The Tara Grinstead Case - Episode 1 (Revisited)
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From Tinderfoot TV in Atlanta, this is Up and Vanished. It's weird listening back to this.

I was just some guy in his apartment, sitting in front of a microphone I just bought at Best Buy, thinking, "Yeah, I'll just go solve a murder mystery real quick. Like, no big deal."

I had no journalism background, no investigative training, just a Google search bar, a fascination with the podcast serial, and, well, a lot of misplaced confidence. I said from Tenderfoot TV in Atlanta. What I really meant was from my apartment in Kennesaw, where I was living with my younger brother at the time. Saying from Tenderfoot TV felt more official, like I was some organization or a team. But at that time, it was just me.

I came up with the name "Tenderfoot" because it's the lowest rank in Boy Scouts. My dad was an Eagle Scout. He made me join Boy Scouts in middle school, and I didn't like it. And the furthest I got was "Tenderfoot." But hey, they don't hand that badge out. You still have to earn it. Crazy to think that all these years later, saying "Tenderfoot TV" means something completely different.

Like a lot of people, I have been pretty obsessed with the podcast Serial and the Netflix series Making a Murderer. And I thought to myself, what if I made one of those? So I literally just went to Google and started searching.

There it is. That's me. Fully committing to this. Like I had a single clue what I was about to uncover. Spoiler alert: I didn't. But somehow, that might have been my greatest advantage. God, this part still cracks me up. It either makes you think this guy's absolutely ridiculous, or wow, how cool, an average Joe can go make a true crime podcast. But it's what I did. I literally went to Google and started searching.

Mind you, I did this for weeks, like I was some detective on the case. Meanwhile, my only real investigative tool was Websleuths and a weird gut feeling. And so I made this post on the website Websleuths that said, "Hey guys, I'm a filmmaker from Atlanta thinking about doing a documentary. Anyone have any theories? Real professional, right?"

And then, boom, I got a voicemail out of nowhere from this guy named Maurice Godwin, a real investigator. Hey, this is Dr. Maurice Godwin. I saw your post about the Tara Grinstead case on Web Sluice. I worked this case before.

from March of '06 to over past '09, 2009 for her family. And probably other than the GBI, there's no one knows no more about the Tara Grandstead case than myself.

I'm not going to lie. When I first heard his voicemail, my stomach dropped. I actually thought it was the police, and I was somehow in trouble for trying to investigate this case.

Turns out he was a private investigator, an actual expert who had worked this case for years.

And suddenly, I had my first lead. Maurice tells me I should go to Osceola. But he gives me a weird little warning. Take somebody with you.

It's a weird place. Okay. At the time, I kind of brushed it off. Now? Yeah, I get it. There were things in that town people did not want me looking into. And trust me, I tried to get my younger brother to go with me. He thought I was nuts. And so my first trip to Osceola was by myself. We're sorry. You have reached a number that is no longer in service.

Your call has been forwarded to an automated voice. The number you dialed is not a working number. Okay, I had a pretty rough start. I was literally getting every type of non-working number message in existence. And when I finally reached some people, it went like this. My name is Payne Lindsey. I wanted to talk to you about the Tarek Renstead case. The Tarek Renstead case.

A podcast. Documentary series. If you don't mind. Sorry to bother you. Interview for the podcast. I'd like to talk to you about Tara Grinstead. Nothing. Not a single person would talk to me. It was beginning to seem impossible. Everyone surrounding this case had their guard up. Okay, pause. This moment, this was the first time I realized it wasn't just a cool podcast project. This was real. I had no idea that this case, this small town mystery, was about to take over my entire life.

This small town in South Georgia had become this impenetrable community that just refused to rehash the old wounds. Osceola had become this impenetrable community that refused to rehash old wounds. Impenetrable community. Wow. Listen to me. This is where I was still in documentary mode, thinking people were just hesitant to talk. What I didn't realize yet was that some people weren't just hesitant, they were scared.

And then, there was a phone call. You know the one. The moment someone called me back after I reached out to a friend of Tara's. I couldn't record it at the time, but I'll never forget what the voice on the other end said. Why are you asking about Tara Grinstead? It was almost like he was investigating me now. I told him about the podcast and the documentary and his tone changed a bit. Then he said, why did you call Susan? I didn't really have an answer for him. Then he said, do not call her again. Click,

That? That was my first real taste of something isn't right here. That wasn't just someone looking out for a friend. That was someone trying to make sure I stopped looking. Here she is, ladies and gentlemen. I call her your Royal Highness because I think it is a very nice, wonderful...

