OCILLA — Eleven years and four months after teacher Tara Grinstead vanished from her rural home, a suspect has been arrested and charged with her murder, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said Thursday.

Ryan Alexander Duke, 31, was arrested and charged with murder Wednesday and is being held in Irwin County, said J.T. Ricketson, special agent in charge at the GBI’s Perry office.

Duke graduated from Irwin County High School — where Grinstead taught — three years before Grinstead disappeared, Ricketson said.

For more than 11 years, the GBI followed hundreds of leads connected to Grinstead’s case, but they all led to dead ends until a couple days ago, Ricketson said.

A fresh tip led GBI agents to interview new people in connection to the case, and the interviews yielded “enough probable cause to secure an arrest warrant for Duke, charging him with the murder of Tara Grinstead,” the GBI said.

Through the years, the GBI interviewed many of Grinstead’s friends, family members and associates, but Duke “never came up on our radar through the investigation,” Ricketson said.

“This has taken 11 years and four months to get us to where we are,” Ricketson said.

Ricketson said the investigation continues and hinted more arrests could take place in the coming days.

“We still anticipate several more interviews and investigative actions that will be coming in the next couple of weeks,” Ricketson said.

“We always believed in the GBI and their dedication to (Tara’s) case. We always believed that it would be solved; we just did not know when,” Connie Grinstead, Tara’s stepmother, said in front of a large crowd of reporters, government officials and residents at the Irwin County Courthouse Thursday afternoon.

“So many people have been hurt by this. We hope and pray that with time, this community can finally have closure and start to heal from this. For us, this just starts another chapter in a very long and painful journey. We ask that you keep us in your prayers. Our wounds are deep, and our hearts are broken.”

Tara Grinstead vanished in October 2005 when she was 30 years old. For more than a decade, the case remained unsolved, and her disappearance has become the largest case file in GBI history.

She was last seen on a Saturday when she went to a pageant and then to a barbecue before returning home. Friends and family discovered her disappearance when she didn’t show up for school the following Monday.

The search for Grinstead during the past decade has been widespread and extensive and has garnered national attention. In the months following her disappearance, billboards featuring her face and advertising a reward for information popped up throughout the state.

Multiple TV specials have examined the case, and the current podcast “Up and Vanished” by Atlanta filmmaker Payne Lindsey has been investigating Grinstead’s disappearance for the past several months.