by Seamus McGraw

OCILLA, GA (Crime Library) — It's been nearly two weeks since Georgia high school teacher and former beauty queen Tara Grinstead mysteriously vanished, and despite a massive search effort, frustrated investigators and volunteers have still not found any significant clues to her whereabouts or her fate.

Tara Grinstead

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It's not for lack of trying.

Although authorities remain tightlipped about the probe, sources say that in the days since her disappearance, investigators have interviewed scores of people, including her estranged former boyfriend, Army veteran and former Ocilla police officer Marcus Harper. So has 20-year-old Anthony Vickers, a young man who reportedly nurtured a crush on Grinstead and was arrested earlier this year on a charge of disorderly conduct after banging repeatedly on the door of Grinstead's home. Heath Dykes, a police captain from a neighboring community described by one source close to Grinstead as a "friend of hers since they were kids" has been interviewed by investigators.

In a brief telephone interview with Crime Library, Dykes said he had last
seen Grinstead "weeks prior to her going missing."  Dykes, who has been
cooperating with investigators, declined to comment further. "I've been a
close friend with her family and her for quite some time, we're from the
same home town. But I really can't make a lot of comment due to the ongoing
investigation. It really wouldn't be fair for me to make any comment that
would jeopardize the investigation....I just want her to be found."

Sources familiar with the probe say at least one of the men — Vickers — agreed to submit to a polygraph test. Authorities declined to discuss whether the interviews had yielded any useful information. None of the men could be reached for comment.

"We're interviewing everybody as you always would in a missing persons case," said John Bankhead, spokesman for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which has taken a major role in the search for Grinstead. "That relates specifically to people she might be seeing and others, so we've got all that covered."

Investigators are also said to be poring over Grinstead's phone records and have taken custody of her home computer and the hard drive of her computer at Irwin County High School, searching for any information.

While Bankhead declined to specifically discuss the steps investigators are taking, he did acknowledge, "we have leads." So far, those leads have not given them enough hard evidence to determine whether Grinstead vanished or whether she was the victim of foul play.

The bottom line, authorities say, is that they don't yet know whether a crime was committed. And the interviews are focused as much on determining Grinstead's state of mind at the time of her disappearance after a local beauty pageant on Oct. 22 as they are on eliciting hard information as to her whereabouts.

Next Page

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Beauty Queen & Teacher Tara Grinstead Goes Missing

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