Tara Grinstead
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Tara Grinstead was a 30-year-old history teacher from Georgia when she went missing in October 2005. Without any sighting of her for the next five years, she was legally pronounced dead, leaving many to wonder if we would ever know what happened to her. Then over a decade later, the authorities finally got the tip that they'd been waiting for. But would this tip be enough for Tara's family to receive the justice they so deserve?

This is Forensic Tales, episode number 252, The Murder of Tara Grinstead. ♪♪

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Tara Grinstead grew up as the All-American girl. She was born on November 14, 1974, to parents Bill and Faye and had a sister named Anita. They all lived together in Hawkinsville, Georgia, a city known as the Harness Horse Capital of Georgia, and about 130 miles south of Atlanta. As a young girl, Tara kept herself busy by participating in the cheerleading squad and being an active member of the local Baptist church.

One of Tara's best friends growing up, Maria Woods Harbor, remembers just how radiant she was, telling CBS News, quote, I mean, she had the biggest smile. She could tell you anything to make you feel better, end quote. Education was also something very important to Tara. After graduating from high school, she attended Middle George College, where she got her degree to become a teacher.

After that, she earned a master's degree and eventually planned to pursue a doctorate. With all of these advanced degrees, her plan was to someday become a school administrator and then eventually a school principal. Now, one of the ways that Tara was able to pay for all of this schooling was by participating in beauty pageants that awarded scholarship money. And based on everything that I read for this episode, she was very, very talented at this.

Almost every competition she competed in, she won. In 1999, Tara won the Miss Tifton pageant, which landed her a spot in the 1999 Miss Georgia competition, something that she was very, very proud of. One of her biggest goals in life at this point was to win the Miss Georgia competition, or at the very least, get the opportunity to compete, and she did.

Even when Tara stopped competing in these beauty pageants, she became someone that other up-and-coming competitors could turn to for advice, mentoring other young women in the community about the pageant world. One of the young women that she mentored, Dana Wilder, who told CBS News, quote, She just took me underneath her wing. She taught me the ins and outs of interviews, hair and makeup, wardrobe, everything, end quote.

By 1998, Tara was teaching at Irwin County High School in Osceola, Georgia, a town about an hour's drive north of her hometown of Hawkinsville. That's where she quickly became a beloved 11th grade history teacher to all of her students.

No one in her class had a single bad thing to say about her. She was described as a compassionate teacher who cared about her students even beyond the walls of the classroom. And when I say compassionate, I mean it. After one of her students' houses burned down, she let the student and their family temporarily live with her so that they would have a roof over their heads.

Okay, now that we know a little bit more about her, let's go to the day that started this entire mystery. On Monday, October 24th, 2005, Tara was a no-show at work, which was completely out of character for her. She had never just not shown up for school, especially without calling anyone. So everyone at the high school knew that something had to be wrong, and she was quickly reported missing to the police department in Osceola.

Earlier that morning, someone from the school where Tara worked called one of her neighbors, a guy named Joe, to go to her house and to go check on her. But when he knocked on the front door, no one answered.

So Joe and some of Tara's co-workers went inside the house, but there was no sign of her there either. At this point, no one had seen or heard from Tara in about 34 hours. The last time anyone saw her was Saturday night, October 22, 2005, and this is what her day looked like.

She spent the earlier part of the day with some of the pageant girls that she mentored. A few of them had gone over to her house, and she helped them with their hair and makeup around 11 o'clock that morning. After that, Tara drove down to the Fitzgerald Grand Theater to watch the beauty contest that started around 3 o'clock. At around 7.30, Dana Wilder, one of the contestants, walked her back out to her car, and Tara left Fitzgerald and headed back toward Osceola.

At around 8 o'clock p.m., Tara stopped by one of her neighbor's houses for about a half an hour, and finally she went to a barbecue a few blocks away from her home. The barbecue was at the home of a guy named Troy Davis. According to other people who were at this same cookout barbecue, Tara left and was home sometime around 11 o'clock. She apparently said that she was on her way back home to watch a videotape from the pageant earlier that day.

So Troy Davis walked her out to her car, which was the last time that anyone reported seeing her. Now, this might be important for later on because that videotape of the pageant that Tara was referring to was never found.

