let me know. he doesn t want to see me anymore. she said, it s been really difficult. saturday, october 22, 2005, still in emotional turmoil, interest ra nevertheless had a full day of activities planned. she had been helping students get ready for the pageant, which was the sweet potato pageant, doing their hair and makeup at her house. that evening after the pageant, tara went to her friend s for a barbecue. she seemed on the upswing. when tara walked in the door that night, she was smiling. she seemed happy. well, the old tara is back. the barbecue is the last time the teacher and beauty queen was ever seen.
i think a lot of people in the beginning that knew that she had been upset about the situation between her and marcus thought that maybe she just decided to get away for a while. i just assumed she needed alone time. this case happened on the heels of the infamous runaway bride case in atlanta. georgia s runaway bride. a girl about the age of tara was engaged, and she got cold feet and left. and they had her missing and she was on national tv. it was a big scoop. she was sought as a missing person. people thinking foul play occurred. and in actuality she had fled and was found in albuquerque on her own free will. because the emotional state tara had been in in the previous week, we weren t really sure what may have happened. tara s case went national, and the media got involved. did they notice it being broken? because the assistant could have knocked it over two weeks ago. the mysterious clues at
truck there that he did not recognize. i don t think that they ve been able to track down the driver of a black truck and we don t have any knowledge of who it could be. of course, a black pickup truck in rural georgia is exceptionally common. we didn t have any better descriptors than that. that was something we certainly kept in context and attempted to identify but weren t able to conclude anything based on that. anybody you know have that kind of vehicle? marcus had a truck like that at the time. so obviously some people wanted to say that it was him, but the neighbor said it was not the same type truck that marcus was driving. maybe not marcus truck. but as tara s ex-boyfriend, the investigation immediately focused on him. marcus harper was the love of tara s life. and he was someone that we certainly had to look at very, very closely, and we did from the outset. the police weren t alone. tara s sister anita also had marcus in her sights.
but i didn t want any kind of commitment. so you were rejecting her essentially at this point. pretty much. did she accept that? no. how many times did you talk to the gbi? four, five times. they ve asked you for things and asked you to talk and you ve provided all of it. yes. at the time, i also spoke with marcus lawyer thomas pa haute os. marcus called me one day when this first broke out and told me that he had been going to the jail and tara s sister was there and made an accusation against him. i said, what the hell have you done with my sister? . he felt concerned that because that accusation had been made down at the jail in front of the officers he might need some assistance, someone to sit with him on the thing. is there anything that your client has not agreed to do that the gbi has asked? not a thing. marcus harper was cooperative, and we secured dna samples, polygraph examinations, fingerprints, all the sorts of things that we did with anybody
or not. you had someone claiming to have killed the person you have been looking for for four years? something we had to do. when i first got the call that he had posted the things that he had online. i mean, it was just devastating to me. he started posting on the internet calling himself the catch me killer, claiming that he had killed about 16 people, and he alluded to the fact that tara was one of them. i mean, he wrote horrible poems about how he slit her throat and how her something about my blade she could not fight and her screams into the night. we were able to trace the youtube uploads ultimately to a man in gainesville, georgia, by the name of andrew haley. was he tara s killer?