New indictment: Man accused in Tara Grinstead case denied talk of burning body

As early as June of last year, investigators hunting the killer of missing Irwin County High School teacher Tara Grinstead spoke to the man now charged with keeping her death a secret.

Details in a new indictment filed late last month shed at least a bit of new light on a vanishing that has captured national headlines for more than a decade.

Back in February, when Ryan Alexander Duke, 33, a former student at the Ocilla school where Grinstead taught, was arrested and charged in her death, his name had only recently come to the attention of authorities.

At a Feb. 23 press conference announcing Duke’s arrest, GBI agent J.T. Ricketson said, “This gentleman never came up on our radar.”

But an Aug. 28 indictment in Wilcox County hints at the circuitous, dead-end-filled route that investigators apparently had no choice but to take in their search for answers in a case that stumped them for years. While Ryan Duke may not have been in their purview, someone since charged with harboring knowledge of Duke’s alleged hand in Grinstead’s slaying, in fact, was.

The August indictment formally accuses another man, Bo Dukes, a former classmate of Duke’s, of lying to the GBI and hindering the probe into Grinstead’s disappearance.

Dukes, 32, has previously been indicted in the case, charged with, among other things, helping Duke burn Grinstead’s dead body in a pecan grove near Fitzgerald.

The new indictment accuses Dukes, who lives near Abbeville, of making a false statement to GBI agent Jason Shoudel, the lead investigator in the case, when Shoudel spoke to him on June 16, 2016.

Dukes “knowingly and willfully,” the indictment declares, covered up the fact that Ryan Duke had confessed to him about killing Grinstead. Grinstead was 30 when she disappeared from her Ocilla home in late October 2005.

When Shoudel spoke to Dukes last June, the indictment goes on, Dukes concealed information that he had helped Ryan Duke “destroy and dispose of” Grinstead’s body.

Dukes’ denial to Shoudel, the document notes, came when Dukes said he did not discuss burning Grinstead’s body with another man, someone named John McCullough.

The indictment doesn’t say who McCullough is or how he might have known Dukes.

This story was originally published September 5, 2017 at 5:57 PM with the headline "New indictment: Man accused in Tara Grinstead case denied talk of burning body."