Revelation

Revelation

  3:03 AM    Unknown

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Photo: A truck passes on Highway 129 on February 28, 2017, near the pecan orchard I believe was searched in 2005.

Revelation

I wish I was as brave as that guy on Up and Vanished.

But I'm a coward.

Last week, I wrote a blog entry revealing some facts I've agonized over for weeks now. I'd already weakly stated some of these facts, or at least hinted at them, but I'd never solidly said, "I believe this happened." At least not on my blog or in the newspaper.

I hinted at it hard in the last blog entry I posted about the Tara Grinstead case, as I was worried that someone was trying to keep it covered up. I still am, but even then, I stayed mostly quiet.

Like a coward.

Then I wrote what I wrote last week, a blog entry I started on the one-month anniversary of the day the arrest of Ryan Duke was announced in Tara's case. I spilled the beans, or most of them, enough of the beans to cook a bowl of chili, if not the whole pot.

But I didn't post that blog entry. The one with the beans. The one with the revelation.

Because I'm a coward.

Well, that's not the only reason. Thursday and Friday of last week were quite hectic for me because I was headed out of South Georgia. I conducted a long interview with a cool couple who moved from the Virgin Islands to the deep country to be maybe the smartest, hippest farmers I've ever met, and then I had to hurriedly write the story based on the interview before I left town. I had to pack and charge my batteries.  I had to get my head and face shaved so I didn't look like Animal from the Muppets.

You see, my brother, Dylan, got married in Walhalla, South Carolina, Saturday. That's about a 4-and-a-half hour trip from my hometown of Irwinville. My sister and I were leaving Friday afternoon, and that trip compressed my time so much that if it was coal it'd be a diamond by now.

Thursday, although my worry and contemplation had culminated in a decision to make a revelation in my blog, I had other concerns, too. I wanted to make a better version of a song I made for Dylan and his new wife, Amber, when their son, my nephew, Samuel passed away last year. The song, "Sammy," is written in honor of that little angel of a kid, but the song itself was originally composed with a threadbare chord progression with very little music because in an eerily similar circumstance, I didn't have the time to make a complete song because my sister and I were rushing to get to South Carolina for the funeral.

So, I made some improvements to the song Thursday and Friday. But even then, I didn't share the song with my brother or sister-in-law. Weird. "Sister-in-law."  I've never said that before. I've never had a sister-in-law. That's kinda cool.

I don't know why I didn't share the song. Maybe it's because I think the threadbare version was better, more raw and less polluted. Maybe it's because I worried that I would stir up sad emotions during a joyous occasion.

Maybe I'm just a coward.

And likewise, I didn't share the blog entry I wrote, the one with the revelations. I finished it, somehow, in the midst of all I had to do over those two days, and I think if I had maybe an hour or two more, I might have worked up the courage to post it.

But I didn't, and it weighed on me all weekend.

The thought that kept coming back to me is what someone wrote to me recently. It was one of the people who gave me money to buy a newer car (which I still haven't done, though I have started looking). When he sent me a check, he left a note that said, "Keep 'em honest."

And I can be a coward all I want when it comes to asking girls out or driving long distances or being too afraid to open my door because there are wasps flying around it. I can be a coward when it only affects me, but by accepting those checks, by accepting your praise and encouragement, I have created an obligation to those of you who want me to be an upstanding truth teller.

I can't be a coward for you.

So I decided that when I came home, I would post some version of that blog entry. I decided I would make my revelation.

But being the only redneck in South Carolina without a cell phone, I went almost 3 days without Facebook access, and I didn't know Judge Melanie Cross ruled on the gag order Friday after I left town. So when I got back to Irwinville, I was instantly distracted trying to sort out what the new gag order meant. For the record, I think it's a definite improvement, but you can read more about that in this week's Ocilla Star.

Of course, I was exhausted after a long trip, so I crashed into bed early, but then I woke up early on Monday, too. I locked myself into overdrive mode. Even though Monday is my busiest day as the writer for The Ocilla Star, as it's not uncommon for me to work 20 or more hours on a Monday, I was determined that I was going to stay undistracted and get my work done as quickly as possible so I could get some of my other work done at home later.

But circumstances are just witchy sometimes.

Because today, the friendly, talkative internet guy was installing new wires and equipment, which was distracting. And just when I thought I had finished my writing, the chief showed up with two weeks of police reports. The power went out twice in Ocilla because a big tree limb fell on a power line. That set me back, and it got even worse because after the power outage, my computer started taking nearly 2 minutes to save, and when your work on news pages autosaves every 5 minutes, that means you can work only about 60 percent of the time.

That's how I normally work, about 60 percent of the time, but since I was in a rush my nerves were fraying, especially when a certain thought entered my mind.

Nearly two weeks ago, when the judge held a hearing on the gag order in Tara's case, Payne Lindsey interviewed me for the Up and Vanished podcast. In that podcast, I spoke some about the revelations I was scared to make. I wasn't sure exactly what I said to Payne, but I knew it was something he might put in an episode, and the new episode was due to premiere that night, Monday night.

I didn't want to scoop myself.

But circumstances ground on through the night and I finished with my Ocilla Star work about halfway through the latest episode of Up and Vanished. I was relieved because my name was not mentioned, and there weren't even any unidentified voices in the background that were actually me, as has happened once or twice before. But then, Payne introduced me, and I cringed.

I cringe a little every time I come on Up and Vanished because I talk so fast and sound like I've got my nose stuck in a door I slammed shut to keep from getting stung by wasps, but this time was special because, as I've noted, I was really scared about making these revelations. There are a variety of reasons why.

First, I'm scared of cops, in general. Some of them I consider to be friends, even good friends, but when push comes to shove, I wouldn't either push or shove them because I don't want to go to jail. I also don't want to cross cops because I don't want to come home to find a planted bail of marijuana on my front porch. Maybe that's why I keep so much garbage there.

But aside from my probably irrational fear of law enforcement officers, I have a certain responsibility to my community, and this revelation could be bad for my community. A Chamber of Commerce expert that recently spoke to the local Chamber told a story about how she convinced her local reporters to keep a story quiet for some time, at least months, because it was better for the community.

But was it, really? Surely it was to her because she got what she wanted, which was more than 2,000 new jobs for her town. But if I lived in her town, which I don't, but if I did, I would have a hard time trusting the local press if I knew this story.

How can we, as reporters, decide which truths are worth hiding? I don't think that ethically we can, not if something is important. We can ignore a comment a county commissioner makes about his pastor at a meeting because it's not important to the public at large, but if that same commissioner said he illegally gave the pastor county money to build a home for orphaned children, I think we have a responsibility to tell it, even if it was for a good cause.

If the press is important at all, then it is important that the press be trusted, and I think both are important. Look at our country right now and how trust in the press is eroded, and it's scary, frankly. Look at the confusion and anger and fear in our world right now, and a lot of it started with dishonest journalism.

We have to be honest, and like my benefactor told me, we've got to "keep 'em honest."

When I talked to Payne that night after the gag order hearing, I told him about when I first started working for The Ocilla Star and how I encountered some push-back from local leaders. There was an attitude in Ocilla of trying to keep everything positive, and I wasn't entirely afraid to stand up and point out when something was wrong. That seemed to be a bit unusual for this small town, and some folks didn't like it. They still don't.

But to me, pretending that everything is positive is like someone who is dying of cancer but they won't get treated because they won't even admit anything is wrong. A person who won't fix his ills will die from them, and a community, especially a small town, is much the same way. If we don't fix our problems, they will continue to ail us.

That is the most important and necessary job of a journalist, pointing out what needs to be fixed, and this revelation may point out something that needs to be fixed.

So when I listened to the podcast tonight, and I heard myself make the revelation, I instantly felt relieved. All the anxiety and worry poured from me. I even felt proud.

And I thought, I wish I was as brave as that guy on Up and Vanished.

Me.

Just to be clear, the revelation I've been talking about is the fact that I believe very strongly that law enforcement received and followed up on a tip about Ryan Duke and Tara Grinstead in 2005, only weeks after she went missing.

I won't reveal everything I've heard about that tip, but I have heard the meat of the story from at least two people whose stories mesh perfectly with each other and whose honesty and integrity I do not doubt. I believe what I say about this tip to the very edge of certainty.

My sources do not want to go on the record, at least not yet, and I certainly don't blame them. I wish I could tell you everything I know, but I can't without compromising the identities of those who wish to remain anonymous.

Here is what I wrote last week but was afraid to post.

Remaining questions

Believe it or not, as I write this, it has been exactly one month since the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced the arrest of Ryan Duke in the Tara Grinstead murder case.

Of course, February is a short month, but we've learned a lot in this short month, though we still have plenty of questions.

This will be a summary of what I know, what I believe I know, and what the rumors seem to suggest. I will, as best as I can, try to provide the source for what I say, but sometimes I can't because I'm keeping dozens of secrets right now about a variety of things. Some people are bound by the gag order, some think they might be bound by the gag order, and some worry about the danger their secrets might place them in. Some just don't want folks to know they're talking to the press.

With all that in mind, don't easily dismiss something I say with confidence. I might know more than I'm saying.

Let's start with the beginning, which is frankly the period of time about which I have the most remaining questions.

On October 22, 2005, Tara Grinstead helped girls prepare for the Georgia Sweet Potato pageant at her home and later attended the pageant in Fizgerald. Later she attended a barbecue at the home of former Irwin County school superintendent Dr. Troy Davis in Ocilla. At about 11:15 p.m., she left a barbecue and was never seen publicly again.

