January 18th, 2001 was, by all accounts, a perfectly ordinary evening for Tara Louise Baker, a first-year law student at the University of Georgia in Athens. She and a friend had been studying at the Law School Library on campus; her friend left at around seven p.m., but Tara—a deeply caring individual whose family and friendships were of utmost importance to her—called later to make sure her friend had gotten home all right. That was at a quarter to ten, and Tara was still at the library, though she said she was going home herself in about fifteen minutes’ time.
No one but Tara’s killer knows exactly what happened after she returned to her house on Fawn Drive that night.
The following day, shortly before noon, firefighters responded to a blaze at Tara’s residence, and after extinguishing the flames, discovered Tara lying dead in her bedroom. The fire had not killed her, however; she had actually been beaten, mutilated, and stabbed to death—though rape could not be definitively determined—before the assailant had set the house on fire in an effort to cover up the crime. Tara had been just one day shy of her twenty-fourth birthday.
Due to the fact that there was no sign of forced entry and the only item stolen from the home was Tara’s laptop, investigators were certain that the murderer was someone who knew Tara, and had perhaps stolen her computer because it contained evidence that could incriminate him. To this end, police first interrogated a young man that Tara had been dating, though he passed a polygraph test, and his alibi checked out. He was summarily cleared of suspicion.
Two other individuals could not be so easily dismissed, however. One of these persons of interest was an acquaintance of Tara’s who was also a law student at UGA and attended one of her study groups; the other was an attorney who had once worked with Tara at a local law firm in Athens. It was speculated that either one of these men could have made sexual overtures toward Tara that she rejected, thus giving them motive for killing her.
Unfortunately, because the crime scene was first approached as a fire, rather than a homicide, much of the physical evidence was destroyed or contaminated, though police still maintain that the case is ultimately solvable. Witnesses did report seeing a young white man clad in jeans and a white t-shirt fleeing from the area around Tara’s home at around the time of the murder.
One particularly unusual—and for Tara’s family, tragic and painful—aspect of the investigation into the slaying was the fact that for at least a decade afterward, authorities refused to issue a death certificate for Tara Baker, justifying their decision by stating that they didn’t want her exact cause of death to become public record, so that they could use specific details about the crime to focus in on a suspect. Though this reasoning seems sound enough, it is a highly uncommon practice, and Tara’s family have had to endure an odd sort of legal limbo, in which they still receive mail addressed to Tara, and have to put up with other upsetting reminders that they have no sense of closure in the case.
As of this writing, there is a $30,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of Tara Baker’s killer.
Crime Immemorial 