Jury selection for Ryan Duke’s trial has begun in Georgia, USA. The American is accused of having killed Tara Grinstead, a high school teacher loved by all.
Tara Grinstead mysteriously disappeared in 2005. This former beauty queen, who became a particularly appreciated teacher at a high school in Ocilla, Georgia, in the United States, vanished without a trace on October 22, after a evening. At first, the authorities investigated a classic story of disappearance, before establishing that the young woman had in fact been the victim of a homicide. But his body was never found, making it more difficult to close this file.
However, two men were arrested. The first Bo Dukes, was sentenced in 2019 to 25 years in prison for helping to organize the murder. The second, Ryan Alexander Duke, 36, will soon be tried. Jury selection has just begun, reports Fox News. At the time of the charges against him, he was 21 years old. A few years earlier, he had obtained his baccalaureate in the establishment where the victim taught History. Two days after the disappearance of the professor, the police went to her home. Officers then found his car in the driveway and his phone charging. The clothes she had just worn during her evening with friends were on the floor, on the floor of her bedroom. A clock and a broken lamp had also been discovered.
A very talkative suspect
The 30-year-old woman’s car had also been searched. The police had found it open, $100 still intact in the glove compartment. The driver’s seat, on the other hand, had been pushed almost completely back, indicating that someone other than the teacher had driven her vehicle for the last time. There was also clay and mud around the tires. Another strange discovery, a latex glove was found in his garden, but DNA tests proved inconclusive. The victim’s cat and dog had been abandoned, which the victim would never have done according to his relatives. A reward of $100,000 had been offered to anyone who would find her alive. Then, the sum had been doubled in exchange for any information leading to the arrest of the suspect or suspects. In vain.
Over the years, this case has received national attention especially after it was mentioned in the podcast “Up and Vanished” but also because of its mysterious nature and its particular setting. The murder indeed took place in Ocilla, a small rural town in southern Georgia, with only 4,000 inhabitants. Tara Grinstead was officially declared dead by authorities in December 2010. Her mother, who died three years after her disappearance, never knew what happened to her daughter.
The case went unanswered for years, until February 2017. Bo Dukes, who was apparently very talkative while drinking or using drugs, allegedly bragged about his role in the death of the teacher, starting in 2006, a few months after her death. During his trial, an old friend and a cousin claimed that he confessed to them about the crime. In 2017, it was during a filmed interrogation that he admitted having participated in this homicide. On the video released during his trial, he explains that his friend Ryan Duke would have accidentally killed the victim. After the crime, he would have asked her to lend him his truck to move the body. Bo Duke confessed to helping his comrade burn the corpse “until it was in ashes”. “To the family of Tara Grinstead, I am truly sorry. Your long suffering has been unimaginable. I failed Tara Grinstead, I failed her family, I failed the local community. And I hope that these procedures have brought peace to the many people injured by my actions, ”he said when the verdict was announced against him. While the two defendants have the same last name, they are not related but were together in high school.