We don't know if Tara drove directly home after the barbecue, but she indicated to Davis that she planned to go home, change into her pajamas, and watch a tape of the pageant. This mentioned pageant tape has long been a source of interest for me because I've always heard no tape was ever found.

A friend of Tara's told me that it is possible that Tara meant she was going to watch another pageant tape, such as tapes of the past pageants she competed in herself. This sounds plausible, as Tara might have had her nostalgic feelings of past glory stirred by seeing other girls compete that night.

If the GBI's allegations against Ryan Duke are factual, then we know Tara somehow made it the few blocks from Davis' home to her own Ocilla home. We know this is part of the GBI's story because all of the crimes Ryan Duke is alleged to have committed are alleged to have taken place in Tara's home some time on October 23, 2005. Those alleged crimes were burglary, aggravated assault, murder, and concealing the death of another.

When I first met Payne Lindsey, host of the Up and Vanished podcast, he told me that Tara's phone received the first phone call she did not answer some time early on October 23, which was a Sunday. Payne told me the time of the call, and I can't swear to it, but I believe it was 12:20 a.m. It was some time between midnight and 1 a.m. I believe this information was told to him by Dr. Maurice Godwin.

The point of giving this specific time is that, if true, it may indicate a time when Tara could not answer her phone.

As to what actually happened at Tara's tiny home on Sunday, October 23, 2005, we know very little, and it's amazing how little rumor is circulating about what may have happened there, at least from what I hear. No one seems to know what happened in that house, and few even seem to have a good guess.

I have heard one rumor about that night that had a somewhat believable motive, but I've also heard three different versions of that story now, and the motive isn't the same, depending on the source. It also involves a third culprit, and no third arrest appears to be coming. I was surprised when I visited a friend at the Irwin County Detention Center recently and learned that a version of this rumor had even reached behind bars.

But I don't believe that rumor. I have no proof of this, and it's really just a guess, but I doubt a third culprit was involved at all.

The vaguely illustrated charges against Ryan Duke do little to enlighten us about what happened at Tara's house. This may jibe with what I continue to hear about Ryan Duke's discussions with the GBI. I've heard that he has talked to the GBI, and I've heard repeatedly that he confessed. However, I've also heard he's told the GBI little about what happened, even if he did confess.

That could all be rumor, of course, but if no one who was inside the house is talking to the GBI, then it might explain why the charges listed in the warrants against Ryan Duke were so vague.

What the arrest warrants allege is that Ryan Duke broke-in to Tara's house to commit aggravated assault and murder, that he assaulted her with his hands, that he caused her to die while committing a felony, and that he concealed her death.

A lot of people in the community are wondering about the level of participation of Bo Dukes in these allegations. The GBI arrested Bo Dukes in relation to concealing Tara's death and burning her body in Ben Hill County, the neighborring county to Ocilla's Irwin.

All of the charges against Bo Dukes stem from his alleged activities in Ben Hill County. He has not, to public knowledge, been charged with any crimes in Irwin County, and Ryan Duke was not charged with any crimes in Ben Hill County, to public knowledge. This leaves an incomplete picture unless we believe someone did a macabre exchange at the county line.

Most people, me included, think Bo Dukes has cooperated with the GBI in some fashion and that he probably has a plea deal arranged, at least in principle. Heck, I've heard Bo Dukes may have talked with the GBI for months before the recent arrests.

On, March 3, 2017, the day Bo Dukes was arrested and released just a few hours later on a $15,000 bond, the District Attorney for Irwin County, Paul Bowden, arrived at the Ben Hill County Law Enforcement Complex, where Dukes was being processed. Bowden has no authority in Ben Hill County, so his presence was interesting to say the least. Surely it wasn't coincidence.

It's made me wonder if Bowden was there to in some way certify a deal with Bo Dukes, but that's just my speculation.

Since I'm speculating, I'm going to guess that the motive for whatever happened to Tara wasn't theft since her tiny house might be the least likely target for that sort of crime in that neighborhood, and it wasn't anything as twisted as someone who wanted to kill for the thrill of killing, like a serial murderer. I think the motive had to have something to do with the fact Tara was a beautiful, popular young woman: Either someone was attracted to her or was angry or jealous about one of her romantic relationships.

I've heard Ryan Duke and Bo Dukes were roommates when Tara went missing. I've heard this so much I believe it's true, but I've confusingly heard they lived in Valdosta, Tifton and Fitzgerald.

I've heard that Bo has said that Ryan showed up in the middle of the night on October 23, 2005, and said he needed help with something.

The GBI's tale alleges that Tara's body was destroyed between October 23 and October 28, 2005 at a pecan orchard called Fitzgerald Farms, north of the town of Fitzgerald. So far, to public knowledge, only Bo Dukes has been charged in relation to the allegations regarding the pecan orchard.

I believe Tara's remains were found.

We probably would know that already, but the gag order is probably preventing it. The GBI announced the search at the orchard on February 28, and by March 3, the search was apparently over. This highly suggests they found what they were searching for.

I've heard that Bo Dukes had trouble pointing out the exact location of the burn site. And every rumor I've heard since the day of the announcement of Ryan Duke's arrest has said the body was burned. I even heard that before the arrest announcement.

I have no idea if Tara's pocketbook and keys, or any jewelry she may have been wearing, were found.

So how did this crime stay a secret for more than 11 years?

It didn't.

I've been told it was like an urban legend to young people of a certain age group, although they were only kids when Tara went missing. Somehow people throughout the community seemed to be accusing Ryan Duke and Bo Dukes even in the hours before Ryan Duke's arrest was announced. And I think some people had heard the rumor but dismissed it because they thought it had been investigated and found false.

I believe that in 2005, a tipster overheard some talk at a party that alarmed him. I believe that between 2 and 6 weeks after Tara went missing, local law enforcement officers were told about this tipster's allegations. I believe this led to a search at a pecan orchard north of Ocilla known as Fitzgerald Farms.

In 2005.

Nothing was found. I was told the tipster couldn't find the burn pile or found the wrong burn pile. Remember, I heard Bo Dukes also had trouble locating the burn pile. It's a big orchard. I've heard 100 to 150 acres.

I don't know how far the investigation went, such as whether Ryan Duke was interviewed. Right now, we can look back with our perfect vision and say, "That should have been investigated more heavily," and we'd be right. But this was 2005, and that was a strange time for Ben Hill-Irwin community, especially for law enforcement.

Usually, the most damning trouble an officer has to deal with in Irwin County is a deer vs. car wreck, because there are a lot of them. Suddenly, the officers in Irwin and Ocilla were getting flooded with tips and leads. "Check yonder near that old silo!" "I heard there was a moonshiner's shanty house back in them woods!" "I saw somebody acting funny at the swamp!"

This is how I think the media coverage in Tara's case might have actually hurt, because law enforcement was following so many tips, they might not have been able to tell the bad from the good. And, if you think about it, "I was drinking at a party and heard somebody bragging about killing Tara Grinstead" doesn't really sound like a good tip.

And I think, to a large degree, the local law enforcement served as an unintentional filter for the GBI, because I believe GBI Special Agent In Charge JT Ricketson was being honest when he said Ryan Duke was "never on our radar." Even if it wasn't true, I think he believed it was true. I doubt the tip was ever handed up to the GBI because there didn't seem to be anything to it.

In probably 2008, I called in a tip about someone who thought the people who killed Tara were out to get him. I talked to local deputies and they checked it out, determined there was nothing to it, and that was it. My tip involved someone who was later investigated by the GBI, but I was never even called by the GBI about it, so I doubt that tip was passed up either.

Maybe it didn't need to be passed up, as I don't think my tip had anything to do with Tara's disappearance. But with this other tipster, the one who talked about Ryan Duke, I think the filter may have filtered out the wrong thing.

In early 2006, I believe, some sort of tip led to a massive search of the Queensland area, which is very near the pecan orchard. This was a time when the tips had slowed down and a search was worth a news story on its own. It makes you wonder if this was someone else coming forward with a similar tip, but this time it was someone anonymous who could not point out the specific location in person.

I'm just about done, but I will say that according to the guys I talked to in jail, Ryan Duke is being kept mostly isolated from the other inmates. Apparently he has gotten a haircut, and a shave, too, I think.

I want to address some of you conspiracy theorists out there. Let go. I know some of you have believed for years that this person or that person was guilty of something in Tara's case, but to continue to hold onto these diabolical fantasies about people who should be cleared at this point is maddeningly arrogant and truly thoughtless.

I'm not sure I believe the GBI's story yet, because we really haven't heard it in full, but around Ocilla, where people have lived and breathed this case for more than a decade, no one believes any of the usual suspects associated with Tara were involved in any way. I haven't heard the first rumor locally that involved anyone whose name was known outside Ocilla before February 23.

And I hear a lot of rumors, as you've read.

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Gagged and Blindfolded

Gagged and Blindfolded

  11:54 PM    Unknown

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Photo: The Irwin County Courthouse is shown on the afternoon of March 16, 2017.

 Gagged and Blindfolded

After two weeks of near non-stop updates and information in the Tara Grinstead case, some of y'all probably noticed that the last week or so has been much calmer.

A lot of that is due to the gag order that stopped law enforcement officers, defense attorneys, court personnel, members of the victim's families or members of the defendant's families, or even potential witnesses from making extrajudicial statements. No one is talking, so there's not a lot to write about.

The most interesting moment I had was on Monday night, technically Tuesday morning. I had just finished writing all my stories and putting them in the newspaper when… Wait, that's not entirely true.

