S1E5: The Black Truck
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Previously on Up and Vanished. The one person who has been vetted the most is her ex-boyfriend, Marcus Harper. He was absolutely tired of her. She was crying and was upset about something. She was very irrational, and she told me that if she found out I was dating someone, she would commit suicide. On Friday, October 14th, at 6.43 a.m.,

Tara sent Marcus Harper's mother an email. If I did not give a crap about Marcus, you all, and his feelings, I would not be in this state. If this were all about me, I would not want Marcus. Just remind Marcus what I said about something happening to me or even him. He leaves it as this, and something may happen to me. Like I said, though, the night of the sweet potato pageant,

The second piece of evidence was a business card found in Tara's front door. The card belonged to a friend of Tara's family, a police officer from a nearby town called Perry.

Late Sunday night on October 23rd, Tara's mom was concerned because she wasn't responding, so she asked his family friend to go check on her. So he drove there with the sole intent of checking on Tara. Oh, yeah. Do you think it's odd that Heath Dykes didn't see the glove on the ground? Uh...

I think it's unusual. You're dealing with a veteran detective. The only thing that the dogs showed any indication to was a burned house. We determined that they were responding to some septic lines or sewage. The residence was completely destroyed. Also destroyed by the fire was a 2000 Ford Expedition. The vehicle belonged to Michael Lankford.

The fire marshal report that I have right here says the cause of the fire is unknown. It was completely burned. Did you ever remember seeing the owner of the vehicle? Did he ever come up there when you guys were there? Basically, are you telling me that somebody other than the folks in Florida owned that? A guy named Michael Lankford owned the vehicle. The homeowner did not own that. Why was this vehicle there is what I'm getting at now. I don't remember nobody talking about, we're going to interview this guy. I can't believe nobody would say nothing like that.

Was Marcus and Michael friends or what? Marcus Harper and Michael Lankford worked at the facility together. They are friends, yes.

From Tenderfoot TV in Atlanta, this is Up and Vanished, the investigation of Tara Grinstead. I'm your host, Payne Lindsey.

The first thing I want to jump into in this episode is the fire on Snapdragon Road. If you missed last week's episode of Case Evidence, I'm going to fill you in real quick. Let's start with the basics. Why is this fire suspicious to me? One, it's the only place in the entire 200 square miles they searched that the cadaver dogs made a hit on. And it wasn't just one dog, it was several dogs.

Number two, behind the house there was a Ford Expedition that was completely burned too, but it didn't belong to the homeowner. It belonged to a man named Michael Langford, and Michael Langford had actually worked at Osceola Police Department the same time Tara's ex-boyfriend Marcus Harper did, and they were friends. Number three, on top of all that, the fire marshal couldn't determine what caused the fire, and it's still undetermined to this day.

I spoke to a man last week named Jim Hanley, who also had one of his search dogs hit on the house. I went down there with my search dogs, and I brought another one in. They spent many hours shifting the debris. I mean, like, according to about 10 hours. First of all, if they didn't feel there was something there, are they going to do that, spend that much time and work? Yes, my dog had interest at the building.

Was it Tara? I cannot prove it. That's DNA and that. My dog's been... I just put her down after 14 and a half years. But she's been tested and tested and tested. Her nose was parts per quadrillion tested too. That's as high as you can get.

A dog is not like a person. A dog just does what it's trained to do. To my knowledge, which is best as I can do, she never falls indicated. Now you can, there is some chemical compositions that will trigger as the same as cadavering, which is what the dog is searching for. What she did at that house was,

I am 95% sure that it was cadaver. I believe that place in my heart has everything involved with, I mean, it has everything to do with this case. Everything. You're on the right track. Was she there when the house burned? No, I guarantee you that not. Would she there before then? The body leaks, you know, bloats in a 80 degree weather. They can't clean it up. There'd be a spot there from hell. Okay, let's burn it.

There was bushes in between the house and the car that didn't burn. He told me there was no trail of fire between the house and the car, and the bushes in between them were never burned. This suggested that the car and the house were burned separately, and that would mean arson, not an accident. Jim also told me that before he came down with his dogs, he was talking in a chat room with some people about the case, and when he said he was going to Osceola, somebody threatened him. I kind of knew we must have...

He ruffled some feathers on, I'm thinking, the one involved because we were on the internet, you know, in a chat room and discussing what could be happening and what should be done. And, you know, the plans were made and we're making it work for this big search. You know, I got on there and they were asking me about canines and what you do and how you do it. You know, it's just a normal chat room. All of a sudden, this guy gets on there and nobody's antagonistic in this whole deal.

