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Get your quote today at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Previously on Up and Vanished. On the forum for Tara Grinstead on May 11th, 2008, someone posted Jim Hickey, software salesman from Atlanta, who took Tara to dinner in early October 2005.
Did he visit Tera the Friday before she disappeared? Who is Jim Hickey? You have to take these emails cumulative. A lot of people who have problems
transfer the issues they had as a child into adulthood is the fear of rejection, the fear of abandonment. The attachment to him was more than just an attachment of a relationship. Marcus plays some of the role in her behavior toward him too. There's no doubt about that.
Tara's sister said the glove was blue, not white. The Nancy Grace Show aired a series of live interviews. Nancy interviewed Tara's neighbor, Joe Poitier. During the interview, Joe revealed a very crucial piece of information.
I walked back to the front porch talking to the chief of police on my cell phone. And that's when I spied the latex glove. It was actually before the police got there. Since the first time I met with Dr. Godwin about this case, he's told me about this mysterious black truck. Do you know if Moshe saw the person?
Heath Dykes drove a black truck. When I first started digging around in this case, back before I even released the first episode of the podcast...
Maurice started getting weird messages on Facebook from a fake account. And the creepy thing was, the messages were about me. The name on this fake Facebook profile was George Harrison. Someone was watching me very closely. The thing that concerns me is, this might be somebody that has some information. As far as you know, you don't have any knowledge of who this is. Zero knowledge.
This whole thing started in June of 2016.
Around that time, I was just starting to reach out to people to interview for the podcast. And Maurice and I had only been talking for a few months at that point. Up and Vantage was still just an idea. That's it. I was out to dinner one night with my fiancé in early June. And I got a missed call and voicemail from Dr. Goblin. For the first time, Maurice seemed to have a serious tone with me. Whatever it was, it sounded urgent.
I was about a 15-minute drive to my apartment from the restaurant, and I decided to wait until I got home to call him back. But before I could get there, Maurice called again. I'm talking about the new message that's on terror sites. There's a Facebook page called What Happened to Tara Grinstead, and it's full of supporters seeking justice in this case. Like any Facebook page, visitors can make a post on the wall. Maurice was talking about the most recent post from a man named George Harrison. It's the first post up there. You don't see it with three comments.
I couldn't see it. I tried logging into Facebook with my fiance's account and went back to the same page.
This time I could see George Harrison's post. It said, "Has anyone heard about the new Tara Grinstead documentary called 'Up and Vanished'?" You read what he said. Now how does he know? How did that person know, I mean, that statement that you read? He was right. How did George Harrison know the name "Up and Vanished"? Because at that point, I hadn't told anybody. Nobody even knew about this yet. Well, it's advertisement. For who?
Yeah, but that doesn't make any sense. Maurice thought that George Harrison was one of my friends trying to promote the documentary, but I assured him that was not the case. But he didn't really believe me. I mean, how else did they know the name Up and Vanished? I didn't have an answer for that. Somehow that name got out there, but I have no clue how. I did my best to convince Maurice I had nothing to do with this, and we started looking into George Harrison's profile a little deeper. His Facebook friends were hidden on his profile, so if he had any, we couldn't see them.
His profile picture was a low-quality black and white photo of five Hispanic girls who looked like sisters. It was becoming clearer that George Harrison probably wasn't a real person. It's a fake Facebook account. That profile picture was one taken, like, from a Spanish site. He changed his profile picture, too. He's put that one with the headset, he's put that up as a profile picture.
Shortly after we started digging around, he changed his profile picture to a white guy with brown hair and a beard who looked to be maybe in his late 20s. Somebody had said something to him about the picture being from a Spanish website or something, so he's changed it to one that you can't find. I've searched for all those pictures in there, even highlighting just the facial area, and there's absolutely no matches anywhere on Google anywhere. We tried every single reverse image search tool on the Internet.
