On October 22, 2005, Tara Grinstead, a former beauty queen and teacher from Georgia, disappeared. Today, Ryan Alexander Duke was arrested and charged with her murder.
In 2005, Grinstead left the Sweet Potato Festival with plans to head to a cookout with friends. Sadly, the 30-year-old Irwin Country High School teacher up and vanished afterwards. Police found her cell phone, car and dog at her house in Ocilla, Georgia, a town about 200 miles south of Atlanta. The clothes she was supposed to wear to the cookout were also found in her home and there was no sign of struggle.
Authorities questioned several people close to her — including an ex-boyfriend and former student who was arrested for trying to break into her house while she was home — but no arrests were ever made.
“We knew something was immediately wrong,” Wendy McFarland, a co-worker, told 11Alive two years ago. “She was not the kind of teacher that would not show up without alert somebody.”
Gary Rothwell, who was the Special Agent in Charge of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation at the time of Grinstead’s disappearance, added that they treated her case as an abduction from the start. “I realized this thing might really be really bad,” he told reporters in 2005.
Today, Ryan Alexander Duke was charged with the murder of Tara Grinstead. Officials made the announcement during a Thursday news conference at the Irwin County Courthouse.
Though details of the murder remain unclear, police did say that Duke was a former student at the school Grinstead taught at.
Ryan Duke is the man accused in the disappearance of #TaraGrinstead – he attended the high school where she taught https://t.co/iIByv4dx2B pic.twitter.com/MwG9TyYVz6
— WSB-TV (@wsbtv) February 23, 2017
Two year’s prior to today’s arrest, a source contacted the GBI and led them to a small pond on private property. It was searched, but a body was not found.
“We found a few items that were mentioned from our source,” said J.T Ricketson, GBI’s current Special Agent in Charge. “We did not find any remains or anything like that, which was disappointing to us.”
Police remain tight-lipped about what exactly they found, but the new lead eventually led them to Duke.
“When we put together cases, it’s like putting a puzzle together,” said Ricketson. “Some jigsaw puzzles have 100 pieces. This one has several thousand pieces.”