While I wrote all my stories, I actually forgot to put one in the newspaper. I forgot about Ocilla Community Day, which is a special clean-up day for the city, which will be held from 8 a.m. to noon Saturday, March 25 in the Harvey's parking lot. Since I forgot to put my story in the paper, I said I'd mention it in my blog. So if you're from the Ocilla area and want to help beautify the city, show up! If you're someone from out of the Ocilla area who is just fascinated by the Tara Grinstead case, March 25 would be a good time to come skulk about the streets of Ocilla in snoopy fashion, just make sure to pick up some trash while you're here.

So anyway, Tuesday morning at about 3 a.m. I loaded into my old Nissan, after checking the back-seat for any potential evil-doers. I'm extra cautious after my experience with the ax a few weeks ago.

With the back filled with nothing but Dr. Pepper boxes and empty Burger King cups, I started to drive home. To get home, I travel down an alleyway behind the newspaper office. Part of the alley goes through a bank parking lot.

So, as I drove down this alley at 3 a.m. a vehicle pulled out of the… wait a second.

I should backtrack and tell you that I listened to the latest episode of the Up and Vanished podcast that same night. In it, a guy talks about seeing Ryan Duke, who was charged with Tara's murder, in a black truck.

The reason a black truck could be important is that multiple witnesses reported seeing a black truck near Tara's house on the weekend she disappeared back in 2005.

So, as I drove down this alley at 3 a.m. a black truck pulled out of the bank parking lot and seemed to be blocking the alley, at least momentarily, and in that moment, a scene from an action movie came to life in my poor tormented mind.

I envisioned someone emerging from the cab of the pickup with a shotgun aimed at me as I did a Kurt Russell turn around to look out my back glass like Bruce Willis as I accelerated in reverse and whipped the car around like Sylvester Stallone. Dodging bullets like Jet Li, I would have zig-zagged my way through the alley like a fastly furious Vin Diesel.

Then I would have raced to the sheriff's office and beat on the door like a very scared Dusty Vassey.

But none of that happened. The black truck just eased on past. Probably someone went for a late-night ATM visit, although I don't think I'd want any of whatever he was buying at 3 a.m.

Maybe if the gag order gets lifted, my life will be filled with more mundane excitements, but unfortunately, today, March 16, 2017, it wasn't lifted.

I showed up today at the Irwin County Courthouse with my camera in hand and anxious to see open government in action. I left disappointed and empty-handed, sometime later.

You see, as I approached the courtroom, a bailiff told me they were checking to see if I could have a camera inside. And unfortunately, I could not take my camera inside.

I had forgotten you have to request the use of a camera at superior court events. Only two or three news agencies requested to use a camera, and I wasn't one of them, so I went camera-less, even though I was the only reporter in the room that pays taxes for that room.

I felt gagged and blindfolded.

But it was my own fault, just like the last time I wound up like that.

Kidding.

I won't go into the minutiae of the court proceeding. The gist is this: Judge Melanie Cross will take some time to consider the arguments made, and she plans to have a decision within the week about whether to nullify her own gag order.

This is a bit like having a cook review her own restaurant. Or a reporter write his own review for his own book. Not that I'm impugning the integrity and honesty of judges. Or cooks or reporters for that matter. We're all predominantly honest and integral.

Judge Cross certainly seemed to take the varying arguments into consideration. But she was in a tough situation. It's difficult to imagine having to correct your own judicial decision. And if you do, it's bad enough having to admit you're wrong under any circumstances, but having to do in front of a room full of people and in front of thousands on camera?

Not that I'm saying Judge Cross was wrong.

OK, maybe I am sort of, but only because I disagree with her decision, and what do I know? Next to nothing, that's what.

I'll get into some of the attorney's reasoning in a moment, but my reasoning is a bit more simple. Right now, we don't know if there will even be a trial in which Duke's rights to a fair trial will be needed. But because Duke's rights may be jeopardized possibly somewhere down the road, dozens, maybe even hundreds of people have their first amendment rights taken away from them right now. Among those who have their rights denied to them are the family members of Duke's alleged victim.

That's just simply not right.

Anita Gattis, Tara Grinstead's sister, was one of those who motioned to oppose the gag order.

The attorneys for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other news agencies argued against the gag order on somewhat complex legal grounds. Most of their arguments could be boiled down to these points: 1. A gag order requires evidence of creating prejudice against a client. 2. A high volume of media coverage is not necessarily prejudicial. 3. No evidence was produced to show the media was creating prejudice against Duke before the gag order was put in place, so the gag order should not stand.

Prejudice against Duke seemed to be a cornerstone of the arguments for and against the gag order. Defense attorney John Mobley presented a stack of about 79 different media reports to show the danger of prejudice being created by the media. Well, I can't speak for all of those reports, but if any were my reports about Ryan Duke, they included people saying several nice things about him. Could my report be prejudicing people in Duke's favor?

I wasn't writing to make him sound like a great guy, but people had mostly nice things to say about him. That's the weird thing about the truth. Sometimes it doesn't paint the picture we're expecting. But is it harmful to the defense?

Maybe some of the nice things reported about Duke are why District Attorney Paul Bowden sat at Mobley's table and also expressed support for the gag order. Which he did. Well, what Bowden said was that his office did not oppose the gag order and that he also had an interest in protecting Duke's rights. OK, but…

Seeing a prosecutor and a defense attorney sitting at the same table was strange. It was like watching a cat and mouse happily prepare a cheese-covered chocolate pie in a cake pan. It just looked weird.

But some people I talked to thought it looked worse than weird. They thought it looked suspicious.

You see, last week The Herald-Leader newspaper reported that the district attorneys in Ben Hill and Irwin counties, which includes Bowden, asked for the gag order to control the case information so that jury pools would not be tainted. I was told by multiple people that the defense attorney asked for the gag order, and I even saw copies of a letter or fax to Ocilla Police Chief Billy Hancock from Bowden saying that the defense attorney asked for the gag order.

Which is it?

I spent much of the afternoon talking about the gag order hearing. While a friend tried to say that it is suspicious that the District Attorney would want the information in this case hushed, I lawyered as another type of DA: Devil's Advocate.

I've covered enough trials in Bowden's judicial circuit to know the man is no fan of the press. Once I was told he accused me of "having the streak of the liberal" when I covered one of his cases. One of his assistants is an old friend of mine, and she now treats me as if I have the plague, I suspect because I am considered the enemy in her office.

I argued that it could be that the DA just wants a fair game board when a trial comes, with neither side having an advantage. I argued that he does not want the press affecting the jury in any way. I argued, but I don't think I did any convincing.

Because this afternoon, my other friend was convinced someone was trying to hide something, that it wasn't just about protecting someone's rights to a fair trial. I really don't know. I hope not, obviously.

I don't personally believe the DA is hiding anything. I really don't. But that's what happens when you ere on the side of secrecy.

Suspicion rushes in to fill the vacuum left by secrecy.

Right now we cannot know if anything is being hidden by anyone or not because of this gag order. Anyone who could answer questions cannot answer them so the rumors will mount and continue. In the absence of knowledge, people speculate and gossip.

If there are any things people want to keep from the light of day, my advice to them is to pull back the curtains. The truth is going to come out, and you want to be in control of the story when it does.

I'll give an example. Years ago, I was part of a team covering a story about a local government scandal. The government would never admit what that scandal was, so the story continued for years and resulted in dozens of embarrassing articles. If the government had admitted from the very start what had happened, it would have been at most a story or two. Instead, secrecy led to years of protracted battles and people having their names trampled over and over in the realm of public opinion.

Right now, if there are any secrets in this case, they likely cannot be told, but if there are secrets, get over the hopeless idea that the truth will never be known. Rip off the Band-aid and come forward with the truth at the first possible moment. Hell, ask Judge Cross for special permission to issue a press release.

Because if it's not me, then someone a lot like me is going to find the secret one day. Right now, whenever the story comes to light you have the gag order as a defense. "We wanted to tell you last month, but we couldn't say anything because of the gag order."

But if the gag order expires or is over-turned, and you sit on your secret for weeks or months, people will be far more outraged when they watch it on television, read it in their newspaper or hear it on a podcast.

I'm saying this as friendly advice to any of you with secrets about Tara's case out there. I mean, if there are any secrets at all.

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Ghost Hunt

Ghost Hunt

  12:52 AM    Unknown

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Photo: Pictured is a page from The Ocilla Star from 2001 that announces the Miss Tifton pageant and shows Tara Grinstead, who was Miss Tifton in 1999.

Ghost Hunt

Tara Grinstead was last seen on the night of October 22, 2005.

But for me, the story actually began in the 1800s.

You see, I spent the evening of October 22 in a facsimile of a 19th century village.

The Georgia Agrirama was established in 1976 in Tifton, Georgia as a living history museum to rural, agricultural life in the late 1800s. During the day, tourists and grade schoolers visited the place, now wordily renamed the Georgia Museum of Agriculture & Historic Village, to get a glimpse of South Georgia's past.

As to why I spent an October night in 2005 there, I will have to take you back a year earlier, to October 2004. That is when the paranormal "reality" television show Ghost Hunters premiered. The show featured a pair of plumbers who decided to battle ghosts. It was like some weird amalgamation of Pac-Man and Super Mario Brothers.

Anyway, this show started a minor ghost hunting craze throughout America, and although I had only seen the show as I flipped through the channels looking for Chappelle Show reruns, I somehow got swept up in the ghost hunting hysteria.

I shouldn't make it sound so mysterious. I know exactly how it happened. I worked with a lady named Holly Catanzarita, who was, and I think even she would admit this, a bit weird. I say this as someone who is also weird. Weird people are good people.

