This past week, Bo Dukes, of Georgia, was issued the judicial decision of no new trial.
He covered up the murder and helped dispose the body of Ocilla, Georgia, teacher and beauty queen, Tara Grinstead. Grinstead was thirty at the time of her death in October of 2005.
She spent the morning of October 22, 2005, helping her youth beauty contestants get ready for a beauty pageant around Ocilla. Shortly following, Grinstead went to a barbecue with coworkers and individuals involved with the local school. Finally, she returned home, with the approximate time of 11 p.m.
She was never seen again. When Monday morning arrived, she was nowhere to be found with a room full of students and alarm bells going off in the mind of her bosses and coworkers. What had happened to the young beauty queen?
Ocilla police went to her home where her car sat in the driveway. Walking through the house, her things were in disarray, and a lamp was broken by her bedside, but nothing else suggested a struggle occurred between Tara and anyone else.
Her meticulously kept home was not the way she would have left it and that set off her close friend, Maria, that also came to the house. Officers could not locate her purse or keys. When looking in her car, the seat had been leaned all the way back and it did not look like Grinstead had been driving.
The trail quickly ran cold and was not solved until the girlfriend of Bo Dukes came forward about her boyfriend’s confession to the crime. He alleged that Ryan Duke killed Grinstead when she arrived home in the middle of Ryan Duke robbing her house. Bo Duke was then woke up and helped to dispose of her remains. Bo Duke received a 25 year sentence for his part in the crime.