There wasn't a single match for George Harrison's new profile picture. His profile now said he was from Seattle, Washington, but that he lives in Blackshear, Georgia, which is about an hour and a half southeast of Osceola. As far as you know, you don't have any knowledge of who this is. Zero knowledge. With no luck on George Harrison's real identity, I told Maurice that he should message him. So he did.
Maurice sent George Harrison a message that said, I've been working on the Tara Grinstead case for her family for 10 years. Do you have information on the case? A few minutes later, George Harrison responded and said, Who the hell are you? He replied saying, My name is Dr. Maurice Godwin. My name has been associated with this case since the beginning. Two hours later, George Harrison replied back. He said, The project of Payne Lindsay will be a success. I will make sure of that.
Maurice said, George Harrison replied,
The thing that concerns me is this might be somebody that has some information. Why do they have to hide their identity? I don't understand why they just don't come out and say who they are. It's nothing but chaos. It doesn't move the case forward. It's just nothing but negative, negative, negative. I mean, it's just weird what they wrote. This guy is posting about my documentary using my name and my documentary's name.
but he also blocked me so I couldn't see if he's even doing that on Facebook. Tendently, without you telling me, I wouldn't even know. Well, I don't know. I don't know. There's something nefarious going on with...
why somebody has to hide their identity. They don't have the guts. I mean, if I was so enthralled about something, I'd just post it myself, wouldn't you? And see, I've been told by a number of people that I needed to get it off my shoulder so nobody won't say that nothing was done, see? Somebody could accuse me saying, you knew this all along, you didn't do anything. And there's only a couple reasons why someone would do this. One, this person's just crazy obsessed with the case, and he's just...
getting some sort of enjoyment out of posting about this just to stir some stuff up. That's definitely possible. Or two, if he knows something and maybe he plans on giving me some sort of information at some point. If he's going to give you something, you need it as soon as possible, right? You know, it sounds like he's got something, information to provide to help solve it. He made the statement to me that he's going to make sure you will solve this case. It's weird, man.
A few days later, George Harrison made another post. It said, this podcast will help move the case forward. Who the hell was George Harrison? Why was he doing this? Save on Cox Internet when you add Cox Mobile and get fiber-powered internet at home and unbeatable 5G reliability on the go. So whether you're playing a game at home or attending one live,
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But one thing about all of his messages stood out to me. They were all lowercase, and they often had weird typos and awkward spacing, almost like a kid wrote it or someone was trying to intentionally disguise themselves. It could be from a phone where sometimes it inserts and you don't do spacing like you're supposed to.
You know, I had an idea how to flush this guy out. How is that? Well, you know, initially I was talking about doing, like, the podcast first. You know, I wonder how much this would stir up if there was a podcast episode on iTunes talking about this George Harrison person. I don't know, man. That's your call. They're obviously getting some sort of enjoyment out of doing this right now. I bet they'd even have more enjoyment when someone's talking about this.
then I think that's what you should do then. So that's what I'm doing now, calling him out on a podcast. It's no longer a big secret. Now we all know about George Harrison. This person would log onto Facebook for a few hours every day at random times. And when he logged off, he would deactivate the Facebook account. So the messages and posts would just disappear. This went on for several weeks, all before I released or announced the podcast. George Harrison's friends were hidden on Facebook so we couldn't see them. But Maurice had an idea.
He spent several days going through every single person in Tara's case he could think of and checking their Facebook friends to see if George Harrison was in there. And believe it or not, George Harrison was friends with somebody in this case. His name was Troy Davis. He's the guy who had the barbecue that night Tara disappeared. The barbecue was at his house. Troy Davis was also the school superintendent of Irwin County where Tara was a teacher. The barbecue at his house that night was the last known place that Tara was seen alive.