Holly wore many hats, and some of them were spooky. Although she worked in the circulation department of the daily newspaper in Tifton, The Tifton Gazette, she also published her own horror magazine, and I contributed some illustrations to it. She was also the author of a horror novel, "Dreamkeeper," and has since published another, "Deep Freeze." At night, leading up to Halloween in 2005, she gave guided ghost tours of the Agrirama.

On Friday, October 21, I attended one of the ghost tours to write a story about them and her team of paranormal investigators for The Gazette. On Saturday, October 22, I agreed to join Holly and her team on a ghost hunt.

Now, you may be thinking, how can you remember what you were doing on a specific night over a decade ago. I can remember, because the next week when Tara went missing, I mused that if anyone ever accused me of having something to do with it, I would have the world's weirdest alibi. Of course, I never thought anyone would actually consider me a suspect.

Unfortunately, I was wrong about that.

So, was the Agrirama haunted? If it was, it means that ghosts are tied to buildings and not locations, because all of the buildings at the Agrirama were moved there from other locales. I'm a skeptic, so I'm gonna say "No."

But I went into the ghost hunt at least a little open-minded. What happened on the hunt managed to close it shut.

I joined the extremely specifically named Southern Ghost Hunters Paranormal Investigations on their after-hours ghost hunt. I don't know what you would expect a group like that to look like, but I was a bit surprised. This wasn't a bunch of Dungeons & Dragons playing, four-eyed, mouth-breathing geeks, I mean, other than me.

Although none of these ghost hunters probably won homecoming king or queen, they were a diverse group of people of varying ages and expertise.

There was Holly, and her son, a likable guy who worked as a prison guard, and even a pair of police detectives from a nearby town. One member of the group was even an attractive lady college professor, but she might've been the daffiest of them all.

Don't get me wrong, most of the people out there were serious, intelligent folks. People of all faiths, backgrounds and degrees believe in ghosts, but some of the things some of the people took to be evidence left me dazzled.

The professor, who reminded me of a long-haired version of Scooby Doo's Velma in everything except deductive ability, told me how, on the last ghost hunt, they got some really compelling evidence using long exposure photography.

Jinkies!

The thing is, long exposure photography makes things look ghostly, and that's normal, not paranormal. When you take a long exposure photograph, the shutter stays open longer, allowing light to be recorded on the image for longer. Instead of taking a picture of an instant, you might take a photo of several seconds. The result is a smeared looking image in which any movement makes people appear as translucent phantoms.

I used that exact technique the night before to make a ghostly photograph to go along with my article about the ghost tours.

We stalked around the rickety old buildings in the Agrirama with sound amplifying devices that would have looked hi-tech if I didn't know they were kid's toys. They looked like a toy gun with a radar dish for a barrel and a pair of head phones connected to it. My parents bought me one when I was 12 to play spy.

We listened for fluctuations in the white noise, which otherwise might sound like static crackling. We used mini-cassette recorders to capture every sound, and then ignore all the sounds that happened when we rewound the tape to listen to them over again. And we waved our hands around to check for cold spots, and that was when I realized ghosts probably don't exist.

Now, I don't know why ghosts are supposed to be cold, as I would think that they would at least be room temperature, but we looked for cold spots. And I found one, and I announced it to everyone, and I was excited.

This was late in the night, and as perverse as it was, we were ghost hunting in what was once a slave house. But as everyone oohed and ahhed over the cold spot I found, the gray cells in my brain started to warm up.

This was a spot just a few inches from the floor. And it was late October and growing chilly deep into the night. And that building was about 150 years old, so I reached down and checked.

Yes. There was a hole in the floor and the cold air from outside was wafting in.

I informed the others that what we were feeling was just natural phenomena, but some still thought it was "evidence." I decided then and there that people would believe whatever they wanted, and that ghosts probably didn't exist.

But ghosts do exist, the kind that haunt people for years with unsettling thoughts, unanswered questions and ever-present heartache. These types of ghosts are not phantoms or poltergeists, but the memories of loved ones parted, and the terrors they cause leave one far colder than any spirit.

I learned about those types of ghosts in the years that came after that infamous Saturday night, because on Tuesday, October 25, 2005 someone called The Tifton Gazette to ask us to announce that a school teacher named Tara Grinstead was missing from the neighboring town of Ocilla.

And for more than 11 years after, law enforcement officers, friends and family, neighbors and co-workers, and even I did what I was doing the night Tara went missing.

We hunted a ghost.

Note: The link to The Tifton Gazette article about the private investigators gives a date of December 7 2005, but many Gazette articles give that specific date erroneously, so it must be a system glitch.

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The History of My Hunks of Junk

The History of My Hunks of Junk

  4:19 AM    Unknown

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Photo: Pictured are my two most recent hunks of junk, a 2000 Nissan Maxima on the left and an enormous metallic boat of a car called a Mercury Grand Marquis on the right.

I've never owned a new vehicle. I've never even owned a nice vehicle. Heck, I've never owned a vehicle with a working CD player.

So, this is the history of the pieces of junk I have driven for all these years.

I learned how to drive on my mom's Ford Aerostar van, which had the peculiar shape of a greyhound's head as it tries to scoot under a fence. I didn't even get my driver's license until I was almost 17 because I couldn't drive, and when I finally did learn, I wasn't exactly a heartthrob with the ladies driving around a vehicle fit for a soccer mom, as if my mom's son had played soccer.

I moved on to driving my dad's Chevy Silverado pick-up for most of my time in high school. It wasn't so bad, really, except that my dad insisted I keep the camper shell on the back of it. When he used it, he kept tools and what-not in it for his job repairing boilers at sawmills. But to a high school student trying desperately to look cool, the camper shell guaranteed I failed at every attempt.

One incident I remember with this particular vehicle was when we took photos for senior superlatives. Each year, at Irwin County High School, the senior class votes for the best male and female in certain categories: Best Smile, Best Sense of Humor, Most Likely to Succeed, that sort of thing. I was voted Most Creative or something, although I wasn't at all shocked I didn't win Most Athletic considering all the sports I didn't letter in.

We went to a nice house and dressed in fancy clothes for our senior superlative photos for the yearbook, but as I went to leave, I accidentally backed into the pick-up truck of a classmate I will call Arnie. This left a huge dent in Arnie's truck.

Now, I don't know what senior superlative Arnie was, but if I had to guess, he was voted either Most Violent or Most Likely to Assassinate Someone with a High-Powered Rifle. He was the kind of guy who was always trying to toughen me up by doing fun things to me like stabbing me in the wrist with a pencil. You can still see the mark. He was one of my best friends.

He wasn't exactly mad about me wrecking his vehicle. Instead, he was opportunistic. He said that he would not make me pay for the repairs if I would fight him. And I got to choose the weapons. Imagine me fighting someone with nunchucks, because that's what I imagined.

Anyway, I paid for the damn repairs. My classmates also didn't vote me Most Courageous.

As a graduation present, my parents bought me a gray 1985 Chevrolet Blazer. I loved this vehicle, even though it was 9 years old when I graduated in 1994. It had a good tape deck, and I put in a nice speaker box with 10-inch woofers that sounded great even without an amplifier. Heck, I even had a CD Walkman that I could plug in to the tape deck, even though any bump in the road caused it to skip. It was almost like having a CD player.

I totaled it three days after I graduated.

Me and three friends were driving around, drinking, but I wasn't drunk after only three drinks. Like most 18 year old boys in the South, I was essentially a functional alcoholic at that point, so I could hold my liquor, or in this case, I could hold the flavored alcoholic malt beverage Zima, pretty well.

Kids, drinking and driving is bad! Don't do it! Especially, if you're drinking Zimas.

Anyway, rain was drizzling down, but only barely, which cops say is the worst because it is just enough wetness on the road to slicken the oil from tires, but not enough to wash it away. So when I dropped either a cassette tape or a pack of cigarettes in the passenger-side floorboard (the stories varied on whether I was telling my parents or my friends), and I reached for that fallen item, whatever it was, and I rose back up and saw I was about to hit a mailbox, I jerked the steering wheel and hydroplaned.

The Blazer twisted around completely as it slid across the slippery road, and it's true that life slows down in these deadly moments, even if they only seem deadly. I remember feeling like I was on one of those spinning teacup rides at an amusement park, only in slow motion. My life was in peril, but I remember enjoying it.

Yet still I'm a coward.

The Blazer skidded all the way to the edge of the ditch and then began to roll over, and I don't know if it was due to the compressed sense of time, but the SUV seemed to teeter in almost a perfect balance for a moment before falling over gently and landing on its roof in the ditch with a crunch of glass and wheezing metal.

Yes, kids, vehicles were often made of metal back in those days.

I was the only one wearing a seat belt, so I was left suspended in the air. Everyone else was left groaning and cussing on the ceiling. No one was hurt, aside from one scratch, I think. In that odd moment, I reflected on the oddity of how perspective relates to language as we climbed out of my rolled up window.

Then, we started throwing Zima bottles into a nearby cornfield. We told ourselves that the reason we hid them was that we didn't want our parents or the cops to know we were drinking. The real reason was probably that we didn't want our friends to know we were drinking Zima.

And yes, I know I probably should have been charged with a DUI, but if it matters, I probably drank and drove far less than most of the folks my age in the 22 years since, if only because no one wantsed to hang out with me at bars, and I never drink and drive today.

So, the summer after graduating from high school, that wistful time written about longingly in songs by the likes of John Cougar Mellencamp, I was left without a vehicle, and my parents, to whom I admitted that I was drinking that night, would not let me borrow theirs. In fact, I spent most of the summer hitching rides with a girl I was dating, not knowing that she was also dating the guy I almost fought with nunchucks, too.

