by Seamus McGraw

Dr. Maurice Godwin

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OCILLA, GA (Crime Library)  —  It may not seem like much, but a well-known criminologist is hoping that a tiny chunk of clay pried from the bottom of a car and a fragment of pine bark pried from the recesses around a fog lamp could hold the key to solving the months-long mystery of what happened to missing school teacher and beauty queen Tara Grinstead.

In fact, there is a possibility that those seemingly minute clues could help locate Grinstead whose disappearance last October has baffled investigators for months, said Dr. Maurice Godwin, one of the nation's leading proponents of the science of geographic profiling.

Godwin, a former police officer turned academician who has worked on several high profile missing persons cases in recent years, told Crime Library today that he has been asked by the missing woman's family to join in the probe and expects to arrive in Ocilla early next month.

It is, he says, a singularly challenging case for the criminologist who has made his reputation by matching geographic clues to other evidence to identify potential suspects or locate missing remains. "There's not been anything found," he said. "The last place she was seen was at home, so I don't have anything that can give a geographic coordinate on anything else."

Ordinarily, Godwin, whose work has been featured on several national television programs, begins at the scene of a crime, places like "a body dump siteor where evidence might be found, like a purse laying by the side of the road," and enters them into computer where a specialized program he developed while studying for his doctorate, runs a series of complex calculations and then spits out a geographic area where a potential suspect might live or work. Authorities can then compare that data to information they have about potential suspects.

But in a missing persons case, such as the Grinstead disappearance, Godwin has to use an even more complex system, he says. Called Reverse Geographical Profiling, it involves compiling whatever information he can about the missing person's last known movements and about the people they were last known to have contacted and trying to match that to any evidence that might help to provide a location.

And it has been successful in the past. In 2003, for example, Godwin pinpointed within 9/10ths of a mile, the location where the body of a slain 23-year-old North Dakota woman would be found, no small feat considering that authorities had believed that the body could have been anywhere in 3,000 square mile area.

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