So based on this very rough timeline, whatever happened to her must have happened sometime late Saturday night after she left the friend's barbecue and early Monday morning when she was a no-show at school sometime around 7.30. Almost everything about the investigation was strange right from the very beginning, starting with the search of Tara's house. When the Osceola police showed up, they found her car still parked in the driveway where it usually was.

but it looked like someone else had driven it because the driver's seat was pushed all the way back. Now Tara was only 5'3", but the seat was pushed all the way back, so that was red flag number one. Red flag number two. Her car keys and purse were missing, but an envelope filled with $100 in cash was found just sitting on her dashboard.

Then finally, a latex glove was found just lying in her front yard, something that we're going to talk a lot more about in just a couple of minutes. Inside the house, things got even stranger.

Tara's cell phone was plugged into the wall and charging and all of her clothes from the previous night were lying on her bedroom floor. These were the same clothes that she wore to the barbecue at her friend's house on Saturday night. The reason why this detail was odd was because those that knew Tara always said that she was super clean and super tidy. She wasn't the type of person to just leave her dirty clothes lying on the floor like that.

She also wasn't someone to go anywhere without her cell phone.

But if you need to hear more, if you need to be convinced more, Tara's dog, Dolly Madison, was also found alone inside the house, which again was completely unlike her. She wasn't the type to go anywhere without making sure that her beloved dog was okay and was looked after for. In fact, I don't know a single person who would just leave their pet at home all by themselves if they didn't plan to be right back.

Finally, Tara's jewelry. Much later on, the necklace that she wore to the barbecue were found, but the earrings weren't. Now the red flags just keep coming. Her bedroom alarm clock was found underneath her bed and had been switched off for at least six hours. No one's really sure what to make of that.

There was also a broken lamp on her bedside table. But beyond that, the cops didn't really find any signs of a struggle. There weren't any signs of forced entry, and Tara lived by herself. Her front door and windows were all locked, and nothing appeared to be broken.

Now, one interesting thing about the broken lamp is that according to some of Tara's neighbors, this might have been a light that she used to indicate to them that she made it home safely. Apparently, whenever she got home at night, she turned a light on inside of her house, basically telling everyone that she made it home safe and sound. So maybe that was the broken lamp or maybe it wasn't. We don't know.

Based on everything they found outside and inside of Tara's house, the police in Osceola decided that this wasn't a case that they could handle by themselves. We're talking about a small-town America police department here. They just don't see cases like this where a young woman goes missing and there's a chance that foul play is involved.

So almost instantly, the local police department handed the case over to the state police, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, or GBI, and they became the lead law enforcement agency. At first, the GBI thought that Tara might have gone somewhere off on her own. She was a 30-year-old woman, and if she wanted to go off somewhere for a couple of days without telling anyone, then she absolutely could do something like that.

Just because someone goes off the grid for a day or two doesn't always mean that something bad has happened to them. But for Tara's family, those that really knew her, this wasn't an option. Tara's sister Anita would later on tell reporters that her sister was, quote, a grounded and Christian woman, a responsible and well-respected member of the community, who in her mind would not simply run off.

We also know how she basically left everything behind. When the GBI's lead detective was asked whether he thought Tara ran off, he said this, quote, It appeared that Tara may have left on her own. However, we had a glove, a latex glove that we couldn't explain. So that gave us strong indication that something bad had happened, end quote.

So the glove the GBI was referring to was the single latex glove found in Tara's front yard about eight feet away from the front door. It's the kind of glove that maybe a doctor or nurse might use. It was first discovered by Joe, the neighbor who went to go check on Tara Monday morning after she missed work. He told the police that as he was walking out of the house, he saw the glove lying on the ground, so he picked it up and then set it back down.

Obviously, the GBI thought that this had to be connected to Tara's disappearance, but they weren't sure that they would find any evidence on it. So it was sent to the state's crime lab for testing. Now, we're talking about 2005 here. So DNA testing on things like this wasn't as good as they are today. But still, even back in 2005, they did find something.

The GBI crime lab found two DNA profiles on the latex glove. One profile belonged to Tara, while the second profile didn't. That belonged to an unidentified male.

So at this point, the GBI felt pretty confident that she didn't voluntarily go somewhere on her own. And whoever handled that latex glove probably knows where she went, or is even the person responsible for her disappearance. In the following weeks, rumors around Osceola spread like wildfire. Everyone wanted to know what happened to her.

There was also a massive local search for her. Irwin County students, teachers, and hundreds of volunteers partnered with the GBI to help look for her. But even after two full weeks of searching and an $80,000 reward, nothing turned up. The town where Tara disappeared from probably isn't even a place that you've heard of, Osceola. It's a small town in Irwin County in South Georgia.