I worked through the summer and saved money, and I used it to buy an almost exactly identical gray Chevy Blazer to replace the one I wrecked. The only difference was the new one was slightly newer, a 1986 model, although it was still 1994. My radio system wasn't quite as good, and I still didn't have a CD player, but we did salvage the speaker box from the other Blazer, so it sounded OK, even though there was an occasional short somewhere.

And frankly, the Blazer was a well loved vehicle, even though it got terrible gas mileage and the air conditioning was so shoddy that it started a long tradition of me rolling the window down. I drove that second Blazer until about 2000, and though it was mostly dependable, it did break down at some odd times.

When you're driving around, you don't realize how far 10 miles is. I was living in Tifton and having trouble with a girlfriend so I decided to go driving at 2 a.m. listening to Pearljam, which at the time was one of my favorite things to do when I was feeling upset. Between my hometown of Irwinville and Tifton is an infamous amateur Grand Prix event called descriptively the S curve, since it is a curve shaped like that particular letter. Taking the curve, I heard something softly explode in the Blazer's engine area, which I later learned was my water pump busting.

The vehicle lurched to a stop dead on the side of the road right in the middle of the S. Since the curve is roughly exactly in the middle of my parent's house in Irwinville and the house I rented with friends in Tifton, I could have gone either way. I chose Tifton because I didn't want to face my dad with more car troubles when I was already having girl troubles. I don't like troubles.

So I walked to Tifton, which was about 10 miles away, in the pitch dark. I passed by a yard full of dogs and they snapped and snarled at me. I prepared to defend myself with the Blazer's key poking between my middle fingers as some improvised stabbing utensil. Those dogs howled at me for about an hour of my trip until I guess they couldn't smell me anymore, and I'm man enough to admit that I was a scared little boy then, even if I was a 21-year-old man.

By the end of my three-hour journey, I was bone weary, hungry and achingly thirsty. No wonder someone invented cars.

I didn't even want to deal with my car at all, because I thought the engine had blown because I didn't change the oil. I thought it would be a problem too expensive for me to fix and I would be forever walking the rest of my life. As it turned out, my parents saw it on the side of the road, got it towed and fixed it for only a few hundred dollars, but I didn't know it at the time because my roommates and I did not have enough money for a phone.

(But somehow I did scrape up enough money at that time to rent a friend's car to drive my girlfriend to the airport to see her other boyfriend. Yes, you read that sentence right. I tell most of that story in the blues song "That Damned Ol' Plane." Consider it an intermission.)

Anyway, over the years the miles extracted their toll from my trusty ol' Blazer and its gauges stopped working. I had to guess how fast I was driving by the wind rushing in my open window. The worst was the lack of a working gas meter, as I've always been the kind of guy who puts $10 in his car no matter the price and never fills up. So it was always a risky guessing game I played and sometimes lost and had to do more walking.

One of those times I lost the bet was when I lived in Athens and I was driving a couple of friends home to South Georgia. The trip was already memorable because we passed a truck on the way down the interstate and saw a couple inside engaged in a sex act.

Kids, driving while engaged in a sex act is bad! Don't do it!

Anyway, shortly later, the Blazer shut off and I coasted to the side of the interstate. I was very nearly out of gas. You know when you make that gurgling sound with a straw at the end of a drink from a Styrofoam cup? Well, that's where I was at with the gas tank.

This created a conundrum. From experience I knew that I could still get another few miles out of the Blazer, but it would sputter and cut off, and when it ran completely out, we might be stuck in the middle of Interstate-75 with hundreds of two-ton 70-mile-an-hour bullets headed our way with no way to dodge them.

We looked to the north and looked to the south, and there were no exits nearby. None of us had even paid attention to where we were, so we might have been 10 or more miles from civilization. I wasn't going through that kind of walk again, especially not on a hot South Georgia afternoon.

So we cranked up and risked it. And the ol' Blazer did us proud. It cut off a few more times, but it kept starting back up, though there were some tense moments when we were halfway stuck in the road and the engine wouldn't quite catch. Soon we saw an exit in the distance and with only fumes remaining we somehow managed to reach the top of the exit hill. Just as we crested, the engine cut off for a final time.

To our right, at the bottom of the hill, was a service station, so we were able to cruise, gasless, down the slope to the pumps.

My dad bought my mom a brand new 2000 Nissan Maxima for Christmas one year, so I got her hand-me-down 1992 Mazda 626 in the deal. This meant better gas mileage, working gauges, and for a short while, a working air conditioner, but eventually that went out on me, as they always seem to. I am destined to sweat, despite my valiant attempts to avoid hard work at all costs.

Of course, it only had a tape deck.

There was something cool about my Blazer, but there was nothing cool about this all-white mouse of a car. I hit a deer with it once and the deer just rolled over a complete 360 degrees and kept running, which shows the kind of power the Mazda had. I wrote a rap that included a reference to it once. "I can't get chicks with my 626 with my no-name clothes and my off-brand kicks."

Once, someone rear-ended me, and the other driver was at fault. Since my dad still owned the Mazda, he billed the guy's insurance company but then didn't pay to fix my car, and I never saw a penny of that money. Later, at the same exact spot, someone else rear-ended me and I told the guy who hit me not to worry about it, just to save the poor guy some money and me some time.

I never told my dad.

In March 2005, almost exactly 12 years before the day I wrote this, my dad, Jim Vassey, died on the west coast of Mexico, where he was working at a furniture factory and living like a runaway cowboy. While he lived there, he once called me and said, "I want you to help me write a country song. It's called 'I'm dating a hooker, a stripper and a married man's wife.'" I don't know what kind of radio station would have played that song.

As you can see, my dad was a bit of a rogue. And he was serious about his misadventures, too. When he died, he was living with a gorgeous exotic dancer who was my age. For all we know, that may be what killed him.

My sister, Dena, and I flew out to San Diego to claim his body and retrieve his things, including his Chevy pick-up truck that would become my next vehicle. It was the most harrowing three days of my life, and worthy of its own story, so I won't go into great detail. Suffice to stay, a grieving pair of siblings should never have to drive a pick-up across the entire length of the country towing a gigantic trailer with dry-rotted tires and a motorcycle slowly slipping through the many straps haphazardly tied to it and threatening to fly off the trailer at any moment and become a deadly missile that will end in the nerve-wracked drivers incarceration for life.

Also, I freaked right the hell out when we tried to take a nap at a truck stop because every semi I heard pulling in was a serial killer bent on out destruction, at least in my paranoid, nerve-wracked mind. I watch too much true crime.

Somehow, we made it home alive without killing anyone, and the pick-up became mine. I really loved that truck in a lot of ways, especially since it was my dad's. It even had a CD player, but you couldn't really say it worked properly. It would randomly spit out CDs like a toddler forced to eat broccoli.

Of course, the truck was notorious because I literally used it as a rolling garbage dump. It typically had a bed full of garbage bags, and for a while, the Google street view of my house showed that white truck with a pile of trash filling the back. Now I typically use my front porch for the same purpose because I don't have a pick-up to even pretend that I'm eventually taking the trash to the dump.

The truck finally died, and I was out of work at the time, in 2009, so basically I just walked around Irwinville. Then my mom called me one day from Augusta and told me that a little old lady was selling her Mercury Grand Marquis for cheap. Sight-unseen, I told her to buy it because in my mind I was picturing a sort of sporty Pontiac Grand Prix. Instead, I got just what I was told: A grandma car.

This enormous, metallic, boxy monstrosity of a car became my ride for the first 4-plus years that I worked at The Ocilla Star, so it was a familiar sight around Ocilla, puttering around. The car drove well, but that was all I could say nice about it. The air conditioning didn't work right, of course, and toward the end of me driving it, the drivers side window wouldn't even roll down, and this was during the hottest summers I've ever experienced, so it was pure torture to drive more than a few minutes. Of all the vehicles I've ever driven, this is the only one that I kind of actively hated.

The most consistent problem, aside from the AC, was that you needed to know a trick to keep the battery from running down. If you opened the car door without putting the key in the ignition and turning the car on, the interior light would stay on for some damnable reason. Probably dozens of times I went to get something out of the car, forgot to do the trick and found a dead battery the next day.

In 2014, I had pneumonia and appendicitis at the same time, and when the ruinous pain in my torso got too intense, I called my mom and told her I needed to go to the emergency room. I planned to drive across the street to her house, but the Grand Marquis wouldn't start because I had obviously forgotten to do the trick.

That day, I dropped two bad habits. I smoked my last cigarette across the street from the hospital, and I've never driven the Grand Marquis again either.

Remember the 2000 Nissan Maxima my mom got for Christmas that year? Well, because I wasn't well enough to worry about fixing the Grand Marquis, I started driving the Nissan and eventually I took over ownership of it. Of course, by the time I got it, the CD player didn't work, and the radio's volume knob is broken so it's stuck at the same volume, just loud enough to put you to sleep.

Of course, the AC on the Nissan used to work, but in the past 6 months, I've developed a problem where the engine bellows gas or exhaust fumes and that means I can't drive with the window rolled down or the AC going or I choke on potentially poisonous fumes. So, now that it's getting warm, I sweat.

A belt squeals. For some reason, all the lights on the dashboard light up at random times. Last week, the gear shifter started sticking. And these are the remaining problems after I just sank over $600 into repairs and replacing tires on the Nissan in the past few months.

I need a replacement, but I wasn't going to be able to replace it for a long while, as I'm the kind of guy who got insurance very cheap through Obamacare, if you get what I'm saying. It didn't help that the pneumonia wiped out my savings in 2014. I had to cash in a life insurance policy to pay for surgery in November.

