In a photo taken that day, which would become iconic to followers of the case, Verena looked happy and relaxed as she posed beside Tara and the children in front of the ballpark. She was enjoying life in America.
But on February 16, that all ended.
Verena’s counselor, Murasky, arrived that Friday, helped a reluctant Verena pack her bags, and wheeled them out of the Grant driveway.
This would not, however, be Verena’s last visit to Macomb County.
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That same Friday morning, February 16, John Cwikla, spokesman for the Macomb County Sheriff’s Office, faxed flyers about the missing woman to the local media. He also sent a digital copy to the reporters on his e-mail list.
The next day, Saturday—eight days after Tara last was seen—a single paragraph headlined MISSING WOMAN REPORTED IN WASHINGTON TOWNSHIP was published inside the metro section of the Detroit News:
The Macomb County Sheriff’s Department is investigating the disappearance of a 34-year-old Washington Township woman. Tara Lynn Grant was last seen at the family’s home during the evening hours of February 9, according to sheriff’s officials. The circumstances of her disappearance are unknown. Grant is white, 5-foot-6 and 120 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes.
A sheriff’s office hotline number was printed below the brief.
Its dry, matter-of-fact prose didn’t begin to hint at the dramatic events that eventually would unfold before Tara’s whereabouts were discovered. But the notice did serve to spark the tinder of public interest. From this day forward, few editions of the local papers would fail to include a mention of what came to be known as “the Grant Case,” and few broadcasts would air without at least a snippet of Stephen Grant’s increasingly histrionic pleas for his errant wife’s safe return home.
Five hours to the south, the distraught Standerfers were packing their bags Saturday morning for the familiar trek up Interstate 75 to their home state of Michigan. Unlike their previous journeys from their adopted Ohio town, this trip seemed likely to forever shatter the happy, safe, upwardly mobile life they’d crafted for themselves.
Chillicothe, between Columbus, Ohio, and the northern Tennessee border, is a quaint riverside town whose roots stretch back to 1796. It served twice as the state capital, before its neighbor to the north, Columbus, permanently claimed that honor.
Families are attracted to the Main Street-USA flavor of Chillicothe’s downtown, complete with its antique courthouse square and riverside parks.
When Erik Standerfer landed a high-paying managerial position at a paper mill in Chillicothe in 2002, he and Alicia moved into a three-bedroom ranch in the southwest side of the city. Alicia took a part-time job as a dental hygienist.
Chillicothe was twelve hours of freeway driving from their Northern Michigan roots, but the country values and neighborliness were familiar.
Two years later, Alicia’s parents, Mary and Gerald “Dusty” Destrampe, moved into a small ranch in Chillicothe, less than two miles away from the Standerfers. Mary and Dusty had fallen on hard times. Dusty was incapacitated after a 2002 stroke. He no longer could work as a water treatment specialist at Fort McCoy, an army base in west-central Wisconsin. They decided to move close to Alicia and her husband.
In 2004, Alicia gave birth to a son, Alex. Daughter Payton was born the following year. But now, Alicia—who knew her only sibling hadn’t missed a day of work in ten years with Washington Group—fretted at the five-hour drive that separated her from the search for her older sister.
“We were frantic,” Alicia said. “I knew there was no way Tara would stay out of touch that long. We knew we had to come up there and help find her.”
Alicia said Tara hadn’t mentioned returning early to San Juan when they last talked on the phone the previous Friday. It had been a forty-minute chat, while Tara waited at Newark International Airport for her delayed Detroit-bound flight—the same layover where Stephen claimed their phone fight had started.
“She said she was going to return to Puerto Rico on Monday,” Alicia said.
Also on Saturday, Griem told reporters that Stephen had hired a former FBI agent, now a private detective, to trace Tara’s whereabouts. After a few early vague mentions of the detective, the story faded away.
“Was there ever a private detective? I honestly don’t know—but if there was, he never sought any help from us,” Sheriff Hackel said. “We never heard from him.”
Griem also said publicly that Stephen and Tara had argued over Tara’s frequent business trips, and reiterated that Tara had left home via a dark-colored vehicle the night of February 9.
He also mentioned that Tara was in the process of laying off some fifty workers at her employer’s San Juan, Puerto Rico, facility. “That’s something to take into consideration,” Griem said.
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Alicia, Erik, and his sister, Jeannie, arrived in Metro Detroit Saturday afternoon and met with Kozlowski at the Macomb County Sheriff’s Office. They talked for a while, and then Kozlowski provided dozens of copies of the handouts bearing Tara’s picture. The Ohio trio then began peppering the area with the flyers.
After they’d hung the posters in gas stations and stores for miles along the southwest route to the airport, they headed back to Macomb County to visit Stephen. The plan was to order take-out pizza and brainstorm about what could have happened to Tara.
As Erik pulled his 2003 Saturn SUV into the long driveway, Stephen came outside to greet them. “I knew immediately as we walked up the driveway…that something was terribly wrong,” Erik recalled.
Alicia agreed that something seemed amiss. Stephen tried to hug her, and she felt uncomfortable. She tried to pull away, but Stephen held her tight. “He just wasn’t acting right,” she said. “I got a really funny feeling right away.”
Within minutes of greeting Stephen, Erik began fearing for his sister-in-law’s safety. “It became immediately obvious that Stephen knew it was a waste of time to look for Tara,” he said.
The days of the calendar’s shortest month ticked on, a never-ending February for the Destrampes, the Standerfers, Tara’s friends, and her coworkers as they waited, hoped, and prayed for Tara’s safe return.
The other alternative was the dreaded message: Tara wouldn’t be coming back.
The nonstop media reports, which soon would mesmerize Metro Detroit audiences—prompting them to snap up extra newspapers and dial radios or TVs to catch top-of-the-hour updates—hadn’t yet escalated into the dozens-a-day volleys of information that would climax in a stunning on-the-air twist.
In fact, the metro final edition of Monday’s Detroit Free Press referred to the case only in a brief posting headlined CONSTRUCTION EXECUTIVE STILL MISSING:
The whereabouts of a missing 34-year-old Washington Township woman remained a mystery Sunday, Macomb County Sheriff Mark Hackel said…. Police said the woman’s cell phone was shut off, and she hasn’t used her credit card.
No solid information, no suspects, had emerged. No limousine service had stepped forward to identify itself as the one Tara hired the night of February 9. That nugget wasn’t lost on Hackel.
“We realized early on there was no black car,” Hackel later said. “We got no calls. Nobody came forward to say, ‘Hey, that was me.’”
Hackel also knew that Griem made it a practice to polygraph prospective clients before signing on with them. The sheriff said he would have accepted those results if they cleared Stephen, who by then had formally declined through his attorney to submit to a police-administered lie detector test. But no results showing graphs indicating