By Seamus McGraw

(Continued)

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Her family, however, refuses to believe that. They insist that suicide is not something that Tara would ever have considered and note that despite all the emotional hardships she had endured, the last time anyone saw her, just hours before she vanished, she seemed tired but content.

In their minds, whatever happened to Tara happened against her will.

Authorities also are skeptical about the theory that Tara simply ran away.

In the days and weeks after Tara vanished, authorities monitored her financial records and scoured the various national databases for some trace of her. They came up with nothing.

There is, of course, the possibility that she might have taken even more elaborate steps, changing her appearance, perhaps, or assuming a new identity in a different place. But to do that, and to maintain the fiction for a year in the face of intense media scrutiny, she would have needed help, authorities say. "You've got to have support if you do something like this," said one law enforcement official familiar with the investigation. "There's got to be a second party."  And because Tara's life up until her disappearance was contained within her native southern Georgia, such an accomplice would probably have turned up on the investigators' radar by now.  So far, that hasn't happened.

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Contact Seamus McGraw at seamusm@ptd.net

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