But as most of you know, I've written a lot about the Tara Grinstead case lately, and in some of those articles, I wrote about the troubles I've been having with my car. After reading it, some amazing friends and fans of mine decided to make the overwhelming gesture of putting together some money for me to buy a car.

I don't know if those who donated will want their names known, so I'm keeping them anonymous, but they are truly incredible people. One was even a senior superlative in our graduating class, and it should have been Most Generous. And no, you conspiracy theorists out there, the donors were not in any way involved with the Tara Grinstead case. They donated because they wanted to encourage me to continue writing about their hometown, and they have.

Then, this morning, March 8, 2017, my sister told me there was talk about some very kind fans on the Up and Vanished Discussion site considering donating to my PayPal account to help me buy a car and a cell phone. I really appreciate them even contemplating donating for a car, as I need one, but I don't want a cell phone at all.

It will be a cold, sad day when I buy one of those time-consuming, courtesy-and-conversation-destroying devices. If you don't want to donate, but like my writings, a nice gift would be for you to destroy your own cell phone.

But it's nice for those who offered to buy me a phone to offer. I'm so thankful for all the compliments I've received lately, and for people to even consider giving to me is truly humbling. I've nearly cried in gratitude, honestly. It's for all those kind people, who have restored much of my waning faith in my humanity, that I am writing this.

And the money I received, it's enough to buy a better car, certainly, but I'm going to guarantee one thing: This vehicle that I buy will have a working CD player!

You see, since I quit smoking, I replaced that habit with composing songs, and I've wanted more than anything to be able to drive around listening to my own songs, but even when I ride with other people like my sister who has a CD player in her car, she for some reason doesn't want to listen to me singing. It's weird, right?

But more importantly, this new vehicle may help in a more serious way. Since I quit smoking, I got fatter, and I also quit being pumped full of nicotine, a stimulant. I haven't been diagnosed, but in the past few years, I think I've developed sleep apnea. I snore badly, which is a symptom, and have a thick neck, which is a risk factor, and I often come very, very close to dozing off when I drive. Sometimes I cross that line, if only for the scantest moment.

I know I should go to the doctor and get that checked out, but you know what that costs and you know I don't have it.

In my Nissan, with it's constant low volume, it's as dozy as NPR and probably contributes to the eye-fluttering, death-defying drives I have too often. I promise that whatever car I buy, I will blare the music at a very loud level to ensure I stay wildly awake.

You wonderful folks who donated have done more than helped buy me a car. You might have saved my life.

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Loving a 'Narcissistic Sociopath'

Loving a 'Narcissistic Sociopath'

  4:41 AM    Unknown

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Photo: An ex-girlfriend claims Bo Dukes, pictured at right leaving the Ben Hill County Sheriff's Office March 3, is not a monster but she also said he is "pretty rotten."

I'm still hearing rumors about the murder of Tara Grinstead. I'm still hearing gossip and reading discussion topics about the possibility of more arrests coming. I've even heard a few things that seem to hold some truth that if they are true, would leave Ocilla and its community quaking to the core.

But it's hard to know what is fully true at this point. Every time it seems like we have the whole picture, someone shakes the Etch-A-Sketch.

I've always thought this case reminded me of the television show "Twin Peaks." A beauty queen is murdered and a small town's secrets are revealed in an investigation that seems to target everyone except the actual killer or killers. This case even has its own Log Lady, in a way.

The strangeness of this case has spilled over into my life. Strangers approach me in public places, and someone offered me $50 to call his mom just because she was so heavily invested in this case. Of course, I did it for free.

I've talked to people I never thought I'd talk to in this case, family members on all sides, and even people who were accused by self-appointed public judges. But only one person who reached out to me on the first weekend of March told me anything that I found both credible and worth reporting.

A woman contacted me claiming to be a former girlfriend of Bo Dukes, the man arrested March 3 in relation to allegations that he helped Ryan Duke cover up Tara's murder.

I will not share this woman's name, but I will call her Mary. She said I could use what she told me if I found it relevant and it was anonymous. I absolutely believe it's relevant, so I'm keeping her anonymous.

I have no way of confirming what she said or even if she was Bo Duke's girlfriend because if I asked around, I would reveal that I had talked to her. I can say she definitely has a lot of ties to the local area and all of the information she told me jibed with what I know about Bo Dukes.

In short, I believe her.

And she came to his defense, or at least, she did at the start.

Mary reached out to me because she read what I wrote about Bo Dukes on the night he was arrested. I said that the only nice thing anyone said to me about Dukes was that he is highly intelligent, and she wanted to share some of the good things about him.

She told me he once took her to a pet store just because she liked birds. They laughed over a joke book together. One night, after too much wine, he carried her up some stairs and tucked her into bed.

"He is not a monster," Mary said. "I just think people should know that."

"He is being emotionless because he must," she also said.

I've been a fan of the true crime genre even before it had that name, so I've heard plenty of stories of people who were monsters, but who seemed normal and even loving to those close to them. I told Mary about one particularly heinous example, Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer.

Between 1974 and 1991, Rader murdered 10 people using the chilling modus operandi that gave him his sinister epithet: "Bind, Torture, Kill." But Rader seemed the loving family man, with a wife and two kids. He was elected president of his church council and was a Cub Scout leader, yet he was also one of the most terrifying murderers of all time.

"I'm not saying that's Bo, but I think it is something for you to consider, because it is true that you are the first person who has had anything nice to say about him, including people who have known him since he was born," I told Mary.

Then, she began volunteering information that showed that she too saw a dark side to Bo Dukes.

"I know he is first and foremost self-preserving," she said.

She said he looks out for himself, that he can be cold and calculating, that he can shut down completely. She described him as someone who uses people, someone who got drunk on whiskey every day, and someone who "would have sex with anything that walked."

Late in our conversation, she said Dukes told her something I personally found very disturbing, and she said he said it in a casual way.

"He also told me he convinced three or four of his girlfriends to have abortions, but if he would have a baby with anyone on earth, it would be me," she said.

Mary said that 3 or 4 weeks earlier, Dukes asked her to run away with him. I've heard that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation may have been talking to Dukes for the 4 weeks prior to my conversation with Mary.

I told her that the behavior she described fit the mental picture I'd already been forming of a narcissist and manipulator. The kind of person who may have talked about the crimes he is alleged to have committed on an internet discussion board only hours after being bonded out of jail. The kind of guy who might try to get a woman to run away with him without letting her know she would literally be on the run.

Mary's response used a word I was trying carefully not to use because I'm not sure I'm qualified to make the assessment. The word was "sociopath."

"It's hard to know someone is a narcissistic sociopath but love them because you're one of a few who has actually seen the human side," she said.

Sociopaths are people who are "characterized by asocial or antisocial behavior or exhibit antisocial personality disorder," according to the definition of the word by Merriam-Webster.

"I'm trying to separate my feelings," Mary said. "I know he has been kind to me and shown me caring. But I also know that deep down he is pretty rotten."

She said that Dukes deserves to be held accountable, but she also said she believed the reason behind what happened was mistakes and bad choices, not malice.

"He should pay for this," Mary said. "But he isn't the murderous bastard everyone would make him out to be. People deserve to see the other side before they judge too harshly."

I asked her if she saw any change in Bo Dukes since Tara's disappearance. She said he looked "drawn and haunted," but she thought that was due to his time in the military.

She said that one night, years after Tara's disappearance, they talked all night, and she asked Dukes what was the worst thing he ever did.

"He got so emotional," Mary said. "He said I need to tell someone. I need to tell."

She said her stomach sank, and she knew it was about "her."

"He said, 'I watched. I watched,'" Mary said.

She said her gut told her. She knew.

"I said, 'Is it Tara?'" Mary said. "He got a hold of himself and said, 'No. Nothing like that.'"

"He just shut down," she said.

She said he later told her she could cut through bullshit better than anyone he knew.

"I knew, but I didn't know," Mary said.

I asked what he meant by "I watched" because that could mean that he watched someone die or watched a body burn or really, watched almost anything.

"I feel like he helped move her but didn't actually do the worst of it," she said, but she also wondered if Dukes told Ryan Duke what to do.

At that point, I encouraged Mary to talk to the GBI, if for no other reason, to assuage the guilt I could tell she was feeling. Although I don't think this woman actually knew anything about Tara's murder, she definitely had suspicions, and I think a good deal of guilt seeped in since Bo Dukes was arrested, whether the guilt was warranted or not.

She said she received mixed advice from friends and family. She said she was sitting back and waiting. She said she did not know enough to do any good and that going public might put her family under a microscope.

"I don't think I have anything of importance," Mary said. "Just intuition, hearsay, and insubstantial witness (sic). So why put myself out there for that?"

She said that the worst part is that if Dukes had told the full story he started, she did not know what she would have done.

"I'm so so glad he didn't finish that story," she said.

I know some of you will be tempted to condemn Mary or expose her by revealing her real name. Please don't. She is just a woman who had some unverified suspicions about someone she loved, and who of us would let a guess overrule our hearts? She, her decisions, and her family do not deserve our scorn.

She said that now the situation is driving her insane. She said it is all she can think about.

"I feel sick," Mary said. "I feel disgusted. Shocked. Hurt. Heartbroken. Angry. All of them."

She said she was morally torn about everything. She said she wants to be loyal and honest, but she also wants to protect her family.

"You don't get a class on what to feel or say if your ex helps hide a body," Mary said.

Note: Bo Dukes is only alleged to have committed crimes in association with Tara Grinstead's disappearance and murder. He is innocent until proven guilty.

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Paranoia and Poster or Impostor?

Paranoia and Poster or Impostor?

