by Seamus McGraw

March 20, 2006

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FAYETTEVILLE, N.C.  (Crime Library) — It was twenty minutes to two in the morning on Sunday and Maurice Godwin, the criminologist who specializes in geographic profiling, was still awake, trying to squeeze some sense out of the details he had collected about the mysterious disappearance of Georgia high school teacher and former beauty queen Tara Grinstead.

Dr. Maurice Godwin

He had been on the case for a little over a week, and already, Godwin was prepared to make some startling pronouncements. While law enforcement officials from the Irwin County Sheriff's Department to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation still classify the Oct. 22 disappearance as a missing person case, and have so far maintained that they have found no evidence of a crime, Godwin's investigation had convinced him that the 31-year-old had been murdered.

A study of the young woman's home a week earlier, he told Crime Library, had convinced him that the young woman had been abducted sometime between 11:05 p.m. on Oct. 22 and 5 o'clock the next morning, and in all probability she knew her abductor, and may even have been close to him. There was, Godwin had determined, a struggle. The proof of that, he concluded, was the fact that some of Tara 's beads had been strewn across the floor, along with the often-reported fact that her bedside clock had fallen to the floor and the bedpost at the foot of her bed had been damaged. "Somebody kicked the heck out of it," Godwin said.

Tara Ginstead

Taken together, Godwin is convinced that they point to a brief struggle. "The beads, the clock and the bedpost that's bent," Godwin said. "I believe there was a small assaultthere in the house. I believe she was abducted, and I think she was taken to a location and murdered."

What's more, Godwin said, he believes the evidence he has compiled suggests that Tara Grinstead was dead before anyone realized she was missing. In his view, based on the study of statistics in similar cases, it is unlikely that she was sexually assaulted, and the entire affair, which has now been under investigation for almost five months, occurred "within an hour."

Sometime after 12:15 a.m. Oct. 24, Godwin believes, the killer returned, and perhaps accidentally dropped a latex glove on Tara 's front lawn. It had to have been after 12:15 Godwin said, because that was when Tara's old friend, Heath Dykes, a police captain from a nearby community, had come by to check in on Tara, and had telephoned her mother when she didn't answer the door. He had not seen the glove. Nor had a former student of Tara 's who had come by earlier Sunday to fetch a dog Tara had been pet-sitting, Godwin said.

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