So Maurice messaged Troy about this, and asked him why he was friends with George Harrison on Facebook, and if he knew who he was. Troy responded and said that he got a message from him too, and that maybe he just accepted his friend request by accident. Maurice asked Troy to send him a screenshot of the message, and he did. The message Troy got from George Harrison said this,
Tara Grinstead was a great teacher, and you were a great superintendent in Irwin County. He sent the message twice. At this point in time, nobody else knew of my relationship with Dr. Godwin, because I hadn't told anybody. So I told Maurice to send George Harrison a message, and act like he didn't know who I was. Maurice messaged him and said, "I don't know of Payne Lindsey." Then George Harrison replied right back and said, "Troy and Payne Lindsey knows who I am." This whole George Harrison thing was only getting weirder.
At first I was leaning towards the idea that this was just some crazy person that somehow found out about my documentary. This was all a big joke. But that was seeming less and less likely. But would a killer really do this? Risk getting caught after 11 years by sending a Facebook message? To a guy doing a documentary on Tara? Why would they be so stupid?
After doing some research, I found that sometimes, surely not most of the time, but sometimes, killers purposely inject themselves into an investigation by overly cooperating with the police or even talking to reporters. One example of this I found is a case from Macon, Georgia, back in 2011.
No, no one has seen her since Saturday. I haven't seen anything. I mean, I've always seen noise outside, but it's just people walking by pretty much. She's as nice as can be. I mean, very personable, very much a people person. We all know where she is. I mean...
This is Stephen McDaniel, being interviewed by a reporter in Macon, Georgia, about a local college student, Lauren Giddings, his next-door neighbor, who's gone missing. But things are about to take a weird turn.
Little does he know, the police just discovered Lauren's body, and he's about to find out on live television. The word body echoes through his head, and he freezes up on camera like a deer in headlights.
The Macon police saw this same video, and within a few hours, he was in custody. Eventually, Stephen McDaniel pled guilty to the murder of Lauren Giddings, and is currently serving life in prison.
This idea that killers stay close to an investigation with no fear of looking suspicious or getting caught is completely fascinating. And it's also kind of alarming. I wanted to learn more about the psychology behind this. How do killers act before they get caught when they're just walking among us?
Well, I'm Dr. Schlesinger. I'm a professor of forensic psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. And I have also been a practicing forensic psychologist for 41 years. The first thing you have to establish is that all murder is not alike.
There's different motivations. There's different clinical pictures. There's different courses and there's different outcomes. So, for example, some murder is a direct result of a psychosis. God tells you to kill and you kill. That's very, very easy to understand. Some murder is sexually motivated. Most murder.
is a result of situational stressful factors. In fact, the prototype of the most common murder is found in the Bible, in the Cain Abel murder case. If you look at the Cain Abel murder case in detail, you'll learn about 60 to 70% of everything you need to know about murder.
Cain killed his brother Abel through the close relationship between offender and victim. He killed him because of jealousy. God liked Abel's offering better than he liked Cain's offering. It was a direct violent assault. He rose up and slew him. And most importantly, when the killer is confronted with wrongdoing, he lies.
God asked Cain, where is your brother Abel? And he lied to God. He said, I know not. I'm not my brother's keeper. That's the prototype of the vast majority of murders. And those individuals who killed
a loved one, a domestic homicide, an argument, that type of thing, they're apprehended fairly quickly. The mentally disordered offenders, the psychotic people, that type of thing, they don't follow the investigation. They live in their own world. But somebody who's more intact, more intelligent, very often does follow the progress of the investigation. Sometimes they inject themselves into the investigation, which often leads to their apprehension. And
Other times they do things like make themselves a victim, which brings themselves to the attention of law enforcement. Many times an individual thinks that they can control the investigation. They think they're smarter than law enforcement. And in their mind, they're thinking, well, if he really did it, why would he come to law enforcement? Why would he give an interview? It obviously shows his guilt.