  5:45 PM    Unknown

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Photo: Pictured is my front door window and the dangling cloth I use to peek through at guests along with the rusty ax I planned to use to defend myself.

I've said before that paranoia is the dark side of the imagination, so let me tell you about how paranoia took over for this creative person upon arriving home on March 4, 2017.

You see, I had just finished writing in Ocilla about the arrest of Bo Dukes for my blog. Though I started writing on Friday night, various conversations on the subject stretched my writing time well into Saturday morning. By the time I posted the blog, it was past 4:30 a.m.

Being a bit of a paranoid person, I have a cloth that hangs from two nails over my front door window. This way, when someone knocks, I can pull back the cloth to peek at who is outside, assuming it's daylight, because I'm so lazy that I haven't installed a porch light at my house. Ever.

So anyway, as I pulled up to my house in little Irwinville, Georgia I saw that my cloth was dangling by only one nail. Yellow light shone from inside my house through the uncovered window, and paranoia ran through me in an equally yellow fashion.

Had someone been inside my home, looking through my front door window, awaiting the arrival of the cowardly reporter who called the place home?

I thought about any number of people I could have infuriated with my recent writings. And of course, I thought that the most recent subject of my writings had just been released from jail less than 24 hours earlier.

I approached my front door gingerly, gazing through the uncovered window with no little fear in my heart. To me there is nothing more frightening than looking at a window and seeing someone leering at you with a menacing grin, not that this has ever happened in my entire life. Just the thought that it might happen is enough to make me want to cower under my car.

I seriously thought about going to my mom's or just going back to Ocilla, at least until daylight. That's how scared I was. Yet I'll say nearly any damn thing in the newspaper. We're all brave in different ways, I suppose.

One time, years ago, a friend of mine got into a somewhat violent argument with their significant other. I went over to her house just to help her feel safe, though I spent the night with a fire poker in my hand and jumping every time the wind made a limb brush against a window. Here's a piece of advice: Never watch true crime shows when you're prone to paranoia and trying to serve as someone's guardian against domestic violence.

Anyway, this was back when I smoked cigarettes, so more than 3 years ago, but I was outside smoking and noticed a rusty ax sitting by the door. Considering that I did not want the significant other coming back and seeing the ax as a weapon of opportunity, I stashed the ax in my car. For years, I carried it around in my car like some sort of madman, but somehow it wound up on my front porch.

So, seeing this erstwhile stolen ax there at 5 a.m. Saturday morning, fearing someone was inside my home, it became a weapon of opportunity for me.

Not sure whether to choke up on the ax or wield it like a baseball bat, I crept inside. I thought that I must clear the house, like a police officer would, checking each room for possible intruders.

I envisioned going to each room, opening each closet, stooping to look under the bed and peeking around every corner. I imagined the crippling anxiety of each possible encounter, that terrifying moment of truth as I lowered my head to the floor or yanked a door open.

Nuh uh.

So I just sat down and checked Facebook, figuring that if someone sneaked up behind me and killed me, at least I wouldn't have to know about it.

Paranoia may be the dark side of imagination, but my desire to avoid unpleasant situations conquers all.

On a side note, I shouldn't have worried about Bo Dukes, as he seemed to be busy. Maybe.

Someone alerted me that someone claiming to be Dukes was participating in the "Up and Vanished" discussion boards at nearly the moment I checked Facebook. This preoccupied me till about 6:30 a.m. as I was flabbergasted and yet enthralled that someone who was out on bond after being accused of crimes in connection with Tara Grinstead's murder would be participating in a discussion on a web site devoted to Tara's case, if it was Bo Dukes at all.

And I can't absolutely say it was Bo Dukes, although other posters on the UAV web site seemed convinced. The "Bo Dukes" poster used the handle AAA, and other posters said it was the same account that previously used the handle Ocilla123456. Again, I can't verify it, but other posters said Ocilla123456 posted a photo of Bo Dukes with the day's date the previous weekend. I saw the photo at the time, but I don't know who posted it.

AAA, who on March 4 claimed to be Bo Dukes, did not say a lot, and his responses were very short usually. He didn't make many direct comments about the case, as he said he was respecting the gag order, although he also said something about Jim Beam breaking gag orders.

He also didn't say anything that revealed he wasn't Bo Dukes, so maybe he was. But remember, we don't know. He refused to take any photos Saturday morning to verify who he was. We don't know if the poster was an impostor.

Here are the most interesting comments AAA said, with thanks to the poster named mouserat for making screenshots of them:

AAA said he had not seen Ryan Duke, who was is alleged to have committed the murder Dukes is alleged to have helped cover-up, since 2007. He said he moved to Atlanta in 2006, he came back to Ocilla briefly to join the Army, and he saw Duke in '07 before going to Korea.

A poster named opticnerve asked AAA if "When all is said and done, do you think it will make any sense to us?" The answer was "No." AAA also said that none of the theories on the "Up and Vanished" site were accurate, to the best of his knowledge.

mouserat asked, "Do you think we'll ever fully know what happened that night to Tara?"

AAA responded, "If I know the full truth then yes."

AAA said that he did not believe "Up and Vanished" podcast host Payne Lindsey owed him an apology, but he said Payne is not his favorite person. He said some of Payne's interviews were biased and "down-right false."

He said he thought the Georgia Bureau of Investigation did a great job.

"Justice is a finicky thing and subjective," AAA said.

He said he was not afraid for his safety. He said Tara Grinstead was his teacher.

AAA said he had shed tears about what happened to Tara and about the fact he got caught. He said what he went through is not as hard as what Tara's family has been through.

"I don't think I could communicate how much remorse here," he said.

If that was Bo Dukes, and if he is guilty, then he has had 11 years to come forward and be remorseful. I don't know what that was on the discussion board, but it wasn't remorse. If I had to guess, I'd say it was more likely narcissistic and manipulative behavior, no matter who it was.

This case is beyond strange, and it gets stranger every day, and the sheer volume of news and rumor has made monitoring my Facebook and "Up and Vanished" more than a full-time job for me. I still can't believe that someone who was just released on bond would be posting about the case on the discussion board.

I'm just glad no one sneaked up behind me while I was reading it.

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Duke and Dukes

Duke and Dukes

  4:28 AM    Unknown

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 Pictured: At right, Bo Dukes leaves the Ben Hill County Sheriff's Office Friday, March 3, 2017.

Duke and Dukes.

Dukes and Duke.

I never heard the names of Ryan Duke and Bo Dukes before the few hours before the February 23, 2017 press conference announcing Ryan Duke was charged with murder in the death of Tara Grinstead. I heard both names from more than one source, but one story I was told made those names unforgettable.

A source told me these two names when he told me that he heard Tara was killed and taken to a pecan orchard owned by Bo Dukes' family in Ben Hill County. He said he heard her body was burned. He later told me this secret was known and reported to someone in law enforcement no later than six weeks after Tara went missing in October 2005.

Remember, I was told this hours before the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced even that Ryan Duke was arrested.

Of course, we don't know that Tara's body was burned, although as I'll reveal later, Dukes is accused of "destroying" her body. We don't know that law enforcement was told about the possible involvement of Duke or Dukes in 2005. We don't even know if Duke or Dukes are guilty, because they are innocent until proven so.

But other than those things we don't know, the facts I was told on that fateful Thursday I dubbed the Day Ocilla Stood Still, have all come to light as the alleged truth.

On that day we learned Ryan Duke is alleged to have murdered Tara.

On the last day of February, we learned that Tara's remains were allegedly deposited at a pecan orchard owned by Bo Dukes' family.

On March 3, we learned that Bo Dukes was arrested and charged in relation to the alleged disposal of Grinstead's body.

Of course, this wasn't the last time I heard the names Duke and Dukes together. Virtually every rumor seemed to include allegations about the pecan orchard, Duke and Dukes. I heard parts of very similar stories to the one I was told on February 23. An interview on the "Up and Vanished" podcast Monday even included some of a similar, though different story.

And every day, I heard Bo Dukes' name. Rumors said he was in custody but not charged. Some rumors said he was on the run. Payne Lindsey posted a topic called "Bo" on the "Up and Vanished" discussion page and that may have led to the strangest exchanges about Dukes.

A person on the discussion page claimed to be Dukes' girlfriend and argued with people throughout the day. Predictably, other posters challenged her to prove who she was. She claimed Dukes was sitting beside her, so someone asked her to take a photo with the day's date on a piece of paper.

Later, through a Twitter account I believe, two photos were posted, one showed a man who certainly looked like Bo Dukes, and the other had the day's date, 2/25/17, written in the man's palm.

I heard that Bo himself participated in the discussions, but I didn't see that myself, but later during an interview with WGXA in Atlanta, Payne said Dukes was posting on his site. I was told he even posted on the "Up and Vanished" discussion page on March 3, after he was released on bond, but I couldn't wade through the thousands of posts on that eventful day to find out.

Of course, there's nothing illegal about participating in an internet discussion board.

But on Thursday, March 2, the rumors were percolating with particular fervor about Bo Dukes possibly being arrested. When I got a seemingly credible tip that there would be a press conference that day, my heart started pounding, because I was just sure there would be another arrest announced, but I made some phone calls and learned there was nothing to it.

Still, I thought there might be something to it, and I thought it might be a good idea to check in Ben Hill and Irwin counties to see if an arrest was made. I thought that an arrest could have been made without an announcement due to the gag order in place in Ryan Duke's case.

Between 11 a.m. and noon Friday, March 3, I arrived at the Ben Hill County Law Enforcement Complex and entered the sheriff's office. I asked the receptionist if any arrest had been made, and I was told I would need to fill out a request form, so I scrawled a generic request for any information on the arrest of Ryan Duke or Bo Dukes or the search for Tara Grinstead. Moments later, and frankly to my surprise, the lady said, "Dusty, he has been arrested but the booking report won't be ready until probably after lunch."

