There were also several bags full of unsigned greeting cards. It turned out they were part of Tara’s stockpile of cheerful messages for her children—she always left cards behind for the kids when she went on her business trips.
The more time McLean spent with Stephen, the more he got on her nerves. “He was really jittery, like he’d just drunk eight cups of coffee,” she said. “He was just bouncing. I was like, ‘Stop! Sit still and focus!’ It was very hard to talk to him because he kept jumping from one subject to another.”
As the detectives prepared to leave, Stephen’s demeanor changed drastically, McLean noticed. “We asked if he would come down and talk to us some more,” she recalled. “Then he said, ‘Well, you don’t think I did something to my wife, do you?’”
Kozlowski said he told Stephen, “If we thought you were involved in the disappearance of your wife, we’d take you to jail right now.”
Then Stephen surprised the detectives by breaking into tears. “He just broke down, sobbing like crazy,” McLean said. “He wouldn’t stop.”
14
The two detectives again asked Stephen’s permission to allow an evidence technician to stop by the house later to take some pictures. After he agreed, Kozlowski and McLean exited the house through the garage and walked toward their cars in the driveway.
“Once we were out of hearing range, we looked at each other and we go, ‘He killed her.’ We just don’t know how he did it, or where she’s at yet, but he killed her,” McLean said. “Now we’ve just got to figure out what he did to her.”
Deputy Adnan Durrani, Macomb sheriff’s evidence technician, went to Stephen’s house about two hours after the detectives. “He appeared to be nervous,” Durrani said. “He was shaking. And he was very apologetic.”
In addition to the small nose scratch, Durrani photographed a bruise on Stephen’s left leg and an abrasion on his right hand. “He said he cut his nose on a piece of metal shaving at his father’s shop,” Durrani said. “As far as the hand goes, he said he cut it trying to start his snowblower.” Stephen did not have an explanation for the leg bruise, Durrani said.
Durrani asked Stephen if he would come to the police station the next day to submit to a polygraph test. Stephen agreed.
15
Almost three hundred miles south, in Chillicothe, Ohio, Alicia was frantic over her older sister’s disappearance. She kept calling her cell phone; no answer. She sent her sister e-mails, but there was no response.
Alicia called Lou, Tara’s boss. He still hadn’t heard from her, either. She felt she had to do something. So did her husband, Erik Standerfer.
The couple, in anguish over Tara’s absence, and concerned for her children, began making arrangements for the care of their own kids and otherwise preparing for the long journey north. They would leave Saturday.
16
Within twenty-four hours after Stephen reported his wife missing, the Macomb County Sheriff’s Office had created one of its standard missing persons flyers to be distributed to the media. The flyer described the petite 120-pound mom, including a photo of brown-eyed, curly-haired Tara smiling directly into the camera lens. The photo was from several that had been provided by Stephen when he reported her missing.
Tara was last seen leaving her home in Washington Township, MI 48094 in the evening hours of Feb 09 2007, the flyer said.
That was the official scenario, in the absence of evidence to the contrary. But that five-day gap between the Grants’ argument and Stephen’s police report didn’t sit well with investigators.
Sheriff Hackel began polling his staff, asking for their hunches about Stephen based on experience, observation, and gut feelings. “Give me the percentage,” he urged them. “Some were one hundred percent [sure] he did it,” Hackel recalled. “Some said maybe fifty percent. Maybe she just didn’t like the guy and wanted to get away.”
The department didn’t want to publicly name Stephen a suspect “and have him hiding in a hole,” Hackel said. The sheriff was formulating other ideas.
Meanwhile, McLean began tracing Tara’s telephone and credit card activity. She asked the telephone company for permission to obtain records covering all incoming and outgoing calls on Tara’s Verizon cell phone from February 1 onward.
“You can get telephone records directly from the telephone company, but you have to have probable cause to search phone records,” McLean noted. “Just the fact that someone is missing isn’t enough. In this case, we were able to get the records based on exigent circumstances. That’s where you [have] a situation that’s above and beyond a normal situation. Stephen waited five days to report her missing. He showed signs of injuries. Tara didn’t have a history of drug abuse or a history of leaving in the past. She had a great work history. If you take that all together, it’s enough to search the records.”
McLean later successfully petitioned 42nd District Court judge Denis LeDuc for search warrants for cell site locations, to determine where Tara was when she made the phone calls.
“We had to start checking everything,” Lieutenant Elizabeth Darga said. “We had to check the airlines. Had she gone out of the country? Had she done any traveling within the U.S.? There was a lot to do.”
While it’s relatively simple to get access to telephone records, it’s not as easy for police to obtain credit card information, Darga said. “But in this case, the last credit card Tara used was through her company. That was her main credit card. Thankfully, the Washington Group was very cooperative, and they provided us records of her credit card use.”
Records showed the last time Tara used her company-issued American Express card was at 9:32 P.M. on February 9 when she paid for parking in the Detroit Metropolitan Airport parking structure.
Darga, who quarterbacked the detective team during the Grant investigation, said she and her crew brainstormed to come up with a checklist of what needed to be done during the first few days of the case. “Whoever could think of what we needed to do next, we would write it all down on paper, and when each thing got done, it would get checked off,” Darga said.
A white board was hung in the detective room, to map out how the investigation was going. “We used the board to keep track of all the phone calls Stephen made the night of February ninth, and in the days after that,” Darga said.
There were several possibilities to be considered, McLean said. “Who’s to say she wasn’t leaving her husband? Some people take a little downtime before they call and let their spouse know they’re leaving them, so we had to look at that avenue,” she said. “In a missing person case, even if you have suspicions, which we did, you have to consider all possibilities. So we went into this investigation with an open mind.”
But even as the detectives considered all potential scenarios, their instincts told them Tara Grant was a murder victim, not a missing person. “We knew in the back of our minds that he killed her,” Darga said. “And when we talked about it, we threw out all kinds of possibilities.
“We even wondered if he cut her up and disposed of the body that way,” she said. “That was actually discussed, but we all came to the conclusion that this guy wouldn’t have the guts to do that.”
Investigators received a surprising fax Thursday morning. It appeared that Stephen Grant had hired himself a lawyer:
Because of the tone of your February 14, 2007 interrogation of Mr. Grant at his home…it is my humble opinion that it is necessary for me to provide a buffer between your department and Mr. Grant, wrote the sender of the fax, Detroit attorney David Griem. Just as