It's only about 2.6 square miles in size, an equal distance between the coast and the Alabama state border, and every bit of it gives small-town America feels. If you drove into Osceola, one of the first things that you would probably see would be a white and red sign saying, Welcome to Osceola, home of the Georgia Sweet Potato Festival, which started back in 1961.

When I say it's a small town, I mean there are only about 4,000 people living there, and the entire city only has two traffic lights. Even though it's less than a three-hour drive from Atlanta, it feels like a completely different universe there. You wouldn't even think that these two cities were a part of the same state.

Atlanta is a big city. Thousands upon thousands of people live and work there. It's loud and noisy. It's just a big city that often feels impersonal. But in Osceola, everyone knows everyone and everyone looks after one another. So for someone like Tara to go missing from a small place like Osceola, it almost seemed impossible.

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Plus, none of the neighbors said that they heard anything unusual on Saturday night. No screams, nothing like it. So this theory seemed more and more likely, at least in the beginning. So to try and get an idea of who she might have gone with, the GBI looked closely at all of her past and current boyfriends or guys that she was romantically involved with, which ended up leading to some pretty good suspects.

The first person they looked into was her ex-boyfriend, Marcus Harper. Before she went missing, the two had been together on and off for about six years.

Marcus was a former Osceola police officer and army ranger, and they didn't exactly have the smoothest of relationships. They would often break up, get back together, break up again, go see other people, and then get back together. But the two officially broke up for good only about two weeks before she disappeared. So the GBI wanted to find out why. It

It's also suspicious that Marcus Harper was a former Osceola police officer, the same agency who first handled the case before turning it over to the GBI. And by all accounts, Marcus Harper was still very well connected to the police department and all of its officers. It's even going to be part of his alibi that we're going to talk about.

Now, according to Marcus Harper, the last time he saw her was about one week before she went missing when he claimed that she came to his house basically begging him to take her back. He also said something else interesting.

He said that while she was at his house, she said that if she ever saw him with another woman, she'd kill herself. So now the GBI had to ask themselves, was this a possible suicide? Did Tara run off somewhere and kill herself because her ex-boyfriend of six years wouldn't take her back? Or was this guy just trying to get the police off his back?

When the police sat down and interviewed Tara's friends and family about their breakup, they all said pretty much the same thing. Tara was completely heartbroken and devastated by it. Despite the breakups and despite seeing other people, they said she was very much in love with this guy and she wanted to get married to him someday. So she was definitely very sad when the relationship officially ended only two weeks before she went missing.

But her friends and family completely dismissed the idea that Tara would have committed suicide. Plus, they still hadn't found her body. It's almost impossible to kill yourself and then also hide your own body. So the GBI felt pretty good about ruling out suicide as a possible theory. However, when it came to Marcus Harper, the ex-boyfriend, he was also eventually ruled out as a suspect.

That's because on the night of Tara's alleged abduction, he had an airtight alibi. He had been at a bar with a former cop partner who told the GBI that they were together all night long. So that's what I meant when I said that he was very well connected to the department. It was his alibi. Some of the other guys the police questioned were Rhett Roberts, Anthony Vickers, and Heath Dykes. Let's start with Rhett Roberts.

Rhett Roberts was the son of the couple who rented the house that Tara was living in. The reason why they questioned him was because after she broke up with Marcus Harper, she started dating Rhett Roberts. And Tara apparently saw Rhett that Saturday night. Remember from the timeline that we talked about just a couple minutes ago? After Tara left the beauty competition, she talked to a neighbor for about a half an hour before she went to the barbecue.

Well, that neighbor was Rhett Roberts. However, after speaking with the GBI, he was completely cleared as a suspect. He had a solid alibi and he didn't really have a motive to want to do something to Tara. Next up was Anthony Vickers. Now, this guy is a lot more interesting than Rhett Roberts.

Anthony Vickers was a 20-year-old former student of Tara's who seemed to have developed what could only be described as an unhealthy and inappropriate relationship with her. At first, Tara had sort of taken him under her wing because he was known around the school to be a troubled kid, and she felt bad for him and sort of gave him a little extra attention. That was just something in her nature that she would do.

Well, later on, when the GBI questioned him, he had a very interesting story to tell.

He said that after high school graduation, he and Tara started seeing each other in an alleged secret relationship that lasted about a year. He said the relationship was sexual, and he described it as a mix of being a fling and something more serious. Now, I'm careful with my words here. I say alleged secret relationship because we don't really know if that's true or not.

