By Seamus McGraw

August 2, 2006

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OCILLA, Ga. (Crime Library) —It's been this way for months now, a fetid cloud of suspicion and rumor rising up from the swamps outside Ocilla, spreading through the Internet, sometimes reaching thousands of miles, and infecting people with a taint rooted in blind innuendo.

In the nine months since beauty queen and school teacher Tara Grinstead vanished, authorities and family members have tracked down scores of possible leads, they've interviewed old boyfriends, and others close to the woman, they've scoured her bank accounts and studied her mental state in the days leading up to her disappearance.

Tara Grinstead

Just recently, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation dispatched crime scene technicians to Ocilla to reexamine sites they had already visited, and investigators, both official and freelance, continue to probe the woman and the circumstances surrounding her sudden and mysterious vanishing.

Despite it all, however, authorities say they still don't know whereTara is or what happened to her. Though privately some concede that they no longer believe there is any hope that she alive, they have found no proof of that, much less any evidence that would lead them to conclude whether she died accidentally, by her own hand, at the hands of someone else, or perhaps even some combination of all or some of those scenarios.

"We don't have a clue," one law enforcement official told Crime Library.

But the lack of hard and conclusive evidence has done little to chill the heated speculation in some quarters about Tara's fate. Nowhere is that more true than on the Internet's message boards where sleuths, some of them amateurs, some of them partisans of one particular theory about Tara's disappearance or another, trade tips and theories, and sometimes little more than unvarnished suspicions.

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