by Seamus McGraw

April 11, 2006

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OCILLA, Ga. (Crime Library) —  Supporters of missing schoolteacher and beauty queen Tara Grinstead say they have some promising leads and plan to rally their volunteers for yet another search later this week.

As they have on several recent occasions, supporters are keeping the precise location of the search a secret, fearing, they say, that any advance publicity might compromise their efforts. But according to Larry Gattis, the missing woman's brother in law, the new search, scheduled for Thursday, Friday and possibly Saturday, will focus on an area that has already been combed by volunteers. The location — which will be disclosed to volunteers on Thursday when they convene at what has become the command center for the Find Tara effort — was picked because during one of the earlier searches six out of eight trained cadaver dogs responded to something in the immediate area.

Tara Grinstead

That, Gattis said, convinced Grinstead's supporters that the area warranted a closer look.

So far, of course, neither searchers nor police have found any tangible evidence to indicate what happened to Grinstead. The missing woman's family and supporters have long suspected that the now 31-year-old teacher, who vanished on Oct. 22, may have been abducted. In recent weeks they have said they become increasingly convinced that she was killed, in all likelihood, they maintain, by someone who knew her.

Investigators, including members of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the local police and sheriff's department, have been far less definitive in their statements about the case. Officially, it remains a missing person's case, and authorities say they don't have any evidence that indicates conclusively whether she was a victim of a violent crime or a young woman, under immense pressure from her studies and emotionally overwrought by her troubled love life, who simply ran away.

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