by Seamus McGraw

(Continued)

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Tara Grinstead

In fact, Grinstead's supporters, based on information culled from a variety of sources, plan to search again this weekend. Unlike earlier highly publicized searches, where in some cases hundreds of volunteers combed the scrub and swamplands in force, these recent searches have been small and secretive. There's good reason for that. Though family members continue to hold out hope that Tara will be found alive, they have over the months, come to terms with the idea that the young woman may be dead. And if she were a victim of foul play, they reckon, advertising the locations of their searches would simply give her killer a chance to move her remains.

Authorities, so far, have not determined what precisely happened to Tara, whether she was abducted and perhaps killed, whether she simply wandered off, or whether the young woman, distraught over her love life and the pressures of her work as a teacher and her studies for a graduate degree, may have taken some desperate step. Officially, her disappearance remains a missing persons case, they say.

All the same, local authorities and investigators from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation have interviewed scores of people and have studied as many potential leads. Among those early leads was a tip that a middle aged man with a long record of arrests and convictions for assaults against woman, a man who had been considered a potential suspect in at least one homicide and an attack a generation ago in Ocilla, had returned to the area. Investigators quickly determined that the man, whose name is being withheld, was elsewhere at the time of Tara 's disappearance.

Since then, investigators have begun revisiting some of those people they interviewed earlier in the probe, including Grinstead's former long time boyfriend, ex-cop and Iraq war veteran Marcus Harper, as well as other men in her life.

None of those interviewed has been named as a suspect.

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