NOTE: This article originally published on Jun 18, 2007. A graduate of the high school where Tara Grinstead taught was charged Monday with murder in the case.
The photograph of the vanished brunette beauty queen and high school history teacher graces the Web and has been grist for TV crime show mavens Nancy Grace and Greta Van Susteren. Her face smiled from a "missing person" billboard on a main street in Tifton.
As more time elapses since her students in Ocilla last saw her 21 months ago, authorities suspect that whatever happened to Tara Grinstead was nothing good.
"Nobody's ready to make a public call, but we go into these missing person cases assuming there is foul play, that the worst has occurred, though we hope for the best, " said Special Agent Gary Rothwell, head of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's office in Perry. "We cover both alternatives, so we treat the scene where she was last believed to be --- in this case, her house --- as if a crime had occurred."
A $200,000 reward --- $100,000 for her safe return and $100,000 for information leading to an arrest --- is posted for Grinstead, who was 30 years old when she was last seen about 11 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 22, 2005, at a neighborhood cookout about six blocks from her house in Ocilla, a town of about 3,300 in south-central Georgia's Irwin County.
A popular teacher at Irwin County High School in Ocilla and a Hawkinsville native, Grinstead was an experienced pageant contestant and a three-time Miss Tifton; she spent the last day she was seen helping other contestants do their hair and makeup for the Miss Sweet Potato Pageant in nearby Fitzgerald. That night, at the cookout, she received a call on her cellphone, "the last contact we're aware of, " Rothwell said.
Known for her punctuality, her fellow teachers knew something was seriously amiss when Grinstead did not appear at school the following Monday.
In her eighth year of teaching high school, she was pursuing a doctoral degree in U.S. History at Valdosta State University and, according to her older sister Anita Gattis, had ambitions of becoming of school principal or perhaps teaching at the college level.
Investigators found her cellphone in her house, along with her dog and cat, both unharmed. Her purse and car keys were gone but her white Mitsubishi was in the driveway, unlocked.
There were no conclusive signs of a struggle inside the house, although a broken lamp was found in her bedroom.
"We believe had there been an altercation, there would be more signs than a broken lamp, " said GBI spokesman John Bankhead. "Her credit cards haven't been used since she went missing, but no contact was ever made with any family member.
"It was uncharacteristic of her not to contact anybody. That's why it doesn't look good."
Investigators have looked at the possibility she was forced at gunpoint from her home, but have no evidence to support that theory, Bankhead said. "We don't know what happened to her ... she didn't travel in a crowd that would have made her a high-risk victim. She wasn't involved in the drug culture or the nightclub culture.
"Most of her time was devoted to education, and the risk factors we find in many missing person cases were not there."
The GBI has interviewed "anyone that we could associate with her, including past boyfriends and acquaintances, " said Rothwell. The case file, "adding up all the contacts of people who knew her and the research and interviews involved, " is more than 5 feet thick, he said.
"We're not just sitting by the phone, waiting for it to ring, " said Bankhead. "We're generating our own leads, and the major way to do that is to reassess everything we've done to see what we've overlooked."
Rothwell said Grinstead's relationship with an Army Ranger who had served in Iraq had broken up "some time previously and had left her distraught." The former boyfriend has been questioned by the GBI, as has a former student who once broke into her house. Neither has been linked to her disappearance, he said.
"The key word is 'evidence, ' and a lot of people confuse 'suspicion' with evidence, " Rothwell said.
Tara's mother, Faye Grinstead of Hawkinsville, said the boy who broke into her daughter's home "had an obsession of some kind about her."
She said her daughter always let her know when she returned home safely from Valdosta and her night graduate classes. "She knew I was a worrier, so she always called that she was OK."
Tara's father, Billy Grinstead, is an executive in Birmingham with Liberty National Insurance, which has put up $50,000 of the reward fund. His wife Connie, Tara's stepmother, said she still gets calls of possible sightings and keeps in frequent contact with the GBI.
"Some feel she just ran away, but I don't think so, " Connie Grinstead said. "She was planning a future, and she was the kind to always think ahead. There were too many things going for her."
Tara's stepmother said she had a call once suggesting the young woman had been spotted at a [Birmingham] truck stop. "We talked to people on every shift, who described a very attractive girl with long brown hair ... it turned out not to be her.
"People might think that would be annoying, but I'm grateful that people are willing to call. ... We get very sad and discouraged, but we have not completely shut the door on hope."
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