Tara Grinstead, how are you doing? I'm doing great. Miss Tifton getting ready to go over to Columbus and represent Tifton over there. Are you excited? Oh, yes, very excited. Well, you are well into your career already, too, aren't you? Yes. What kind of work do you do? I'm an 11th grade history teacher at Irwin County High School, and I also have a cheerleading squad of junior varsity cheerleaders, 9th and 10th graders. I just completed my first year teaching, and I loved every bit of it.

That's a local news interview from 1999, when Tara won the beauty pageant for Miss Tifton, the biggest city near Osceola, and she was moving on to compete for Miss Georgia. She seemed to have everything going for her. She was popular among her students, all the teachers loved her, but in October of 2005, she would disappear without a trace, and never be seen again. Who would want to hurt Tara? Let's recap the night of October 22nd, when Tara just completely vanished. I'll have my friend Rob describe the scene.

Saturday, October 22, 2005. Tara went to a beauty pageant during the day, and then she attended a friend's barbecue later that night, just a couple blocks away from her home. She arrived around 8 p.m. and stayed for a few hours. Friends at the party said she was acting normal, nothing out of the ordinary. Around 11 p.m., Tara told a friend at the party she was going home to watch the videotape from the pageant that day. She said her goodbyes and drove off.

She was never seen again. Monday came and Tara didn't show up for work. When the bell rang for class to start and Tara wasn't there, students informed the faculty and they called the local police department. The chief of Osceola Police, Bill Hancock, was the first to arrive on the scene.

Her car was parked in her driveway, and the front door was locked. As he approached her front door, Hancock discovered a blue latex glove just feet from her doorstep. Even more puzzling, he found a business card wedged in the front door. The neighbors, an elderly couple, had a spare key to Tara's house.

They were really close to Tara, and they kept watch on her house at night. They had a little system going. Every night when Tara came home, she turned on the lamp by the window in her room facing their house. That night, Tara's lamp was never turned on. Hancock used the neighbor's key to gain entry to Tara's home. The house was in near-perfect condition, but there were a few subtle things that seemed a little off. The lampshade on her bed was knocked askew.

tilted in an odd position, as if maybe it had been knocked over. The clock, normally on her nightstand, was found on the floor by her bed. Her cell phone was found sitting in its charger on the nightstand. Hancock quickly realized the severity of this case. He made a call to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for backup, and official investigation was underway.

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He lives in a small town in North Carolina, and I drove up from Atlanta one afternoon. Are these all notes about the Tara case? Yeah. He had this thick notebook. It was filled with hundreds of notes, thoughts, names, all related to the Tara Grinstead case. He started thumbing through it, reminiscing about the case.

Maurice is an older man, gray hair, glasses. You get the sense that this case and many others like it have taken a toll on him. And even he'll tell you it's exhausting. To Maurice, this is not a hobby. It's always ever known. And then in the back here are some updates and stuff. I was contacted in the end of January of 06 by Tara's sister Anita. I couldn't take it at that time and I actually didn't take the case.

Then she contacted me again and I took the case about the end of February and I went down in March. And then I worked on the case. I spent two whole days in the house. We searched a lot of places. There was nothing to ever come of anything. And this case is cold as Alaska. So Tara's sister, Anita, hired Maurice to help with the investigation. And he wasn't involved until March of 2006, almost five whole months after she went missing. So one of the things that I did when I was there was

I talked to some of the locals. A lot of people clammed up and wouldn't talk. Seems like most people will clam up and don't talk in this case. Oh yeah, and still today. It appeared that to GBI and some others that were there, it didn't appear to be a struggle.

so they said there was no struggle well gbi admitted that what do you think well this is what i found see she had the old timey wooden floors with the gaps in between them so i got on my you know knees and stuff and crawled around i found a clasp from a necklace a lesser known fact in this case that i actually learned through maurice is a broken necklace that was found by police inside her home

The beads were scattered about on the floor, and they bagged it up as evidence. But it was still unclear to police if the necklace was broken on accident, or if it meant that there was a struggle inside the home. Almost five months later, when Maurice went to visit Tara's house, he found a clasp on the floor that looked like a match. And you can see on the clasp it had been pulled apart. So based on what you know about the necklace and that clasp...