All we know for sure is that Tara called the police on him on March 20, 2005 and had him arrested for repeatedly banging on her front door and her windows.

He wouldn't leave her alone, so she called the cops and he was arrested for it. Now, when the police arrested Anthony Vickers at Tara's house in March, another guy was inside her house at the time. A guy only referred to as H.D. in the police reports. His full name had been redacted.

Well, later on, H.D. was identified as Heath Dykes, a married police captain with the Perry Police Department and someone else we're going to talk about in just a second. But going back to Anthony Vickers, a few weeks after Tara's disappearance, he told the GBI that he received a phone call from a woman screaming on the other end of the phone, and he swore to them that the woman sounded exactly like Tara.

But later on, the police suspected that the call came from a drug dealer's house and probably had nothing to do with the case. Eventually, Anthony Vickers was pretty much cleared as a suspect in Tara's case. Yes, he may or may not have been seeing Tara, or maybe he was just obsessed with her. We don't really know the answer to that. But the GBI crossed him off their list of suspects.

Now, something I didn't mention earlier, when the cops first showed up at Tara's house when she was reported missing, they found a business card lodged in her front door. Well, the business card belonged to a guy named Heath Dykes, a.k.a. H.D. from the police report taken after the incident involving Anthony Vickers, a.k.a. the married police captain from a nearby town.

So what does Heath Dykes have to do with any of this? Well, not only was his business card found on Tara's front door, but he also apparently called and left over 20 messages on her answering machine the weekend that she disappeared. Why is that?

Well, according to Tara's family, Heath Dykes was a longtime family friend, and Tara's mom, Faye, had called him to see if he could go check on her when no one had heard from her in a while. It was also discovered later on that Tara had spoken to Heath Dykes over the phone at the barbecue the night that she disappeared.

a night that he was apparently at home with his wife watching football. So apparently, Heath Dykes called and left all of those messages because he was worried about her. He might have also been romantically involved with Tara and was the last known person at her house that weekend. But just like all of the other guys that we've talked about, Heath Dykes was eventually ruled out as well. He may have seemed like a good suspect in the beginning, but that was it.

So when it came to the men in Tara's life, pretty much every single one of them fully cooperated with the GBI's investigation. And at least two of them agreed to polygraphs. Marcus Harper, the ex-boyfriend, even apparently agreed to hire his own private polygraph administrator since his private attorney wasn't able to be present on the day that the police scheduled his test. But that didn't mean people weren't still suspicious of him.

Yes, he had an alibi. He was apparently at the bar with another cop friend. And yes, he agreed to do this private polygraph examination. But people were still looking him as a possible suspect for a very long time. He was the ex-boyfriend after all. And he and Tara only broke up like two weeks before this happened.

But all of that was just pure rumors and pure speculation. And to be fair, the police never publicly named Marcus Harper a suspect. And again, by all means, he was fully cooperative with the investigation, just like the others. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Do you have a point of sale system you can trust, or is it...

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For the first three years, the GBI kept whatever details they knew about the case a total and complete secret. No one knew what they had as far as forensic evidence went, except for the latex glove. And even that wasn't made public until 2008. It wasn't until CBS aired an episode of 48 Hours on Tara's disappearance that people finally learned about the unknown DNA and fingerprint found on the latex glove.

But even after searching for a match for the past three years, they couldn't find one. The GBI tested over 100 people in Tara's life and even tried looking for a match in the national database, but nothing. So by 2008, the GBI went public with the case and the glove evidence, basically hoping that someone would come forward with new, fresh information to get things going again.

This is what the GBI said at the time, quote, quote,

This case has never gone cold. Leads come in on a weekly basis. We have several avenues we are pursuing now, end quote. So despite Tara being missing for three full years at this point, the GBI wanted people to know that they were still actively working the case and they still had fresh leads coming in. But I don't think Tara's family was too satisfied.

because about a year into the search, they hired a private investigator to help look for her. By 2009, a very interesting suspect emerged. A guy who digitally obscured his face and his voice started posting videos on the internet. And in the videos, he called himself the catch me killer and bragged about killing upward of 16 young women, one of them being Tara Grinstead.

He also claimed to know what happened to another missing woman, Jennifer Kessie, a case that we covered in an earlier episode of the show. Jennifer Kessie went missing just three months after Tara did in Orlando, Florida, and a lot of people thought that there was a lot of similarities between the two.

