Who Is Tara Grinstead? Suspect Ryan Duke Charged In Former Georgia Beauty Queen's 2005 Murder

After more than 11 years of dead-end leads and trails that went nowhere, investigators finally announced the arrest of a suspect in the 2005 disappearance of Georgia teacher and former beauty queen Tara Grinstead. On Thursday, Ryan Alexander Duke, 33, was charged with Grinstead's murder.

“This gentleman never came up in our radar,” J.T. Ricketson, special agent for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said of the near cold case in a press conference Thursday.

No other details about Duke were released in the press conference other than that he was a student at Irwin County High School, where Grinstead taught.

On Saturday, Oct. 22, 2005, just a few weeks before her 31st birthday, Grinstead disappeared after attending the local Sweet Potato Festival in Ocilla, Georgia, 165 miles south of Atlanta. She was reported missing after she failed to show up to work Monday. Upon investigation, police found her cellphone charging in her bedroom, her car parked outside, unlocked, and no signs of a struggle aside from a broken bedroom lamp. Her purse and keys were missing.

“Tara never left her car unlocked and never drove on dirt roads. There was no struggle in the house,” Grinstead’s sister, Anita Gattis, told the Atlanta-Journal Constitution in 2006. “Tara was a singer; that was her talent in pageants. If someone was removing her, she’d project her voice. And she took self-defense. She’d go out kicking and screaming and fighting.”

Grinstead’s body was never found, and her case inspired a podcast called “Up and Vanished” that debuted in 2016. A website, findtara.com, provided information about her disappearance and investigators' contact information.

Authorities never stopped investigating Grinstead’s case, said Ricketson, who noted that her file had become the largest one in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s 80-year history. Before Duke’s arrest, GBI interviewed more than 200 people without finding a single person of interest.

Authorities were expected to update the public with further details on the arrest.