In your opinion, did that necklace come off in a struggle? That clasp was pulled apart by force. You can take that for what it's worth. Then I found some pieces of broken plastic of the headboard in the master bedroom. The bedpost

was split in two and broken and was found lying under the middle of the bed. You had to get up there and find it. Then I also found a box with dust on it underneath the bed. So that was never retrieved by the GBI. Then one thing that I noticed is she had a rug beside the bed. I moved, I pulled that rug up and the rubber came off on the back of it. So the rug had never been lifted.

So in your opinion, did the GBI do a good job investigating? Absolutely not. On a scale of 1 to 10, what would you rate the GBI's performance? Probably 3. 3 out of 10? 3 out of 10. Five months later, he finds a whole slew of evidence inside Tara's house that the GBI completely missed. You could sense his frustration still today. But what did any of it mean? I asked him to recap that Saturday Tara went missing. I wanted to know his account. So walk me through the day.

My understanding is that during the daytime, she had girls at her house and stuff, helping girls with the pageants and the makeup, the hair, preparing for the sweet potato pageant in Fitzgerald that afternoon. I think the pageant started about 3 o'clock, is what I was told. So then she went to the pageant, stayed at the pageant, and then she left the pageant around 7:25 to 7:30. One of her pageant girls named Dana Wilder

walked with Tara to Tara's car, and she said that she had to go to her superintendent's barbecue. So she left the Papaget in Fitzgerald and drove back to Osceola. I was told that her landlord, the son of her landlord,

Rhett Roberts. I was told that she talked to Rhett out at the curb of the road about probably quarter to eight then. Again, another lesser known fact about this case that you can't find anywhere in news articles. Between leaving the pageant and going to the barbecue that night, Tara made a brief stop at a friend's house, a man named Rhett Roberts, who was actually her landlord's son, and they talked briefly at the curb of the road. And then she proceeded on to barbecue and arrived about eight o'clock.

And then at 11 o'clock, she left the barbecue on the notion that she had to go back and watch a video. What video is that? That would be no video because so far there's never been one that existed that we know of. Remember Tara told her friends at the barbecue that night that she was going home to watch the tape from the pageant that day? The police could never find it.

And as far as they knew, no video ever even existed. There's two types of crime scenes. There's a primary crime scene. That's where the most actions occur between the victim and the attacker. And then there's a secondary crime scene, say, where a car was left. The problem with this case is you don't have any secondary crime scene, and you don't have any really primary crime scene. You don't even know for sure if the house is a crime scene. That's right. The answer lies in the GBI, GK's files in Prairie, Georgia.

the answer to this case lies there why can't they solve it i don't know listening back to this now i can hear how naive i was but i also hear something else too my curiosity despite my lack of experience i was determined to find answers even if i didn't know what i was stepping into because back then tara grinstead was still a name on a missing persons report a decade-long investigation that led nowhere

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On my drive back to Atlanta, I played our interview on repeat, analyzing every detail. And when I got home, I caught my first lucky break. Someone was finally willing to talk to me. Hey, how are you? I'm good. How are you doing? Well, I had a little problem with my back, but thank the Lord it's getting better. Awesome. Are you still walking every day? Yeah. Wait a minute. When am I going to take that much? That's my grandma. That's my grandma.

But she's lived in Tifton, which is only a half hour from Osceola, for nearly half her life.

Maybe she knew something. So I'm looking forward to seeing y'all. We're going to bring pound cake and some cowboy cookies. Yes, I need some more cowboy cookies ASAP. Okay. That's what I'm baking right now. You heard the bell go off? Oh, perfect. Fresh ones. Fresh ones. Fresh. Okie dokie, darling. All right. Well, I wanted to ask you something. Okay.

So I'm working on this new documentary, and it's actually about this girl who went missing about 10 years ago in the town of Osceola. Her name was Tara Grinstead. Do you remember hearing about that? I do. I certainly do. And, you know, Osceola is only about 25 to 30 minutes from here.

What do you remember about that as far as like what were people saying when that happened? I'll ask around a few people that might remember. In fact, I'll call my friend who lived in Ocilla.

Okay. And I'll ask her. She'll know. I'll call her right now. Awesome. And I'll call you back, okay? Okay, that sounds great. Okay. All right, bye-bye. And sure enough, 10 minutes later. All right. My friend's name, her first name is Melba. M-E-L-B-A. That is her first name. Okay. Let me tell you what she did tell me. I'll tell you right quick.