My eyes widened. I hadn't really expected an arrest, despite all the rumors I had heard about an arrest. I had to clarify.

"Bo Dukes was arrested?" And yes he was. What I later learned was that he was booked less than an hour before I arrived.

And yes, if it matters for some journalistic style points for some reason, your intrepid reporter was the first on the scene, though word quickly spread obviously as three news stations later joined me.

I should note that I saw both Special Agent Jason Shoudel, the lead investigator on Tara's case, Ocilla Police Chief Billy Hancock, and Tifton Judicial Circuit District Attorney Paul Bowden at the Ben Hill complex, so if I didn't already know Dukes was arrested, I would have known something was afoot.

Waiting for the booking report, I wasn't sure what to do. I struck up a conversation with some of the employees outside of the nearby magistrate court. One of them recognized me from my song "Irwinvillain" which I thought was humorous.

Then, a receptionist walked outside with the booking report and I read it. More on that in a minute.

A lady I suspected was a reporter went inside the magistrate office, and I had an idea. Would Bo Dukes have a first appearance before a magistrate judge, just as Ryan Duke had before him, and would the arrest warrants against him be read?

I went inside, and let me just go ahead and say for anyone who ever has trouble in Ben Hill County, the staff at the magistrate court is very helpful and friendly. They told me Bo Dukes waived his right to a first appearance, probably to prevent the media circus that accompanied Ryan Duke's similar appearance.

They also gave me copies of the Bo Dukes arrest warrants, and they are a bit less vague than those used to arrest Ryan Duke, although they still leave the puzzle incomplete.

Dukes was charged with concealing death. The warrant alleges that Dukes unlawfully concealed the death of Tara Grinstead at the location known to the property owner as Fitzgerald Farms, off Bowens Mill Highway 129, in Ben Hill County, which hindered the discovery of and unlawful killing of Grinstead by Ryan Alexander Duke, who faces the same charge in Irwin County, along with murder, aggravated assault and burglary.

Dukes was charged with hindering the apprehension of a criminal. The warrant alleges he unlawfully concealed and destroyed Tara's body, which was evidence of the crime of murder. The warrant says the accused knew or had reasonable grounds to believe Ryan Alexander Duke committed the crime. The location was again given as Fitzgerald Farms.

Dukes was charged with tampering with evidence. The warrant alleges he destroyed physical evidence in the form of Tara's body at Fitzgerald Farms. The warrant says the evidence involved the prosecution of murder with the intent to obstruct the prosecution of Ryan Alexander Duke.

All three warrants say the statute of limitations was tolled because the crime was unknown. Tolling means the statute of limitations was legally suspended since the crime was unknown. Normally, a crime must be prosecuted within a certain number of years, but that limit was suspended.

The bond for each charge was $5,000, for a total of $15,000. I've heard the bond was actually higher than that, but $5,000 three times is what my documents say.

Fitzgerald Farms seems to be the large pecan orchard searched by the GBI for Tara's remains this same week. The property belongs to Randy Hudson, who had nothing to do with this horrible crime. I am stating this unequivocally. Regardless of the charges against Bo Dukes, I don't believe any other member of the Hudson family had anything to do with what happened to Tara.

Earlier I said that I knew Mr. Randy most of my life, so I didn't think he had any involvement. Someone asked me why I would trust someone just because I have known them all my life. The simple answer is that I wouldn't necessarily. But when I know someone well enough to doubt that they would do something so heinous, and when the GBI is saying he was not involved, and when none of the rumors I hear implicate him in any way, and when the idea of him working with the two people accused in this crime seems unfathomable, I think the preponderance of evidence suggests that Mr. Randy had nothing to do with Tara's disappearance.

I asked him for a comment, since his property was being searched, and I could tell the emotional toll this terrible situation has cost this man. He said, as the GBI did, that he is fully cooperating with authorities. I was told separately by others that the Hudson family installed a gate and posted no trespassing signs at the pecan orchard at the GBI's request, and that they offered to let the property be searched without a warrant.

Without offering any defense of Dukes, Mr. Randy said he and the rest of his family had nothing to do with the crime being investigated. Importantly, he offered his prayers to the Grinstead family.

Knowing this was someone who was striving to help bring those responsible for Tara's death to justice, it infuriated me to find later that someone used my own Facebook page to bash the Hudson family. If Bo Dukes was involved in this crime, it was his actions as a grown man, not that of his family. If we were all held accountable for the crimes of our family members, we'd likely all share a very large jail cell.

The lady denigrating the family said they were accountable for pampering him and putting up his bail money. There are a Titanic boatload of assumptions there.

How do we know Dukes was pampered? Although the Hudsons are successful, I'm sure they got that way with a lot of work on farms, and whether it's pumpkins or pecans, working on a farm is hard work.

The other assumption is that he would need family money for bail money. A bail bondsman usually only charges 10 percent of the overall bond. Even I could come up with $1,500 if needed.

But so what if a family member did put up the money? I would hope that most of our mothers and fathers would be willing to bail us out of jail, that they would be willing to consider us innocent until proven guilty.

Shouldn't we all, to some extent at least, extend the courtesy of "innocent until proven guilty" to anyone after all we've learned? Through 11 years of mud-slinging and character assassination of those the public condemned in Tara's case, haven't we learned our lesson? I know it's difficult with so much emotion crackling around the edges of this case, and we're only human, but we need to endeavor to be better humans than we have been in our accusatory past.

Back to my time at the Ben Hill County Law Enforcement Complex...

I asked the chief magistrate judge if there would be an opportunity for photos, and she didn't answer, citing the gag order in place, but even though I don't think she intended to give anything away, it was like a no comment. No comments rarely mean no.

So I went outside and waited along with the rest of the crews. I saw someone I thought was a direct relative of Dukes', and I tried to approach her. I even managed to say "Excuse me, ma'am," but she either didn't hear or ignored me. I don't blame her. I don't know what I even would have said. I shut up and turned around realizing that whatever kind of journalist I am, it's not the kind that hounds grieving family members.

And then after a relatively short wait, I took photos as Bo Dukes emerged, dressed to something close to the nines, along with a man I assume was his attorney. I was lucky to be in the best position to get photos of him, and as he walked past, I shouted, "Bo, any comment for the local paper?"

In retrospect that was a lame question on two fronts. First, any comment? Way to ask a direct question, Dusty. Second, local paper? Technically, since I was in Fitzgerald, Georgia rather than Ocilla, where I actually work, it wouldn't have been a comment for the local paper at all.

Regardless, he didn't answer. He didn't say a word.

I couldn't help contrasting the two men who were classmates, friends, and even, I've heard, roommates, the two men alleged to be associated with Tara's death.

Ryan Duke appeared as a broken man crushed by the weight of the world on his shoulders. Wearing shackles and green striped jail coveralls, remorse or even darker emotions seemed to be gnawing a hole through him from the inside. His bushy, disheveled head and facial hair, his hollow eyes betrayed a person who seemed to have passed desperation for even less wholesome locales.

Bo Dukes strode along in a three-piece suit, expressionless but unfazed. Clean shaven and well manicured, he looked like someone on the way to a business interview rather than stepping away from charges that allege he helped cover-up one of the most famous murders in Georgia history.

Ryan Duke seemed to be a man slowly disintegrating over the years since Tara was murdered in 2005. I've heard rumors of self harm. He had two DUI arrests and became reclusive. I've heard he suffers from serious medical problems as well.

Bo Dukes got married, and I've heard he joined the military. He had his own legal problems, though his crime seemed more selfish than self destructive, as he and his wife pleaded guilty to stealing more than $150,000 worth of property from the Army. Even though he divorced or separated, he supposedly had a girlfriend at the time of his arrest.

Ryan Duke was described universally as a peaceful guy. Even an article sent to me by someone from Green County included an account by a friend from middle school who described Duke as someone who would walk away from an argument. If he had a fault, I heard, it was that he tried too hard to make friends. A friend described him as the kind of friend who would come help you if you broke down at 3 in the morning.

Meanwhile, I've talked to a lot of people about Bo Dukes, too. The only thing I heard that was positive is that he was highly intelligent.

I believe the GBI is confident they got their guys. I believe they're confident of their charges against Duke and Dukes. But if they are guilty, it is disturbing that someone can sleep in his own bed after callously disposing of a human body and leaving people's hearts to break slowly over more than a decade.

Lots of rumors, and a few credible sources, have told me that Dukes may be working with investigators in this case, and he certainly seemed to know there was a possibility he would be arrested. People probably do not normally walk into sheriff's offices in a suit with a lawyer unless they are lawyers themselves. And while the charges against him are serious, I believe that there are more serious charges someone can face if they are alleged to be an accessory after the fact in a heinous crime, though I'm certainly not a lawyer myself.

Much of my limited knowledge of the law comes from covering trials. In one trial I covered, a member of the Mexican Mafia was accused of kidnapping for participating in snatching a woman and taking her to Atlanta in an attempt to recover drug money owed to his gang. This man stayed loyal to his gang and refused to accept a deal, but his partner took a deal and got only 20 years. The man on trial, despite the victim asserting that he was the only one who treated her kindly and with respect, he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

With Duke and Dukes, I cannot help but wonder deeply if there is some sort of plea deal promised or in place. If so, I just hope the right person was given the deal because as bad as it is to imagine that someone who covered up Tara's murder might be walking around free, it is even worse to imagine her killer might be among us.

But then again, for 11 years, I guess he was all along.

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