Limb from Limb. George Hunter
know yet, Stephen replied. He bragged that he’d had a friend install a spying device on their home computer so he could monitor Tara’s e-mails.
He rattled on, roguishly telling the nursing student—whose real name, Deena Hardy, was being withheld at the time—that he might need a sponge bath and that he was all alone with no one to play with.
I do want to see you naked, he wrote. Naked women are always good to see. Especially if you haven’t seen them in a while.
Hardy also provided a copy of the e-mails to Captain Wickersham. “We were suspicious of Stephen even before those e-mails, but when we saw them, it made us even more suspicious,” Wickersham said. “The e-mails made it obvious he thought his wife was cheating on him, which was very interesting to us. If there was foul play, now we had a possible motive.”
The salacious e-mails revved up public interest in the case. CNN ran a report on Tara’s disappearance. Good Morning America aired a taped interview with Hackel. The day the e-mail story ran in the Detroit News, chased by other local print and electronic reporters, Stephen Grant abruptly ended his cloister and granted numerous interviews.
“I hope Tara walks through that door,” Stephen told Channel 7, sobbing dramatically, his eyes widening with every word. “God, please—call. Please. Call anyone.”
Photos and video of Stephen—whose prominent, bulging eyes and breathless, melodramatic speech patterns undermined any attempt on his part for dignity and gravitas—were a dream come true for the investigative team. People who privately commented on the case agreed: Stephen simply looked guilty.
The term “bug-eyed” was fast becoming an adjective applied to Stephen Grant—not just as a physical descriptor but as shorthand for his increasingly flaky persona.
During interviews at Griem’s Detroit office, Stephen told reporters that his wife had been out of contact before, but he said this was the first time he was “scared.”
He raised the eyebrows of veteran reporters by blurting out that he’d prefer that she be off with another man than in harm’s way. “If she’s with somebody else, OK. I can understand that,” he said. “But I wish she would at least call home. Her kids are worried about her.”
And while he steadfastly denied any involvement with her disappearance, Stephen repeatedly said that police had told him he was their number one suspect.
“I understand why I’m a suspect—I get it,” Stephen said. “The police always look at the husband.”
Hackel denied investigators were looking at Stephen as a suspect. “We haven’t even established that a crime has taken place,” the sheriff said.
Hackel also told reporters that Stephen, while granting wide-ranging media interviews as a distraught husband, was responding to investigators only via faxes to and from his lawyer’s office. The sheriff also said his detectives had questioned Tara’s coworkers, after a source told investigators there were rumors she was possibly having affairs at work. The subjects of the rumors denied the allegations, Hackel said.
Tara’s family members were disgusted when Stephen’s lascivious e-mail exchange was made public. “It sickened me,” said Alicia, who by now had returned home to Ohio with her family. “I was flabbergasted.”
Alicia and her mother, speaking to reporters, continued to contradict Stephen’s assertion that Tara intended to head back early to Puerto Rico. Tara was tired from work and looking forward to an upcoming family getaway to Arizona, Mary said. And, she insisted, her daughter would never go two weeks without calling Lindsey and Ian.
“Her children are everything to her,” Alicia added.
With Tara missing and Verena gone, Kelly Utykanski, Stephen’s sister, was helping her brother care for Lindsey and Ian. Utykanski, thirty-nine, lived in nearby Sterling Heights with her husband, Chris. The squat, brassy redhead related to reporters how she had been helping distribute the missing persons posters and that Stephen was trying to shield the children from media reports. Ironically, a year later, it would be Kelly herself who contributed to some of the most sensational media coverage on the case.
For now, though, she was a concerned sister and aunt, looking out for the welfare of her brother’s children. “They obviously know Mom is lost, and that police are looking for her,” Utykanski said. “But we’re trying to shelter them from this as much as we can.”
23
Media interest in Tara Grant’s disappearance was becoming so intense, Hackel decided to hold daily 11:00 A.M. press briefings in the conference room at police headquarters. Two large cardboard blowups of Tara’s portrait were placed on easels on each side of the podium from where Hackel gave his daily updates. One of the photos was the picture that was originally released by police in the missing persons flyer, depicting Tara in a dressy sweater and scarf. The other photo was a shot of Tara leaning back slightly in a rocking chair and turning her head to smile at the camera.
“I figured having a press conference each day would allow me to pass information on to the media, and allow the media to ask me questions, without having to make a million phone calls every day,” Hackel said. But each morning, the sheriff grimly reported the same thing: there was nothing new; there was still no sign of Tara.
Reporters, who crowded elbow to elbow at the large wooden table that dominated the narrow conference room, pressed Hackel: was Stephen a suspect?
Hackel maintained that Stephen Grant was not—although the sheriff continuously expressed frustration that Stephen refused to help with the investigation.
“It’s become very clear at this point he doesn’t want to cooperate with us,” Hackel told reporters. “You would think he would be right there at our side, wanting to get all the information he could get from us. But he hasn’t called us once. Think about that. He called us and said his wife is missing, but since then, he hasn’t once called us to ask how the investigation is going, or if we have any new information,” Hackel said.
“We’re getting support from other family members, and from Tara’s workplace,” the sheriff said. “The only person who is not cooperating with us is Stephen Grant.”
Detective Sergeant McLean was after another search warrant—an effort to trace Tara’s whereabouts by the location of her personal/work cell phone. The warrant covered all incoming and outgoing calls from Tara’s Cingular cell phone account from February 9 onward. The warrant also directed the Cingular National Subpoena Compliance Center to provide a list of all recorded cell site locations activated by this number during this time frame.
But like every other road pursued in the investigation so far, this one was a dead end.
Out of the public eye, Verena Dierkes quietly boarded a jet at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, bound for Frankfurt.
The young nanny was leaving Michigan behind, months earlier and under vastly different circumstances than she had planned. But her memories, and her secrets, soared toward Germany with her.
24
On Thursday, February 22, Hackel finally said aloud what he had been thinking all along: for the first time, the sheriff publicly characterized Tara’s disappearance as the result of a possible crime.
“We’re now focusing our investigation into the possibility of foul play,” Hackel said. “This is day thirteen of her disappearance, so it makes you stop and think. If she’s no longer alive, there’s a concern about the body as evidence, and extracting evidence from the body. This is a difficult thing to discuss, but, unfortunately, in our business, it’s something we have to consider.”
Hackel then laid it on a little thicker, in phrases calculated to make Stephen sit up and take notice. He revealed that investigators planned to search undisclosed “wooded areas” for Tara’s remains. “If there is a possibility that she is buried somewhere, there will be