and nothing could be further from the truth. To give you an example or an analogy, it's like a third-party discovery of a body. An individual kills his child in an emotional state, shaken baby or whatever, and they arrange a neighbor to find the body, look in the basement behind the oil burner, a little further back. Oh, it's there. And they think
that if it's a third party who discovered it, it distances themselves somehow from the murder. Nothing could be further from the truth. So many of these individuals follow the investigation because they want to know what the police know to satisfy their own anxiety. And many of them think that they're smarter than law enforcement. They can control the investigation by getting close to it. I had a case in New Jersey. This guy killed, in New Jersey, two women. He killed another person while he was in prison in Florida. But
Because the women were killed and they were abducted from malls and they were young people and so on, there was a tremendous amount of media attention at that time. What this guy did was he self-inflicted a wound, went to the police station, and he said that he was attacked by the offender that everybody's looking for. Trying to get into the police station to talk to them to find out what they knew, he
He obviously became an immediate suspect, and he was linked not by what he said, but by hair and fiber and tire tracks and so on. So those things do happen, and the police are very, very aware of that.
The famous case is Dennis Rader, the BTK killer. The case was cold for 30 years. What happened is a citizen in Kansas wrote a book on the BTK killer, and that triggered Dennis Rader's narcissism because he wasn't getting the credit for this. He then started communicating with the police, which almost always leads to the individual getting apprehended. He was not apprehended for 30 years.
And he was highly intelligent, a college graduate, majored in criminal justice. The case went cold for 30 years. He got involved in this again by contacting the police, and he was arrested. Now he's in prison. As a general proposition, most victims who get killed know the offender.
That's just what the vast majority of murders are. They're people closely connected with someone. There's a lot of emotionality in the connection between offender and victim. Most people don't kill the toll collector on the turnpike. I mean, there's no emotion there. Now, with your particular case, the Georgia case,
She was a very super attractive beauty queen. And it would not surprise me at all if somebody was obsessed with her in some sort of way. And, you know, the murder may have occurred spontaneously or it could have been planned.
It's just very difficult to know from a distance what that is. I mean, could she have been abducted by a total stranger? Yes. But statistically, it's a rare event. Probably the police interviewed this individual perhaps multiple times, but they just didn't have enough to go on. They didn't get anywhere with the individual.
One other important point I think needs to be made here. Very often the media creates an image of somebody who's eluded apprehension, like your guy, for example, as an evil genius, an expert in deception, a master of disguise, high intelligence. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you have a complicated image,
explanation or a simple explanation, it's always a simple explanation. I was involved in a case down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. This is about 15 years ago. We killed who knows how many people, maybe 40 or something.
But it seems that he entered the house without breaking into it because there was no evidence of any forced entry. And either the woman was abducted or the woman was left there and killed. But there was no broken window or broken door and this sort of thing. And so the theories that developed out of that was he was a master of disguise. He was disguising himself as a police officer. Do you know what it turned out to be? He said that he went up to a door.
and he knocked on the door and said, "My car broke down, can I use your phone?" If the woman said, "No, it's out of order," he just left. If the woman said, "Okay," he just came in, dialed his own number, after about 10 minutes you can determine if there's a male at home that poses a threat. There's no male, then you just kill the person. He wasn't any genius at all, he did something very, very simple. In your case, it's probably a simple explanation for this.
When the first of two videos went online, the GBI immediately got involved. He himself was claiming that he's killed 16 people the way I understood the video, and he was giving clues as to one of his victims, and that victim, the clues that were offered were those that appeared specific to Tara Grinstead. Tara Grinstead vanished from Irwin County in October of 2005. The clues were unmistakably about her. Don't try to chase me. Don't try to catch me.
They almost immediately traced the videos back to the defendant, Andrew Scott Haley, in Hall County and confronted him. He confessed. He made the videos and even showed the agents where he placed his camera on a shelf in a bathroom closet to shoot them. And he stated essentially that it was a game, that he was trying to get as many hits as he could on his YouTube website. We've seen it before in this case. Someone taunting the police and the media with clues about Tara Grinstead.
