Ryan Duke is on trial this week in a Georgia court charged with the murder of missing beauty queen Tara Grinstead.
True crime fans outside of the small town of Ocilla are probably best familiar with the case through Up & Vanished, whether through listening to the hit podcast or watching the Oxygen documentary.Â
Payne Lindsey hosted both and knows the case inside and out, likely more than most.Â
leaving a dinner party on October 22, 2005.Â
Police visited her home two days after she went missing and found her car parked in the driveway. Upon entering the home, they found her mobile phone charging and the clothes she had worn to the dinner party were still on the bedroom floor.
There was almost no sign of a struggle, or Grinstead.Â
The investigation into her disappearance became the biggest in the history of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI).
In 2010, Grinstead was officially declared dead but her body has never been found.
The GBI received a tip about Duke in 2016 and he was arrested and charged with burglary, aggravated assault, murder and concealment of a body.
His former classmate Bo Dukes, with no familial relation, was arrested and charged with attempting to conceal a death, hindering apprehension and tampering with evidence. In 2019, Dukes was convicted of helping conceal Grinstead’s death and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
It has all been a long time coming for Lindsey, who has been subpoenaed in the case and court take the stand in the remaining days of the trial.Â
‘They could call me, they may or may not. Either way it’s still surreal to me to be involved in the case in that sort of way,’ Lindsey told Metro.co.uk before the trial began.
He added: ‘I hope that we do hear a lot of new evidence because if we don’t then I think the case is going to be a hard one.
‘I think he [Duke] is the actual murderer. I don’t know if they have enough solid evidence to really make that case. I hope we learn more about what we know about Tara and there’s a clearer story and more evidence.
‘Based on what I know about this, I think this is going to be a hard conviction.’
However, keen not to forget the victim at the centre of the fascination surrounding the case, Lindsey said: ‘That’s the saddest part of this whole story is that it took over a decade to arrest anybody in this case and so much time there was no answers.’
Lindsey was only six months into his Up & Vanished podcast exploring the Grinstead disappearance when the cold case was resurrected with the tip about Duke.
‘It was arguably the craziest time of my life,’ Lindsey admitted. ‘If you go back and listen to season one, the first 12 episodes it’s almost like two different seasons, two different stories.’
Recalling the breakthrough with the arrest of Duke, the filmmaker said: ‘That was an extremely long day, everyone was calling me. I remember that night after they arrested Ryan Duke, then I also heard Bo Dukes’ name about a month later.
‘I started hearing another version of this narrative that seemed to make the most sense and there was another person involved.’
Lindsey also described the chaos surrounding the arrests as like ‘living out some sort of true crime novel’.Â
‘That was totally surreal and impossible to forget, it’s ingrained in me,’ he admitted.
‘So for all these years later to be at this point is overwhelming.’
The trial against Duke continues.