Well, the guy making the videos was eventually identified as 27-year-old Andrew Haley. And as it turned out, he didn't actually kill any of the women that he claimed to. He didn't kill Tara and he didn't know anything about Jennifer Kessie either. It was all just a hoax. And for the GBI detectives working Tara's case and many others, it turned out to be a complete waste of time.

Now, when it came to this Andrew Haley guy, he ended up receiving a prison sentence for making false statements and evidence tampering. But he was never actually considered a suspect in any of the murders that he claimed to have committed. Again, it was all just a hoax.

A year later, this is now 2010, Tara's family had her legally declared dead. There had been no sighting of her in five years. No activity on her bank accounts, no arrests, no credible suspects, nothing.

So I think this was the family's way of trying to move on from everything that they had been through. It had been five long years. Obviously, she was the victim of foul play, so the family wanted some type of closure. And sometimes declaring someone legally dead is the best way to try and do that.

But just because Tara was officially dead on paper doesn't mean that's the end of the story or her family's quest for justice was over.

Six years later, in 2016, there was a renewed interest in Kara's case after the podcast Up and Vanished covered her case in a multiple-part series. Usually when we talk about true crime podcasts, we talk about their entertainment value. But sometimes podcasts can do a lot more than that.

Sometimes they lead to new interest in cold cases. And even more rare than that, they can actually lead to new tips. And that's exactly what happened with the Up and Vanished podcast and Tara's case. Also, if you want to listen to more of this case after this episode, go out and subscribe to season one of the Up and Vanished podcast.

After the show aired between 2016 and 2017, the GBI announced they received a massive tip that led to the arrest of someone connected to the case. A guy named Ryan Alexander Duke. Here's what happened. In 2017, a woman named Brooke Sheridan came forward to the GBI with some new information.

She said her boyfriend, a guy named Bo Dukes, told her that he had helped his friend Ryan Duke cover up Tara's murder. Now, just to be clear, their last names are Duke and Dukes, but they aren't related. They just have similar names. And they both attended Irwin County High School together where Tara worked.

Bo Dukes was even a former student of Tara's three years before she went missing. He was even someone the Grinstead family had known for years, but had never suspected him in Tara's disappearance. So Brooke told investigators that it seemed like her boyfriend had been keeping a secret for her for a really long time. She said she kept probing him to tell her what was wrong and what was bothering him. And that's when she said he finally confessed and told her his secret.

that years earlier, his roommate, Ryan Duke, woke him up one morning and told him that he had accidentally killed Tara after trying to rob her inside her house. He was apparently inside the home when she came home, caught him, so he attacked and strangled her to death. After that, Bo told Brooke that he helped Ryan burn Tara's body in a fire pit, which took about two days to do.

According to Brooke, she finally decided to come forward about her boyfriend because she, quote, believed Tara's family's peace was more important than his freedom, end quote.

So now it's February 23rd, 2017, and the GBI arrested Brooke's boyfriend, Bo Dukes. And two months later, in April of 2017, a grand jury indicted him on six counts, including malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, burglary, and concealing the death of another. At first, the judge put out a gag order to prevent any more details of Bo Dukes' involvement in the crime from getting out.

This was done basically to ensure that he got a fair trial. However, that was eventually revoked about a year later in March of 2018, and people were allowed to talk about the case again. During Bo Dukes' first interview with the police on February 21, 2017, he admitted his involvement, saying that Ryan Duke came to him saying that he killed Tara and dumped her body in an orchard that Bo Dukes' family owned.

He also confirmed the part about burning her body that took course over the period of two days. So this essentially lined up with everything that his girlfriend had already told the GBI. So right after that, the GBI went out and arrested Ryan Duke, the alleged actual killer. And in a voluntary interview with the police, he also confessed that

He said he broke into Tara's house looking to steal from her. He was high on drugs. Tara came up behind him and that's when he killed her. He said he originally went into her house looking for drug money and things just completely went sideways. Ryan Duke even provided a DNA sample to the authorities and they were able to match the unknown DNA to him that was found on the latex glove.

After that, both men, Ryan Duke and Bo Dukes, were arrested. Now, it may have taken over a decade, but at this point, it seemed like justice for Tara and her family was finally about to happen. They had two confessions. They had the accused suspect's DNA on the latex glove found in Tara's front yard. What more would they need to get a conviction?

The first person to go to trial was Beau Dukes, which began on March 19, 2019. He was the one being charged with helping his friend cover up the murder. In the end, he was found guilty of all charges and eventually sentenced to 25 years in prison for his role in everything.

