The Mysterious Disappearance of Tara Grinstead

Tara Grinstead

All of that would have been more than enough to weary most people. But there was something else Tara had been grappling with, her close friends knew. For months, she had been bouncing between emotional extremes while trying to come to terms with the end of her six-year relationship with Marcus Harper. She had hoped they might marry. But Marcus had other plans. His stint in the Army Rangers had opened a whole new world for the former Ocilla cop, and now, serving as an independent consultant traveling often to war torn Iraq, he and Tara had become very different people. Though Tara ended the relationship, she remained deeply disturbed by its failure, by all accounts. As many of the people closest to her would later say, despite it all, she remained deeply in love with him. And she struggled in the close-knit community of rural Irwin County, Georgia, to find a way to deal with her feelings of rejection and humiliation without vilifying her former boyfriend.

Tara with Marcus Harper

It was a monumental task. Still, Tara had by all accounts seemed to be in good spirits that night, her friends have said.  There was nothing in her demeanor that night, her friends say, to suggest that Tara was particularly despondent or that she made some kind of private decision to cast off all the pressures and demands and emotional complications that had come to dog her life.

In short, there was nothing about Tara Grinstead that suggested to her close friends that night that it might be the last time they would see her.

It was.

Two days later, after the well liked teacher failed to show up for school, Tara was reported missing. A two-week manhunt, involving an army of searchers, some on foot, some on ATV's, others on horseback, has so far yielded little to indicate what might have become of her. Tara Grinstead had simply vanished.