She was a school teacher. And on the Saturday that this happened, there was a beauty pageant in Fitzgerald, Georgia. Now, Fitzgerald is like 15 minutes away. And there was a beauty pageant.

on that Saturday, you might know this, at like 3 o'clock, she went to help the girls put their makeup on and that sort of thing. Right. When the pageant was over, my friend that I just talked to, Melvie, she talked to her at 6 p.m. at the theater. Really? Melvie said when she left the theater,

Tara was still at the back of the theater with a friend. Tara did leave and went to visit a friend in Fitzgerald. In fact, it was a student that she had taught for just a short time. And then from there, she went back to Ocella to her principal's house because he had a cooker that night.

Man, I could have never imagined that my actual grandma would be the one to drop a bombshell on me on an unsolved missing persons case I was investigating for my True Crime Podcast. But sure enough, she did. I'm pretty sure she had no idea I was recording our conversation. I did eventually tell her. But seriously, listening back to the very first episode of Up and Vanished, the very first cliffhanger ever, and it's my grandma. It's kind of surreal.

That was episode one of Up and Vanished season one. The very beginning. And now, I'm going to take you through every single season. Revisiting everything. What I got right, what I got wrong, what's changed since then. And here's the deal. A lot has changed since then.

What you don't know, and you're about to find out, is that in every single case of Up and Vanished, we've always continued investigating. I've been talking to the CBI, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, in Crystal Risinger's case for over four years. And I recorded all of it, with their permission. I've talked to the FBI, in Ashley Loring Heavy Runner's case.

There are major new leads, tape I've previously recorded that didn't make sense back then, but makes a whole lot of sense now. In a brand new sense of urgency, in a call to the public, you guys, even as listeners, to help us solve these cases. There's a lot of things about Ryan Duke's trial that I never told you, just from my personal experience. At the time, I truly did not want to get in the way of the justice system doing its job.

That's why the only time I ever appeared in the actual courtroom was on the very last day when they read the verdict. But wow, do I have some stories for you. So each week, we're diving back into every season, starting with season one. And look, I know it's a whole lot of information, so I'm going to make it easy for you.

Whether you've binged all these seasons recently, or you heard them years ago, or you're hearing all this for the first time, we're going to recap everything in a very clean way so I can give you a real update and call to action to help us solve these cases. This is eight years of work, audio you've never heard, and insights from me that I've never shared. And all of this is leading up back to Season 4 in The Midnight Sun.

I've also spent several months going through all my old phones, hard drives, everything I could find, and dug up old footage of me and the team investigating these cases over the years. We've also filmed a whole bunch of new stuff that shows you exactly where we are in our investigations into the disappearance of Florence Okpialik and Joseph Balderas in Season 4.

So I encourage you to go check out my Instagram, which is @painlindsay and @upandvanished. If you want to see some visuals with what you're hearing, it'll be worth your while. And to dispel the mystery, I'm going to give you the release schedule of every episode coming up right now, so you know exactly what to expect.

The season recaps begin today. Next Friday, February 21st, we're releasing a very robust episode that recaps you on the entire Season 1, gives you all brand new information, catches you up on everything so it's not confusing, and I'll give you my real insights on what I think actually happened to Terragrinstead. And play for you tons of tape I've never aired that I think you'll find very compelling.

Then, the following Tuesday, February 25th, we dive back into Season 2. And on Friday, February 28th, we have a second episode on Season 2. Because there's so much content and so much tape with the suspects, the persons of interest, and hour-long conversations with the CBI that have spanned over four years and are as recent as of two days ago. Then, on Tuesday, March 4th, we're diving into Season 3.

Believe me, if I started murdering people, there'd be none of you left.

True crime has always captivated us. But what if there's more to these stories than what we're told? The headlines, the verdicts, the familiar narratives. What if that's just the beginning? I created Truer Crime to dig deeper, to uncover the stories that go beyond the surface. We're diving into mysteries you think you know. The Manson murders, Jonestown, the assassination of Dr. King, and the ones you've never heard.

They would have thought he was the sweetest thing in the world because he portrayed that. He portrayed the happy family. He haunts me. He's with me every day. We were robbed, all of us. If it takes me 20 years and I can live that long, I'll be working on this case. We're not just telling stories. We're uncovering hidden truths. Truer Crime is available now. Listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.