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By Josh Clark
The murder of Meredith Emerson, the disappearance of Cayle Bywater and other, possibly related cases involving missing women have renewed interest in the case of another missing Georgia woman. Tara Grinstead, a beauty pageant winner who earned her Masters degree and was working on her doctorate while she taught history at Irwin County High, went missing from her home in Ocilla the night of Oct. 22, 2005.
Her ex-boyfriend, Iraq War veteran and former Ocilla police officer Marcus Harper, and several other people have been investigated in the disappearance.
After Harper and Grinstead broke up, she apparently found that Harper, then 30, was dating an 18-year-old. Her sister, Anita Gattis, told the nation during a “CBS Early Show” interview days after her sister’s disappearance that she had been told that Harper and Grinstead had a “very heated argument.”
Suspicion around Marcus Harper continued to expand after a tip came in that on the night Grinstead disappeared, a truck had been seen speeding down Green Road, a rural route located south of Ocilla. In and of itself, this information would have hardly been useful, but Marcus Harper’s mother lived on Green Road, and the tip prompted the organization a volunteer search party, which began combing a 100 acre area along the road in March of 2006.
Things went a bit awry, however, after Harper’s mother, the sole landowner along the Green Road area who had not given permission to have her land searched, called the sheriff, complaining that she was being harassed by searchers. The sheriff came to the Harper property and reportedly threatened to lock up at least one member of the search party if they didn’t stay away from Mrs. Harper’s land.
Although Harper has been the focus of most media attention and some law enforcement scrutiny, he has an alibi for his whereabouts around the time Tara Grinstead went missing and he wasn’t the only person Grinstead knew who came under a cloud of suspicion following her disappearance: Some reports linked her with a married law enforcement officer in another town. At least two of her students had tried to create relationships with Grinstead at Irwin County High. Anthony Vickers, a former student of Grinstead’s, had been arrested after he was found at her house one night. He was investigated, and his parents’ property searched, but nothing was found. Another student, who remained unnamed, had been removed from her class after police found he was responsible for a series of threatening phone calls to Grinstead.
The trail appears to have grown cold over the last two years, but Tara Grinstead’s family continues to hope for her safe return. For more information, visit www.findtara.com. If you have any information on the whereabouts of Tara Grinstead, please call the Georgia Bureau of Investigation at 478-987-4545.