Georgia man acquitted of 2005 murder of high school teacher after confessing
A Georgia man confessed to breaking into a high school teacher’s house to steal money for drugs, then murdering her. He told police and wrote it down. On Friday, he was acquitted.
Ryan Alexander Duke was found not guilty of malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault and burglary in the 2005 death of 30-year-old Tara Faye Grinstead after changing his story on the stand, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
Instead, he was found guilty just for concealing the body of Grinstead, who was found in a pecan orchard, burned beyond recognition and identified through bone and teeth fragments, more than a decade after she was reported missing after leaving an Ocilla cookout and never showing up to work the next morning.
Tara Grinstead was reported missing in 2005. (Elliott Minor/)
In 2017, a tipster pointed the Georgia Bureau of Investigation toward her boyfriend at the time, Bo Dukes, whose family owned the orchard where Grinstead’s body had been found. Dukes then pointed to Duke, his one-time friend.
A day later, Duke confessed all to officials at the Ocilla Police Department, according to the Journal Constitution, admitting that he had broken into her house and then hit her when she caught him.
“I don’t feel like I deserve to be free to breathe,” Duke wrote.
He was also able to lead GBI investigators to the orchard where Grinstead’s fragments were found.
Duke was arrested on Feb. 22, 2017, and charged with Grinstead’s murder. Dukes, the tipster’s boyfriend, was arrested the next month for helping to conceal the body; he was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March 2019.
Ryan Duke (Hyosub Shin/)
But on the stand, Duke told an entirely different story than what he confessed in 2017, claiming that Dukes had woken him up in October 2005 and told him that he had killed Grinstead and the pair then burned the body.
The false confession, Duke claimed, was out of fear of the other man.
Dukes refused to testify in court, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights, according to the Journal Constitution.
Duke is due to be sentenced Monday for concealing the body.
