Man charged with murder in long-baffling Tara Grinstead disappearance
Authorities have charged Ryan Alexander Duke with murder in the puzzling disappearance of Tara Grinstead, a high school history teacher and former beauty queen who went missing nearly 12 years ago.
Officials made the announcement at a Thursday news conference at the Irwin County Courthouse.
Few details about the arrest or killing were discussed. Authorities said Duke was a student at Irwin County High School and graduated about three years before Grinstead went missing.
A tip led authorities to Duke, said J.T. Ricketson, special agent in charge of the GBI office in Perry.
“The search efforts never ceased,” he said.
Connie Grinstead said her family always believed her daughter’s disappearance would be solved.
“We just didn’t know when,” she said.
Grinstead’s disappearance has been perhaps Georgia’s, if not the Southeast’s, highest-profile missing persons case. It has been featured prominently on cable news and network television crime shows.
Oct. 22, 2005, was the last night anyone is known to have seen her.
Grinstead, a few weeks shy of her 31st birthday, had gone to a Saturday-night cookout at the home of a former Irwin County school superintendent’s family. When she was reported missing after not showing up to teach at the county high school the following Monday, the clothes she had worn to the cookout were at her house.
Her cellphone was charging in her bedroom. Her purse and keys were missing. Her cat, Herman Talmadge, and her dog, Dolley Madison, were in the house. There were no certain signs of a struggle. A bedroom lamp was broken. Her car, a white Mitsubishi, was parked outside, unlocked.
Over the years, investigators spoke to dozens of people who knew Grinstead, including men she had relationships with. They also interviewed a former student who was arrested in March 2005 for apparently trying to break into her house while she was home.
But those conversations proved futile in finding her or anyone who might have kidnapped or killed her.
For more on this developing story, return to Macon.com and read Friday’s Telegraph. Information from Telegraph archives was used in this report.
This story was originally published February 23, 2017 at 3:09 PM with the headline "Man charged with murder in long-baffling Tara Grinstead disappearance."