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I met up with Dr. Godwin in person, and he told me about a big lead he was chasing back in 2006. I found a kid who lived around the corner from Terrace House on Ash Street. He told me that he was riding his bike around that area Sunday, and he saw a black truck parked in the yard. He said that there was an individual in there, and that individual said something to him.

like a nasty comment. They came to interview this kid again. When GBI went to talk to them, they actually searched their mama's truck and they also searched her house. So they clammed up and never discussed anything about the black truck because it felt like they were being treated as suspects and no kind of composite. They never got anything close to that.

Then I found another witness from their porch. You can see Terrace driveway and they saw a black truck.

First at 7:30 Sunday evening, parked in the driveway. The same person at 6:00 a.m. that morning, that person's husband, going to get milk, saw the truck there at the house again. So who do you speculate that truck belonged to? I have no idea. GBI's response, there's hundreds of black trucks in Irwin County.

Do you think the black truck is important to this case? Oh, I think so. Too many people think. Here's another thing. A year ago, I got information about another report of a black truck incident. This was that Saturday night. The lady was backing up out of her driveway into the road, and the car pulled the stop line and likely hit her. But it was a black truck, and that was it. See, at the time, you could have done something.

You could have done a DMV on it, Department of Motor Vehicle, trucks in the area, but it's way too late now. According to Maurice, a lot of people saw this black truck that weekend, driving by Tara's house or even parked in the yard next to it. And he's convinced that the truck is related to Tara. Too many people have seen it. But where are these people now? I spent a solid two months trying to find the kid who saw the truck. He claimed that he actually saw the man driving and that the man cursed at him when he drove by.

If this kid really saw the man, then maybe he could remember what he looks like. And maybe a sketch artist could do a composite. But this kid was really off the map. I mean, I tried everything to find this kid, but no luck. So I moved on to other witnesses. I remember the night that she went missing because me and my best friend was on the phone. My house, when you go to a cellar, you...

You turn on the right on Polk Street, and my property is down in the last block before you turn on Alder Street to go to her house. And her house was on the next block on the right.

a block away from me. Well, I remember me and Christy, the girl that was living in my house, we were on the phone because I was making the church bulletin for our church. I was having some complications and she said, don't worry, I'm on my way. I'm going to come help you.

We were still on the phone and she had gotten her car. You know, it was usually really quiet right where we all lived, you know, right there where Tara lived and I lived. It was really quiet. You didn't have to worry about nothing. My friend said that she got in her car. All of a sudden, she hollered. She said, dog, I'm about to back out of my driveway. And she said, here comes this black truck.

like a few back out of Kara's Drive and came right up Alder Street. She said that truck came around off of Alder Street and turned on Paltz Street, flying, about rear-ended her, about running her over. And this was around midnight. It was a black truck, and she said it wasn't a new truck. She's seen some whites coming up the road, but, you know, she...

got in her car and was going to, you know, back out anyway. They didn't even stop for the stop sign. If you're looking at Tara's house, Alder runs down to the side where her carport is. When you come out of her driveway and come back to Alder, you wouldn't make a right that would go, like, to her backyard. You would make a left. When he'd come up that road, or whoever it was, came to that stop sign on Alder and talk, that

That's my property. Well, they were coming up older that way and made a right onto Park. So she said they never even stopped. They just made a right-hand turn, come on Park Street, and she had to slam on brakes to keep from hitting her. And she said, girl, I don't know who was driving that truck. She said, but, you know, they could have hurt me because if I wouldn't have been paying attention and just backed on out, you know, they would have probably rear-ended, I mean, you know, crashed her car pretty bad. Do you know if it was a bigger or smaller-sized truck?

In February 2009,

A disturbing video surfaced on the internet. It featured a man with his face disguised and his voice digitally altered. He proclaimed to be a serial killer. He called himself the Catch Me Killer. In the video, he claimed to have killed 16 different females, and one of these he described was determined by authorities to be Tara Grinstead.

He said that he wanted to play a game and he would slowly release clues about his murders through a series of YouTube videos. He warned the viewers not to attempt in trying to discover his true identity and that his IP address could not be traced. I decided to confess a few things. But in order to do so, I'm going to give everybody a clue. Many clues. The first person to solve this first video, I'm going to have you send me an email.

I'll post the address for the email. Each person out there that decides to play my game has a chance to become an actual hero. You have a chance to become something that I'm not. The only clues that I'm giving you are clues never released by the press or by police department.

The Catch Me Killer tells viewers, play my game and solve my puzzles and I'll lead you to 16 bodies one by one. He claimed one of his victims was a case we've covered heavily here on Issues. Tara Grinstead, a 30-year-old teacher and former beauty queen, mysteriously vanished from Georgia three years ago. The video sparked the attention of the media nationwide and the GBI launched an investigation to track down the man's identity.

