A criminologist who lives by data and Court TV's own psychic profiler join probe 2/23/06

By Seamus McGraw

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OCILLA, Ga. (Feb. 23, 2006) After months of fruitless and frustrating searches, the family of vanished high school teacher and one-time beauty queen Tara Grinstead is now turning to opposite ends of the spectrum — joining forces with both a scientist and a psychic — in the hopes of turning up some information about the young woman's fate.

On the one hand, renowned psychic profiler and Court TV personality Carla Baron is scheduled to travel to Ocilla in March, said Larry Gattis, Tara's brother-in-law, who along with his wife Anita has been leading the aggressive hunt for the missing 31-year-old.

Tara Grinstead

And next week, a respected criminology professor is scheduled to arrive in Ocilla to lend his expertise to the search. "He does a lot with statistical analysis and computer profiles," Gattis said, adding that the professor will spend several days in Ocilla, interviewing people, studying the case file and will then "input all of that into a computer and it'll kind of spit out different probabilities."

Baron is expected to take a more esoteric approach. Among other things, she will meet with family members to determine whether she can learn anything that might help her get a mental picture of where Tara might be. A crew traveling with Baron will film the encounters to be aired later this spring on Baron's new Court TV show, "Haunting Evidence."

"We're covering all the bases, " Gattis said.

In fact, in addition to the haunting and high-tech approaches, both law enforcement officials and Tara's family are continuing to use time-honored techniques, shoe leather and good old-fashioned hard work to crack the now-four-month-old mystery.

In the months since Tara vanished, police and investigators from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation have conducted scores of interviews, focusing often on key men in Tara's life, including a former Ocilla police officer and Iraq War veteran from whom she had recently parted after a tempestuous, six-year relationship. Authorities have also quizzed, among others, a former student who, by all accounts, had developed a crush on the teacher, and a cop from a nearby community who had been close to her.

Authorities have also tracked down reports of various possible sightings of Tara from as far away as Virginia and New York. And there have been several major searches, including several done by the nationally known search-and-rescue group Texas EquuSearch. But none of those efforts has led to a breakthrough.

The searches continue, Gattis told Crime Library Thursday. "We took dogs down into an area south of Ocilla, but they didn't hit on anything," Gattis said. "I've been out probably four times in the past two weeks searching different areas and haven't really had any luck."

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