His defense lawyers tried to get him a lesser sentence, closer to about 12 years, by talking about how he was a decorated military veteran. And if it weren't for him or his girlfriend coming forward, we still wouldn't know what happened to Tara.

So although he basically admitted his part in the crime, he also wanted the judge to know, hey, if I didn't say anything, you guys still wouldn't know what happened to her. And my friend and I, well, we wouldn't be in jail right now. Well, that tactic didn't work because he wasn't sentenced to 12 years in prison like his lawyers asked for, but instead he received the maximum, which was 25 years.

At the sentencing hearing, the district attorney, Brad Rigby, reminded the court that Bo Dukes kept a secret for years, while Tara's family and friends, they just sat there and waited and waited for answers. He could have come forward a long time ago with what he knew, but he never did. Plus, it was actually his girlfriend who came forward in the first place. It wasn't even him.

Now next up was Ryan Dukes' trial, the person actually accused of murdering Tara. The trial was initially scheduled to begin on April 1, 2019, but was delayed by the state Supreme Court until May 9, 2022, after Ryan Dukes' lawyers argued that they were unfairly denied funds for experts to testify on his behalf.

so this meant everything was delayed for several more years. Now, it's May of 2022, the start of the trial, and about 17 years after Tara disappeared. Ryan Dukes' defense attorneys argued that he had given a false confession to the GBI back in 2017 about his involvement in the murder. They said Ryan was afraid of his former friend Bo, and that's why he originally confessed to it.

He also said that he was under the influence of several drugs, including morphine, Percocet, marijuana, and quote, probably a couple Vicodin at the time of his confession and that it wasn't true. So now Ryan was trying to point the finger at Bo. The roles were completely reversed in this new version of events. Bo was the real killer and he only helped to burn the body after the fact.

Ryan said that on October 22, 2005, the night that Tara was killed, he was at home drinking beer and tequila all night.

He said he passed out in the bathroom and then the next morning his friend Bo, who had been living in Dukes' mobile home at the time, showed up and told him that he had killed Tara, even showing him her purse. At first, Ryan said that he didn't believe Bo because he was known to make what he described as dark jokes sometimes. So maybe this was just another one of his sick and twisted jokes.

Ryan then said that he thought Bo had more than likely just robbed Tara but didn't actually kill her like he said. So when Bo fell asleep, he took his truck keys and drove to the neighborhood where he thought Tara lived so that he could return her purse to her. I guess he figured he was just trying to be this nice guy. But he said he didn't know exactly where she lived or where her house was.

So he stopped at a payphone and called 411 to be transferred to Tara's home line. But he said when she didn't pick up, that's when he started to worry that his friend Bo might have actually been telling the truth about killing her.

According to his testimony, Ryan went back to the house and woke Bo up. And when he asked Bo what he had done, he said Bo took him to the orchard and showed him Tara's body. He said he wouldn't have even known it was Tara if Bo hadn't said anything because her body was so badly beaten and bruised.

According to Ryan, she was wearing jogging pants and a t-shirt, and while he didn't remember if she was wearing shoes or not, he said it was possible. That's when Ryan said Bo instructed him to get into his truck, and they went to the barn on the property to get some firewood so that they could set her body on fire.

Over the next part of Ryan's testimony, he got very emotional, saying, quote,

He said he had a really hard time with everything, while his friend Bo seemed, quote, cheerful and almost excited. He even alleged that Bo began molesting Tara's body before they drove farther into the orchard and found a spot to light her body on fire. After they burned her body, he said they both agreed to keep all of this a secret. And Bo told him that he would burn down his house if he ever told anyone what happened.

According to Ryan, he didn't see Bo for about a week until he showed up at his house and asked him if he was okay and if he had told anyone. Ryan apparently told him that he didn't say anything to anyone and that he wasn't okay. He said he felt really bad for what happened and even asked Bo if they could go down to the police station together and basically confess to everything. But obviously we know they never did that.

Over the next several months, Ryan said that Bo brought up Tara as a reminder to him to, quote, never say anything and that no one would ever believe Ryan even if he did. When he was asked on the stand why he continued to protect Bo and didn't tell anyone about the murder, Ryan said he was, quote, afraid of Bo and with Bo being capable of killing someone, that's reason enough to be scared of someone.

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According to Ryan, they visited the site where they burned Tara about one month later. And while he was living with Beau, he didn't have a car. So one day, when they drove together to the grocery store, they stopped by the orchard, and Ryan described the area looking like a small campfire had been there. But he said they couldn't see any of Tara's remains anymore.

