Hughes said he decided to call Tara’s boss in Puerto Rico, since Stephen willingly provided the phone number, one of many names and numbers that were recorded in the notebook he clutched. Troendle, the fifty-year-old executive who was in charge of Washington Group’s Puerto Rican operations, was at his San Juan office when Hughes called.
“I wanted to find out what was going on between Lou and Tara, since that was Stephen’s concern,” Hughes said. “When I talked to Lou, he seemed genuinely worried about Tara. He said he would assist us in any way we needed to find out what happened to her. He really seemed worried, because he said Tara would never leave without telling anyone. Right then and there, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. I’m thinking, ‘Oh boy, Stephen Grant is lying to me.’ And he’s sitting there smiling,” Hughes said.
“After I got off the phone with Lou, [Stephen] asked if I wanted to call her parents, but I said, ‘I’ll leave that to the detective bureau.’ Because after I talked to Lou, I was concerned Stephen was lying, and I figured I’d better leave any more phone calls up to the detectives. I got the feeling that this guy was playing me.”
That feeling was reinforced when Stephen veered onto his next topic: the Grant family’s live-in babysitter. “He started talking about the au pair,” Hughes said. “I said, ‘How old is she?’ He said she was nineteen, and I asked him if he was having any kind of relationship with the au pair. He leaned back in his chair and smiled at me, and said, ‘She’ll never tell.’”
4
During the course of their conversation, Stephen disclosed that he knew of a warrant out for his arrest, based on unpaid traffic tickets. “I decided not to pursue that, because I thought the detectives might want to talk to him, and if they arrested him, he might not talk,” Hughes said.
Hughes did, however, start asking tougher questions. “I asked him about the scratch on his nose, and I said he needed to tell me if there was a fight that night,” Hughes said. “He started getting nervous, saying, ‘No, no, no.’”
Stephen insisted it had only been a verbal spat, even though he admitted he’d had a few beers before Tara got home. He also mentioned that he kept a handgun in the house. “Then I asked him if we could send detectives to his house to ask further questions and look around, and he said we could,” Hughes said. “Basically, I think he wanted to come in here and hit a home run with me, get the missing report down on paper, and exclude himself as a suspect. He seemed to feel good about the interview.”
Hughes handed Stephen a preprinted witness statement form and asked him to recap his statement in writing. In a spidery, juvenile scrawl, the father of two poured out a story that filled two pages and spilled out of the lines provided into the document’s margins: I said it was not fair to the kids that they would only see her for one day, he wrote of the argument he’d had with his wife. She said “Tuff.”
Stephen stated that during the argument with Tara, he repeatedly said, “The kids are going to be disappointed if you’re not home Saturday,” Hughes wrote in his report.
As Stephen told his story, Sergeant Brian Kozlowski was reporting for work. Striding through the sheriff’s department lobby, he overheard Stephen relating his story to Hughes. Kozlowski later said one thing stuck in his craw: he had heard the man say his wife had been missing since Friday. The veteran detective wondered the same thing Hughes was wondering: why would anyone wait five days to report a missing spouse?
Finally, after more than an hour, Stephen’s deluge of information trailed off. Hughes told Stephen that detectives would be in contact with him. The cop then typed out his report and submitted it to his supervisor, who turned the case over to the detective bureau as Case #0700003638. A description of Tara Grant—five feet, six inches tall, 120 pounds, brown hair, brown eyes—was entered into the nationwide Law Enforcement Intelligence Network (LEIN).
The most intense investigation in the history of the Macomb County Sheriff’s Office was under way.
5
At the same time Stephen was spilling his story to Hughes in the lobby, the telephone rang in Lieutenant Elizabeth Darga’s office, located just off the lobby. Darga, who oversees the day-to-day operations of the department’s detective bureau, found the phone call peculiar.
“It was a woman who said she was a sergeant out of the Michigan State Police post in Lansing,” said Darga, a twenty-year police veteran. “This woman said she knew the Grant family, and had been in contact with Tara’s sister. She said that Stephen Grant was planning to come in to make a report, and that we should really look closely at this case because something was not right. She said there was no way Tara would have left like that.”
Darga relayed the Michigan State Police (MSP) phone call to her boss, Captain Anthony Wickersham, who headed the detective bureau. “I said, ‘You might want to hear this one. I just got off the phone with a female state police sergeant from Lansing,’ and I told him what she said,” Darga recounted.
Wickersham agreed that the case warranted a closer look. “It was obvious from the beginning, something wasn’t right” he said.
Learning that Hughes had just concluded his meeting with Stephen Grant, Darga called Hughes into her office. “I asked, ‘Did you just take a report about a missing woman?’” Darga recalled. Hughes said he had, and relayed to his boss what Stephen had told him.
“We immediately put a priority on this case,” Darga said. “There are times when you get a missing persons report and there are factors that lead you to believe they took off for whatever reason, or there’s some type of substance abuse. But in this case, there was none of that.”
The first phone calls made in the investigation were to Tara’s family. “Everyone said there was something wrong, because she would have never left her children,” Darga said.
Darga assembled several detectives in her office at about 1:30 P.M. and explained the situation. “I told them about the information I’d gotten from the state police sergeant, and I directed everyone on what we needed to do,” Darga said. “We had to start checking everything.”
6
Macomb County sheriff Mark Hackel wasn’t having a good month. It started heading downhill back on February 4, Super Bowl Sunday. What had begun as a relaxing evening at a friend’s annual football party—watching the Indianapolis Colts get ready to square off against the Chicago Bears—soon turned to horror.
A few seconds after the Bears returned the game’s opening kickoff for a touchdown, the sheriff’s cell phone rang. The caller was one of his detectives, bearing news that disturbed, even sickened, the veteran lawman and his staff.
A woman named Jennifer Kukla had just been arrested for murdering her two young daughters inside their Macomb Township mobile home, the detective relayed.
Kukla, a thirty-year-old single mother who worked at a McDonald’s restaurant near her small trailer, told arresting officers that voices in her head had told her to kill the girls, eight-year-old Alexandra and five-year-old Ashley. The killings would spare them from future pain, Kukla said.
She told deputies that she grabbed a butcher knife at about 7:30 A.M., and chased the dark-haired little girls through the trailer. She slashed her youngest daughter in the chest, and the bleeding five-year-old scurried to hide under the kitchen table. Ashley’s older sister came to her defense, screaming, “Mommy, don’t do it!”
Kukla wheeled and turned her attention to Alexandra, repeatedly stabbing the little girl in the throat, nearly severing her head. Then Kukla dragged Ashley from beneath the table and slaughtered her in the same manner.
In a bloody frenzy, Kukla proceeded to disembowel the family dog and its