attempted to call her four times -- at 9:57, 9:58, 9:59 and 10:01 p.m., including a call where one digit was misdialed, phone records indicate.
     "She was dialing so fast she got the last number wrong," Johnson said.
     The strange gurgling, crackling sounds on Johnson's answering machine had been Carla's cell phone trying to make a connection.
     
     The wind this time
     The wind wails in the place where Carla Simmons died.
     It whooshes through the treetops of the aspens and the ponderosas like the sound of a car coming, always coming, around the bend just ahead.
     Perhaps that is how it was that night, that whooshing sound like a car driving toward her. Or perhaps it was an actual car, forcing Carla to swerve too far to the right to let it pass when she slipped the front right wheel of her van into the busted culvert.
     "She tried so hard to get out," Johnson said. "You should have seen the rut she made with the rear wheel. The tire had all its tread burned off."
     They found her lying on her side in the roadway wearing only underpants and a blue sock on her right foot.
     Her van's ignition was on, but the engine was off. Blood was smeared on the rear left hubcap and on the roadway near a pile of clothes.
     Tar was found on the sole of her left foot, and abrasions on the foot and back appeared to have been caused after death, autopsy results indicated.
     "He wasn't a rapist," Margaret Johnson speculates about the killer. "It was too mishandled, too scattered. He would have already taken her in the van. Maybe he thought he could do it. But she surprised the hell out of him. And he left her."
     A receipt from Raley's grocery store dated that night was also found at the site, along with a piece of paper with a license plate number written on it. Johnson said she thinks it was the number of a person who had been following her from Le Cafe Miche.
     An open bottle of wine was found at the site. Carla had apparently opened it and had drunk some as she sat on that cold night alone.
     Sightings of strange men -- one in a Volkswagen, another with a dirty blond beard driving a mid-1970s light blue Chevy truck with a camper shell and a dashboard cluttered with empty Marlboro packages -- have been reported. But, so far, the case remains unsolved.
     
     Autumn breeze

Courtesy of Steve Hanks Carla Simmons was 24 when she posed for well-known artist Steve Hanks in this 1985 painting titled "Autumn Breeze." The painting was used on her Mass card at her funeral.