Now, a few months later, they moved into another house together as roommates, but that didn't last very long. Ryan claimed that Bo never paid rent, helped financially, or cleaned, leaving him to basically do everything. So after that, they no longer lived together or spent much time together. But Ryan never went to the police to say what he knew.

A few years down the road, Ryan said that he tried to kill himself by overdosing on pain pills, saying at the trial, quote, I couldn't keep a job and went into full renal failure and had a lot of kidney issues from all the drinking, drugs, and sleeping pills. I was drinking heavily, around a fifth of liquor a day, and would drink until I passed out. I think he wanted the jury to have a little bit of sympathy for him, and maybe they did.

He said a few months before his interview with the GBI back in 2017, he was drinking heavily again, smoking pot daily, and taking pain medication, which explains why he falsely confessed. He said he was high on drugs and basically decided that he would be the one to take the blame for everything because he knew that Beau wouldn't do so.

But now, according to Ryan, the only truthful part of his confession was that he helped get rid of her body, but he only did so because he was scared. He said he wasn't the actual killer.

On cross-examination with prosecutors, Ryan was questioned about his testimony where he said he didn't know where Tara lived. If Ryan had Tara's purse, which he said that he did, why didn't he just look at her driver's license to find out where she lived?

And why not just go down to the police station to drop off her purse there? If he wanted to be this upstanding citizen, basically the prosecution saying there are so many ways you could have found out where she lived or there's so many ways that you could have returned that purse. But according to Ryan, he said he didn't think of doing any of that.

Instead of looking inside her purse or going down to the police station, he said he decided to go back home and just confront his friend Bo about it.

Also during cross, prosecutors brought up a recorded phone call between Ryan and a friend where Ryan apparently told the friend that he was having a sexual relationship with Tara at the time. This was a recorded jailhouse phone call. But now, according to him, that was a lie too. He said he was just, quote, telling him what he wanted to hear.

At trial, he completely denied ever having any type of relationship with Tara, despite what he said on that recorded jailhouse phone call. Now, not surprisingly, prosecutors grilled Ryan about sincerity of his statements. He testified that he was so upset while getting rid of Tara's body in that orchard, but he wasn't upset enough to come forward and tell her family what happened.

He had years, decades to come forward and say something to finally bring this poor family some peace. However, according to Ryan, he was very upset about what he did, and it was something that he thought about and regretted every single day.

When it came to the latex glove, the prosecutors had Ashley Hinkle testify. She was the forensic biologist with the state crime lab who swabbed the glove back in 2005 and 2015. She said they matched Tara's DNA on it from one of her toothbrushes.

and the second profile belonged to an unidentified white male. The DNA came from the inside part of the glove. 90% of it belonged to the unknown male, and about 10% of the DNA belonged to Tara. And when Ryan Duke voluntarily provided his DNA sample in 2017, it came back as a match to the unidentified male profile. So it was his and Tara's DNA found on the glove that was found in her front yard.

According to Ashley Hinkle, the state expert, quote, the primary profile from the inner piece of the glove matched Ryan Alexander Duke with a probability of matching one and 300 quadrillion in the population. In my opinion, it would be that of Ryan Duke or an identical sibling if he has one, end quote. So that seems like pretty good odds, right? But here's a problem for the prosecution.

Besides Ryan and Tara's DNA, the GBI also found a third DNA profile that hasn't been linked to anyone. Of the total amount of DNA that was found on this latex glove, 5% of it belonged to this unknown third profile, and that DNA was found on the outside of the glove.

So this gave the defense an opportunity to basically argue that the DNA found on the glove doesn't necessarily implicate him in the murder, or it could mean someone else is responsible, whoever that third DNA profile belongs to. According to the defense, no direct forensic evidence was ever found proving Ryan had ever gone inside of Tara's house.

The GBI didn't find his blood. They didn't find his fingerprints anywhere. It was only found on the glove, which was found outside of the house. They also questioned whether the DNA evidence on the glove could be trusted at all because of previous errors that the state crime lab had made in other cases. Plus, the glove was never turned over to the defense so that it could be independently tested.

Now, if that wasn't enough, they even went as far as to argue that Bo probably planted the glove in front of Tara's house, trying to basically implicate his friend in the murder instead of him. During the trial, Ryan's lawyers asked if he or Bo had ever worn gloves when they were preparing to get rid of her body, and Ryan said he didn't remember wearing gloves.