But it turned out to be a hoax. Is George Harrison just another sick person playing a game with me? Or does he have some information for us? I'm sending my brother money directly to his bank account in India because he's apparently too busy practicing his karaoke to go pick up cash. Thankfully, I can still send money his way. Direct to my bank account.
Yes, I know I'm sending to your bank account. Western Union, send it their way. Send money in-store directly to their bank account in India. Service is offered by Western Union Financial Services, NMLS number 906983 or Western Union International Services, LLC NMLS number 906985, licensed as money transmitters by the New York State Department of Financial Services. See terms for details. Months later, after I started this podcast, I got a call from a private investigator in Georgia. He asked that I not use his name, but he said he had something to tell me.
All right, first of all, about a year ago, someone came to our office who was one of Tara Grinstead's students. You know, he's just like, I've always wondered what happened and, you know, the things that I hear in town.
are different than what the law enforcement's coming up with. It's like he was smart, but he was smart about the case. He didn't seem like the brightest guy, but he was smart. He knew. He's always been thinking about it for the last 10 years, so he knew what to say when he came to see us. This guy had all kinds of theories about what happened, but he just didn't know, and that's why he was coming to us. All this happened about a year ago. I don't know the exact date when this guy came in, but I want to say it was a year ago.
This kid sounded sketchy to me.
We agreed to meet up in person to discuss it further, after my wedding, which was the following weekend. All right, man. Good luck to you this weekend, man. Have a great wedding, and we'll see you on Tuesday. Before Tuesday came around, he tried reaching out to the kid again, and things got pretty interesting, so he called me with some updates. We had the original number on the intake formerly filled out. We called that number. Didn't work. We did a search on him, had another number on him. Didn't work.
So he finally found a new number for this kid, and he called him. The kid answered. And he agreed to meet him in person again, on Tuesday, the same day I was going to be there.
Well, at first he said, hey, I'm definitely coming. He said, I'll be there. So it was after a good five-minute conversation, kind of explaining what you're doing. And at the end of the conversation, he's like, well, yeah, I know who he is. I've seen some of the stuff. And I know he's communicating with his private investigator in North Carolina. I was like, look, I said, he's just getting information from that PI. I was like, well, that's what we do. And he's like, okay. He said, well, okay, I'll be there. I'll go ahead and be there. And so we hung up at that point.
And then he started sending me text messages saying, hey, I'd like to talk to him, meaning you. This is what he says. Is there any way I can talk to him like today? And I said, I'll ask just why I got married yesterday. I don't know. I'm bugging too much today. And he said, okay, thanks. Do you think he may be up to something? I had this gut feeling that this kid was George Harrison. So I told him the whole story to see what he thought.
Long story short, like months ago, before I even announced the podcast, actually, this person made a fake Facebook account. Somebody did. And he said, has anybody heard about the new series called Up and Vanished? This person, whoever it is, kept saying, Payne Lindsay will solve this case.
Payne Lindsey is going to solve this case. The first profile picture was like of these like Spanish girls. But one more thing that was odd though about all the messages he sent, they were all like sloppily written. They were all always lowercase, sometimes two spaces in between a word. Really? He told me this kid was Hispanic and that his text messages were worded exactly the same, just how I described them.
As a matter of fact, I'll send you a screenshot. I wonder why he said that. Either he thinks you're on the right track or he thinks you're getting too close to him. Well, there are people who for no reason become so obsessed with a case that it actually ruins their lives.
There's been a number of PIs, one that helped the Natalie Holloway case, who actually wrote a book about it, Natalie Holloway. I say there's been about 10 PIs that's been approached by terrorist gangs, you know, asking them about looking into it and stuff like that. And nobody will touch this case. There was a guy out of Macon, Georgia,
He got involved. He talked to me for about three weeks. He called me. He said, I'm not dealing with it no more. And I can tell you why. People have to invest money and time and effort and everything into any case they go in to try to do something on. Here's the word, trample on. When a case has been trampled on so much, I won't touch it with a 10-foot pole.