Though the man's face and voice are digitally obscured, police were eventually able to track down the man by his IP address. The man was 27-year-old Andrew Haley of Gainesville, Georgia. After a thorough police investigation, they were ultimately able to determine that the videos were part of a bizarre and elaborate hoax.

Haley was eliminated as a substantial lead in Grinstead's disappearance, and was later charged and convicted of tampering with police evidence. This case seemed to be full of different false leads. Surprisingly, just this last week, another internet video surfaced. A man named James Rankin was hiking in the woods by his house in upstate New York when he stumbled upon something pretty creepy.

Over two dozen trees all around him were covered with people's missing posters. And one of the posters was Tara's. The video hit the internet just a few days ago and has since reached over 30 million views. So I come down the f***ing hill. And remember, we're still in the woods. We're still in the f***ing woods. Right? Okay. I was like, okay, these are probably no trespassing signs or maybe it's something for the wildlife or something. Anyway, I'll cut right to the chase because I might die here.

Look what these... What the f*** is going on in here? These are all different f***ing people. This is Utah, Florida. They're all different. This one's from Georgia. And look at this s***. Like, look. Look where the f*** we are. Who the f*** does something like this?

Though the video was indeed pretty spooky, it was likely some sort of hoax once again. But for the sake of the podcast, I tracked down James himself so he could tell me the real deal about this video. There's a park nearby. It's got some hiking trails. I'm going through the actual park and I see this little side trail branching off of a main trail and I follow it. I'm

I see at the end of the trail there's like a fire pit and some things hung to the trees. I go down to take a closer look because I figure it's either signs that say keep out. Some of the parks hang up signs with information about local plants and kind of animals you should be looking for. So I went down to check it out. So I get down there and it's all these missing persons posters, which...

caught me completely off guard because I, it's, it's so incongruous to anything that I was expecting to see and anything that I've ever seen before. It was alarming, you know, and I'm looking around at where exactly I'm situated and seemed like what I needed to do other than get the hell out of there was, uh, get,

some kind of documentation about what I found. And I jumped on Facebook first, and I wanted to kind of sound a distress call. I mean, the longer I spent down there, the more fishy it looked. And from there, I left everybody that had seen this video. I got friends and people that I don't even know, and they're all in complete agreement, take this to the police.

So that's what I did. Told them what I found. I showed them the footage. You know, they were like, thank you for calling it in. You did the right thing. Go home. The next morning, somebody from the office, he left a voicemail. They investigated. They were told by the homeowners at the property said that these posters were hung up by them as decorations for an upcoming Halloween party. ♪♪

A few episodes back, I talked briefly about Marcus Harper's alibi. According to Marcus, he was at the White Horse Saloon to watch his friend's band. Then he left and met up with his friend Sean Fletcher, an Osceola police officer. They rode around together in the cop car that night and made several stops in reference to a man named Benny Merritt. So I made a request with the Osceola PD to get the reports on Benny Merritt.

Because if these didn't add up, then Harper's alibi didn't add up either. When I got the reports back from Osceola, none of them happened on Saturday night the 22nd. There was one that happened the night before, and one on the 26th, but not a single report for Benny Merritt on the 22nd. This was a pretty big deal. If there's no reports on Benny Merritt, then maybe those stops didn't happen. And if those stops didn't happen, then where was Marcus Harper? But before I got ahead of myself, there was still one place I had to check.

the Irwin County Sheriff's Department. It's possible that the reports weren't filed with Osceola, but instead with the county. So I gave them a call. Can you give me one of the person's names? Benny Merritt. Amy? Benny. Benny? Yeah. All right, hold on just a second. This thing is going to be slow. It's all good. M-E-R-R-I-T-T.

That's how you spell it. All we have is one report on heat. Let me see if I can see what it's about. Okay. What date? Incident date was 10-26-2005 to 10-27-2005. It was against a lady that lives on Fillmore Road. The report date was actually 10-27-2005. Any other report on Benny Merritt?

No, sir. That's the only one we got on him. I just got off the phone with the Irwin County Police Department, and I called them to see if they had any separate records about Benny Merritt, separate from Osceola Police. So he actually ended up looking it up on the phone when I was there, and they only have one report on him, and it's on October 26th. That's it. If that's true, then somebody's told a bold-faced lie.

I mean, I was a police officer. If there was no report, then that's highly suspicious. The dispatcher gets a phone call. She has to write on the log when that came in, and she has to put what was the resolution of that. If none of that exists at all, they're just depending on the word of Marcus Harper.