But he did say that he and his brother often wore similar gloves at home while taking out the trash and emptying the cat's litter box. They were both germaphobes, I guess.

And according to Ryan, they always place the trash in the back of Bo's pickup truck to be taken to the dump. So it was possible that Bo saw one of the gloves that Ryan used to take out the trash or empty out the litter box and planted it at the crime scene. And if that was true, that could explain why his DNA was found on that particular glove in front of Tara's house. It's because Bo could have planted it there.

There was also the issue of Tara's body. Because it was burned so badly, we don't know what her cause or her manner of death actually was. It's hard to prove that a murder happened if you can't even tell the jury how it happened.

Dr. Ashley Gooding, an anthropologist brought in by the GBI in 2017, told the jury that human remains were discovered in the orchard that Ryan took investigators during his interview.

But even though a human finger, a possible tooth, and cranium bones were found at the location, the anthropologist said that the bones were both too damaged and too charred to verify that they in fact belonged to Tara. The DNA testing on them were inconclusive, although it seems pretty obvious that it was in fact her, they just don't have the forensic evidence to back it up and say for sure.

Now, Ryan's own uncle even testified. He basically said that he remembered seeing a fire on the orchard, but just assumed that it was a bonfire. However, since the GBI was never able to officially find Tara's remains, the defense used that as an opportunity to say that, hey, there's no direct forensic evidence linking Ryan to any crime.

Yes, his DNA was found on the glove, but that didn't prove that a murder took place. So that was the defense's case in a nutshell. During Ryan Dukes' original confession to the police, he was high on drugs, and the real killer, Bo, threatened to hurt him if he ever said anything. There was a third DNA profile found on the latex glove that no one's ever been able to identify.

There was no forensic evidence proving that he was ever inside of Tara's house, and there was no forensic evidence that there was even a murder. Tara's body, technically, has never been found. Yes, they found charred human remains in that orchard, but they can't officially be identified. The DNA testing was inconclusive, and a cause or manner of death can't be determined.

So besides the DNA on the latex glove, which could have gotten there some other way, there's no direct forensic evidence linking Ryan Duke to Tara's murder. That's what the defense argued, at least. Now, what about Bo? What did he now have to say about his former friend pointing the finger at him?

Well, before he even took the stand at Ryan's trial, his attorney advised the court that he would be invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

So every time the defense or the prosecution asked Bo a question on the stand, he said, with his attorney standing right next to him, under the advice of my counsel, I will be invoking my Fifth Amendment right to not provide testimony today. This went on question after question until the judge basically just said, hey, are you going to answer every single question with that answer? And Bo said yes.

So eventually the judge said, okay, that's enough. He took him off the stand and it was just pointless testimony and a waste of everyone's time. He wasn't actually going to testify to anything meaningful.

So at this point, the case was handed over to the jury, and it really became a question of who do they think the actual killer was. I think everyone knew that both of them were involved in this, but the jury needed to decide who did what, who actually killed Tara, and who maybe just helped the other dispose of her body. Well, here's what that particular jury came up with.

On May 20, 2022, Ryan Duke was found not guilty of murder, aggravated assault, and burglary, but he was found guilty of concealing a death.

They deliberated all day Thursday afternoon after the trial was over and for about two hours on Friday morning before coming to this decision. Now, if you recall from earlier in the episode, Bo was found guilty of basically the same thing, and he was sentenced to 25 years in prison. However, when it came to Ryan Dukes' sentence, he got a lot less.

Three days after his criminal trial, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. But again, that was just for the concealing a death charge. He was found not guilty of murder, aggravated assault, and burglary. So technically, neither Ryan Duke nor Bo Dukes were found guilty of Tara's murder. No one was.

Yes, both men were found guilty of helping to get rid of her body, and both of them definitely had something to do with what happened to her, but neither one of them was convicted of her murder. Despite Ryan Dukes' DNA being found on the latex glove, the jury wasn't able to convict him of murder. Maybe they really believe the defense's theory that it could have been planted there after the fact.

It's now been almost two decades since Tara Grinstead disappeared on October 22, 2005. And to this day, there are still so many unanswered questions that not even forensic science can answer. We don't know how she was killed or who did it. Was it Bo Dukes or his friend Ryan Duke? Who did what and are they both equally guilty?

And who does the third DNA profile on the latex glove belong to? Does it even have anything to do with Tara's murder, or is the DNA completely unrelated? And now that both men have been sentenced, will there ever really be justice for Tara's family?

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