Tuesday came around and my friend Donald and I went to the investigator's office in Atlanta. Before we were allowed in, they made copies of both of our IDs. Then we met in a conference room. We met with another investigator in there as well. She was the first person to receive contact from this kid and she told us her story. He told me that he didn't speak very good English when he came to Georgia and that Tara was his teacher.
and helped him speak English. That was his genuine story to me. Now, have I validated that? No. Have I been hired by him? No. Has he shared a lot of information? Yes.
What is his, you know, at this point, everybody's a suspect. My concern is that I don't know what was done right or wrong. I don't know why he's obsessed with this. Okay. You know, I had teachers in my life that I probably wouldn't have gone to this length for, but I mean, I'm sure that if we can find her annuals, somebody must have all the people she's taught in seventh grade. Okay. And his name is there.
you know, that might be a good or bad thing, but validate that friendship. Did, did she go over to his house? He go over to her house and I don't know. I mean, he, he told me after that grade or they're finished that, you know, he, he didn't see her anymore, you know, and he just felt when it came on the news, he felt very bad about,
He never paid us any money. He was never a client. Okay, so I don't know what he's done or not done. I just know he has a few clues, a few theories, but unless we can verify that relationship, it bothers me. Well, I'm confused that I had a number for him forever. Forever, okay? And he always answered my calls. I call it. It's disconnected. I told Rebecca, find his mother.
Found somebody. I left a message. I said, look, I don't know who you are, but I'm looking for this person. I think it's your son. It's important. Tell him to call me. Right. I didn't hear anything. And next thing you know, like Sunday, he calls. He says, hey. And I'm like, what's wrong with you?
Why are you changing all your numbers and stuff? What's going on? Well, I've made a few people upset. I said, yeah, you seem to do that a lot. Okay, so I don't know what's wrong with you, but there's an issue here. So there's somebody going to be at my office on Tuesday that wants to give this case some attention. It can't hurt. Okay, can't hurt at all. So let's get together. Okay, I'll see. Okay, well, it ain't all see. Are you going to come or are you not going to come? So I don't know what's wrong with you.
You know, I don't know if he cared about her so much that he's just obsessed with the case. And I'll tell you one thing that was always weird. All of his messages were always lowercase and, like, typed funky. Well, you showed me a screenshot of a text with him. Yeah. It looks just like his messages. Yep.
If you can speak English, you can't necessarily write or type it out as well. And I know this because my gardener, he always tells me, call me. And if I do text him, he never replies. He always just calls back. And he just said he just does better speaking directly. So that definitely goes to your theory. Yeah. He knows it's weird. I find it...
I wasn't really too concerned about him until he just didn't decide not to show up. That bugs me. Because, I mean, what does he got to hide? The whole phone number thing. I was just trying to call him. Well, actually, I don't know if we should call him because we want to be able to... I can call him. The kid had agreed to meet with the private investigator that day, but it didn't look like he was coming. Needless to say, I didn't have any patients left. So they gave me his number, and I called on myself in front of everybody.
There he goes again. Disconnected number. I have been uncomfortably tight-lipped about this because I've been investigating it. I've never once mentioned it. He doesn't even, he doesn't know that I know he exists. He has no reason to think that. Okay, what's this guy's name? Let's run him. You got his information? Yep. Okay, I'm glad he gave us the license. Just like they took my ID when I came in.
The last time the kid was here, they took his ID too. She left the room for a second to go print it out. Was I about to learn the real identity of George Harrison? There's our guy. Who the hell is that? Thanks for listening to episode 11. After episode 12 in two weeks, we're going to take a short three-week break and come back with episode 13 on February 27th. But don't worry, I'll be releasing some awesome bonus content every Monday before February 27th.
Stay tuned this Thursday for another Q&A episode, answering your questions from the voicemail line. Next Monday for case evidence, and the following Monday for episode 12. Thanks for listening, guys. See you soon. Shopify's already taken the cash register online, helping millions sell billions around the world.
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