By Seamus McGraw

October 19, 2006

advertisement

OCILLA, Ga. (Crime Library) — The leaves have started to turn again, and once more, they gather on the grass outside the modest white house on the corner of Park Street, just as they did on a crisp October night a year ago when Tara Grinstead left that house for the last time.

Tara Grinstead's house

No one in her neighborhood saw her leave the house that night, except perhaps for her loyal dog, who may have barked a farewell. No one can say for certain whether she left alone, or whether she left willingly. The only thing that is certain is that when the former beauty queen and schoolteacher left her house sometime after 11 pm on that October night she left behind what is arguably the most intractable mystery in the history of Georgia law enforcement.

Tara Grinstead

In the year since she vanished, Tara Grinstead has been the subject of one of the most comprehensive missing person investigations ever undertaken in Georgia. More than 40 investigators from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, together with local law enforcement officers, have dedicated more than 5,500 man-hours to the hunt. They've tracked down hundreds of leads and interviewed scores of people, from her estranged boyfriend and others with whom she had romantic links, family members, to near strangers. They have dutifully copied their notes into casebooks, filling nearly 50 of them, 15 times the number of volumes used in an average murder investigation. And though they now have a stack of books as tall as a man, they are, authorities say, no closer to finding out what happened to Tara Grinstead than they were a year ago.

In fact, a year after Tara Grinstead vanished, seemingly into thin air, no one — not the police or her family, not the friends or the students she left behind — can say with any   degree of certainty whether she simply became overwhelmed by the complex demands of her rigid and rigorous life and ran away, whether she collapsed under the weight of her own broken heart and emotional upheavals and might have taken her own life, or whether she was, as most who knew her suspect, a victim of foul play.

Next Page

See Full Coverage of Tara Grinstead Case

For more daily crime news